BOOGER WONDERLAND

It was Xmas Eve, thirty-eight years ago. The morning was dark, and cold, and there was ice on the ground as I drove my Standard Eight car gently down Benton Way Bank, Wallsend-on-Tyne. I had two outrageously bald tyres and no cash to replace them. I didn’t fancy skidding down into the ferry landing at the bottom of the bank. The two bald tyres were now diagonally opposite each other, for I harboured a theory that I would skid first one way, then the other, and finish up in a straight line. The theory lacked empirical evidence, however, and I didn’t want to put it to the test. I eventually managed to park safely and to walk into the Dry Dock office where I worked. I was a trainee buyer at the time. Atkinson was the yard buyer, a man whose hair was so crinkled it looked as if it had been set in Airfix. He had an annoying habit of marching briskly into the office I shared with three colleagues, and then leaving before he had finished giving me an instruction, so that his words disappeared over his shoulder into thin air as he returned rapidly to his room. I invariably had to chase after him to learn what he required. My other colleagues were Marjorie, the elderly comptometer operator, Paulson, who was training to be a ‘runner’, carrying bits of information to all corners of the Yard, and Bill Lofty, who unofficially ran the office.

Marjorie costed works tickets. Her precious comptometer, which was at least fifty years old and which she polished assiduously every night, was a heavy steel-framed thing that took up half the desk. It contained different-coloured octagonal keys that sat proud of the framework and delineated singles, tens, hundreds and thousands. Marjorie rattled and clacked away all the time, and there was scarcely a day that I didn’t go home with a slight migraine headache. Paulson sat next to me. He was an imbecilic young man with a pugilist’s face and a rictus grin who smelt of TCP. He was immensely irritating. He and I had crossed swords over the little matter of whose was the responsibility of looking after the office coffee money, a great perk because you could borrow from it if you were short and pay it back on pay-day. He had won the argument and I only spoke to him if it was absolutely necessary.

Bill Lofty was about fifty-five years old, as round as he was tall (about five-feet-six). His suit was mirror-shiny with age, and he fastened with a snake-buckled belt his threadbare trousers under his huge, rolling, distended stomach, which was nourished with vast and regular quantities of beer, courtesy of the Castletown Boilermakers’ Club, of which he was a member. Such hair as he had was plastered in place with what looked like axle grease. These were the days before smoking in the office was banned and Bill was a sixty-a-day man. No cork-tipped for him, either - Capstan Full Strength was his preferred brand. You always knew when Bill was approaching the door, because he would gurgle and wheeze like steam escaping from an incorrectly packed gland. Whenever he was under pressure to deliver some of the fruits of his labours, which was often, he would puff out his cheeks, cup his lit cigarette conspiratorially in his right hand, and say ‘The boogers can have the information when I’ve finished with it.’ He didn’t get on with Stillwell, the general manager. ‘See that Stilwell?,’ he would say to me, rather loudly, in the other’s hearing, ‘Thinks he’s a toff because he lives in Whickham. He’s just an ordinary booger like the rest of us. Let him come here and I’ll tell him that.’ I would always say ‘Shut up, Bill, he’ll hear you.’ ‘Hear me?’ Bill would roar ‘That deaf old booger couldn’t hear the Niagra Falls if he was standing under it in a barrel.’

That Christmas Eve, we were all going out for a celebratory drink at the Dock Inn across the road. There were fifty of us, but no Stillwell. Marjorie declined on the grounds of propiety and Paulson was engaged in the Riggers’ shop on some business of his own. I confined myself to drinking orange and lemonade, not wanting to damage my admittedly wafer-thin reputation, but Bill swallowed at least a gallon of Exhibition ale. He was in combative mood when we returned, and was all for sorting Stillwell out once and for all. ‘Quick,’ I whispered to Marjorie, ‘Call a taxi. We can’t keep him here – he’s going berserk.’ Paulson and I managed to wrestle him out as far as the cashier’s office. ‘Let me at him,’ Bill was saying. ‘I’ll sort that booger out. I’ll teach him to make a fool out of me with his constant demands for this and that.’ Fortunately, the taxi, a Wolseley 6/110, I think it was, arrived quickly, and we were able to pour him into it without further mishap. His last words, delivered in a defiant yell to Paulson and I were ‘Tell that booger Stillwell that he can have the work when I’ve finished it.’

I went back to the site last week. The place was deserted. The ship repair yard had gone bust. The cranes stood silent, redundant sentries over a glorious industrial past. The offices were still there, just as I had remembered them, only boarded up and desolate. An empty plastic bottle blew past me, tumbleweed in a ghost town. I glanced up at the office window where I had worked all of those years ago. It had looked out over the Dock Inn, now a hole in the ground. Standing there, steeped in thoughts and long-dead memories, with only a few desultory herring gulls and the slap of the river against the staithes for company, I felt I saw that taxi once again draw up, and Bill get into it, with that defiant phrase still on his beery lips. It was a hollow memory, for there are now no more boogers there to receive the work, once Bill has finished it.