The training was intense too. You had to learn how to listen without talking and also just how to listen. There were certain things you had to listen out for, like ‘pick-up points’. A pick-up point is when someone says something but then immediately dismisses it or changes the subject. For instance, they might say, ‘This happened, but it didn’t affect me.’ So rather than letting that point drop, you would say, ‘OK, how do you feel about that now?’ Often you would say that and they would realise, or they would admit to themselves, that this issue was part of their problem, or it would lead onto something else that was the problem. You were opening doors all the time.
There are all sorts of protocols. The Samaritans were founded by Reverend Chad Varah, and although it was run by the church, you never brought any form of religion into it. You never said, ‘Pray to God and it will all be better’, or anything like that. You never give your real name, you always choose a pseudonym, and you never speak to the same person twice. Fair enough, you might if they call back and you happen to pick up the phone, but if they make the call and ask for you again you say, ‘I’m sorry, Terry or whoever is on another call at the moment but I can speak to you.’
You log every call with the name of the caller, your name, the reason they called, how long the call lasted and whether they want a follow-up call. This follow-up, again, would be done by someone else. It is a safeguarding measure, making sure you don’t get too emotionally involved in someone’s problems.
And you never give advice, but they have all sorts of leaflets and phone numbers people can call if they have particular problems. Maybe they have housing issues or something, so you can say, ‘If you like, you can call this number and they will be able to help you.’ It’s not giving advice, just giving information which may be useful to them for their specific problem.
It is up to the Samaritan who takes the call to judge if a caller is suicidal, or a suicide risk. On every watch there is a crash team of two or three people who go out to be with people if they are thinking of committing suicide and want someone with them. Sometimes they may want you just to stay on the phone with them while they do it, which you would, but sometimes they don’t want to be alone and so they ask for someone to be with them.
However you’re not allowed to talk anyone out of committing suicide. By Samaritan Law a Samaritan is not allowed to call an ambulance if they have taken an overdose or whatever. You say to them, ‘If you want me to stay with you then I will do, but I cannot call an ambulance for you. But, by the law of the land, if you lapse into unconsciousness then at that point I have to call an ambulance.’ Several times I was on the crash team and went to people’s houses and sat with them while they took an overdose, though more often than not they would just talk about it.
I remember one Bank Holiday Monday me and Lisa were meant to go out, but at eight o’clock in the morning I got a phone call from the Samaritans saying they were short-staffed and could I go in to help them out. I say ‘could’ but I was a Samaritan Leader and so it was my duty to go in, so that was our Bank Holiday screwed.
Not only that but we only had one car at the time which I had to take to get into the Samaritans, so Lisa was stuck at home. After an hour or so we get a call in from a woman who says she can’t take it anymore, her husband has left her and there’s nothing worth living for, she’s taken a whole bottle of diazepam and she wants to die. But she wants someone with her, and so me and the other member of the crash team jump in my car and we drive round to her house.
When we arrive she shows us the empty bottle and tells us how her husband has left her after over twenty years of marriage, that she doesn’t have any children and has nothing to live for. She’s clearly taken an overdose but we can’t call an ambulance until she loses consciousness. All of a sudden her eyes start to roll and she begins to fall asleep. We begin frantically calling 999 but we can’t get an ambulance. We’re waiting and waiting but nothing is coming, so we pick her up, put her in the back of the car and I race us all up to Watford General Hospital. We pull up outside A&E and they take her straight inside, pump her stomach and save her life.
Unfortunately, on the way there, she’d puked in the back of my car, all over the seats, all over the floor, and all over my colleague who was sitting with her in the back! Now, not only have I left Lisa on a Bank Holiday, who I’d promised to take out when I returned, but now our only car is now sprayed from floor to ceiling in vomit.
I spent the rest of the day scrubbing all this sick off, putting lemon juice on it to neutralise the smell and cleaning and cleaning until I’d got it all off. When I got home my wife was not happy, I assure you! But, at the end of the day, she couldn’t be mad with me for too long. I had probably saved this woman’s life, though I will never know for sure. As a Samaritan we don’t stay with them at the hospital – we can’t get involved in that way, we just do our bit and leave the rest to the professionals.
Twice a week, I would do a four-hour shift, then once a month I’d do a full night duty. I also used to do one-on-one interviews with people who came to Samaritans House in Watford. You ask them if they’d like a cup of tea, but otherwise it is like a phone call; you try not to talk, just listen to what they have to say. It’s a bit like counselling. But you have to be very careful – you park your car out of sight and enter via the back door, trying not to be seen. You have to be aware of anyone loitering around, in case they are waiting for a particular volunteer, and you have to be careful when you come back out, get to your car and drive off without anyone following you. You have to be as anonymous as possible.
I also enjoyed going round with the collection tin. Some people would just stand outside a Sainsbury’s somewhere rattling the box, but I’d go up to people who were trying to ignore me and say, ‘Come on you mean bastard, it’s a good cause, put some money in!’ Always with a smile on my face, of course, and it usually worked. Sometimes people would say they didn’t have any change, so I’d make a note of their face and when they came out after their shopping I made sure I caught them then instead!
In all I was a Samaritan for nineteen years and it is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my life. Unfortunately a few years back I could no longer commit to doing the night duties and you can’t be a Samaritan if you can’t do night duties, it’s not fair on the rest of the volunteers. Also, as I was on the television and getting recognised in the street, I didn’t want to be in the awkward situation of someone coming in for a one-to-one and potentially recognising me.
The point of the service is that it’s anonymous and you don’t know the person you are talking to, so if I was recognised that would change the dynamic of the conversation and not help that person. I sincerely hope, though, that in the future when I have a bit more free time that I am able to go back. They’re an amazing bunch of people who care so deeply for others. It’s an incredible organisation and it’s a privilege to help people in need.
I’ve certainly never forgotten how they helped me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
GORDON RAMSAY, EAT YOUR HEART OUT!
In between the various television appearances I was still doing the day job. I had been in the business for over forty years by now, worked at a lot of places and my name had travelled to many more. From my consultancy work to my intervention at the garage where I found the receptionist, Paula, with her hand in the till, I had always had a reputation for fixing problems with companies. With my new-found status as a TV personality I started getting calls from garages that had issues and I was asked to go in and give my professional opinion.
And so I started to become the ‘Gordon Ramsay of Garages’ if you like, going into businesses, seeing what was wrong, hiring and firing and turning the place around. In this job the biggest problem I find is getting people to open up and admit they have a problem. Even as a Samaritan it’s not always easy in the mucho macho world of the motor trade to get guys to say, ‘Please can you help me?’ You can’t help someone who doesn’t want any help or
doesn’t realise they need it. Once they’ve admitted they have a problem, it’s then a case of working out what that problem is.
In many of the garages that I have gone to where I have been recommended by friends or colleagues, they say, ‘Business here isn’t good.’ So when I go in, the first thing I look for is whether they have returning customers, and if not why not. Is it the fault of the mechanics? The management? The customer service? The pricing? You have to go into all of these things to find out exactly what is causing the business to go down.
I remember one particular garage in Finchley. The place specialised in one make of car, which was Alfa Romeo, and a very good friend of mine was also friends with the owner and used to take his car there. But he’d say to me, ‘You should have a look at this garage, I don’t understand it, whenever I go there it’s dead, they’re doing terrible.’
This I thought was strange. OK, Alphas are a niche market but they are well known for having ‘teething problems’, shall we say? (That’s my polite way of saying they fall to bits on a regular basis.) So I would’ve thought a garage that specialised in Alphas would have a steady stream of business. My mate said he knew the owner and said he was a really lovely guy, he needed a bit of help and suggested that he could benefit from my expertise and experience.
So I gave the bloke a ring and, sure enough, he’s a really nice guy. Not a mechanic himself, he’s a businessman, and he’s had the garage for about twelve years. I tell him all about myself and my experience and so he invites me in for a cup of coffee and a nosey around. I go in and it’s quite a clean garage, nicely laid out, but all the mechanics are sat around doing nothing. They had four mechanics and a receptionist and only one car on the go, nowhere near enough work to keep all of these people employed. The boss can’t understand it and it doesn’t seem right to me either, as I know they do a decent job on my friend’s car, so I offer to come and work for them for a week and see what I can do.
I start the following Monday and the first thing I do is go and meet the receptionist and look through the books. I asked him why he thought they didn’t get returning clients. He said they’d had quite a few complaints about dents in cars, and things going missing from the vehicle interiors. I asked if they’d broached this subject with the mechanics. He said he had but no one ever admitted to anything, they all covered each other’s backs, and all they were interested in was putting their hand out on a Friday afternoon and getting paid. They all worked on a flat rate, so whether they do twenty cars or one, they all get good wages and they don’t give a fuck.
Next I asked to be introduced to the guys, so we called a meeting in the tearoom. They were naturally sceptical of me, and were either stand-offish or downright rude. I went over my background with them, told them about Rolls-Royce, Jaguar etc.
‘Yeah, but that’s Rolls-Royce, Rolls ain’t Alphas, what do you know about Alphas?’ one of them argued with me.
‘I know enough,’ I say.
So they fire off lots of questions, which I answer.
After about an hour-and-a-half of this I had a pretty good overview of what they were like. I went outside and saw the receptionist and said, ‘You need to call the owner, I need to have a chat with him.’
The owner came down and I said, ‘Look, there’s only one way you’re going to be able to turn this place around. You’ve got six mechanics altogether, you’ve got to get rid of four of them because they’re useless. They don’t give a damn about what they do, at least one person amongst them is stealing from cars – and when this happens those clients don’t come back, so they’re effectively stealing money from your pocket.’
At least four of them had to go, but I couldn’t make them redundant, so I had to play it a little bit clever. We called a meeting with the whole firm and the owner said that he was handing over the running of the business to me and that I’d have as much authority over everyone as he does.
As soon as he’d finished I went in all guns blazing, starting with: ‘I’ve had an hour-and–a-half with you lot, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’re about and I have to say I’m not happy.’
‘What do you mean you’re not happy?’ someone called out.
‘I mean stuff is being stolen, cars are being returned dented, no one is taking responsibility, so I’m calling the police. So, for whoever is nicking stuff from the cars I have some advice: go and collect your tools and get out now, because as soon as the police are involved you’re on your own and you are going to be in serious trouble.’
With that four of them got up and headed for the door. I told them as they left, ‘Good, because if you hadn’t walked out, you’d have been fired anyway.’
I had no intention of calling the police, but this saved a lot of hassle.
So now I’m down to two mechanics, the two that really wanted to be there. We all set about calling former clients and asking them to bring their cars back, or we would go and collect them to save them the trouble, and along with the two decent mechanics we started going over the previous work that had been done, all for free.
This gave the company good grace, and slowly but surely the clients started to come back. We put a big advert in the local paper inviting anyone with a previous grievance with the garage to get in touch. They got calls and they brought the cars in and put the faults right, for free.
I was with the company, off and on, for three-and-a-half months and in this time it went from a dead garage losing tens of thousands of pounds a month to the busy, bustling and successful business I thought it should be. It went from being on death’s door to rude health and went on for another ten or twelve years before the owner sold out for a very healthy profit.
That garage was a prime example of how just one or two rogue employees can ruin a reputation. Word of mouth, particularly in a clique like Alpha owners, gets bad news around quickly and overnight you can lose business. This success, along with many others, means I’m now in high demand as a consultant for various garages in the south-east of England.
When I look back over my career I’ve done things I’d never expected to do. I had no idea back when I was nine years old and I was taking my uncle’s new vacuum cleaner apart, or walking into that greasy garage when I was twelve, that it would lead me to working in far flung corners of the globe. Certainly, when I was working for Al and the other characters at the Blind Beggar, I had no idea I would end up working for, and becoming indispensable to, the Metropolitan Police.
On and off for the past few years I’ve worked directly and indirectly for the Met. I started off simply driving recovery vehicles. I was happy to get out of the garage once in a while so I was sent to police stations all around London and as far afield as Gravesend in Kent, collecting vehicles that needed work doing and bringing them back to the main workshop in Park Royal.
It seemed that every policeman in London watched Chop Shop, and every police station I went into I’d get: ‘Fuck me it’s Bernie the Bolt! Where’s Leepu?’ Then I began working on the cars themselves, sometimes on the spot at the station or back at the workshop, and of course attending breakdowns out on the street. More often than not, this was because diesel had been put in a petrol engine, or petrol in a diesel. So yes, even the police make that mistake sometimes!
And it was really interesting work, getting to see how the police went about their business, and working on vehicles from high-performance unmarked vehicles to riot vans to those used by the Diplomatic Protection Group.
The only part that wasn’t so good was attending the accidents. Unfortunately, during high-speed chases, mistakes are made or there is mechanical failure and things go wrong. Sometimes they go fatally wrong. The accidents you really don’t like to see are the ones where officers have been trapped inside vehicles and had to be cut out. When an accident involving a police vehicle occurred I would be scrambled to the scene to move the vehicle as quickly as possible. I didn’t touch the civilian vehicle involved (if there was one) – that wasn’t my remit, I just had to ge
t the police car back to the garage pronto. Sadly a stricken police vehicle in certain parts of London is a magnet for troublemakers and it would get smashed up pretty quickly if it were left there.
In fact the only instances where I wasn’t supposed to get the car moved was if there was a fatality, in which case the crash scene investigators would have to do their thing before I was allowed to touch the vehicle. What happens is, a police car has an accident, the officer calls back to base, and they immediately get in touch with the central office of the contractors who deal with all the Met vehicles. That’s the company I work for, and I’m on-call ready to go.
Patrol cars do a lot of mileage and often at very high speeds in urban areas, there’s lots of revs and lots of crunching of gears, so there is a hell of a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to keep these vehicles in the condition needed to do their job.
Getting back to the workshop was rarely a straightforward affair. I’ve been driving recovery trucks one way or another for forty-odd years, but nothing in my life prepared me for the first time I took a police car on the back of my recovery vehicle. One of their cars had been involved in an accident and was smashed up at the front, so I had to pick it up from Brixton Police Station. As I drove out of the yard I was subjected to the most horrific abuse: bystanders started spitting at my truck as I waited at traffic lights, and also threw fruit and all sorts. It shouldn’t surprise me, I suppose, but I couldn’t believe how much people hated the police. But although belligerent pedestrians were trouble, the one good thing about having a police car on the back was that no one ever took liberties with you on the road. They always gave you a wide berth and always let you out of junctions!
Bernie Fineman, Original Motor Mouth Page 18