When I was thirteen, I started doing a paper round. I delivered newspapers on foot to a few streets near where I lived and walked around with a left lean from the huge orange pvc bag sitting on my right hip. Monday to Saturday my mickey mouse alarm clock clanged loudly to get me up, a speedy bowl of cornflakes, label the papers in order with a pencil and shove them into the bag. I’d wear an old khaki green parker coat, all the rage in the 80s with its furry hood and hi vis orange lining. It was soon the colours of newsprint, tarmac and morning rain.
A cheap version of a Sony Walkman and foam headphones (also orange) provided a soundtrack. I listened to albums put onto cassettes by my Dad. Before I stepped out into the dark I carefully chose a tape from the shelf. Go West, ABC, Matt Bianco, Eagles, Stevie Nicks or Donald Fagan’s The Nightfly which was a personal favourite. It was the lyrics I loved.
In the winter, I didn’t listen to music so much. I loved the dark, the silence. In the shadowy morning, before the sun came up, I would narrate my walk in my head, noticing, observing, describing, reflecting and rewriting lines in my head to make them sound better.
I storied the pavements and the empty streets, the familiar commuters walking to the train station, the overgrown gardens and tight brass letterboxes and the teenage melancholy that was already a fixture in my brain. The alone time gave me freedom, we had so much freedom then. I loved to walk in the dark streets, empty roads, few cars in sight, a small but confident belonging to somewhere.
In the four years I delivered newspapers I only made a handful of mistakes, the wrong paper through a letterbox. I lived in my head and sometimes I got distracted and mixed up the order in the bag. But mostly I was a reliable morning routine for the customers who got their daily news on the doormat.. I got great tips at Christmas, envelopes taped to the ice cold letter boxes with cash inside. My wages rose every year, they said I was the best they ever had, and gave me £7.50 a week in a brown envelope. But I just liked walking in the dark, composing my words.
I was folding newspapers through letterboxes and teaching myself how to be a writer, a poet, noticing and reflecting and choosing lines like music in my mind. Not a word made it onto paper.