The Opportunities of Youth

The Opportunities of Youth

Copyright © Don Phillips 2005

Published by Don Phillips at Smashwords

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to all the trainees of the Special Unit of Avon County’s Youth Opportunities Scheme. They know who they are.

Prologue

This book is a comedy, but the reader needs to understand a little of the background of Youth Opportunities as they were known.

In the late seventies the Thatcher Government determined for once and for all to destroy the power of the Trade Unions who they felt were holding the country to ransom and to be fair, the majority of people in the country at least half agreed with her. However, what the Thatcherites actually achieved with their monetarist policies was the destruction of the countries manufacturing base, which slid rapidly downhill and has been diminishing ever since. Apprenticeships and other types of trade learning practically vanished overnight as companies cut down on all possible expenditures and then went to the wall in droves, buried under an interest rate that finally topped out at eighteen percent as Thatcher determinedly pursued her policies.

There is no doubt that this did severely curb Union power. However, it also removed the livelihood and job opportunities of thousands upon thousands of school leavers. This was especially true for the less able kids who had relied on jobs in the manufacturing industries. And so in Avon County, now vanished from the face of the earth, ACYOPS was invented, Avon County Youth Opportunities Scheme, to give these unemployed kids something to do. The idea was that they should be paid a minimum wage by the state and placed with kindly employers who would teach them the ropes in return for their prepaid labours. In other words free workers from the government in return for giving them real world experience. Some, the more able, were put straight with employers. The rest were first of all put with Supervisors in groups to learn such skills as building and painting and decorating.

They practised on community halls, church halls and other buildings whose owners were very happy to have the work done, however slowly, for only the cost of the materials. To carry out this work of placing and administrating YOPS a whole new department was needed by most County Councils and then they had to be staffed. For old builders whose bodies were giving out before retirement could rescue them, it was a godsend and these people did a good job in teaching a difficult client group how to survive on a building site. Other private schemes were also sanctioned in all sorts of areas of employment. Some were incredibly good, but many were just bloody awful.

In all these schemes the sponsoring body had complete freedom in the matter of choosing staff and no common criteria was ever issued by government nor were the qualifications claimed by the applicants ever really properly checked.

Many schemes had absolutely nobody who had any experienced in training youngsters for work at all and many supervisors were taken from the ranks of ex-teachers. This was not very successful as this group had tended to spend six years training to be teachers only to find what a difficult job it is to teach thirty or more teenagers at a time, especially if they had not the slightest interest in your subject. These people then abandoned the teaching profession for anything they could get their hands on, including ACYOP. Because they had been to teaching college for six years learning a job they now discovered they didn’t want, they found themselves fast approaching thirty and totally unsuited to placing sixteen year old kids into the world of work that they themselves had never experienced. None the less, despite their rejection of the teaching profession dozens of these failures, I can use no other word, were employed to become ACYOP supervisors with absolutely predictable results.

Finally there was a group of youngsters that nobody knew what to do with. These were the special needs trainees, as they would be called now. In those days we were less politically correct and a lot more honest. These kids were known in the trade as the Sad, the Mad and the Bad. The sSad were the educationally subnormal, yes, that is how they were called then, and those kids who had found themselves in care for some reason or other and without a normal home. The second group were the Mad and they were the ones who for some reason were out of kilter with the rest of the world. Teachers and parents had given up on them and they were left in limbo. The last group were the Bad. Those kids who had crossed swords with the law and had been offered the choice of a custodial sentence or ACYOPS.

Of course it was not quite as clear-cut as that. Some kids fell into more than one category while others embraced all three. Sent along by Social Services, Probation, Police, schools and any one else who had a school leaver they did not know what to do with, these were the clients of the Special Unit and these are the kids around whom much of this story revolves.

By now some of the more politically correct among you will be getting jumpy at my continually calling them kids. Well we tried all the politically correct titles. We tried calling them clients and we tried referring to them as Youths and Young Persons. They laughed at us and said it was bollocks, so we went back to calling them what they called themselves, Kids. I had over seven hundred pass through my hands. Six hundred and ninety six of them were saveable. Four of them should have been shot. Not a bad ratio really.

Chapter One

For whom the lights flash (Somerset, February 1982)

He was thirty-six years old, tall and faintly tanned from a recent weeks holiday. He was in good physical shape with all his own hair and teeth and was reasonably good looking. His light grey suit, dark blue tie and polished black shoes told you he was not a manual worker although he sat at a table in the empty factory canteen. He was watching a set of coloured lights blinking on the far wall by the menu board. The yellow and green were not active, but the red, white and blue were pulsating on and off, on and off, on and off. A bit like this company he thought, although it was becoming rapidly more off than on these days. Their latest heating pumps were a disaster and as they seized up all over the country, usually when the weather was at its wettest and coldest, plumbers were deserting the company in droves. No plumber was going to continue buying a product that ensured at least one call out within the guarantee period and a disappointed customer on five out of ten installations. They were particularly losing out in the hard water areas where the design almost ensured a breakdown the minute any calcium started to form. This unfortunately included most of the housing estates in the north of England and in particular Manchester and Liverpool. Not a part of the world where a plumber, however practised in the art as most were, wants to piss off all his customers on an annual basis.

He heard footsteps echoing across the floor and looked up to see Derek Killick approaching him. He nodded and indicated the seat opposite. Killick pulled the seat out and sat down.

Your lights are up you know, Tony, have been for nearly fifteen minutes.

Tony wondered if Killick thought he was blind as he was only sat fifteen feet from the said lights and was practically facing them. Derek Killick ignored his sarcastic and exaggerated raising of one eyebrow and taking his pipe out of one pocket and a plastic tobacco wallet from another, proceeded to fill it. He did this with slow and careful movements of a man wishing to portray that he knew the secret of getting an even and steady burn.

Killick came from a Scottish naval family and his father had been a full naval captain, although of nothing more exciting than an oil supply ship, as Derek had revealed one day at the golf club when he was in his cups. Never the less, his family had a four-generation history in the service. The full set beard and the pipe gave him a feeling of keeping up the family tradition although it turned out that he himself had decided after an incredibly short period of time that the navy was not for him and was now taking his accountancy papers. Several times in fact as he kept failing various parts, which was why at the moment he handled the collection of debt and the foreign transaction payments in a small corner of the Accounts Office?

Killick also felt that the beard and pipe gave him a gravitas that his bright red hair would have denied him with a beardless face. He was right about that. He got the pipe going and sat back watching his work colleague with an expression of bemused interest on his face. He didn’t know why Tony was hiding in the canteen and ignoring the lights signal that showed some one wanted him, but he knew he would find out sooner or later if he were patient. He crossed one ankle over the other knee in a typical Killick pose, placed a knowing look on his face to hide the fact that he was actually very curious to know what was going on and puffed out clouds of aromatic blue smoke.

Tony had nodded to show that he had heard him, but apart from that just carried on turning the plastic cup from the vending machine of what passed for coffee, around and around in his fingers. The bloody machine had turned out a mixture of tea and coffee again resulting in an evil mix that even a man dying of thirst in the proverbial desert would have found difficult to swallow. He put the cup down with a sigh.

Tony Filton was well built man with a full head of wavy, dark brown hair and grey eyes and although he himself could not at first understand it, he had a way about him that attracted the opposite sex of all ages. He had enjoyed this until he heard two of his office staff discussing it one day when they didn’t know he was within hearing range. It seems they thought he was such a nice person.

This was an opinion did not please him greatly as he had always thought they liked him because he was sexy and that to be called nice was probably the worst thing that could happen to you. Nice people were usually nice because they had a completely innocuous personality and he would rather be thought an interesting bastard any day. Ever since he had overheard them he had been a little brusquer in his dealing with his office staff in an attempt to change their opinion. The jury was still out on whether it was working.

At five feet eleven inches he would have made a good rugby half back, although his chosen game had been football. Until a few years ago that is, when a badly broken wrist had driven his wife to threaten him with all manner of nastiness if he didn’t give up the game and grow up. He had over three months to think it over while he underwent two bone grafts on his smashed wrist. He had capitulated. Thinking about it now he realised that he had capitulated on a lot of things with Tas. Tasmin Pearling had been an only child and very used to getting her own way.

The silence between the two men stretched into several minutes. Killick was relighting his pipe and having finally got it going again sat back in his chair, ankles crossed and arms folded, puffing peacefully and giving a fair impression of an old steam locomotive. Being an ex-Naval Officer of however brief a period, Killick often liked to act as if he was on the bridge of a destroyer, calmly directing things while others panicked. However, the red beard and hair were ample warning of the temper that lurked within him, as had been seen when the tool room apprentices had made a large key from sheet aluminium and attached it to the rear of his diminutive and very ancient Fiat 500. Having driven it twenty-two miles home before he discovered it, which included driving through the heart of Taunton, he had failed to see the joke for some weeks before he eventually laughed (hollowly). In the meantime the apprentices had kept carefully out of his way. Tony, who had put them up to it had never confessed. He removed the pipe and examined its now even burn with critical eyes.

Well, what are you going to tell me that is so sensitive that you cannot come over to the office and tell me about it? John Duggan will go mad when he finds I am missing you know. Its now nine o’clock and I had only been here fifteen minutes when I got your phone call. He will give me hell when I go back. It is month’s end this week.

Tony gave a faint smile. The thought of the diminutive little pipsqueak who was the company’s Chief Accountant, having a go at the redheaded and fully bearded, six-foot ex-naval officer sat in front of him, was really quite humorous.

Did you tell anyone where you were going?

There was a shake of the head from Killick. Tony put two ten pence coins on the table and indicated the battered machine against the wall.

Better get yourself a coffee, Derek. You might need it when you hear what I have to say.

Killick looked shocked.

As bad as that is it. You feel we may want to take our own lives, do you.

He indicated the coffee machine. Tony gave a tired grin and waited until Killick had banged and kicked the machine into producing what passed for coffee. He brought it back to the table and stared at it with a look of disbelief on his face.

What you have to tell me must be really bad if you think I will want to drink this after I hear it. This stuff makes the local river water look drinkable, and that is sixty percent mud.

Tony nodded and then sat up straight with his hands flat on the table in front of him.

Out of the blue there was a Senior Management meeting suddenly called last night, at four forty five.

Killick snorted to show what he thought of the phrase, Senior Management.

So that is why little John Duggan was running around all afternoon like a chicken with its backside alight. He was backwards and forwards to Mike Rutherford’s office like a bloody yoyo. (Mike Rutherford was the company’s MD) So what’s it all about?

Tony was the Sales Administrator and as such was part of the Senior Management set up. This was a really a historical accident as his position within the Sales Department did not merit his inclusion. However, two years before he had been the Personnel Manager and had been entitled to a position on the Senior Management team until the last round of redundancies had made it no longer necessary to have a personnel department, according to Group. After all, the company had shrunk in the last two and a bit years, from nearly fifteen hundred to just under nine hundred employees and a full Personnel Department was now a luxury. But a grateful Mike Rutherford, relieved that Tony had handled the last round of redundancies without major strife and bloodshed, had then transferred him to the Sales Department as the Sales Administrator, but reporting directly to him.

This was in the hope that at last he would be able to receive some straight information that would enable him to make some meaningful decisions, hence Tony’s continued inclusion on the Senior Management team. The upshot had been that the information and statistics that Tony supplied him with, had led to the then Sales Director being fired.

The job of the Sales Director had then, to Tony’s everlasting amazement, been given to one Robin Welsby-Green, previously the Export Sales Manager. In Tony’s view, anyone who spent the majority of his time swanning around the world in Club Class, who’s expenses were the equivalent to ten ordinary reps and who was shifting less product than any single UK rep, was unlikely to make the hard decisions needed to make the changes required to halt the falling sales graph, and so it had proved. He also thought that Welsby-Green was an overweight, underhand shit, but that was just his personal opinion. One of Welsby-Green’s stipulations on taking the job had been that Tony from now on worked for him. End of meaningful statistics for the other Directors, as all information now ran through Welsby-Green and beginning of a very hard time for Tony.

It would not be an over statement to say that Tony didn’t like Welsby-Green anymore than he liked Tony, which was not at all. However, they had not yet had the courage to throw him off the Senior Managers board, as he was the only member with any knowledge of employment law left in the company. Killick knew all this as they often played golf together and like all golfers spent the time in between the shots putting the company they worked for to rights.

Well come on then. Lets have it, for Christ’s sake.

Killick was getting impatient.

Well although the meeting was called at a very short notice it seems that I was the only one surprised by that. As I went through reception and up the stairs to the boardroom, Grace on the switchboard remarked that she had wondered when it would be my turn to be called and how many of us poor buggers would be going this time?

He nodded grimly as Killick sat up straighter.

When I walked into the boardroom I was the last to arrive. Nobody, and I mean nobody, would look me in the eye.

He put down the coffee cup he had been playing with for the last ten minutes and told Killick all about it.

When he had entered the meeting and said good afternoon no one had answered him and he had felt his survival nodes jump. Even Andy Mattison, the Works Director and perhaps his closest colleague in the company when he had been in Personnel, if Mattison could be said to be close to anyone, would not look at him. Mike Rutherford had said that now they were all here he would like to get the meeting under order and he took his place. It was short and sweet. They had to make further cuts and this time they would have to include Chiefs as well as Indians. Could everyone go home and think about it tonight and he would call individuals back in the morning to discuss their ideas for cutbacks. Tony had sat back and watched them all leave and they couldn’t get out fast enough. As the last one left he had turned to speak to Mike Rutherford, but that gentleman had scuttled back to his office through his private door from the Board Room. When later he had asked Rutherford’s secretary, Pat, if he could see him, she had told him that he was leaving immediately for a meeting in London with Group and did not have the time to see anyone. He came to the end of his story and sat back,