Demob & Getting a Job
I was demobbed straightaway. From memory, your leave entitlement was a day for every month you spent overseas. So I had three and a half years back pay in my bank book and I was getting a cheque every fortnight from the RAF. I thought I was never going to be poor again!
I went out to see different people when I got home, friends and relations, and it got a bit boring sitting around doing nothing, so in the January I said, well, I’ll go back and start working again. By this time I was, what, 25. I went to get my old job back and the chief clerk of the transport office, he says, 'Look, you went away a boy, you’ve come back a man, it’s very difficult to give you that job back, but I have this other job for you,' which involved shift work. I had to get up at half past 4. The first trams and buses were out at 5, and the job entailed seeing the conductors had their boxes with all their tickets in it; seeing the trams went out on time and all the rest of it, and you finished work at 12. There were other shifts involved as well and I didn’t like this one little bit, so I looked around and I thought, well, housing is the big thing here, there a big push about building houses straight after the war, so I started to study to become a housing manager.
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