What we will do to earn a crust

A junior relative asked the other day whether I had had any other cool jobs in my career. I had just told her about counting squirrels at the Hudson’s (not Hudson) Bay Company in London. London, England, that is. There’s another HBC in London, Ontario.

Well, catching earthworms on a Toronto golf course at night during the last days of winter was certainly a cool experience. Not to say freezing.

The worms would be sold to fishermen at the start of the season. We literally bagged them, running around the fairways and greens with miners’ lamps on our heads. Our reward? A dollar for ten worms. So on a good night, we could earn three dollars.

But that’s how it was then, trying to scratch a living in that tough climate. One early morning, my friend Vincent Langley and I were at the tail-end of a queue of perhaps fifty people, lined up for work at a car wash. We had been there in the dark since five o’clock. From previous experience, we knew there was little chance of being selected that day. But we waited anyway.

A man drove up in a truck, wound down his window and told us he had a job for us. He took us to a six-storey block of apartments, with glassed-in passages on three sides, gave us buckets and mops and told us to clean the passages.

When we were done, three hours later, he sat us down at a kitchen table and gave us each a plate of egg and bacon. One egg, one strip of bacon. We thanked him, finished the meal and prepared to leave. We asked the man for our payment.

He nodded at the empty plates. “You’ve just had it,” he said.

The squirrels we counted at the Hudson’s Bay Company were pelts, of course. We counted them in tens. Then they were passed on to be tied into bundles. Eventually, they would become coats or rugs.

Two men were responsible for the binding. One would hold a piece of cord at the required length, and the other cut it. Often, there would be delays at that point of the production line. The Australian who had the cutting job was painfully slow.

At lunch one day, we complained to some others about this chap. A New Zealander from another team said they had a South African as the cutter who was also annoyingly slow with the knife. He couldn’t be as slow as our man, we said. It became a bet. We asked the foreman to put the two of them in a team together.

We gave them most of a morning to settle in, then strolled over to observe. The Australian was on the floor, leaning back against the wall and holding out the knife. The South African was sawing the cord back and forth, languidly. Almost all their energy was directed at the conversation they were having.

One cool job I did have in London, in between proper jobs in newspapers, I nearly blew. It was at the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria Street. The pay was fair, the staff canteen cheap, the environment pleasant. But one day an elderly gentleman came in and said he wanted a swordstick and bulletproof vest made for him. I thought he was a nut (which in retrospect he might have been) and sent him on his way.

The manager saw the old man leave, and asked about it. I told him. “So,” the manager said, “did you take his measurements?” It appeared the Army and Navy Stores offered a line in both, swordsticks and bulletproof vests.

Another job, which was decidedly “uncool”, I’d had earlier in the same area. A Polish man was renovating an old four-storey house and looking for a brickie’s mate. I had no experience but I was desperate.

The fourth floor façade overlooking the street had already been knocked out. My job entailed carrying a hob of bricks, and then cement, to the bricklayer who was replacing the wall. It was exhausting work. At the end of the day, I would have a snack and fall into bed.

Then all at once the other workers started knocking down the façade on the ground floor. When I first saw this, I was alarmed. Surely we should be getting danger pay? What was to stop the rest of the house falling down with those pillars gone? Then I would look at the broad back of the bricklayer alongside me and feel reassured.

The following Monday morning, when I reported for work, the owner of the building took we aside, told me I no longer had a job and paid me for the week ahead. “The bricklayer has quit,” he said.

Why?

“He’s says it’s too dangerous working up there.”

From one aspect, that Hudson’s Bay Company job was certainly deserving of danger pay. Every evening, when we left the cavernous building, we would have to run a long gauntlet to the Blackfriars tube station. In pursuit would be a pack of stray dogs, chasing the smell of squirrel on our clothes!