Career Choices for the Teenage Urchin

I left school at 16. Yes, 16, just past the age of qualification for being a fully fledged Dickensian urchin. Not for me the hallowed halls of university, no siree. The Grammar School had drained me of any desire to further my education, and I was lured by the prospect of earning a bob or two to fund my airfix model and subbuteo fixation. And besides, the Post Office needed postmen (now called Postal Delivery Workers) to help them cope with the Christmas rush of 1973.

I loved being out in the outdoors, even if it wasn’t so much the gently rolling Sussex Downland or quaint little villages of the Weald, but rather the streets of Eastbourne in the winter. I was so enthusiastic that one of the old sweats in the sorting office there told me to slow down as the managers were wondering why I was getting back to the depot half an hour before everyone else every morning.

I would’ve quite happily stayed for the rest of my working days but for the fact that January arrived and people stopped sending Christmas cards to each other, which in turn meant that I and my fellow temporary workers were cast out into the cold, no longer needed. OK, it was a short term contract and I knew that at the time but I was still a teenager and the world, particularly the post office, owed me a living.

So, what to do? I needed a job, and fast! There was a model of the Heinkel111 available in Gamley’s the Toy Shop and I needed it. Not quite the same motivation to earn money as having your mortgage under threat, but I was yet to understand what was actually important in adult life so excuse me if I was getting my priorities wrong at the time.

Scouring the jobs pages of the local rag, the Eastbourne Herald, two “exciting opportunities” leapt out at me. Bearing in mind my lack of academic qualifications, which were limited to two “O” levels (English Language, and rather strangely, Technical Drawing being the sum total of my educational achievements) the positions of astronaut or intrepid explorer were more or less closed to the likes of me.

Of the opportunities that were open to me though, one was as a Civil servant, and the other was Landscape Gardener.

I was offered both jobs, two “O” levels being enough to prove your employability in those days, and I took the former, joining HM Department of Transport in 1977. It provided me with a nice warm office and a decent pension. I made some good friends, some of whom I still get drunk with occasionally to this very day. I drove that desk to various parts of the world, to exotic places such as Havana, Damascus and Ipswich – yes, Ipswich – and I pushed a pen around until the computer arrived, when I switched to typing numbers into spreadsheets. All very exciting.

Sometimes though, when in the pub with those good friends, or in the wee small hours when Morpheus is laughing at my attempts to catch him, I wonder what my life might have been like had I chosen the other (garden) path. And that thought springs to the fore whenever I watch Monty Don on Gardener’s World, planting a hibiscus or pruning a cherry tree. I would probably be fitter by now, bronzed and sinewy, and perhaps with knackered knees, but I’d know when to prune my roses.

So perhaps I should’ve taken that other path, for after all, being able to tell the difference between a delphinium and a narcissus – that’s a skill worth having.