Turkey Feet

12:23 am by admin.

One of my first memories of working in Alexanders was something that happened to my cousin Alan and I while working for my dads then boss Alfie Johnson. Now Alfie was a portly red faced gentleman, and I use that word in it’s purest meaning, with a tendency to be a bit gruff.
Alan and I were both around 14/15 years old and my dad got us a Christmas job cleaning and scrubbing and generally running around doing just what we were told to do. We were both a bit in awe the whole thing. It was, to us, a mad house, people were boning big lumps of beef, others were rolling big joints of meat. Pigs were being cut up, sausages were being made and of course the most important thing of all, turkeys were being cleaned.
Now one of our jobs was pulling the sinews out of the turkeys and considering there were well over 200 of the beasts we were glad we had two sinew pullers.
They were a weird contraption and not easy to use because ours were wall mounted so we had to hold the dead, floppy, 20lb bird under one arm and try to load the feet into the guides one at a time then pull like fu crazy

Anyway I think you get the picture. By the time we were finished it was about 1 O’clock in the morning and we were knackered looking forward to our beds. After all we were just a couple of young innocent spoilt kids. I think that’s exactly what Mr Johnson thought because he hit us with a dynamite job, possibly to teach us that hard work is just that, hard.

“Just one more wee job lads” he growled, “I want you to count the feet into those sacks then count the turkeys and make sure the numbers match” . “What !!! ” we said in unison, ” But why?”.
“Well” he said if the feet match up with the birds we know that no-one is nickin’ them, ’cause they cost a lot of money”. Seemed a reasonable thing to do ( I know , I know but we were only kids for crying out loud).

So we knew there were, say, two hundred birds so four hundred feet was our target. “A wee tip” he said, “count them in pairs it will be quicker”. Armed with the tip of an expert we got stuck in. I think we got to about 50/60 pairs and getting more and more cross eyed by the minute. He hit us with the killer blow. ” Hey, I hope you’re putting them in actual pairs lads, I want two feet from the same bird you know, if a jobs worth doing it’s worth doing right.”
Well, we couldn’t take it any more and  we grabbed a sack each and tossed the contents on the floor at his feet. It was all we could do to stop the tears from flowing.

Just then we looked up from the alcove we were working in to see the whole staff, including my da, looking at us. Silence descended and then Alfie, the bugger, burst out laughing which was the signal for everyone else to do the same. “God you’se are good value for a wind-up”, my da said and they all started to give ua a hand putting the feet into the sacks,without counting.

Posted in Stranmillis Road (The Alexander Years), Belfast, People | No Comments »