What was the first job you ever had? →[More:]
Here's my story.

I grew up in a typical Midlands town with terraces of two-up, two-down red-brick houses that usually had a corner shop and/or a pub at the end of the street. We had a corner shop selling groceries that also had an off-licence. (An off-licence can sell bottled drinks - this was before the days canned beers were sold in the UK - and it sold mostly ales, fortified wines such as 'VP British Sherry' and, for the sophisticated palate, the odd bottle of Hirondelle Liebfraumilch, which was pretty much the only wine you could buy in the UK when I was a kid.)

This is the street. Our house was on the left, next to the second blue car and the lamppost you can see in the picture. When I lived there, nobody had a car. People rode bicycles or got the bus.

This is the other end of the street. The building on the left used to be the corner shop, with its door on the corner where that little window now is.

Now in England when I was growing up they had fairly strict laws on child labour. No working under the age of 13 (unless it was in an acting role), no working on licensed premises, very strict controls on working hours. Despite this, my dad arranged with the owner of the store, a creepy bloke named Paddy, for me to work there after school, when I was 12. I worked from 5pm to 10pm, when the shop closed, and my mum would walk down at about 9.45 to collect me (and to pick up some more booze for my dad to drink when he got back from the pub - his drink of choice was Gold Label Barley Wine, like Thunderbird, it's one of those drinks only consumed by pissheads).

So, I'd get home from school at 4.30, eat my dinner (which we called 'tea') and then go down to the corner shop to work. It was really hard work, re-stocking the shelves, which involved bringing crates of ale up from the cellar, boxes of canned goods and other packages products from the garage and generally humping stuff about.

I did this five days a week, 5 hours a night. My wage for the week was 40p. I strongly believe now that my dad was getting paid in booze for me working there.

I remember one particular Friday night I'd just been paid and my mum had come to collect me. I wanted an ice cream to eat on the walk back up the street, and Paddy deducted the money - 8p - from my wage.

This all sounds incredibly Dickensian looking back on it now but at the time I really didn't have any choice about it.

But I was falling behind (and falling asleep) at school, and the teachers noticed. I was under strict orders from my dad to say nothing - he said I would be in trouble with the police if anyone found out.

Well, someone did find out. This was in the days before 24-hour Tescos, and few and far between were the shops that stayed open after 5pm, so this place was always packed and it was a total gold mine for Paddy. One evening, the odds were against him, and one of my teachers came into the shop to buy something. She saw me there and said to Paddy "I didn't know Jan was your daughter". "Yeah, right, maybe if I'd got married when I was about 15" he replied.

Next day I was taken out of class to the Deputy Head's office where I was questioned about this. After school I walked down to the shop as normal, to find Paddy's banshee of a wife yelling at me that I'd got him into trouble.

I found out years later that he was prosecuted and fined, and that my dad was also implicated in some way but I never found out if he had to go to court or anything. But I do know that I was punished heavily for the school finding out.

So, that was my initiation into the world of work. Not the best job I've ever had, but, also, incredibly, not the worst.