Taken from the New Statesman archive, 13 August 1976.
This rather bleak portrait of professional contentment was one of a series of articles Mooney contributed in 1976 under the
title "Familiar Figures", her other subjects including a roadsweeper and a BR steward. - Brian Cathcart
It is a grey and glassy hour, between 5 and 6 a.m., when the alarm clock's tick turns to a threat. No thud of traffic yet to shake the trees. The milkman carries his crates into a small council block, noticing with distate the dossers (young and old) who snore on doormats, oblivious to the bottles' clink. Doorsteps differ greatly on this round: middle-class houses with fresh white paint and brass letterboxes, unlit council stiars, scruffy student flats, the carpeted hallways of the expensive private flats that overlook Clapham Common. 586 homes, all served by the same milkman, wait for the morning delivery.
His name is Fred Farthing: milkman for over 40 years. As the clocks of his customers tick, he performs his function with the same clockwork regularity – not lonely, not minding rain or snow, not wanting to talk, not noticing anything much. He concentrates on time; the five miles the milk float can run, and the minutes it takes him to pace up that path, leave a pint, back down and up the next path, leave two pints and six eggs, back down, across to the float and so on. He calculates he walks about 25 miles a day. The only thing that halts this rotating progress, the automatic application, is accident. A woman waiting by her gate, who calls him, may mean he forgets the two houses opposite which he normally visits first. It irritates him. And once a lift jammed in the private flats, shooting him past the first to the second floor. "I automatically did the first-floor delivery up there, remembering the amounts, not noticing till the end." Like the postman, the milkman regulates himself, so he can finish in good time.
Fred Farthing began his career at the age of ten, in 1921. "We didn't have much money and I was the eldest of four, so the extra money came in handy. So I used to meet the milkman at four in the morning, fog or snow, and help him with his round on the horse and cart till 6.30. Then I'd go home and do whatever jobs I had to do indoors, before going to school. And I'd work all day Saturday and Sunday, getting 1s 6d a week plus a pound of butter. That was a great luxury."
People slip into their life's work without choosing – so at 14 Fred left school to join the dairy as a delivery boy on a bicyle. Then he graduated to "the servery"; getting the wide variety of groceries ("twice as much as we carry now") ready for the milkmen to take on their rounds. Next he was out on the streets at last – pushing the small hand cart with huge iron wheels, walking from door to door, learning to memorise exact orders. During the war, in France with the Cameronians, he began to remember South London, and the doorsteps andthink about a different job. "Why go on being a milkman?" Still, he went back: "There wasn't much else, and anyway I thought, it's not a bad job. In the open . . . and once you're out on the round you're your own master."
In 1946 he moved to this round in Balham: for 30 years – same round, same houses, same stairs. Houses have been pulled down; grass disappeared; babies grown up, married and ordered milk for their own children. Fred Farthing is completely detached from what he does and where he functions. In his sixties, he is able to remember anything interesting or unusual that has happened to him during that time. He thinks . . . "There was once . . . I remember, I was putting my had with five bottles – you carry one in each finger to save time – through the railings at the school. I dropped two down, when I saw this Alsatian bounding towards me. Because I had the other three bottles in it, I couldn't get my hand back fast enough. So he bit me. I've still got the scars. That's the only thing that's happened to me." He says that there is only one real change he notices on the streets, apart from the traffic: "They're so dirty now. They used to have a roadsweeper down here but now he's gone. They send the machine along, but it only goes past parked cars where the sweeper would go under them. You can't beat old ways."
Fred Farthing gets up at 4 a.m. "I go down, put the kettle on, and make porridge – summer and winter. And I take four halibut liver oil capsules, because you need that protection out in the open. After three cups of tea I leave home at 5 a.m.and get to work at 5.15. You have to load your own float with the crates, then get your cream, butter, chickens and other stuff from the servery. I start delivery before 6 a.m. And try to finish by 12.30 – or 4 p. m. on Friday and Saturday. I could start later but I'd be home much later – it's up to me."
For the seven-day week the milkman will average about £45-£50, working on a basic wage plus commission. "You have to get rid of a certain amount of stuff before commission starts at 5p in the £1. But you can't flog milk to people – they know what they want and that's it. Your money comes from suggesting that they have butter or eggs or something. Most of the time I don't bother." One year, though, he was star salesman at his depot – and it is that enterprising side of the job that appeals. "It's like running your own small business, without the responsibility. The books are checked, but basically it's up to you what you make of the job."
He calls his job "brain work", though "the public think of it as a cushy number they don't know how much adding up you have to do, how much you have to remember. I wouldn't have wanted to do anything else really – except, I think, if I'd concentrated at schoold, I'd have liked to have studied to be a carpenter. That's a real skill . . . But I can't say I think about it. You don't. I mean,. You've got to work, haven't you? You have to -- so there's no point thinking about what you do. I've never been used to big money so I don't miss what I haven't had. I've always worked weekends, so I don't know no different. I like my job."
Balham is inner-city suburbia, where families settle and people have not yet learned the habit of picking up cartons from the "deli" on the way home from work. Fred thinks the empty future of no whine of the milk float, no alarm-regular clink of bottles, will come. "Now you get young men coming into the job who can't stick it. It shows in their work: they miss houses, or come late, or don't take away the empties. So people get fed up and get their milk from the Paki shops that stay open late. So then they cut the rounds – and soon that'll happen all over. It won't make money to deliver."
That is the way the bread went . . . and it seems to be all that worries Fred Farthing. He says that nothing affects him – not work, nor holidays, nor irritable drivers, behind the float, nor the TGWU, of which he is a member, nor customers. Not even picking up unwashed bottles stinking with green mould, or finding 20 empties on the step of a lazy household. In the evening he watches television until about ten, when he looks at his watch and prepares for bed. The gold watch is inscribed on the back, commemmorating the 30 years' "loyal service" F. G. Farthing has given to United Dairies.
As others are setting their alarm clocks for 7.30 or 8, he glances at the gold-coloured clock on the mantelpiece, ticking away the forty years' "loyal service". "It don't mean much to me. I just got it last year at the Pensioners' Dinner and put it up there and that was it. The wife didn't say much. There's nothing to say. These things are handy as a reference though – I mean, if I want some HP, and they ask for a reference, I show them my watch as one. It shows I'm steady, but that's all. Funny how they always seem to give clocks and watches . . . and I haven't even finished my time."
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