Someone blogged recently about getting a milkman, instead of hitting the supermarket for their milk, and I realised that none of you really know anything about my Dad.
When we lived in Australia, Dad worked at Uniroyal in Salisbury. I have absolutely no idea what he did there - we used to tease that he sprayed the tyres black. Dad was a happy man in Aus, he loved living there, and I have lots of fond memories of him there.
When we moved back to the UK, it was kinda unintentional. We came back to visit. We lived a little north of Adelaide in Aus, and we sold up with the intention of moving to Sydney. When we got back, Mum got major homesick, and never one to refuse my mother when she wanted something, Dad chose to stay.
Big mistake. He hated it in the UK. We were never completely happy again, and it was often heard lamented in our house about "it was never like this in Aus".
We needed somewhere to live, so Dad took a (temporary) job as a milkman. The reason : it came with a house. We could then look at leisure for a decent house, a decent job, a decent area in which to live. We stayed in that house for the next 10 years, until a weirdo neighbour forced us to move. We got another tied house, same company, where my folks stayed until Dad retired and they moved into sheltered accommodation.
Dad was a milkman. He was out of his bed at 3am every day, 6 days a week, and at the dairy for 4am. The dairy was an old style one - still had all their own cows, and would milk them daily (I often went along to milking and learned how to milk a cow both by machine and by hand). The milk would be treated onsite, depending on what was happening to it, and also bottled onsite. The racket of the bottling machine was unbelievable. Yes, they were still glass bottles. The dairy was family owned and run, a real 'old' company that spanned generations.
Dad would load his own float every day, and had his own system of making sure the milk that had been left on the float overnight was never left to go off. He also had his own system of milk in a fridge, which I still maintain in my own fridge today.
Then he would drive off down to the next village along from us, delivering his milk, slowly making his way out into the countryside where some of his drops were a good 15 minutes or so apart.
I used to help him on a Saturday. It was when I first realised that the day could smell different. That awful choking sensation when the first car of the day would drive past. Owls floating by silently, hunting. Foxes and rabbits running into the road. The whirr of the electric milk float, the rattle of the bottles.
I tripped one time and fell, dropping and smashing the bottle I was carrying, my hand landing in the glass. I cut an artery in my finger, and it still hurts. That has to be 30 years ago!
Mum would make sandwiches and the dogs on my Dads milkround had the highest cholesterol in the country!
Dad got frostbite one time and nearly lost his fingers on one hand. His boss wouldn't believe him. Eventually something happened, I disremember what, and the boss realised Dad was telling the truth, and he apologised.
Dad hated being a milkman, although he got all the gossip and was known by pretty much everyone in the local area. He hated not having much money, not having a home of his own, the job, the tedium of doing the same damn thing day after day for year after year. But he did it, because he was one of those old fashioned men who believed he had to provide for his family. A matter of pride. He would no more have chucked his job because he didn't like it, when he had nowhere else to go, than he would have driven off Beachy Head.
He was fit as a fiddle. I only remember a few times him being ill. Once he slipped a disc. Once his lung collapsed. Once he had frostbite. Apart from that, he was hardly ever off sick.
When my Dad died, he had so many folk who liked and respected him. His friends were honoured to stand up and speak for him. The crematorium was literally standing room only. We didn't realise until we stood up at the end how many folk were there. Even the people who owned the dairy were there although Dad had been retired for so many years before he died.
The dairy is no longer a doorstep delivery service. I know there is still some activity with the herds but I don't know what they do. I think they just sell their milk to the supermarkets in tankers now, not even in cartons.
Dad was one of the old school who was regarded as an institution in the areas he delivered. It was 'Len's Round' and a lot of people were sad to see him go.
So were we.
