I have had lots of jobs. Some of which I am going to blog about in the future: but this concerns the first few I had when I left education.

I left school when I was fifteen years old because teachers had given up hope of me getting any qualifications. They allowed me back to sit CSE drama which I got a grade one for. In my mind I was always going to be an actor so qualifications didn’t matter.

School then allowed me to do extended work experience at the factory my dad worked for. He pulled some strings. I was pleased at the time, but then the monotony set in. Twelve hour shifts catching one bit of paper with glue on it and laying it on another bit of paper which fell from large clunking and hissing machines like large square snowflakes.

I remember the men getting their pay packets. Brown envelopes: as well as a weekly wage inside the company gave them thirty pence for the tea machine; two pence for a cup of liquid that would make even hardened alcoholics livers shiver: but we drunk lots of this brown stuff, it stopped the boredom of the paper catching.

As a young lad I was generally the tea boy, but also the butt of many older men’s jokes.  They sent me for rubber hammers; glass nails, left handed screw drivers and the like. I once spent four hours in the storeroom waiting for Bob to get me a long weight to fix a machine........it was a very long wait indeed!

All the time at this factory I waited for a producer or a director of a film to come around and spot me.  I knew they would come, I just wasn’t sure when. My £22.30 a week went up to £54.80 when I came of age and tea prices had risen and then I was expected to settle in for the long haul of life and overtime, but by god I was bored.

A few weeks before my sixteenth birthday I brought a train ticket to Devon; walked out of work and began my life.

I was going to Pontins Holiday Camp, where I just knew a producer or a director would spot me: Goodbyes were tearful, I remember my mother at the sink crying; her hands emerged in soapy water: “Why have you got to go to Devon?” She sobbed. “Why can’t you just be normal?”

As the train left the station I looked out of the window, I passed the factory where my dad was working and where I had been just a few days previously; a few minutes later I passed the road in which I had lived all my life;  I smiled and for the first time I felt free.

Pontins was brilliant. When I woke in the morning and opened my curtains I had an ocean outside; I lived with lots of other young people; we drank, laughed and generally had a wonderful time. I made many friends some of whom I’m still in contact with now. Soon they were offering me a prestigious blue coat; but because as a general worker I had formed an alliance with the common workers, chalet maids, cooks and cleaners, we believed all blue coats to be a little above themselves; so I refused it. Rightly or wrongly it felt good to do.

Of course this was a summer job, so winters were hard; I stayed in Devon with friends and slept on their floor, I lived on Jacket Potatoes without butter for a whole month. We had signed on, as you could do then, but Thatcher’s Britain was slow with red tape hold ups for income support.  It was then that my friends Dave and Mark decided one of us had to earn some money; the only way of doing this was to go on the fishing boats leaving Brixham every day. So we pulled straws. I will never forget the feeling of fear as I pulled the short one.

The next day I was at the docks at 4am. In those days it was simple to get a job on the boats; stand at the dock and ask everyone who arrived if they needed a hand. Very soon I’d got my job. We would leave the following day; a mini trawler expedition which would sail and fish for the best part of three weeks going nearly as far as Spain.

The boat left the following day; eight men onboard including myself. I say men, they were monsters, huge, burley animals that put my skinny seven stone frame in a shadow. They did not speak words; or words I understood, they merely grunted , spat, smoked, snorted snuff and drunk scrumpy from tin flasks.

If you know Brixham Harbour you will know the mini lighthouse and the wall; well the boat began to sail, and I thought:

“Wow, this is lovely, calm and peaceful......What do people complain about?"......The harbour waters were like a mirror.

It was then we passed the harbour wall!

The sea was horrendous; the waves crashed the boat in the air and brought it down like a fairground ride. Within six minutes my colour had gone from that of a healthy pink young man to a mottled green ill looking creature. The sea sickness started at around eight minutes.

Some people say that sea sickness lasts a while, and once you get your sea legs you’ll be fine. This is a LIE; well it is in my case. I was sick after eight minutes and I did not stop being sick until we arrived home nearly three weeks later.

I had a simple job as it was my first sailing. For those who have never been on a mini trawling boat it is quite an easy operation. The nets are cast out from something like a giant catapult or cannon on the back of the boat; they fly through the air and are weighted and tied so they drop into the ocean like an open bag, they are then pulled along a little way and are gathered back up by the hauler, hopefully full of fish.

Of course the nets need to be secured to the boat at the time of launching them into the air. By long heavy thick rope.  That was my job; first to tie one side of the net on to the boat, then to walk around and tie the other. Easy...........Simple in fact. I had been shown how and when to do it by a spotty man with black teeth while in the comfort of the harbour and had mastered it in minutes; he had grunted satisfaction, spat a huge ball of his chewing tobacco near my foot and walked away......I was a fisherman now......Simple!

Simple, that is, if at the time of the first throw out (as the Skipper called it), you were not hanging over the side of the boat, yellow in face and being very, very sick.

The nets were thrown; they hung in the air like the screeching gulls around the boat; they continued through on their journey.  I watched. A new sickness now rising in me. The world had become slow motion; on and on they went, on and on and on and on;  then, still as slow, they fell towards the green choppy sea; the ropes that I had been due to tie dangled teasingly like a grandmothers apron strings, and then, like that net had never been there, it vanished, into the sea. Not even a ripple marking its spot.

The Skipper stood to my left. His jaw dropping almost on the salt stained deck of his boat, his eyes blazing:

“You little F****r!!!!!!”......... His words resounded in a thick Devonshire accent........ I still hear them now.

“You F*****G little F****r!!!!!........... I’ll F****G kill you!!!!!!! Come here you little bloody, f*****g b*****d!!!!!!!!!!”

He was not happy. Nor were any of the other seven gorillas who proclaimed themselves as men. I remember standing there; in real fear of my life. They had just cast out a net worth at least a thousand pounds without any fish in it; full of fish worth two or three thousand at least.

I stood rooted at first.....Then after it had sunk in I did the only thing I could do......... I ran! It seemed to be the only good thing to do. Only the boat wasn’t really that big. So to be honest running wasn’t a great option either. The Skipper followed me; with more expletives than a boy could throw a live or dead fish at: I managed to get into the small bathroom and pull the lock on the flimsy wooden door.

It was then, for the first time on that boat, I began to cry! I do believe that crying saved me from being dragged out and either thrown overboard or strangled with the skipper’s braces.

I cried for England; big choking sobs, with the fuming Skipper just outside the door. The only pause in my sobbing was when I stopped to be sick.

Eventually I let myself out. No one spoke to me in conversation again; on a boat somewhere floating in a massive sea I was sent to Coventry.  I was given a new job which did not involve tying the spare net to anything. In fact, I think this was a made up role, a punishment, I had to help the  hauler pull in the net after the throw out. This involved me kneeling under the hauler while it brought the net aboard. As each yard of net was pulled over so were the fish. Each fish greeted me with a slap on the head. Sometimes when I glanced upwards I was met in the face with a cold skinned fish of some description. Conger eels, cod, whiting and sole and some of the largest crabs I have ever seen. At the end of my four hour shifts my hair glittered and glimmered in the sunshine with fish scales; I must have looked like some transsexual mermaid without a tail.

I was left to eat on my own and had no human company. (Mind I didn’t have much of that from the beginning, these men were really not human!)

One day the foulest storm of the trip hit the boat; I sat outside drinking tea in a set of yellow cagoules trying to put something into my belly which would soon come up again.

I looked out to where the horizon should have been; and that had been replaced by a wall of sea; the boat lurched upwards the height of a mountain it seemed; then again back down; and then a wave hit the boat directly and washed completely over me; I looked down into my tea cup; and saw  simply salt sea water. For the second time on the trip I began to cry!

I have never ever been so relieved to be back on dry land as I was when we arrived home. The smell of fish stayed with me for weeks. Of course I wasn’t paid. The other animals took their wages (up to £1,200, which in 1986 was brilliant) and went promptly to the public houses and drunk and fought each other until the next voyage. These men were hard men, and though they scared me to death then I have nothing but the upmost respect for people going to sea to catch my dinner! Fishermen in the UK have had a very hard time over the last twenty years, government quotas have fallen and made fishing very difficult and does not protect our waters being fished by foreign vessels which are often much larger.

When I arrived to where I was staying I was hoping for some welcome; friends able to talk to me: but it turns out the dole cheques had arrived in my absence.  Dave and Mark had cashed both their own and mine and were that evening swanking it up in a nightclub in Torquay.

I went to the cupboard, took out a potato and stuck it in the oven. Pleased to be safe and sound and still very much alive................