Bernie Fineman, Original Motor Mouth

by Bernie Fineman

  And that was it. Eight years later and I was still working at that same garage.

  Next morning I came in and everyone wanted to make me tea, buy me breakfast, because I was the hero that got rid of the foreman they all hated. I was given a mechanic called Ted to work with, and he said, ‘Watch, listen and you’ll learn properly.’ Ted was a fantastic man, the best teacher I could ever have asked for. He taught me things I could only dream of. He taught me the difference between just doing a job and doing a job properly. He taught me methodology: that means not just replacing a component, but finding out why that component failed in the first place. Was it the component that failed or the component that drives that component? I became his shadow, everything he did I did.

  As an apprentice after about a year you have to start taking exams, so Ted came up with a test for me which he thought was appropriate. ‘Right, Bernie,’ he told me. ‘I want you to put a new set of contact points in that Silver Shadow over there.’

  I’d seen him do it a hundred times, so was confident I could put in the new parts without any help. I went over to the stores, got a new set of points and condenser, put the dressing cover over the wing so I wouldn’t have to lean on the car and damage it, took the distributor cap off, took the rotor arm off, and turned the engine’s crankshaft round with a socket and a ratchet. The points have to be open on a cam-wheel (a revolving part whose outer edges have projections to activate the points’ mechanism). I got the old points open by turning the crankshaft, and in those days it was a twin set of points in there so I did the first set, put them in exactly how Ted had showed me, turned the engine over again until the next set were completely open, took that set out and changed those points too, ‘gapped’ them with a feeler gauge (adjusted the distance they opened to the correct one), put in a new condenser, and turned the engine over again to check that when the points open they were no more and no less than 14-16 thousands of an inch (known as ‘thous’).

  Job done, Bob’s your uncle, so feeling pleased as Punch I went and got Ted. He came across, turned the engine over, checked the gap on one, turned it over again, checked the gap on the other, then looked at me and smiled. Then he smacked me straight round the back of the head, saying, ‘Where is the fucking grease on the cam?’

  You had a little bit of grease that you put, with a tool like a lollipop stick, onto the cam itself, so that it lubricated the heel of the points as it turned over. And for that I got a clip round the ear. Ted was a perfectionist and thank God he was too ’cos it made me one. I never forgot that bit of grease ever again.

  After passing that test I was sent away for a day to Biggleswade to sit the full exam along with the three other apprentices. We were picked up from the garage at 8 am by coach and taken to what looked like an old school. Inside was a workshop where we spent the morning doing the practical tests. They would put two faults on the car and a guy would stand there with a stopwatch and time how long it took you to find the faults. The first problem they gave me was an engine misfire, while the other one was that every time you beeped the horn the headlights would also flash. There was no diagnostic equipment in those days, not like now, when you just plug in a laptop and wait for it to tell you what the problem is.

  So I turn the engine over and sure enough it is misfiring. Now Ted always taught me to look at the most obvious things first – don’t try and be too clever, as you’ll doubtless be wasting your time. So I looked at the plug leads and sure enough someone had put two of ’em in the wrong order. Sorted that out and moved onto the horn. It was obviously a wiring problem but we didn’t have AVO meters (special electrical testing devices), just test equipment, so I made a circuit tester by taking this piece of wire with a bulb on it, connecting it to earth, then connecting the other bulb terminal to a wire, so as to detect any current. Next I took the wires out of the headlight to connect to one side of the bulb. When I pressed the horn the light came on, meaning it had become live when it shouldn’t have done, thus proving it was a bad wire. I traced the wire from the headlamp back to the fuse box and there I found someone had taken one of the horn wires off and plugged it into where the headlight cable attached, so it was a simple case of swapping them back again.

  I completed the whole job in under eight minutes, while most of the other apprentices were still scratching their heads about the misfire. I was feeling pleased as they sent us off to lunch, until they informed us that in the afternoon it would be the written exam.

  Oh shit!

  I sit down in the classroom after lunch and we’re handed the exam papers. I look at it and it’s just a jumble, and my heart sinks. I’m so annoyed with myself that I pinch my wrist so hard I make it bleed. I knew that if they’d asked me the questions verbally I could’ve told them the answers, but there was no way I could get it down on paper. I literally just sat there for two hours while everyone else scribbled away.

  At the end I made sure I was the last one to hand in the paper as we left the classroom. The examiner looked at it and said, ‘What’s this?’ I told him that I was sorry, but I couldn’t read and write. He looked at me like I’m some fucking moron.

  He just couldn’t comprehend I’d been sent to take the exam when I couldn’t read and write. He looked down at the exam paper and read me one of the questions and I answered it straight away. The guy just shook his head, didn’t know what to do with me. He said he thought I had a learning difficulty as I obviously knew the answers, so I left with a glimmer of hope that he would pass me. A few days later I found out I got 95 per cent on the practical test and 0 per cent on the theory, but they didn’t tell me – the results were sent direct to the employers. So I was hauled in front of the MD and I started to cry, just stood there and bawled my fucking eyes out because I was so embarrassed.

  An hour later, Ted came over and asked why I hadn’t told him I couldn’t read and write. Truth was, I was ashamed.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’re going to get this sorted. Once a week, on a Wednesday, you’re going to come home with me after work and stay at my house. My sister is a teacher who works with kids with learning difficulties, and every Wednesday she’ll teach you to read and write.’

  I don’t know if Ted realised it at the time, but I would be staying at his house every Wednesday for the next four years. That’s how long it took his sister Melissa, with one-to-one tuition, to teach me to read and write. To help me recognise letters she would make them different sizes, so that A she would write bigger and B she would make smaller, C a bit bigger again and so on. Eventually I learnt the sequence of the letters, so if I had to write the word ‘book’ I would know that B was a small letter, O was a large letter and K was a large letter too.

  To help me with my writing she said: ‘Don’t look at the page, look at your hand as you write.’

  And it worked!

  Don’t ask me how but it did, and that’s how, slowly but surely, I learnt to read and write by the time I was nineteen. Every Wednesday, and the occasional Sunday too, I would stay over at Ted’s, Melissa would teach me and June, Ted’s wife, would cook the most amazing dinners and I became like one of the family. They never took any payment, they did it for me.

  Ted and June had had two children who had died at birth, so they saw me in many ways as their son and treated me as such. I am so fortunate to have had such an incredible family in my life. Ted was the best mechanic I could ever ask to learn from – even though at home he was nice as pie, at work he wasn’t afraid to have a go at me and would slap me if I ever did anything wrong or was out of order! And Melissa changed my life by helping me to read and write, and Ted’s wife June was like a second mum.

  I don’t know what I did to deserve those three wonderful people but thank God they came into my life. This would’ve been a much shorter book if they hadn’t!

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EARLY DAYS IN THE GARAGE

  After nearly being booted out on my first day after twatting the foreman, I was with Thomas & Draper for eight years. Th
ey were a Rolls-Royce garage but also specialised in all sorts of top-of-the-range cars such as Jaguars and Aston Martins. Basically we worked on the very best cars in the world at that time.

  One day, we get a call from Elstree Film Studios saying they’ve got an Aston Martin that won’t start. You’d think that this might be a bit of a glamorous job and a mechanic would jump at the chance to get out of the garage for a while. But this is 1964, everyone’s up to their arse in work, we’re in Croydon, and Elstree’s in fucking Hertfordshire, about two-and-a-half hours away. Basically, it’s more hassle than it’s worth, so who is told to go and sort it out? The runt of the litter, of course.

  So off I set on the bus with my little toolbox for the epic journey up to Borehamwood. By the way, these days I live in Borehamwood (I know, posh twat, ain’t I?), about two minutes from Elstree Studios. And do they ever call me up now I’m just around the corner? Not fucking once!

  I get there a few hours later and after the security guard was satisfied there was nothing funny in my toolbox, he took me over to the studio in question. I’ve obviously never set foot on a film set before so when I go in it’s like another world – what seems like a huge aircraft hangar with hundreds of people buzzing about. All I can remember are lots of lights hanging from the ceiling – it was like a space ship. People are milling around, trying to look busy, but basically all everyone is doing is waiting for Bernie in his boiler suit, steel toe-cap boots, shirt and tie, to turn up and fix the damn car.

  As soon as I set foot through the door someone grabs me and takes me over to the silver Aston Martin DB5. I turn it over and sure enough: vuh-vuh-vuh-vuh, the thing won’t start. So I did the test I’d been taught to do by Ted and found the problem pretty quickly: it was an open circuit on the low-tension side of the coil. I took the wire off, made a new wire for it and a new connector – boom! On the button it starts up and it’s purring like a dream.

  The director and everyone are over the moon, time is money to them and Bernie’s just saved the day. Then this tall geezer comes over to me who I recognise from somewhere but can’t think where, and he says, ‘Well done, boy,’ and slips me a five pound note. Being a young mechanic I didn’t see too many of them in those days, I can tell you! I was so chuffed I hot-footed it straight out of there, and didn’t stop to think who it was who gave it to me. It was only a few months later when the movie came out and Sean Connery’s bloody mug was everywhere that I realised it was Mr James Bond himself, and I’d been on the set of Goldfinger!

  The only other person I remember from my visit was Harold Sakata, who played the part of Oddjob. He was Japanese, only about five-foot four inches tall but about the same in width as well – he was massive! I certainly wasn’t going to forget him in a hurry.

  By the time Melissa had finished helping me with my reading and writing I was ready to take the next test in my apprenticeship course. As I was that bit older and more experienced, the test I went for was that much harder. This time for the practical I had to take an engine out of a Rolls-Royce, and I was given 5 hours 20 minutes exactly to do it.

  As usual the guys with the stopwatches were there, but they weren’t just looking at speed, or how you took the engine out, it was the order in which you did things they were also interested in. Of course, I was confident that Ted had shown me the proper way to do it. First of all you have to make the car safe, which means disconnecting the battery, then you drain the fluids, the antifreeze and the engine oil, to make sure there are no spilt liquids which could make things slippery.

  Only then would you start doing the mechanical work. You’d have six boxes, each would be marked with the relevant nuts and bolts, plus some tape so that with every connection you removed you would put some of it on the end of the wire and write on the tape exactly what the part was that it was connected to. You’d take out the wired loom and move it well away from the work area so it was not in the way, then you’d take out the radiator, remove all the hoses, loosen the engine mounts, and then you took all the bolts out of the engine bellhousing, which attached the engine to the gearbox. Then you dropped the exhaust down, got the engine crane to take the weight of the engine, covered the wings of the car so nothing got scratched, and pulled the engine forward and upwards out of the car. You then let the car down off the jacks and put the engine on the bench.

  My next test was to reline the brakes on the front and rear. They were asbestos linings so, being aware of how dangerous the fragmented material and dust could be, once you’d taken the brake shoes out of the car’s wheel drums, for each one you had to drill out the old lining on the brake shoe, and put a new lining on it, and rivet them to fasten them in place, file them down, and put them on the car – so that when you put the wheel drums back on you wouldn’t have to bang them on, but they’d glide on with your hand. If the lining wasn’t fitted to the shoe correctly, of course, the wheel drum would be obstructed, and wouldn’t fit on smoothly as it should.

  Then we broke for lunch, but I couldn’t eat anything because I knew what was coming next and I was absolutely bricking it. We sit down in the classroom and we’ve got one hour to complete the theory test. I turn the papers over and my heart immediately leaps. Where before I just saw squiggles, now I can read it! Where before I sat on my arse looking into space for an hour, this time I completed the whole thing in twenty-five minutes.

  If I could explain the feeling of that day, it was a bit like an orgasm that lasted five hours!

  When I got back to work and got the results it was massive – it put the company on the map. Nobody had got 100 per cent on both the practical and the theory before as far as I know, and it reflected so well on the company and Ted in particular because it was their training that had got me those marks.

  I got a 50 per cent pay rise, a round of applause, an award (I was made Master Technical Engineer) and I was initiated into the Institute of the Motor Industry. So from being kicked out of school at thirteen, by the time I was twenty I had all these letters after my name. My mum and dad cried their fucking eyes out when I told them, and I’d never seen my dad cry before.

  It just goes to show that if you’re given the right motivation and the right help and the teaching is geared towards the needs of the individual, anyone can achieve anything. I was left on the scrapheap. By the age of seven or eight the teachers at my primary school had given up on me, Mrs Hassinger thought I was a waste of space, I’d been written off as a dunce and insubordinate, as someone who was thick and would never amount to anything.

  And I believe that everyone has potential so long as you can find the right work that interests and excites you, and find the right atmosphere in which to learn. I hope that in some small way I’m an example to young mechanics out there who may not have GCSEs coming out of their fucking arse, but want to learn and want to be the best. If they get their head down and put in the effort, they can achieve anything they want.

  But just before you think I’m getting a bit too cocky for my own good, I’ll tell you a story that brought me back down to earth with a very hard bump.

  At the back of the garage was an old Aerial Square Four motorbike. I’ve never been much of a fan of bikes, I much prefer four wheels to two, but it was transport and so over a few weeks in my spare time I got repairing it. I tested it and all seemed to be running smoothly, so I decided to take it for a run one lunchtime. I pulled up by some traffic lights and a car pulled up next to me so I decided to put it through its paces. As the lights turned green I powered down but the throttle went wide open, the bike shot forward and flipped me right over.

  One second I’m sat on the bike at some lights, the next I’m still at the lights but the bike is sat on me! Anyone who’s ever ridden one of these old Square Fours knows that they weigh an absolute ton, so not only did I hurt my pride but also got three broken ribs, a broken arm and my left knee was shot to fuck.

  I ended up in Hackney Hospital, and my mates from the garage took great delight in coming over to see me and ripped the
piss something rotten. After a week or so in hospital I went home but still wasn’t able to work. My arm was in plaster but there was nothing they could do with my ribs, I just had to let them heal naturally. When I did finally go back I was on kitchen duty for the first week! I was never a fan of bikes anyway, even less of a fan after that, and I’ve never once got on a bike since!

  I worked at Thomas & Draper Monday-to-Friday, then half-day Saturdays. I’d then head back to Springfield Court and help them out with the taxis on Saturday afternoons and they’d leave me the keys so on Sundays I could do private work. Thomas & Draper didn’t mind this as they knew that if they let me do a bit on the side I wouldn’t be looking to move elsewhere.

  But one day, after eight years at Thomas & Draper, we were sent to a motor trade conference where they told us about all the latest trends in car mechanics and whatever. It was here that I got approached by another garage called Stewart & Arden. I suppose you would say I was ‘tapped up’. They knew my reputation and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Not only did they double my money, but the garage was much closer to home. After all those years of getting three buses to Croydon it was starting to take its toll, so reluctantly I agreed to join them.

  A few days later I took Ted out for a drink after work where I told him I was leaving. He was heartbroken, he cried, I cried, we both cried! He’d been so good to me, like a father-figure, and had treated me like a son. But he understood I needed to earn more money and advance my career, so I had his blessing which meant a lot and I knew I could always call on him if I had a problem.

  We remained good friends right up to his death in 1982. He was still working in the garage even though he was well into his eighties. He always said he’d never retire, he couldn’t afford to, but also what else would he do? It was all he’d ever known and work was his reason for living, he loved his job so why do anything else? In that respect I know I take after him. Here I am now, more than thirty years later, and I’m that silly sod who won’t, or can’t, retire.