IT WAS 4.30am; dark, really dark, and the rain was pouring down.
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And the alarm would not stop.
I was 13 years old, I left the embrace of my warm blankets and struggled in the dark to get dressed and with only a raincoat for protection, headed into the elements on my faithful treddly.
And over the road to the newsagents.
Where, huddled under the veranda, were a dozen or so other paperboys (yes, it was all boys back in the 1960s) in various stages of half-awake and/or half-asleep and rugged up in everything from raincoats and duffle coats to one in a t-shirt and trackpants and shivering worse than our grumpy newsagent did when struck down with a malaria relapse (he was a war veteran).
Finally he arrived, in his heated car and rugged up for the next excursion to the South Pole, and promptly growled at two kids who had leaned their bikes against his shop’s glass front.
Followed closely by the delivery truck, which promptly dumped the day’s bundles of paper on the wet footpath, in the rain, and took off into the gloom.
“Hurry up, get them under cover,” Johnno, the newsagent, commanded.
It was a Saturday, which old Johnno hated, because he couldn’t go straight home to bed once the last paperboy was dispatched.
The problem was the Saturday Age.
It was so big and so heavy it should have been registered as a deadly weapon.
The Sun and the Addy (the local Geelong Advertiser) were also pretty hefty on a Saturday – plus a few copies of The Australian (we thought those people must have been communists because the paper always had a red map of Australia on the front page) and there was one elitist near the top of my route who got the Australian Financial Review.
The upshot was our bulging hessian bags, slung over the pack racks on the back of our bikes, couldn’t fit all the Saturday papers, so you would count them out, fit what you could and Johnno had to drive all over the neighbourhood dropping off bundles so you could reload without coming back.
No mobile phones back then.
If you counted wrong, or anything else went wrong, you rode back to the shop and started over.
Rain, hail or shine we would deliver our papers six days a week.
The funny thing is, at the time, you memorised your route and you knew where every paper was going, never referring to the grubby, much thumbed notebook in your back pocket with all your addresses.
It was a lot of houses, some had one paper, some had two, on weekends many had three.
And you could rattle off the whole lot without mistake if asked.
But now, writing this, I have absolutely no idea how much we were paid.
It would only have been a few dollars but probably seemed a lot – or why else would we go through this daily?
My bike was not just second-hand, I suspect it was multiple hand.
I was never quite sure where the old man found it, but as was his wont he rebuilt it, painted it, and I was mobile.
And it proved a trusty steed as I slogged up the hills (I never used my light no matter how dark because the dynamo made you feel as though you were dragging a boulder behind you) and raced down the other side, with the back-wheel swinging and shaking from the unbalanced load.
This was also before the days of plastic wrap papers.
You had to roll every one of them and put them in the letterbox.
Except that Saturday Age.
They could not be rolled and the letterbox that would fit one had not yet been invented.
But there is also method in paperboy madness.
People who got the Age tended to be the ones with two cars in the drive (who could afford two cars?) and that meant Christmas tips.
So you dropped your bike on the footpath and lugged their Age to the front door – out of the rain.
It worked.
They often left a $2 note under the doormat.
Once – but only once – there was a $5 note, which I waved at other pre-dawn slaves as we crossed paths during the morning.
Most places you were lucky to find a 50 cent coin.
I don’t know if it was to be my start in the media – I would eventually work for all the papers I delivered (except the Oz) – but even though my memory isn’t what it was, I think the real decision was made by my English teacher, who suggested I give journalism a go.
To which I replied “what’s that?”
Andrew Mole, Baby Boomer