Palmers Greek Part 3

One of the benefits of doing a paper round, apart from the almost-too-much-to-spend income of £8-10 a week, was the feeling that Palmers Green was my kingdom. It was deserted as I walked (or for a while, roller skated on my disco roller skates) from street to street at 6am each day.  The woman who was in charge of the newsagent shop would let me take a chocolate bar for free, and because Wispa was new and an ABSOLUTE REVELATION OF CHOCOLATE JOY, I’d always take one of these, have a bite every 5 minutes and avoid chewing it (applying the fruit pastille rule) to make it last the whole round.  The only shitty thing about the job was when the tabloid newspapers introduced Sunday supplements. Those News of the World and Sunday Mirror magazines may have been full of crap, but they felt full of bricks once you squeezed them into my sack-cloth shoulder bag and attempted to stand up straight with it slung over my back.  I walked around like a hunchback (and skating with that extra weight meant that each sloping garden path I got to, I’d end up slamming into the front door at 30 mph.)

Coincidentally, linking the paper round and hunchbacks, was a girl that my mate Darren and I cruelly (but secretly, because we’re not bastards) named Helen the Hunchback.  Helen also did a paper round and my mum knew her mum.  Before I even encountered her, my mum, in a desperate effort to land me a girlfriend, convinced me that Helen looked like Kate Bush, whose posters adorned my bedroom wall at that time, and suggested that I ask her out.  This assertion may even have been the prompt that led to me deciding to take up the paper round. It wasn’t until I’d had several similarly encouraging mentions of this fabled beauty by my mum that I actually met Helen in the newsagent’s one early morning. All that she had in common with Kate Bush was her gender (and even that similarity wasn’t irrefutable).  What she did have, wasn’t a hunchback (we exaggerated with the nickname slightly), but she did have a pair of shoulders on her that meant that she could have delivered the Sunday papers to not just Palmers Green, but the whole borough of Enfield, without feeling like that gargantuan bag weighed any more than a box of Kleenex, something she wasn’t ever going to have any teenage boys reaching for.

On the subject of reaching for teenage boys, behind our back garden was a mechanic’s workshop and the bloke who worked there was nicknamed Robert the Iron by my dad. (You’ll need to know your rhyming slang to understand that one.) My Dad’s evidence for suggesting that Robert was homosexual - and therefore (in the logic of the times) interested in touching young boys - was based on three factors: Firstly he was unmarried; secondly, he lived with his mother; and thirdly he was friendly towards us.  Indisputable proof, your honour. That didn’t prevent Dad acquiescing when Robert asked if he could take me to an Arsenal game, it just gave him a lot of pleasure joking that I should watch that he didn’t sneak a touch of my bottom if Arsenal scored.  As it was, unsurprisingly, Robert didn’t do anything of the sort, but he did stop outside the ground to feed an apple to a police horse and this was even more embarrassing, so I didn’t want to go to Arsenal with him again.