LUCKY JACK
Being the misadventures of one of life's losers.
Chapter Three: Jack in Clover
WARNING TO NEW READERS- This is a rambling, VERY British episodic part work which was originally published as a series of short stories in the 1990s but has recently been modernized and brought into the 21st century. The main character, Lucky Jack, some readers may recognise as appearing in other short stories published elsewhere which straddle this one in chronological sequence of events. All of the Lucky Jack Drake tales will be rewritten in time but may not be released in chronological order for which I apologise.
JACK IN CLOVER follows after JACK AND THE ESSEX GIRLS and JACK IN THE BOX and comes before JACK THE DESPICABLE in the current chronological order of stories being posted here. .
GreenFingers January 2017
People are always crapping on about how your schooldays are supposed to be the best days of your life, I can understand where they are coming from but for me the most memorable days, and nights, of my life were definitely the three years that I spent at the University of Essex.
For me university life was great, studying and learning has always come easy to me and so the work was a doddle and I could spend my time and money on having a good time so it became a three year shag-fest with a useful business degree at the end of it. The campus was wall to wall with young attractive women and the surrounding urban areas were populated with estates full of housewives whose husbands commuted into London to work each day. Added to the residential totty were the holidaymakers that came to Southend every summer desperate for sun, sea and sex. If shagging had been on the curriculum I would probably have achieved a doctorate in the first year.
For a shag addict it was paradise, I was in clover.
I couldn't wait to leave school and get to college. Until I was fifteen I had lived with my Gran in a farming village in Surrey. My Dad, who was a seaman and never there anyway, was inconsiderate enough to fall overboard in the middle of the Atlantic, leaving a mountain of debts and no cash in the bank. Nobody saw him fall, jump or get pushed, nobody actually missed him for nearly a full day and so it was a real tussle for my mother to get a pay-out from the insurance company to cover the mortgage payments on our London flat. She was forced to go back to work as a secretary and then the Social Services creeps came sniffing round and caught me at home alone one evening when she was working late to earn extra money. The short story was that my mother either had to give up working until I was fifteen or I had to go live with my Gran at Woodley Hill weekdays during term time.
I had hated everything about village life when I was a kid and couldn't wait to get back to London where there were proper shops, traffic noises day and night, real schools with a thousand other kids and switched on adults who talked about football and television in the pub instead of cabbages and potatoes and how good their prize bull was at fucking cows. I guess that the years spent with my Gran living at Woodley Hill made me determined to get to university and find a decent job in the city. I seriously fancied myself as a stock broker or economist with a line in Saville Row suits, a flash set of wheels and an office in the city with thick carpets and a big swivel chair behind a desk the size of a bloody football pitch. I was not going to end up working on a piss poor farm, married to one of the local 'Miss Piggys' at nineteen like all the other lads in the village.
Nobody could ever say the 'Lucky' Jack Drake was lazy or brainless, stupid at times perhaps, but I was a worker and a survivor. With Mum struggling to keep a roof over our heads and get me a good education things were always tight financially at home and so as soon as I got back to London I got myself a part-time job. For any guy who was only half-way street-wise it was a doddle in those days to get 'dodgy' ID cards with an altered birth date and I was well connected, I went to school with half the villains in London, and so I started work at a local supermarket filling shelves from 6pm until 2am five days a week even though I was really only fifteen years old. It gave me six hours sleep a night and all day Saturday and Sunday to swot for my exams, but I was a quick learner with a good memory and was confident that I would get good grades...and I did.
I had got used to having cash in my pocket without thieving and with the extra work that I got during the school holidays I was able to save enough money to be able to buy myself a clapped out old VW Polo which I had a mate re-spray and tune-up for me before I left for Southend and the U of E Business School. I didn't doubt for a moment that the car was probably a chop job, made up of bits of other motors from the scrap yards but it ran OK, the documentation seemed to pass muster and I had my own transport at 17 years old, with the road tax and insurance paid up, it wasn't the flash Mercedes that the young teenage drug gang soldiers were cruising about in, but it was mine.
My previous, if somewhat shadowy, employment record, along with a glowing reference from my former supervisor, a really lovely lady whose husband worked away a lot, got me established straight away in a part-time job with Sainsbury's at Southend on Sea, and I quickly added some casual sessions as a barista with Starbucks and so alongside my student grant I was probably better off than most students who were unwilling or too lazy to work or just relied on funding from home.
After three years easy study I was in full anticipation of a decent Upper 2nd Class Honours Business Degree but had yet to have a positive response to the dozens of CVs that I had sent out to suitable employers who should have been begging me to come and work for them. I was starting to realise that only the top 10% of business students nationwide, those gaining 1st Class honours degrees or back-to-back IT qualifications, ever got as far as an interview for a place with a top city firm. The chances were about the same as getting selected to play for Chelsea FC first team whilst kicking about in the park, but I was still hopeful that I would have a decent job before I finally left university.
I guess that I really did not want to relinquish the freedom of the student life and dreaded the prospect of returning to London without proper employment. The last thing that I wanted was to be joining the fucking dole queue along with all those other disillusioned graduates who had slaved to get their degrees only to find that only one in a thousand performing arts students would ever actually get work as an actor and were destined for years of six month contracts at call centres or stacking shelves in Morrison's and watching the drug dealers who had left school at twelve, if they had ever been at all, riding around in brand new Land Rovers or Mercs their pockets stuffed with rolls of fifty pound notes.
Those last few weeks of the academic year were frantic. There was no further coursework to complete or submit and a lot of the other students had already departed for home but I was staying on to the bitter end. There were lots of end of year parties, barbeques on the beach, and other opportunities for the keen nookie hunter. A lot of the female students were feeling equally depressed about joining the real world or needing to return home to live with their parents after three years freedom and were happy to let guys who had stayed on get them pissed and fall into bed for a good-bye shag.