Anecdote – Ray and the warehouse

Ray and the warehouse

At sixteen I managed to secure a holiday job working in a warehouse storing plastic products – bowls, bins and such. I was working for six weeks before going back to school and into the Sixth Form. For me the job meant that I could buy some much needed clothes and some albums. I remember buying some desert boots, elephant cord hipsters and a turtle neck. I felt like a real beatnik. For me the six weeks were an interlude to be endured. For Ray it was to be the rest of his life. He had left school. This was going to be his life. School days were over for him.

The work was tough but OK. The Lorries would come in stacked with boxes of plastic goods. We would form a human chain, under the strict eye of the foreman, and unload them. We would build the boxes into great stacks reaching up into the rafters, and the rafters were high – forty feet in the air. Every other row would be tied to secure it. We would be staged at heights throwing the boxes from hand to hand up into the air, standing on a platform of boxes at different heights. It was hard work but fun. The guys who had been working there a long time had bulging biceps.

There were all kinds of skives and japes. The ‘old-timers’ in their twenties, would skive off by hiding. Their favourite ploy was to take out boxes from the base to create a cave, crawl in, pull a box in to shut it off and have a kip where the foreman couldn’t find them.

Sometimes one of the huge high stacks would start leaning and we’d have to go up and tie it to the beams.

Once a worker was found asleep under one of those leaning stacks. The foreman cut the strings holding the stack and it tumbled down on top of him. It took us ages to dig him out from under the boxes but he was unhurt.

They used to play tricks on us new workers.

The other part of the job was to take the large stacks down and load them back on to other Lorries. To do that the string holding the stacks into a cohesive body, had to be cut. The foreman instructed me to cut the strings on a stack. He directed me to cut the string from the bottom rows and work my way up. Like an idiot I did. At the top I leaned over and cut the last string. I suddenly found myself teetering on a huge unstable pile of boxes tens of feet in the air above the composition floor. The whole stack went down with me in the middle of it. It terrified the life out of me but they all found it hilarious.

Two weeks after I’d left to go back to school Ray fell off a stack and fractured his skull. He never recovered.