The CV

to!’
    He just laughed and virtually threw me out.
    Another side of me came out now. I was wound up and angry. I wasn’t frightened to speak up, but short of grabbing hold of him or kicking him, what could I do? He was a grown man and I was an eleven-year-old shnip. I went back home and told my mum and dad what had happened. They laughed, then my father asked, ‘How much did you get in the end?’
    ‘Four and six.’ A sudden look of fear came over his face at the realisation that his eleven-year-old son had made 4s 6d.
    ‘Where did you get this stuff from?’ he said.
    ‘I told you – from the factory down the road.’
    ‘They let you take it? You sure you didn’t take it without asking?’
    ‘No. The boss gave it to me. He wanted to get rid of it. Normally the dustman takes it away.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    I couldn’t believe it. Instead of being complimented, I was being interrogated as if I’d done something wrong! It was a strange attitude, but one I’d become increasingly familiar with in later years. Many’s the time I’d have to play down the success of my business activities because my father could not believe that someone so young could make so much money. To put things into perspective, his take-home pay at the time was £8 for working a forty-hour week. How could an eleven-year-old boy go out and make 4s 6d in just a couple of hours? Basically, I’d spotted some stuff in one place and seen another place to sell it. And what’s more, I really enjoyed doing it.
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1959 – 1963: Enterprise activities
    While my social life was non-existent, I still kept busy with work and my hobbies. Sometimes they combined, as with the Saturday job I took in a chemist’s in Walthamstow High Street market. Having found that I enjoyed science and engineering at school (in contrast to some of the more boring subjects such as history and the arts), I thought pharmacy might be the way to go, and naïvely I figured I would learn about it on the job. The shop was owned by a very nice man called Michael Allen. When I told him I aspired to be a pharmacist, he taught me as much as he possibly could about drugs and that sort of stuff.
    I spent most of my time in the front of the shop selling cough syrups and lozenges. Here I was, a young kid, being asked by punters what cough syrup they should take. Mr Allen taught me to ask if it was a chesty cough or a dry cough. For chesty, you got a bottle of Benylin; for dry, you got a bottle of Pholcodine Linctus.
    Mr Allen was a bit of a boffin who knew all the technical pharmaceutical stuff, but in my opinion lacked a bit of business savvy. I introduced one of my marketing ideas to him and his staff. When asked by the customer for a bottle of, say, Milk of Magnesia, if you were to reply, ‘Small or large?’ most punters would say, ‘Small.’ Much better to ask, ‘Do you want the small 1s 6d one or the extra-value 2s 6d one?’ I applied this to lots of things in the shop, ranging from Old Spice aftershave to cough syrup, and it worked nine times out of ten.
    There were exceptions to this rule. Packets of Durex, for example, came in both economy and bulk packs, but I wasn’t going to ask a strapping six-foot-tall punter if he wanted the small pack – it could have been taken the wrong way.
    Now, here’s a bit of trivia you may find as surprising as I did: a largenumber of married women would buy contraceptives as part of their weekly shop, on behalf of their lazy husbands. At first, as a young lad of fifteen, I was a bit embarrassed when a woman asked me for them, but after a while it was like water off a duck’s back. However, when it came to Tampax or sanitary towels, I certainly wasn’t going to try my ‘small or extra-value’ scam. Instead, it was a case of: ‘They’re over there, madam, help yourself.’ That was where I drew the line. After all, there was a limit on how far you’d go for the boss!
    It was at Mr Allen’s shop that I also developed my interest in photography, which was sparked by the cameras, film and developing paper he sold. I couldn’t afford a good camera, but I soon picked up tips on which model was the most economic to buy. This information was going to be useful because another sideline I had in mind was to become a photographer. While I scraped together the money to buy a Halina camera, I was already working out what to say to my parents. I had visions of my father shaking his head in disapproval when I brought it