Back in the early 1950s (when I was about eight years old) there were olive trees growing in the local park where us kids used to play. One day we noticed a man had his car parked up alongside the trees so we went over to investigate.
Turns out he was picking the olives from the trees and intended to take them home and turn them into olive oil which his wife would use as cooking oil.
Olive picking is a tedious and unrewarding job. First you have to lay a tarpaulin on the ground. Next you get a big stick and hit the branches so that the olives fall onto the tarpaulin. Then you pick up the individual olives and put them into a wooden box.
So this guy asked us if we would help him. He said he would pay us sixpence an hour which was an astronomical amount for an eight-year-old at the time. Most kids that age would be lucky to get sixpence a week in pocket money (I didn't get any pocket money at all) so sixpence an hour was almost too good to be true.
We didn't hesitate. There were five of us and we spent the rest of the afternoon picking olives (one of the most boring jobs ever) but we didn't actually get bored because we were so excited about the money we were earning, and the treasures we would be able to buy with our hard-earned cash.
At the end of the day the man realised he had run out of cigarettes so he gave us one shilling and sixpence and told us to go down to the shops and buy him a packet of cigarettes. "Why don't all of you go," he said. "While I tidy up here and get your money ready for you." Why not indeed. Off we went.
Back in those days smoking was socially acceptable and there was no law about selling cigarettes to children so there were no questions asked when we bought a packet of ten fags. Then we hurried back to the park to give the smokes to the man and (most importantly) collect our wages. Two shillings each! We were millionaires! Life had never been better.
But we couldn't find the man! The park was empty. He had loaded up his equipment, stowed away his boxes of olives and pissed off without paying us! Instead of getting a total of ten shillings between us for all our hard work, we were left with ten lousy cigarettes!
It took us quite a few minutes to figure out what happened and even then we couldn't really believe we had been cheated. We hung around in the park until it started getting dark, just in case the man came back with our money - but he never did.
Sixty years later and I still regard swarthy Italians as sneaky, slimy, bastards.[Unfair I know - but fuck 'em.]
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