Don't Push Too Many Trolleys

4Don't Push Too Many Trolleys

My very first job was at Sandhurst College, the British Army's officer training academy in Camberley, which was about 5 miles from where we lived. I was keen to get a job as soon as I finished my GCSEs in June 1991, but because my birthday was in July, I wasn't quite 16. So (in the days when you could get away with this) I lied and said I was 16 so that I could get a job in the Sandhurst kitchens as a pot washer.

My 20-minute cycle ride took me up a steep hill, and while I would normally have managed this with ease, I was anxious to take the hill as fast as I could. I was extremely nervous because we were not far from Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital and the infamous child rapist, James Saunders, had just escaped. (He was later called “the wolfman” because he lived in the wild for three weeks before being caught.) There was a very loud alarm that sounded whenever a prisoner had escaped from Broadmoor and I could hear it blaring while I was cycling up the hill, my heart pounding, imagining a deranged rapist might jump out of the bushes at any time and attack me. But I was so determined to get to my job on time, I forced myself to ignore my fears and keep peddling.

My most poignant memory of my dish-washing job – apart from learning the useful practice of soaking dirty baking trays before washing them up – is of meeting a real character called Micky, one of the more experienced kitchen hands. He was in his 60s and physically quite an ...