Being a binman always seemed like an excellent job to me when I was a kid.
When I was very young and we were poor and lived in the terraced streets of Burley, I had a friend at Brudenell Primary who’s dad was a binman, his dad always met him at the school gates at 3pm, my dad and all of the other kids dads were all still working at that time, but being a binman meant that you only seemed to work for half the day.
Being a binman’s son also meant that your dad met you at the school gates still wearing his thick leather jerkin, a formally brown leather jerkin but now blackened with decades worth of grease and grime from carrying the old metal bins on his shoulders and back.
Being a binman’s son meant that your dad had a flat cap blackened with hair grease that was a permanent fixture on his head, indeed being a binman’s son meant that you only discovered if your dad still had hair when he removed his grimy old flat cap on your annual one weeks holiday, to replace it with another, holiday, flat cap.
Being a binman’s son meant that your mates would often say goodbye to you just before you exited the school gates rather than when you reached the arms of your waiting parent for being a binman’s son meant that your waiting parent carried a permanent unattractive aroma of rotting vegetables around with him.
Being a binman’s son meant that the kid in our class was always receiving surprise presents from his dad, stuff that he’d found in the bins during the working day, board games that the rest of us coveted but had to wait for birthdays or christmas to hope and pray for came to our mate easily, or at least easily once the previous owner had lost some of the pieces and thrown the whole lot in the bin. Our mate at school always looked at us a little puzzled when we spoke of being “the boot” or “the top hat” in Monopoly for his game of Monopoly did not have these two items, visiting a local toy shop to buy new dice for the board games that his father brought home from work was second nature to our mate at school.
The binman’s christmas party’s for their kids were the stuff of Primary School legend as once a year, coincidently just a few days before christmas, all of the Leeds City Council binmen would knock off work even earlier than normal and their wives would start to arrive at the council bin depot laden with huge shopping bags full of sandwiches, buns and cakes to lay out on old tables that had been scrounged from bins all over the city over the last year and later on a binman Father Christmas would hand out hastily wrapped christmas presents that had also been retrieved from bins all over the city over the last year – there is no joy quite like the joy of a binmans lad who opens his hastily wrapped christmas party present to find a game of Cluedo with most of the murder weapons still inside.
Our Primary School mate received, unannounced, at least two bikes a year from his dad the binman, bikes that other kids had grown out of, bikes that often were not damaged in any way at all, did not have buckled wheels or missing brakes, bikes that sometimes had stickers on them that other kids had placed there, one bike that had a rope tied around the saddle post that we could neither remove or work out why the previous owner had tied there, but still, two bikes a year, I had two bikes throughout the whole of my childhood.
We’d often see the old rounded bin wagons in the terraced streets of Burley with a thrown-away bike tied to the back, another kids cast-off bike on its way home to a binmans son.
The old rounded bin wagons of yore were as far from the modern automated crushing rubbish receptacles as a Tiger Moth is to a 747, the old rounded bin wagons of yore were just hastily adapted open trucks with a semi-circular roof plonked on top of the open back, equipped with two sliding doors on each side the binmen would deposit their metal bins of rubbish inside until they were full and they had to drive back to the depot to empty the truck by hand.
Of course the open nature of the bin wagon meant that the binman had plenty of opportunity to peruse your rubbish after he had tipped it into the truck and they would tie rakes and shovels to the truck body to assist them in their treasure hunts while housewives stood at garden gates, arms crossed against their ample, pinny covered busoms, a stern look on their face and the occasional cry of “You won’t find anything worth ‘owt in my rubbish Gordon Hepplethwaite”
But my abiding memory of the binmen who browsed the rubbish of the Burley neighbourhood when I was very small was of our very own gay binman.
Of course I had, and still have, no knowledge of his sexuality, indeed if you had called him “gay” in the early 1960s you would have been paying him a generous compliment for it would mean that he was a happy chap and the life and soul of the binmans Christmas party, but our binman looked different to all the other binmen on the round, for our binman did not wear a greasy flat cap like all the other binmen.
He did not wear a greasy flat cap for a greasy flat cap would ruin his “permanent wave” bouffant hairstyle.
“Don’t point at him” my dad told me one day as I sat on the kerb outside our house watching the binmen scrounge around in the back of the wagon, and he turned my head away for I was pointing at our gay binman and asking my dad why it was that his bleached blond hair was piled neatly up in tsunami waves on top of his head, even as a five year old it just looked wrong to have a binman in your street that looked like he’d just stepped from the salon of Mr Raymond “Teasy Weasy” Bessone.
Always eager for further information I had asked my dad again why the binman on our round had such funny hair and as he persuaded me back into our garden with a slap around the back of the head I was told that it was because that particular binman “Was effeminate” and I was not to speak of him again and the way my dad spat out the word “effeminate” left me in no doubt that this was not a good thing and that I should not consider bleaching or waving my hair in such a manner when I grew up, and indeed I never have, such is the power of parenting.
Binman sounds so much more proper than what I’ve always called them — The Garbage Man.