An irate customer virtually stuck a credit card in my face because I was charging him 4p for a plastic bag.

In the high pressure of getting through queues of customers rapidly on the tills, I charged somebody double by mistake.

On another occasion, I blundered by charging someone at a 90% discount.

But there were some lighter moments – the singer Lulu chatted to me as I served her and gave me a 50p tip.

My experience on the tills at Marks and Spencer in the 1980s also makes me feel sympathy for retail workers at this time of year when they face the greatest demand.

Aged 22, I worked at M&S’s flagship Marble Arch branch in central London in the winter of 1986-87 before I got my first job in journalism.

I was one of the extra staff initially hired for the Christmas rush and then kept me on permanently until I moved to Kent.

Every shop worker has difficult customers and the most common hostility you got was when there was a long queue at your till and people thought you were too slow.

But some could erupt over the tiniest things.

When I was on a week’s secondment at the Hackney store that January, a man took umbrage over me charging him 4p for a plastic bag. He protested that he already spent £500 a month on his Marks and Spencer charge card.

He refused to pay the 4p and time was taken to getting the supervisor to come over and authorise the removal of that charge. Then he got impatient with the delay and stretched out his arm to aggressively stick a credit card inches from my face. This was to make me hurry up and process it.

In these situations, the supervisor could be called to calm things down but if someone became violent or aggressive to an extreme the store had burly security guards, usually there to catch shoplifters.

Volatile customers have never gone away. The retail trade union Usdaw recorded from a survey of 3,000 retail staff that this year 65% experienced verbal abuse, 42% were threatened by a customer and 5% were assaulted.

Meanwhile, British Retail Consortium (BRC) reports that incidents of violence, threats and abuse on staff almost doubled from 2020.

Before then, about 450 incidents involving shop staff were recorded each day but this shot up to more than 850 in the 12 months up to March 2023. Thousands of employees reported being shouted at, spat on, threatened or hit while at work.

The BRC believes that the spike came from workers having to enforce and encourage mask-wearing among customers during the pandemic, while also getting them to follow social distancing rules.

KM colleagues Charlotte Phillips and Isabel Tree have told of the regular abuse and name-calling they endured in previous jobs from store customers over prices, returning goods or the unavailability of items.

This was when working in Bromey, Canterbury and Maidstone before starting their media careers.

Isabel mentioned someone grabbing cash from her till. For my colleagues and I in the Eighties, part of our training was to look out for thefts and fiddles.

Once a young woman presented to me a stolen credit card. In that case the supervisors already knew so I was told to say and do nothing and leave the security guards to nab her as she left.

Some light was made of the constant war between the company and these crooks.

“How do you know if they’re thieves?” asked one colleague.

“When they start running,” replied another.

But M&S was also hot on stopping pilfering on our side of the counter.

The men’s uniform trousers had no pockets at all and in our first days in training we were shown a video called A Matter of Time.

This was the dramatisation of a worker stealing, eventually being caught and prosecuted and even the repercussions for their family.

At least now goods at the till are scanned, which must cut down on mistakes. But there were blunders in my time, which may have been contributed to by the technology used then, which some may now call fossilised.

We used push-button tills, in which every single figure and dot had to be punched in. With an accidental tremble of the hand, I once charged a woman double for a £25 dress.

She told the supervisor so the mistake was rectified and I was told to “be more careful next time”.

Once I changed someone £2.25 for a £22.50 dress simply by forgetting to add the zero at the end of the figure. I saw her staring at the receipt for a couple of minutes before leaving. She was obviously thinking: “Thank you very much, I’m out of here.”

I didn’t dare tell anybody.

I think it was this slow process that would contribute to customers’ irritation with the time taken over transactions.

For each person you had to follow a till procedure of 15 steps, starting by asking their method of payment. Plenty of cheques were written, always with guarantee cards.

Other steps included double-checking the price on the tag on a hand-held electronic device called a psion, removing security tags and handing over the receipt. But some of them would take seconds.

As a newcomer, I found working on the tills the most nerve-wracking but eventually mastered it, going at a reasonable speed without haste. I ended up with a score of 14 out of 15 during an assessment.

On February 16, 1987, I met Lulu when I loaded her goods into the back of her Range Rover.

As she stood waiting she sang to herself and the security guards joked with her, pretending they didn’t know who she was.

I used a mechanical device in the loading bay to lower her trolley from a concrete platform to road level for her car.

She asked me about the device and gave me a 50p tip.

Lulu was again in the spotlight at the time as she starred in the TV comedy-drama The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole. That series ended seven days before we met.

I found Marks and Spencer one of those companies that looked after its staff. Marble Arch had an in-house doctor and the head office a short walk away had a physiotherapist. I needed her when I wrenched my back lifting a heavy object,

All women staff were given personal alarms, but not us men. We were told we could “take care of ourselves”. A sign of the Eighties but out of macho pride we didn't complain.

I was on duty on the evening of March 6, 1987, when the Herald of Free Enterprise sank off Zeebrugge in Belgium.

The capsize of the Dover ferry claimed 193 lives.

I started my first newspaper job in the town on March 30 and regularly followed up updates on the disaster over the next few decades, starting with covering fundraising cheque presentations as a cub reporter and shadowing a senior in the inquests that year.

Other follow-ups over the years include covering anniversary ceremonies and contributing to the KM’s 30th and 35th-year special features, interviewing people affected.

I was at work until 8pm on Friday, March 6, and looking back it seemed a strange coincidence that the shop floor was eerily quiet. During evenings it was usually very busy, with many of the customers picking up items on their way home from work.

I had actually had a job interview at a newspaper in Folkestone the previous month but had not yet been told whether I had the job. By March 20, I was offered a post at the Dover sister paper.

In the following days from March 6, I had seen the haunting images on television of the ferry lying on its side.

But I had no idea then how involved my working life would be in the tragedy.