Ten years ago I left my part-time job pushing trolleys in a local supermarket. I had worked there for two and a half years, leaving when I was eighteen to go to university. I thought that I would need all my spare time for studying. I was doing English at Queens . How naive can you be. Looking back, those trolley pushing days were some of the best of my life.

When I started that job it was the first time that I had come into contact with girls who didn't want to run away from me. I went to an all-boys primary and an all-boys secondary school. To me, girls were just something Nigel Bryson used to moon at out of our school mini-bus window. 

Every check-out was operated by beautiful girls. The shop floor was full of them stacking shelves. The back stores were awash with them. Even the coal-yard had a girl on the till. It was the girls that pulled me through those rough years because trolley pushing was the hardest job in the supermarket--even tougher than working in the coal-yard. Yes, the coal-yard boys had to hawk dirty great big bags of coal for hours on end in the  freezing rain, but it was seasonal work. During the summer months they sat with their feet up on pallets of anthracite and watched us break our backs.

My first ever shift was on a Saturday afternoon. It was mayhem. I remember collecting my first line of trolleys, pushing them gingerly into the mall through the side doors and sliding them around to the trolley bay inside. There was a crowd waiting. A man asked me if this train stopped at Central station. A wee girl said that I must be going to do some shopping. I would have laughed if I had any energy left in me.

Trolley pushing is a dying art, like pot making and playing football in the street. These guys who do the job now have no style, no finesse. In my day it was none of that £1 coin in the slot lark, chains holding them all together, no more than six trolleys at any time. When we worked we pushed forty or fifty trolleys at once--bareback. You had to know the undulations of the car park, the angles for crossing the zebra crossing to run perfectly up to the doors. 

Like any great master, we made it look easy--but it most certainly wasn't. On Saturdays, the boss would send somebody out from the shop floor to cover our lunches. We would often come back out to scenes straight out of a "Die Hard" film. Riots. Cars on fire. Mass brawls in the car-park. Crucifixions. Trolleys lying everywhere. 

In two and a half years I only hit one car (well, I was only caught hitting one). It wasn't even my fault. I was half way across the zebra crossing, escorting a line of nursery school kids, bunny rabbits and kittens at the same time, when a car tried to drive on through. That’s exactly what happened, your honour. Forty trolleys whacked head first into the driver's door. He took it well. He could have caved my face in if he had wanted to. At least it was only a Citroen.Us old school trolley boys were a breed unto ourselves. Davey held the fort on weekdays. He was two trolleys short of a full bay. He cursed constantly and he would go around kicking trolleys with his big DM boots. One day I got a phone call from the boss asking me if I could come in because Davey had to be taken to hospital. He had tried to fire a wonky trolley over a fence, and it had come back down and smacked him clean on the head. He came back from the hospital with a big egg on his forehead. He cursed more and kicked the trolleys with more frenzy that day then I have ever seen in my life.

I worked Tuesday and Wednesday nights and Saturday afternoons with Austin Baby-Trolleys. We called him Austin Baby-Trolleys because he was obsessed with getting the baby-trolleys in and out of the way. The baby-trolleys stayed in a wee room overnight. He would plan his night’s work around getting them in: "We'll bring those baby trolleys in around half eight!"We were paid three pineapples an hour. Austin held the record for us part-time trolley boys. He earned 165 pineapples one week. My record was 128. That was a Christmas week when I worked night and day for a week. What did Santa get me that year? Cramp. Thanks Santa. 

I was working the day the new coin-operated trolleys came online. It was one of the saddest days of my life--up there with the time I bought the Cranberries' third album. The night before, the whole workforce had spent an hour after the shop had closed wheeling the old trolleys up in the lift to the trolley graveyard--a massive storage space beside the cinema where Pizza Hut was meant to open but never did.  Austin burst into tears when his baby-trolleys were thrown into a dark grimy corner.

All us trolley boys were called in early the next morning. A massive truck was parked outside the shopping centre. The truck was full of shiny, new, state-of-the-art, will-rip-your-head-off-and-spit-down- your-neck, will-steal-your-girlfriend, will-burn-your- house-down, best-thing-since-sliced-bread trolleys. We spent the morning filling up the bays in silence. I worked with those new trolleys for six months. It was cold and clinical. There was no emotional bond.  Austin was never the same again.

I bumped into  Austin in a bar last week for the first time in ten years. He was a terrible sight. He was sitting in a corner by himself, drunk, mumbling something about baby-trolleys. 

Author's Biography

****Soon to come****

E-mail Shane at s.mckay@ntlworld.com

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