Back in the M.A.F.F. - Part Two of Two

My dear colleague, Colin the Contortionist, really was called Colin but he was employed by the M.A.F.F. more as a Scientific Officer than as a contortionist. Most Government departments at the time would have had us believe that there was no need for a contortionist on their premises but we had one anyway and our daily rigmarole would have been a lot less bearable without him. He was known the length and breadth of the Government Buildings site in Lawnswood for the incredible party tricks he was able to perform. He should have been very good at being a scientist because with his unkempt spiky hair, his wispy beard and his wee round John Lennon glasses he looked like a scientist, if not a nutty professor. But he wasn’t very good at science and had dropped out of his degree course at Leeds University two years earlier. He had got this job because he was terrified of facing the wrath of his parents if he went home to Sussex to tell them he was never going to have his name up there in lights alongside the likes of Louis Pasteur and Charles Darwin as they had hoped he would and as they had told their neighbours accordingly, and too hastily in my opinion. He was possibly the skinniest person that I have ever met and to demonstrate his incredible physique, or lack of it, he would take off his white lab coat and his purple tie-dye grandpa vest, stand on a stool and protrude his shoulder blades until he could hook them onto a shelf high up on the wall of the laboratory. He would then invite one of his audience (he really deserved to have an attractive young lady assistant in a sparkly leotard and a dramatic drum roll) to remove the stool, leaving him dangling there until it was time to go home or one of the dandruff-bearing management team walked in on us and he would jump down.

Another man, much older than the rest of us, would tell us tales about what had happened to him with a girl he had met the previous evening. He had a different story every single day, the plotline was always something quite sordid, it had always taken place in his kitchen and it had always taken him totally by surprise. We fathomed that he was a regular customer at the ‘special’ cinema in a part of town that most of is never went to (well, not very often) where films about people who were a bit overcome by the heat had had to loosen their clothing and then all of a sudden they were down to their vest and pants or less and you wouldn’t want the priest to find out about what happened next. He’d obviously wanted to share his experience with his colleagues in the hope that somebody in the world might find him interesting but he knew that if he told us the precise truth we’d vandalise his mucky mac. I suspect that these days he has a mucky Apple Mac in his bedroom so he no longer needs to leave home to watch the sinners and fornicators, and that the special cinema has gone out of business. Another casualty of digital technology.

We had a political activist working amongst us. Everyone called him Frudd. One day I asked, ‘Why does everyone call him Frudd?’

‘Because that’s his name,’ everyone replied. ‘John Frudd.’

Had it not been for the rampant acne and the grey polyester trousers dotted with patches of egg yolk and ketchup from a myriad of staff canteen breakfasts, I would have said that he looked like he’d been made from modelling clay and possessed some of the physical features that might have made a person think that he was the Incredible Hulk, had the Incredible Hulk been only five feet tall. He had had to ask his mum to turn up his white lab coat to stop it from trailing on the ground and getting dirty (or dirtier). He was an avid supporter of a political organisation that I had previously had no experience of. This party, called the National Front, was a fine body of bonehead Fascists who Frudd was quite confident would win the approaching May 1979 general election, form a government and get Britain back on its feet. Thankfully they didn’t win but the people who did turned out to be not much better. Someone asked him to go through the key features of his party’s election manifesto. His response, although quite rude, was perfectly succinct. In fact, it amounted to only two single syllable words.

‘Why do you read the Daily Star and not the Sun?’ someone asked him, thinking that the reputation of the latter would deem it to be right up his street.

‘Because the Star has greater political content’ he replied. ‘That’s why the photos of the girls with their paps out have to be pushed right back to page five, rather than on page three where you would always find them in the less intellectual rival, the Sun.’

I remember a man called Tony, whose job seemed to be nothing more than giving us all a form (an item of official M.A.F.F. stationery known as a CF6 or a VAT69 or an AK47 or something like that) on a Monday morning for us to enter our flexi-time hours that week as we worked them, and then to collect the completed forms as we went out of the door on Friday afternoon. One lunchtime he went to a shop in town and returned with a brown paper bag containing around a dozen shiny tin kazoos. He handed them out to us and we spent a lively couple of hours performing the music of popular recording artists like the New Seekers, the Bay City Rollers and Petula Clarke on these small and very simple, but highly entertaining instruments as our bovine beakers bubbled. At five o’clock he asked for them back because he was taking them to a children’s party. I thought this was terrible. What did seven-year-olds know about Petula Clarke?

The Government Buildings on Otley Road in Leeds had formerly housed the Government’s War Room, opened in the early 1950’s but within a few years, nuclear technology left it obsolete as the H bomb threat required a new breed of protected accommodation. So the M.A.F.F. moved their business in, along with the Department of Health & Social Security (D.H.S.S.) and the Department of the Environment (D.O.E.). It was a very cosy arrangement but I still don’t know what the collective noun is for a group of government departments. A nebuliser, perhaps? We used to chat with their staff and even meet up with them for a beer in the Lawnswood Arms on a lunchtime or in the city centre pubs at the weekends. They were nice people and they didn’t smell of silage. With a few of them I established friendships that continued until long after I’d moved on to another job.

On Thursdays after work we’d play each other at football on the nearby university sports fields, but because football is a game for two teams and we were three government departments, one week in three we’d have to take our turn at not playing and just going home for our tea instead. I rarely played in these games because I wasn’t particularly talented at football or at inflicting grievous bodily harm on people so I wasn’t often picked by the team selectors. Although these sporting events were supposed to be a bit of good natured, inter-departmental camaraderie it was often the case that a fight would break out over a hotly disputed refereeing decision, a boot aimed at a shin rather than the ball or the mention of the fact that we were allowed to read books at work and our opponents weren’t. Sometimes there was the suggestion that the police might be called, not because of the fighting but because we weren’t really allowed to be playing our games on the property of Leeds University so the groundsman would come along and shout abuse at us whilst trying to catch hold of our ball and run away with it.

I remember him threatening us with the pointed end of a corner flag whilst shouting, ‘You shouldn’t be here because you’re nothing but bloody riff-raff sitting in that bomb shelter all day long doing sod all except wasting taxpayers’ money and if you want to play on this pitch you should go to university and learn something decent and then you might be able to get a proper job and I wish they’d come and drop a bomb on that place anyway because it’s just a pile of old concrete and rust and then where would you be?’ We weren’t afraid of him but there was no point in trying to play football with him around, so we removed the lumps of the mud that had accumulated around the studs on our boots and threw them at him as we departed for the pub.

It wasn’t a place that I could say was a nice pub or had a good atmosphere or good beer but I do remember having some good times there. But what I remember even more clearly was being there on one occasion with my girlfriend Debbie (she wasn’t from Leeds so she wasn’t called Janine) and not having a good time. She was a permanent employee at the M.A.F.F., several grades higher than me and worked in the laboratory where they did autopsies on deceased farm animals. If you live on a farm and your animal dies you can’t just go making it into chops and sausages, you know. Civil Servants have to take it away and carry out all manner of investigating to establish if it had died from natural causes, or in suspicious circumstances, perhaps murdered in the library with a candlestick, or from a disease that the nation’s agriculturalists needed to get into a panic over. I, in particular, was worried that Debbie might catch something incurable from a poorly member of some farmer’s herd and that we would both have to be destroyed by a government vet.

Anyway, we’d often meet straight after work in the pub when it opened at 5:30. I was always there first because she cared about her work. Even though we weren’t together very long it was always nice to see her, but one evening when she sat down at our table she seemed a bit unhappy and not at all talkative. I tried to make her smile by telling her some silage jokes but she was in an awful mood and was determined to stay there.

So nervously I asked her, ‘What’s wrong Debbie?’

‘I’ve been doing fucking pig shits all day,’ she snapped at the top of her voice, ‘and I can still smell them!’ causing twenty or thirty elderly customers, who were in the pub for the Tuesday teatime pensioners’ special, to turn their heads and scowl at us in horror.

That district of Leeds was quite well-to-do so those people would have had absolutely no time at all for young folk who did pig shits. However, if Debbie had thought to include the words ‘analysis of’ and ‘for scientific purposes’ in her outburst I’m sure they’d have been more accepting of her and possibly even offered her a bit of their teatime special, which hopefully wasn’t pork.

Not being pensioners ourselves, we never found out what made these Tuesday teatime pensioners’ specials so special. We suspected that it was the Sunday lunchtime ordinary food warmed up and sold off at a reduced price before it went off. Debbie suggested that the pensioners’ specials might actually contain bits of pensioner which would have been awful because, if this was so, the meat eating public of Great Britain would no longer need farm produced foodstuffs and the M.A.F.F. and Debbie and I would all be out of a job.

My contract had been for six months with the possibility of an extension to this if I was any good at the job, but working beyond the end of the six months never came up for discussion as after three I had moved on to something that could more realistically be considered a career.

I had been taken on as a casual employee which was along the lines of what might be called a zero hours contract today. There was no sick pay, holiday pay, pension scheme or invitation to become a member of the golf club. I worked flexi-time and I could decide for myself each morning whether or not I was going in to work that day, as long as I phoned them to tell them if I wasn’t and accepted that I wouldn’t get paid. They encouraged me to work a minimum of three days per week but some weeks I’d only work two days and others four or five. This meant that I could have a day off whenever the weather was exceptionally good or exceptionally bad, or if I had a job interview to go to elsewhere or if I simply couldn’t be bothered being a stand in for the digestive tract of a cow. During my time there I took a couple of days off as an act of solidarity with my colleagues who were permanent employees and were striking for better pay and conditions. They told me that if I crossed their picket line as a non-union member they’d never buy me a pint again. So I joined them on their picket line, handed out a few leaflets, shouted some mildly uncomplimentary things about a man called Fred Peart who was the Labour Government’s Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and then, at the end of a hard day’s striking, we all (with the exception of Fred Peart) toddled off to the pub.

I’ll never forget my short time working as a civil servant. It was an ideal stopgap between two careers, giving me a bit of extra time and money to look round for a more suitable job. Sometimes it was an absolute scream being there and I made some wonderful friends. At the time I wouldn’t have called it my dream job but, looking back, it definitely was a job and I spent a lot of my working hours there in a bit of a dream as I reflected upon the seafaring career that I had given up and wondered what excitement might lie ahead in my next line of work.

Not long before I said goodbye to the M.A.F.F. I got a letter from Seacroft Job Centre, signed not by Janine but by the general manager. At my introductory interview with them they had asked me a series of generic, multi-choice questions about myself, my interests and my expectations. The idea was that they would punch my answers into a computer, press a button and then after a bit of clanking and whirring a piece of paper would emerge containing a description of my dream job. After more than two months of clanking and whirring (I was obviously a bit of a challenge) the machine came to the conclusion that I should be working for the Forestry Commission. And as luck would have it, the general manager added, there was currently a vacancy for someone to work in the cafeteria at the forest on the Scottish Isle of Raasay.

So I went to work in London.

Image:

Every image I use is from a photograph I have taken myself. 

On this occasion - This is Daisy, with her daughter. She taught me everything I know about digesting cattle food.