Newspapers

• Harry Smallbone , Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2010

Three and a half years. Three and a half years of backbreaking work. Three and a half years of weekends down the drain, outings ruined, bickering and rushed homework. Three and a half years of delivering newspapers. And it’s all my fault.

It had started so jokingly that day in Year Five. A friend had told me that he delivered newspapers; the ‘Western Suburbs’. I thought nothing of it at the time and mentioned it in passing to my parents. The fanatical gleam in their eyes should have warned me of what was to come.

Weeks later, my dad made the fateful phone call to the POST Newspapers’ office. Innocently, he asked for a chance to deliver newspapers near our area, Claremont. With some trepidation, we picked up three hundred papers from their secluded headquarters at a bowling green.

Gritting our teeth, we (the three children) set to work folding and rubber-banding the newspapers in preparation for delivery. Hours were spent on this onerous task and soon it became a boring chore. On Saturday, the time finally arrived. We set off with bags filled with twenty papers and walked slowly to the letterboxes. The paper round regularly took up more than three hours of our valuable weekend time.

Despite our speed, or lack of it, our parents soon picked up another round, this time in Nedlands. “Slave labour!” we cried, but they would have none of it. Six hundred newspapers to deliver was no laughing matter, and the time doubled, both in folding and posting as we drove to a completely different suburb.
The toll on our weekends grew as the time taken to finish the papers increased to two hours. Homework was being finished more and more on Sunday and our life was overshadowed by the exhausting papers.

More and more rounds were piled onto our workload, and we soon delivered all the papers between Victoria Avenue and Waratah. We delivered, at our peak, 2000 papers. 2000. The impact was unbelievable. We ran about three kilometres each weekend with papers under one hand, folding on the fly and shoving them into letterboxes. Something had to give.

It did too, but in the wrong way. My sister dropped out in 2007, leaving just my brother and me to deliver the grand total of 2400 papers. We delivered to most of the Western Suburbs and had six rounds each week. Our reward for this, apart from the pay of 10 cents a paper, was one measly box of chocolates at the end of the year.

Today, however, we have cut back to just three rounds and 1000 papers. Comparative luxury. Our weekends are still overcast, but more time spent at the beach has improved our job satisfaction immensely.

Still, I wonder if we will ever stop. If we will ever have a completely paper-free weekend. Somehow, I doubt it. How I wish I had never mentioned it all those years ago. Maybe then, this atrocity would never have happened.