Confessions Of A Milkman

Timothy Lea takes up one of the great institutions of British life—the doorstep milk delivery—and asks the question that occupied so much popular culture during the 1970s: surely somebody, somewhere, must be having sex while all this ordinary work is going on?

Confessions of a Milkman is the sixteenth instalment in the indefatigable Confessions series, in which employment is rarely permitted to interfere for long with Timmy Lea’s real vocation. This time he enters the dairy trade, armed with a milk float, a collection of bottles and the sort of delivery round that would cause serious concern in any competently managed business. Customers receive personal attention, service regularly extends beyond the doorstep and the distinction between being “on the job” and being on the job becomes hopelessly compromised.

The traditional milkman already occupied a curious place in British folklore. He arrived early, knew which husbands had left for work and was permitted to wander around residential streets while everyone else remained in dressing gowns. For Timothy Lea, this is less an occupation than an elaborate plot mechanism. Before long, Timmy is encountering lonely housewives, suggestive misunderstandings and innumerable situations in which clothing becomes administratively unnecessary.

The humour is broad, the innuendo relentless and the social attitudes preserved in pure 1976 aspic. Nobody should approach this expecting delicately observed romance or an enlightened examination of workplace boundaries. It belongs to the age of cheeky postcards, avocado bathroom suites, brown wallpaper and British sex comedy—the peculiar national tradition in which erotic adventure was accompanied by embarrassment, collapsing furniture and somebody arriving at precisely the wrong moment.

Beneath the sauce, however, the Confessions books now have an additional fascination as artefacts of their era. This was a Britain of doorstep deliveries, cash rounds and little glass bottles with foil tops, when the electric milk float was a familiar part of every morning and apparently capable of transporting one remarkably energetic young man through an inexhaustible succession of compromising situations. The sexual revolution had arrived, but it was moving at approximately eight miles per hour and making a faint humming noise.

Published by Futura in 1976, this original paperback is not merely a later reissue of the story but a surviving piece of the phenomenon itself. The Confessions series was enormously popular, routinely disreputable and seldom purchased with the intention of improving one’s standing among serious literary people. Copies were read, lent, hidden, bent and carried around in circumstances not conducive to preservation. Their survival as collectable period paperbacks therefore has a certain improbable dignity.

This particular copy is in Fair condition and has suffered a little from damp at some point in its history. Happily, the effects are limited and have not significantly affected the bulk of the book. The text remains complete and quite readable, which is the important thing unless you were hoping to use it as a clinically sterile exhibit in a museum of 1970s erotic publishing.

It is worn, certainly, but worn in the manner expected of a genuine collectable paperback that has lived through nearly half a century rather than being manufactured last Thursday to look “vintage”. The wear and slight evidence of past damp form part of its history. One might even say that a book about a milkman has inevitably encountered a little unwanted liquid, although thankfully no further investigation is required.

This is a suitable copy for collectors of the Confessions series, devotees of British sex comedy, admirers of outrageous 1970s cover art or anyone assembling a cultural history of the period’s less respectable reading matter. It remains perfectly usable as a reading copy while retaining the appeal of an authentic, increasingly collectable Futura edition.

A Fair but very readable worn collectable sold by Crappy Old Books—slightly damp in its past, thoroughly suggestive throughout and still capable of completing the round.

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