BUT FOR MAXWELL I MIGHT NEVER HAVE PASSED 'A' LEVEL PHYSICS

There are lots of experiences in life about which you can afterwards say 'that was my first'. These are the transitions in life where what you have read about, or seen in films, suddenly becomes real. Your first job is just such a transition and I was reminded of this by watching the truly excellent film drama about Robert Maxwell on BBC2 last week.

The story is compelling. The man whose parents die in Auschwitz, who starts life with nothing, not even a pair of shoes. Who learns the most impeccable accent with the correctest of accents and who later amasses a fortune by sheer will and bluster.

The film was also a tour de force for David Suchet, who played Maxwell. Though as David Suchet is now so type cast as Agatha Christie's famous detective I felt it was Poirot playing Maxwell, rather than Suchet and that at any moment the famous upturned moustaches would sprout anew on the scowling Maxwell face like a species of weed.

Plenty of course regard Maxwell as a deceiving crook who robbed a great many people of their pensions. I do not dissent from the general judgement. Fortunately my world and his did not collide in the later stages of his life. But in my early years I had considerable reason to be grateful to Maxwell, for he gave me my first real job.

I am stretching a point. The great man - for such he already was - did not exactly appoint me personally to the temporary holiday cover position of Gestetner operator in the print shop at Headington Hall, in Oxford. But one of his minions, or his minions' minions must have done and so, one sunny day some forty years ago, I found myself on the Maxwell payroll.

Nor, if we are being strictly accurate, was this my first paid employment. Our neighbouring farmer used to let me drive his old Fordson tractor and work on the bailing sledge for an initial wage, I seem to remember of less than a shilling an hour.

But the Maxwell job was the first in which I had to dress up, at least semi smartly, and turn up at a set hour, fussing over stencils and correction fluid while the machine sat atop a table and rocked gently to the movement of its large and inky roller. If all went well the sheets of print - the machine demanded paper of blotting paper absorbency - flew into a tray at the bottom.
I suppose I must be one of the few people left on this earth qualified to operate such a machine. Even the verb 'to roneo' - after Gestetner's great rival Roneo - and meaning to run off a number of copies on a duplicating machine - has vanished into the oubliette of the archaic.

The Gestetner's nemis - the Xerox - sat just across the print room floor. And occasionally, I was allowed to operate it. All it took to operate the Xerox was a press of the button, though because the technology was then new and scarcely reliable an engineer had to be on almost permanent stand-by.

The beige machine was as big as a desk and when working emitted a eerie green light from under the vinyl flap where the documents to be copied were placed, which gave it the look of a refugee from an early science fiction movie.

It also smelt - not an unpleasant smell - but a kind of burning chemical miasma arose whenever it was in use. Sometimes this became all too real and the precious photostat emerged charred and smouldering at the edges.

I never met Maxwell during that stint, though it seems I just missed him on more than one occasion, for he had the habit of dropping in unannounced at the outposts of his empire. Nor did I ever meet him subsequently at the establishment he opened just across Magdalen Bridge, known universally as 'Maxwell's.'

This was a most wonderful emporium: from a first floor devoted to academic books you descended by a wide spiral staircase to a basement that was half coffee shop and half record boutique.

It seemed the height of sophistication then in those days to tuck myself up with a book and a nine-penny cup of coffee brewed by an ultra-modern Expresso machine and listen to the adjacent sounds of music.

Before my 'A' Levels I would sometimes retreat there to revise, if I had any time to kill. In particular I associate physics - my weakest subject by a mile - with Maxwell's coffee house. I must have lost myself in the dark corner under the spiral staircase many times while trying to ponder the mysteries of gravity and optics.

Not maybe the best chosen place for revision, you may think, nevertheless, I passed.