We thought of ourselves as being involved with these smoky vehicles of change, we never saw ourselves as just standing on the ends of platforms crossing numbers off a list. We didn’t tolerate frivolity, or drinkers or the unserious. But machines don’t make good companions, and it is true that I spent much of my youth alone, cycling between stations on roads that could be grey and wet in autumn and winter, with often only a distant relationship to my fellow enthusiasts. It isn’t much wonder that I was so easily recruited into the Chapel – but that was later.
Meanwhile, attendance at the Royal High School became more and more of a penance. Many of the boys delivered by tram on the 1 St October 1924 continued to be unhappy ten years later. The attitude of many teachers towards pupils was deplorable. They seemed to regard us as something of a nuisance and an interruption to their daily routine; collectively to have been unaware that children and their interests had any connection with the employment of teachers.
There were exceptions. One devoted history teacher came up with a scheme by which any pupil who discovered a genuine error in any history text would be awarded an extra 1 per cent in the term examination. The enthusiasm with which his pupils combed their texts for mistakes was impressive, though there were rumours that their parents had been drawn into the research. Inevitably, a market economy developed around this precious information. Confident boys placed suspected errors on the market, charging rates that varied with the probability of acceptance. It was good practice for life, of a kind.
The school’s emphasis on classics was less useful for the world we were about to enter. By the time I was fifteen, my father had to ask the Rector to make special arrangements to allow me to study history and geography instead of Greek. But as the final examinations approached, I knew that my prospects of formal academic success were slim.
On holiday in the autumn of 1935, my father saw an advertisement for a Civil Service competition for a single appointment as a sorting clerk and telegraphist in the GPO in Edinburgh, and announced that I should apply. Sons in those days did exactly what their fathers told them to do, or at least I did, so at the age of sixteen I sat the examination. I took first place in the city, to my own astonishment and my family’s, and on the morning the brown envelope came my father told me that I could leave school that day.
I went to the Rector’s office and told him that I was going. The Rector, a very elevated person named Dr King Gillies told me in omniscient tones that I was being very foolish, that I could expect only to become a butcher’s delivery boy – the ultimate social disgrace. I spoiled his day by showing him the letter from the Civil Service Commission. And so my formal education ended.
I still think I would have made a reasonably good butcher’s boy.
Early in January 1936,1 started to study at home for the next grade of the Civil Service. I had a couple of months before I started work. I also began to explore the Lothian Hills and the coast, cycling to small harbours and old docks, to obscure sidings that were said to contain interesting survivors of early locomotive classes. These were rehearsals for later marathon rides around the kingdom on my brief holidays from the Post Office. I thought that I might never have so much completely free time at my disposal again. I was right.
In the year of the Popular Front in France and of the Spanish Civil War, the year Japan began its assault on China, I was going on even longer excursions. In 1937, on my annual holiday from what was then a not very fulfilling job, I cycled all the way to the English Channel and back – a 1000-mile round-trip down the west coast, and back up the east coast via Newcastle and Berwick. I did it completely alone. I was barely aware of what was happening thousands of miles away in Asia. I had no politics; I was an only child.
It is strange, looking back now, to think of those boys at school to whom I was never really close. Men born ten years after me could speculate idly about their schoolmates, but that option was closed to me by events in China and Central Europe while I was growing up. I know exactly what happened to each of my contemporaries. Of the twenty-five of us in our final year at school, only four survived the war. But there is no justice in statistics, and by some arbitrary chance not one of the twenty-two young men in my officer class at Catterick was killed.
You had to start at the bottom in the Post Office, just as my father had done nearly forty years before. I became a sorter of mail, and after a week’s training I was put on the lowest rung of the Civil Service ladder, from which I was destined to become successively Senior Sorter, Postmaster and so on.
A worker called Bobby Kinghom, who I would later meet under very different circumstances, took me in hand and showed me how to survive without working too hard, and I put his good advice to use on the main shift ft-om 7.30 in the morning until 3.30 in the afternoon, six days a week.
I had to open parcels from overseas so that customs could inspect them, then laboriously tie them up again. They also assigned me to the football pools section, where a dozen sorters filtered millions of coupons being sent out to the punters who were hoping to get rich from their predictions of the scores of the coming Saturday’s soccer matches. All this waste paper, victim of the laws of probability, would have to be sorted, bundled and bagged for movement to Waverley Station, where it would be loaded on to trains heading out to towns in the borders and further south.
I was now drawing a big circle around Edinburgh of places to which return journeys could be made by bicycle on early summer evenings, and I’d escape to some point on it every afternoon. So many miles, so many lonely sightings of worked metal and quiet satisfaction at another unusual entry into my orderly classification of the world. Ordnance Survey maps helped you to identify half-forgotten branch lines, perhaps some colliery where there might be a couple of engines whose identity and even whose existence would be unknown to anyone outside the colliery itself; but some of the sidings were so obscure that they did not appear on maps, and there was no alternative but to search them out.
I learned in the Post Office that obsession can take many forms. One much older man became something of a special friend. He had been unemployed for most of the previous five years and had become a communist. He became obsessed with our ignorance of the names of places to which the pools envelopes were being sent. His need for order and his conscientious devotion to the job drove him to make, in his own time, over a period of weeks, a card-index of every British place-name he could find, as an aid to sorting the pools mail. Anything less like the behaviour of a communist militant is difficult to imagine; but perhaps this innocent card-index man would have found a different outlet for his obsession if the circumstances had been different.
Some flavour of the austerity and discretion of the workplace in the 1930s remains with me in the memory of a colleague called Wendy, from whom I took over duties in the motor transport section after I passed the clerical officer’s examination in late 1936. One lunchtime she failed to return to the office. Such was our respect for punctuality that I began to imagine that she had had an accident, or been kidnapped. In a manner of speaking she had suffered both fates: she had used her lunch hour to get married.
My job was now to maintain the records for the Post Office Telephones’ vehicles all over the south east of Scotland. We had to watch out for things like excessive fuel consumption, breakdowns and accidents. This was my future now: the minute administration of Post Office machinery, counting and accounting in careful detail for the public’s means of communication and the people who kept it running.