Halcyon Days on the Post Office Motor Bikes.

Hi folks: I wrote this in 2011 and for some reason it is being widely read again so I thought I would re issue it here. I have made the font different from the one before – Ariel Black 14 - easier to see. 

I was living in Hollywood, California, when I wrote this, about to return to London and Brexit and at the time of writing this I had never heard the word let alone know what it meant.

I got a great kick reading it just now so I hope you enjoy it.

Aged 18 the day before I was going on my SAS selection course I was forced into a bag and my hair parted down the middle - boys will be wags!!!

I was driving around here yesterday in the sunshine, with the sun roof open and really enjoying the bends in the road and listening to The Chieftains on the stereo, and my mind went back to the days I worked for the post office in Birmingham riding a motorbike.

I remembered doing the same thing then; the sun was beating down onto my crash helmet as opposed to my white hair but I got the same feeling of gratification which you get sometimes when you enjoy riding or driving.

Driving is possible to enjoy which is why I don't use freeways or motorways unless I have to; there have to be bends in the road and a certain amount of variety with regards to hills and valleys and because of this you concentrate on the enjoyment of actually driving.

I can't understand people who use cruise control and just sit there wishing the journey would be over – wishing their lives away.

Of course it's different if you're driving with children and their 'are we there yet' comments. I am all for putting DVD players in cars and SUVs (with head sets) for children to look at as more accidents are caused by parents looking at the children in the mirror, to make sure they're okay, than anything else.

There's a mini biography of me on the Internet Movie Data Base and it says that before I was an actor I (he) had the 'best job of his life delivering telegrams for the post office' – that is a true statement and I remember the time when I actually felt it and said to myself 'I will never have a better job than this ever' and I was right.

It was obviously on a summer's day and I had to go along a dual carriageway on Bristol Road South in a suburb south west of Birmingham; I turned left off the main drag onto a road, I have forgotten the name of, but it was full of bends, twists and turns and I was going down a slight hill; the bends were just right so I could fully open the throttle and swung left and right, banking over each time with the foot rests coming very close to the ground. What a job, I thought. I was my own boss – we all were when we were on the road – and I didn't have a care in the world.

Well I cared very much for a girl I used to meet in Rose's Cafe in Selly Oak; that cafe was on Bristol Road in the main high street of the Selly Oak suburb. It was a cafe with a great jukebox and I would drive everybody crazy by playing Love Letters by Kitty Lister on it – it just wasn't rock 'n' roll but listen to it today and see how great it sounds.

The office, we worked out of, was in Selly Oak and when we entered the yard at the back of the office we had to turn off the main street and if there were any girls looking some of us would let the foot rests scrape along the floor. The footrests were made of steel and the street made of concrete and what do you get when that happens? Sparks! That's right.

So the 16 and 17 year old girls would see us ride up and the sparks flying which looked very impressive to our youthful minds; especially in the dark.

I had another little trick I used to do: I would rest the motorbike on the concrete floor of the space where we garaged our bikes and open the throttle turning the handle bars slightly in. This would cause the bike to skid and spin around in a circle and as I would put the head lights on, it looked like the wall of death with those sparks flying, the engine revving and the supervisor yelling at me to stop.

When I stopped I took the crash helmet off and walked into the office feeling like John Wayne or James Dean; or what I thought was like them.

Of course I had filled the place with exhaust fumes but it didn't matter to me; I was young and I was going to live forever and in any case the exhaust fumes didn't bother me as I lit up a cigarette and moved to take my riding gear off in the locker room where we also drank tea and broke each other's balls.

We would drive the supervisors up the wall but what did they expect? We were mad headed 16 and 17 year olds with motor bikes on our minds half the time and sex the other half.

One of the supervisors was a very sexy girl from the north of Ireland who was in her late twenties and was the Brigitte Bardot of Belfast as far as I was concerned. She hardly looked at me but she would go weak at the knees if ever she heard the voice of Frank Sinatra. She dated one of the lads but he was a tall good looking fella who looked a bit like Elvis.

These supervisors were only in charge of us after six in the evenings when the proper supervisor would go home; they were actually telegraphists who received and sent telegrams by sticking the tape onto the telegram form (photo below), putting them into the telegram envelope and giving them to us to deliver; we got to know every street, alley, crescent and avenue in the Birmingham postal districts of 15, 16, 17, 29, 30, 31 and the suburbs of Rednal and Rubery.

There was a rock singer in the area called Jimmy Powell who suddenly shot to fame with a minor hit called Sugar Baby and another supervisor, called Tinkerbell Jackson, said that I could sing as good as Jimmy Powell as she'd heard me when I must have been singing to myself. 'You can sing better than he can – I've heard you do your Little Richard.'

Hummm, I thought, that's what she thinks of my Frank Sinatra, which I was trying to perfect for some reason!!!!

Most of the telegrams we delivered were to businesses and lots to weddings and birthdays but some were bad news; sometimes a supervisor or telegraphist would tell us it was bad news and to 'make sure the person is not by themselves.' Sometimes we would knock next door if we knew it was some old lady by herself to try to break the bad news gently. There were hardly any phones in those days – hardly any land lines don't mind mobile phones!! God however did we manage?

One or two people would scream when they saw us coming as they knew it was bad news; must have given some of us complexes.

The weather wasn't always so nice and sometimes we had 50 or 60 telegrams to deliver and maybe some express packets too which we kept in our paniers; it rained, the roads became slippy we would skid on a manhole cover and come off. We hit lorries, buses, cars and it is a wonder none of us were killed. We were taken to hospital, sometimes detained, sometimes in a coma or concussion but we all survived.

I was only taken to hospital once when a truck turned right in front of me without signalling as I was about to overtake him; as he hit me, one of the hooks that they use to tie rope to on the side snagged under my gauntlet and twisted my arm around. The driver didn't even know he'd hit me and was quite content to carry in driving which would have dragged me under the rear wheel but I shouted something very apt to stop him; the first thing that came into my head which was 'you stupid oaf!' Not a word I'd used before or since.

I tore the tendons in my arm and had a few days off work.

Accidents always seemed to happen in hazy lazy weather; we rode in the snow and ice and terrible rain conditions but it was the sunny days we should have been watching for.

There are no more telegrams now they have gone the way of the dodo and are replaced by every other means of communication. No more Rosie's Café in Selly Oak and no more hanging around in there playing on the one armed bandit and the jukebox.

The girl, I mentioned earlier, would come and sit with me every night and we would talk. Her friend would talk to the other telegram lads – they called us wags for some reason. I never asked her out on a proper date; I don't know why but I would get a kiss and a cuddle when I left her at the bus stop. That's what it was like in those days you just dropped them off at the bus stop.

A lot of my pals stayed on at the post office but it wasn't for me; I didn't like the job you had to do when they 'retired you' from the motorbikes at 18 – a postman.

I went to drama school to study speech, drama, dancing, singing and sword fighting and later on I went back to school to study sociology, English Literature and Film Studies and ended up writing this for you – hope you enjoyed it?

telegram from 1944

Ten minutes, 38 seconds.

Ten minutes, 38 seconds. There's a phrase for you. I have just bought a book with that title and it's got me thinking.

I have only read a few pages so I can't give an opinion on the book but Ten minutes, 38 seconds is the length of time it takes your brain to die after you die. How they know this, I have no idea but it's worth thinking about.

I remember in LA I drove a friend of mine to visit her husband in hospital and as we drove away she got a phone call from the same hospital; it was to tell her that her mother had just died. She went straight up to her mother's room at the hospital because, she said, she wanted to get there before her mother actually went. She was talking about spirits and that the soul of her mother would still be there.

She came back to me after a short while and I believe she believed she had caught the spirit.

The other thing I heard was that the very last bit to go from your brain is your earliest memory. I can understand that in a way as that is the time when we are still living in a world of wonderment, seeing things for the first time and having the luxury of being naive and not caring who knows we have never been there before. That is opposed to someone who likes to pretend they know the place, knows the best way to get there and those are the people who do get lost.

I remember when I went to India the woman who was a member of our party was absolutely amazed by me because I wanted to see everything. I asked what certain tubes were, what they were for and nobody laughed at me. One of the other people knew everything – he hadn't been there before either but he told us that we were going through the Western Ghats and that they are a mountain range that runs parallel to the western coast of the Indian peninsula, located entirely in India. It was way before the Internet (where I got that bit of info from) so he'd looked it up in a book before the journey but it was me who was experiencing the wonderment and excitement of India.

The thing he didn't do was to try some Indian food before leaving for India so he spent most of the time being ill – this was, of course, after eating fish'n'chips as opposed to the local bill of fare.

The 10 minutes and 38 seconds has fascinated me since I heard the phrase and I was thinking, as I walked down the street the other day, that if I dropped dead at that particular moment with the garbage laying around the street and bits of rubbish being discarded that I would be experiencing the worst things of modern life with my 10 odd minutes.

By the way the 38 seconds was put on by the author so it's just 10 minutes.

Some of the things of modern life that disturb me is the rush to get everywhere quickly. Someone knocked my wife over at Baker Street Tube Station running for a train on the Jubilee Line. Now when you think that the Jubilee Line has a train every one minute why would the guy run to save one minute?

I was having a cup of coffee last week with a pal and I told him I'd been to Mousehole in Cornwall (pronounced Mowzel); he asked what I did there and I told him nothing – and that's what I went there for. Five and a half hours on the train which gave me plenty of time to read my book and then five and a half hours back. Wonderful! Read: have a sleep: look out the window, have a snack and another read. What more could I want? Then to think about that man who ran into my wife to save one minute. And I actually did nothing. No schedule, no itinerary no nothing. My wife would go down to breakfast at 8.00 and I would stay in the fart sack till she came back with The Guardian – I'd have a browse then walk to another fishing village called Newlyn for a late breakfast – I have a very late breakfast every day which I usually eat sometime after lunch.

My wife would take the tiny bus to meet me and took the photo, above, of me arriving one day.

At Newlyn I saw the fisherman statue by a local artist called Tom Leaper. The statue shows a fisherman casting his line as the boat arrives in port. It was built to honour dead fishermen with over twenty local men having died fishing since 1980. Here's the photo I took of it.