Milk Round

Although what I am about to relate could hardly be construed as a particularly earth shattering confession to past misdemeanours, I know that I will feel some relief for unburdening it onto a page.
During the 1980s I was a milkman’s assistant. My mother got me the position by leaving a rolled up message for our milkman in one of the empties. She told me it would be character building. And that I’d look cute in the uniform.
She was right about the uniform. I especially liked the peak cap worn at a jaunty angle.
Sartorial benefits aside though, I hated the job.
The resentment was all the more bitter because it was during the school summer holidays. When I should have been having long luxurious lie ins, followed by lazy days doing nothing in particular, I was dragging myself out of bed at 4am, loading a battery operated truck with heavy crates of gold and silver top and then being ordered to run up and down various garden paths depositing bottles on door steps.
All this in the company of a clinically depressed milkman who broke all the laws of milk delivery personnel by neither whistling or making cheeky comments to anyone who happened to up at the same time as us.
You might think that 4.30am on a summer’s morning is, on balance, rather a pleasant place to be, working to the soundtrack of the dawn’s chorus and illuminated by a glorious rising sin.
Don’t you believe it.
My memory of that summer is one of miserable drizzle and cold and the thankless, never ending travail of getting milk to the city’s cornflakes. It was a relentless and soul destroying task. By the second day of doing it I was planning of ways not to do it and it was an article in the Evening Post that gave me a cunning plan.
I’d read that blue tits had learnt that if they pecked through the foil tops of milk-bottles on doorsteps they’d be able to feast on the cream at the top. Blue tits were a growing menace to milk-men in the city because their customers were starting to complain that the thought of a greedy little beak supping their milk before them was putting them off their cornflakes.
Some customers were canceling their deliveries, opting for unsullied milk in cartons from supermarkets.
An idea was hatched.
The next day for every two pints I delivered to a house I would, out of sight of the milk float, poke a small, beak shape hole in the tip (using the lid of a Bic pen) and sip a little of the cream at the top.
This went on for the rest of the week.
In addition to all the extra calcium I was getting in my diet, it looked like it was having the desired effect. My boss was getting complaints. So many in fact that he took to taking a catapult along on the rounds - “just in case we see any blue tits”.
After about two weeks of my skimming milk, my boss and I actually bonded in a strange way. I would spy imaginary blue tits and he would dash off in pursuit, loading his catapult with gravel from his customers’s drives. And blue tit fever spread to the households.
We would start to see customers more regularly at dawn, waiting on their doorsteps to gather the milk in before the blue tits got there.
I noticed a physical change in my maudlin boss, people actually smiled and said hello to him, and he smiled and said hello back.
On my last week on the job he actually started whistling, like a proper milkman. Tunelessly and relentlessly, but at least he was happy.
Summer ended and I went back to school, older, wiser and, thanks to all that extra milk, with very strong teeth. I never do another milk round again.
My boss, my mother tells me, is still doing the rounds into his late 60s. Whether he’s still armed with a catapult I guess I’ll never know.