7. Clicks, Tricks & Cider-Sicks

I escaped from the child-labour camp known as ‘Mirza News’ sometime in 1984. My method was simple – I delivered a Guardian to the old man with the red face who had been ‘taking’ the Telegraph for around ten years. By the time I returned from the morning run, he had been in to complain and I was Sacked Boy Walking. The unsmiling harridan who ran the place confirmed that enough was indeed enough. She slapped down the week’s pittance in advance (minus the cost of the Telegraph) and I left, wondering where my arcade money was going to come from, now.

There was nothing else for it. I was going to have to get a clicker.

Not what you think it is.

I was a paper-boy for two long, withering years – terrified awake by a cheap and angry alarm-clock, and bundled out into the dawn by a bleary mum. I hauled around a dayglo orange bag, back-breakingly overstuffed with Mirrors and Suns and, given the lefty consituency, plenty of Guardians and the odd lonely Telegraph. In the early evening, the bag was re-bloated with too many copies of the local paper.

Whichever route I plotted and re-plotted, the round always took just over an hour and left me around ten minutes to drop off the empty bag, race back home and get ready for school. Sundays were special, because the papers were three times the size and weight, and I had to hobble around with two bags – one over each shoulder.

There were loitering bullies, mad old tramps, rival-school no-go zones. There were scary houses with sealed letter-boxes, whose owners insisted I head down a side-alley and leave the paper on the back-door mat – amid looming awnings and peculiar outhouses. In winter, the early mornings and late afternoons were dark, and the occasional yappy dog was a minor inconvenience next to the scary old folks with rheumy eyes, shamelessly spying out of poorly-lit first-floor windows.

”This is the NEEEEEEEEEEEWS!”

As far as I could see, being a paper-boy was a lousy way to top up my pocket money – no perks, no sweets, no free comics, no paper-girls. The single, solitary fragment of glitter sparkling on the surface of such a loathsome turd of drudgery was… the annual Paper-Boys Trip To Blackpool. Here’s how it worked.

The local newsagent chain fleeced a fiver off the parents of all local paper-boys and then hired the cheapest coach they could find. One Saturday morning in mid-June, the coach chugged around all the different newsagents, sweeping up the eager employees. On my second – and final – Blackpool Trip, I went to the off-license with David Grantham and his bigger brother bought us two litre bottles of cheap cider. We then worked out which newsagent the coach would call at first, and, when it arrived, we pushed our way on and commandeered the fabled back-seat – ‘saving’ places for other mates.

We managed to cram a whole lot of chaos into the hour-and-a-bit motorway trip. By the time we made the leg-stretch stop at Knutsford Services, most of the passengers at the back third of the coach were steaming drunk – in that special, teenage, Tasmanian Devil-like way. Among other unspeakables, we had written several hilarious messages onto big pieces of paper (‘FUCK OFF’, ‘BUMMER’, and, probably, ‘FUCK OFF BUMMER’) and were holding them up to the back window in full view of any driver unfortunate enough to stray within eyeshot.

As we caught that mythical site of the Blackpool Tower somewhere in the distance, a tubby boy called Lyndon Ash spectacularly transformed his cider into watery sick – which slopped and sloshed around the floor of the coach, and trickled to within near-sniffing distance of the driver. Even now, twenty-odd years later, I can close my eyes and re-summon the nostril-twitching cocktail of cheap coach seat, cidery sick and tipsy teenage boy-sweat.

”Mmm… Apple-y”.

One of the back-seat crew, Michael Howell, had recently been suspended from school for two months and so bristled with the charisma of Alpha Idiot-Male. Out of a scraggy little ADIDAS bag (with the standard All Day I Dream About Sex scrawled over the logo), he pulled out an odd, vaguely dildo-ish device. It was a small plastic tube with a tiny button at one end and a metal prong at the other. When he pressed the button, a thrilling blue spark flashed at the end of the prong. Technically, the piezo ignition section of a pilot-lighter. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Fucking clicker, innit?”

We leaned in close, as, through a fug of meths-breath, he explained how to stick the prong into a coin slot, press the button and marvel at the free credits.

There was scepticism.

When we arrived in Blackpool, after the mandatory, chewy doughnut-fuelled rampage around the Pleasure Beach, we headed for the greatest arcade on the sea-front – a vast, two-tiered place with row after row of the latest coin-ops – all cranked up to form a grunting, chirping, zapping cacophony, and all set to 10p play (at a time when 20p-a-credit was starting to creep in).

10p, 20p, 50p… made no difference to us. We headed for the dingiest area of the arcade – where even the change attendants feared to tread – and Michael Howell got out his clicker and he moved from game to game, sparking up credits. Most machines would show the full quota of 99. Some would notch up just the odd one or two, while others would go crazy and crash.

And so… heads full of cheap booze, bloodsugar levels brimming, we played free game after free game and we laughed and swore and competed, before the foul-smelling coach swept us back to stoopid reality, where real money was required to have fun.

Teenage Northern Boy ‘80s Mecca.

I received a sound bollocking for losing the paper-boy job, but it was good to have my mornings and evenings back again. The clicker I blagged from one of Michael Howell’s mates did the job for the less salubrious arcades/chippies/pool-halls – where the games were stashed away in convenient gloomy corners. But it was a sleazy thrill, and nothing next to the rare joy of finding a forgotten 10p in a coin-reject tray.

A few days after my liberation, I have a vivid memory of a late-ish gaming session at the local Silver Coin arcade. Swearing and twitching away at the cabinet nearest the door, I laughed out loud at the sight of Mirza News’ Unsmiling Harridan staggering across the road – still working the early-evening run at close to 9pm.

SICKBOY, October 2003

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