The Story of George
In the 1960s, I use to serve behind the bar in a pub called The Merryhills in Oakwood. It was one of the vacation jobs I did to fund my way through University.
Although it was a leafy suburb and still is, the pub was only half-genteel. The Saloon Bar was comfortable and had a nice class of client. But the Public Bar was a different story and there was sometimes an edginess. I remember one night, sorting out a fight, by breaking a bottle of Guinness on the bar and jumping over the counter. They didn’t want to take me on, but then we all knew that Mick the large Irish barman was coming round by the easy route with the landlord’s Alsatian.
But it is the story of George I remember.
On a quiet Monday, I found myself talking for most of the evening to a guy called George, who had been in my year at primary school. I said to him, that at school, I thought he might have been a bit rough and that now he seemed to have calmed down. He said that he had. But it hadn’t always been so and a couple of years before he’d been up in court on a charge of vandalism. The magistrate had said that he deserved Borstall, but also said that he had a mate who owned a demolition firm, who was in need of men, who liked to smash things up. If he’d take the job, the magistrate said he’d forget the Borstal.
George had worked in demolition for some months and hadn’t been in trouble since.
Perhaps there is a moral here, in that we’ve now made employment so safe, it just doesn’t appeal to a certain class of youth!
I suspect too, that magistrates can’t recruit workers for their friends!
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