'NO F***ING way!" shouted the woman at the petrol station attendant as I stood in line waiting to pay for my fuel, as susceptible as everyone else in this country to price-rise phobia. "Don't shoot the messenger," I thought to myself as she reluctantly paid a hundred for her SUV tankful, and my heart went out to the poor guy with a job I once had the dubious pleasure of doing myself.
I was 15. European laws against the exploitation of child labour had not even been imagined back then. I was paid a pound an hour for being the 'forecourt manager' and the place was surreal. This was Wick, 1983, and the station was on the very edge
of the harbour, at that very scary meeting of tides where the North Sea meets the Pentland Firth. This really was the petrol station at the end of the world.
In winter, I wore a waterproof suit and had to wait until after the seventh wave (it being the largest) before venturing out to fill a tank. Sometimes I got the timing wrong and was hit by walls of water as I clung to the petrol pump pipe as if on a ship holding on to a life-saving rope.
Ah, but the memories. There was the 18-year-old heavy-metal-head who came once a day to fill up his can with his one pound's worth – "for my lawnmower". Then it was three and four times a day. I later discovered he had a brain haemorrhage from petrol sniffing and head-banging to AC/DC in the local club.
There were security measures. The guy whose job I inherited had been held at knife-point, the cash till raided. There was a crowbar under the counter that I was, somehow, expected to use in case lawbreakers were ever to come my way.
And so it happened, at 6.30am one Sunday. The derelict building I looked out at each day, covered in scaffolding, (now the premier nightclub in Wick) was in 20 minutes radically transformed.
I had just taken the padlocks off the pumps then gone back to my wooden shack as the waves shook the foundations.
I looked out and suddenly a little van pulled up in front of the scaffolding. As if it was a covert military operation, four men jumped out the back. I was sure they were headed for me and I grabbed my crowbar.
But no. They climbed the scaffolding, and starting at the top, passed down the wooden planks. The guy at the bottom cast his eyes around and I ducked for cover. As the planks were passed down he started on them with a chain saw. Snatching quick glances I saw everything. Level by level, and there were five, the planks were passed down and cut. Within 20 minutes the scaffolding had been laid bare and the van was filled with wood and driven away.
The remaining men shot a parting glance in my direction and each went on their way. All hands-in-pockets as if nothing had happened. For the police record I have no memory of faces that would fit names.
When I got home, my parents informed me they'd had a great deal on firewood and so my weekly wood-cutting for pocket money arrangement was okay this week. I said nothing.
The petrol station is no longer there. It must have succumbed to the waves and gone the way of all flotsam. In retrospect I was lucky not to have suffered the same fate.
