Back on the road

ALAN Wilkinson grins when he remembers the reaction of the personnel manager at Rowntrees. He had pitched up there in the mid-1970s, chasing a job as a butter melter. It was after he had tried his hand at being a labourer and working in a steam laundry; but before he went on to get jobs as a railway signalman, gardener and ratcatcher.

"I remember this guy at Rowntrees saying 'so what went wrong with your life?'," he says. "And I thought 'nothing. I'm having a great time'."

Thirty years down the line, despite an inability to hold down a serious job for more than five minutes, he still is.

For the last ten of those years, he has been eking out a living as a writer. It was Alan who wrote the bestselling history of Jackson's Supermarkets in 1994, and who in 1998 published YESSS!!!, a comprehensive catalogue of Manchester United's defeats.

More lucratively, he spent a year or so writing scripts for the ITV soap Emmerdale. "The assistant producer said 'you're the most authentic voice on the show'," he says proudly. "I'm from Surrey, so that was a huge complement. But they kept bringing in more hunky teenage boys and girls, and I thought 'this is supposed to be a village in North Yorkshire!'" End of his Emmerdale career.

He has also written scripts for documentaries such as Vets In Practice. But by the beginning of this year he was at enough of a loose end - part-time job as a Tote racecourse betting assistant and a bit of teaching aside - to be wondering what to do next.

That was when he began messing about on his computer at home and, just for the fun of it, typed in the words "writer's residencies". Up came details of a three-month Jack Kerouac Writer In Residence vacancy at the house in Orlando, Florida, where the great American writer lived when his classic Beat novel On The Road was published in 1957.

Alan, now 53 and living in Bootham Terrace, York, sasys he was a Kerouac fan in his youth. "I read all his work when I was young - the good, the bad and the embarrassing," he says. So the opportunity was too good to miss.

Which is how, from next March, he will spend three months rent-free in Kerouac's former home in the Sunshine State, writing the book he has always wanted to write: about his own life "on the road".

It promises to be some book. He probably has Ernest Hemingway rather than Jack Kerouac to blame for the fact he turned into one of life's most consistent drop-outs, Alan admits. "Writing was something I had always wanted to do, right from 18, from reading Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath and then Hemingway, him sitting on a sidewalk in Paris with his notebook and red wine," he says.

It was an idea packed with excitement. So instead of going to university, the Surrey boy who had grown up on a poor council estate before landing a scholarship to a posh public school, decided to drop out.

"If you're good at school, they tend to shove you on a path where life is about books and learning," he says. "I wanted to know about people. I wanted to learn to build a house, to dig a garden. I wanted to get my hands dirty."

For the next 20 years, that's precisely what he did. First there was a job at a steam laundry, where the middle-aged women he worked with turned the air blue with their unclean language. Then he spent a while as a labourer. "I wasn't good at it. It was bloody hard work." In 1973, he turned up in York "for personal reasons" and spent the next eight years in the city. First it was the butter-melter's job.

"There were these 56lb blocks of rock-hard cocoa butter imported from Ghana, Nigeria and Holland," he says. "We used to rip open the blocks, put the butter into vats and melt it. It was a bloody hot job." After a while, he was transferred to be a cocoa sifter. "I hated it. You were stood under a hopper eight hours a day and I thought, sod this. There has to be something better."

There was: being a shunter at York Railway Station. Nothing glamorous, of course. "It was walking about hooking up wagons on to engines," he says. Then he worked as a freight train guard for a while, before moving to Lincolnshire as a signalman.

His railway career ended when he spotted an advert in the local paper for a council ratcatcher. "I thought, 'how can you resist?'" he says.

Being a ratcatcher was a "fabulous job." "Sometimes it would be little old ladies who had a mouse in the attic. Sometimes it was a farm with a serious infestation of rats in the pig unit. Sometimes it would be just wasps' nesting in someone's pantry."

Throughout 20 years and 30 or so jobs, he watched and listened. Like Hemingway he carried his notebook everywhere.

It meant that by the ripe age of 39, when he decided to study for a degree, he had a rich source of material on which to draw if he was going to make it as a writer.

He followed a four-year American Studies degree at Hull - which involved a year in New Mexico with his then wife and two daughters - with an MA in Creative Writing at East Anglia.

After a brief brush with academia, he slipped into the life of a freelance writer, producing company histories, TV scripts and a bit of Emmerdale. But somehow he never seemed to find time or the opening to write what he really wanted. Holding down a succession of part-time jobs - such as his work at the Tote - didn't help much.

"But writing is a precarious business, and it pays to have some sort of steady income," he says. "Besides, it is great fun. At Ascot I was in the Royal Enclosure, taking aristocrats' money. When was the last time you had aristocrats queuing up to give you money?"

The Jack Kerouac residency will finally give him the chance to get his life down on paper - provided he can chain himself to his desk instead of spending the three months finding out what makes Orlando tick.

But he's looking forward to writing the book. The Sixties and Seventies were a great time to be a drop-out moving from job to job with nothing but a notebook in your pocket, he says. "Life's an adventure and then you die, so you might as well make the most of it.

"They were wild and wonderful days. There was always another job. They were dirty jobs, and the money wasn't good, but I thought it was great, and the key thing was having a good time. I want to write a book that celebrates that. "

Where better to do that than in Jack Kerouac's house?

Updated: 11:29 Thursday, July 10, 2003