Just Another Day

                           Just Another Day​

 

Mam is shouting up the stairs.

“Time ta get up, ya lazy bugger … time ta do tha stint t’ factory. Can’t ya ‘ear yon siren it’s neet-shift finishing, and you, laying there like Little Lord ruddy Fauntleroy.”

 

The factory, the bloody factory, the rotten factory that takes our days and nights and minds, and grinds our bones to make the owner’s bread:

‘And what’s on the table today, Mam, what grub can you muster up from your sweat and heartache?’

 

“Eat tha bread and dripping, its best beef ya know, from t’ end of the street, tuppence a quarter.”

 

The fat had dribbled into the roasting tray and had set solid. It was grey. It slithered from the knife across the face of the slice of white bread, like a dead, diseased, slug. Mam shook salt onto it, not to melt it or to watch it wriggle in agony, but to add taste. 

“Rent man’s due to neet, so don’t be coming back too early we don’t want that so-and-so catching us in.”

 

‘Up in the morning, out on the job, work like the devil for my pay. But that lucky old sun, he has nothing to do but roam around heaven all day.’

 

Dear Mam, I thought to myself. How many years is it now, living here in the shadow of Rycroft’s Mill. Living here and listening to the steam-powered hooter that marks our Life with misery, telling us when to eat, drink, and sleep.

 

I was right when I was a lad growing up; it did suck in your soul and send it up the chimney. Folks got often seen going into the mill like rows of dancing dollies cut from a newspaper but seldom seen coming out. Years of dancing dollies going nowhere except two weeks at Bridlington, with your friend Brenda each year, where you pour out your curiosity to each other at the larger blue-sky world around you.

 

The sea crashing on the shore, the fresh air, the pink candy-floss, the sticks of rock, the toffee apples, the roller coaster, the penny arcade and the “kiss me quick” hats. And tides of people pressing against you in laughter and like children seeing things for the first time you run, and skip from one place to the next, and for those few short hours of each day spent away; you become a living person with hopes, aspirations and dreams. I ask you in all honesty, what sort of Life is this?

 

We have only to look at the lives of our parents, and grandparents, to get some idea of the price we pay. Labour never-ending, constant struggles to pay the rent and to buy sufficient food and clothing, no time for anything bright and beautiful; we only sing of such things at the Harvest Festival each autumn when the Vicar asks us to lift our hearts.

 

“All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, and all things wise and wonderful the Lord God made them all. He gave us eyes to see them And lips that we may tell…”

 

All we see are grey streets. A labyrinth of small stone houses blackened by Mill smoke, festering in Town-Clerk planned lines up the hillsides, wave after wave, with miry alleys and little-cindered yards where there are stinking dustbins and washing lines of oil-stained, threadbare, overalls hanging in all of them. And in most half-ruinous outside toilets that freeze over in winter and can only be unblocked by boiling pans of water.

 

The houses in which we live from week to week are as though fiends in hell for our appropriate punishment for things we know nothing of, have designed them. Two tiny rooms upstairs, and two small rooms downstairs, connected by a narrow, windowless staircase, with fifteen steps in all, covered in green linoleum from top to bottom on which the original pattern like the faded memories of generations have got polished away.

 

            ______________________________________________________________

 

Our toilet, which is situated twenty-five yards down the street among a straight row of ten of them, stands inline between the houses. We share a key with Mrs Higginbottom’s family at number 27. On Sunday mornings bright and early, the ritual of menfolk marching down there in twos and threes to commence their day, their Sunday Herald newspapers safely tucked under their arms like the pace-stick of a Regimental Sergeant Major is nothing fresh.

“I see yon Albert, had a skin full last neet – causing bother down t’ wukking men’s club… that lad can’t ‘old ‘is beer ya know, that’s ‘is problem. Give him a few wine gums and a pint a watter and he’s all over t’ show I don’t ruddy well know youngsters of ta day can’t sup like we could … do ya remember old Joe Hartley he could sup ten pints of bitter a neet. No problem.”

“Oh aye, Bert… did ya go to t’ committee meeting then?”

“Yes, I did, lad, and that complaint was dealt wi appropriately.”

“Oh, Aye! The one about them lassies moaning? They’re allus moaning about one thing or t’ other, I mean men folk swearing int’ public bar at the club on Sunday dinnertime is standard practice. What else do they expect? It’s only time them there lads get ta themselves, and what I want ta know is why aren’t they at ‘home getting dinner sorted out instead of ‘anging about club supping and ruddy moaning.”

           

 “Aye, I know lad. Well, we chatted about it, had a few pints mind, and came up with t’ only answer to that problem. The Committee, unanimously decided that t’ best action possible in dealing with this matter was to ban all women from t’ club on Sunday dinnertime. That way, no bugger can complain.”  

 

Even at its best, I say that this is not a life. It is not the lot, of one or two individual families either; everyone is affected. This existence we struggle with day in, and day out, is what gets fobbed off on to us as Life and we are supposed to not complain and doff our caps in recognition of superior beings that are always telling us what to do.

 

I am sick and tired of the shame of poverty, tired of the pawnshops and of standing on street corners most days, with hardly a penny in my pocket. What hope is there beyond the dirt, and grit, and the choking, chemical fumes from the dye works and factory’s that are slowly suffocating us from birth? I say it is microscopic, and those that say there is room at the top if you do as you get told, work hard, and obey, are talking bunkum.

 

Most of them are afraid that it may be true; that there is no hope at all. They comfort themselves, believing with all of their heart that there is a future other than what they see. The truth is that there is bugger all except a lifetime of poverty, and early death, a cheap funeral, and a pauper’s grave.

 

I finish my cup of tea and put on my boiler suit over my shabby trousers and shirt. I pull on the flat cap that was my dad’s and tie my muffler around my neck.

 

It is raining. I slip out of the door and head towards the factory at the end of the street. The rain is driving horizontally, relentlessly, and the dirty cobblestone road seems paved with black glass. We’ve had no snow yet, icy weather, sleet, and the wind but no howling snowflakes driving and settling in crispy drifts against the flat, stone, walls.

 

 

At five minutes to seven, from the side of one of the tall chimneys at the end of the street, there appears a plume of steam vapour, instantly followed by the dark, loud, jarring note of a siren. It is the warning signal telling us workers that there are only five minutes before we commence work.

 

The high gates slide back. In concert, the large assembly seethes about and through the opening and spills into the sizeable rail-lined yard of the factory, spreading in all directions like a panicking army of dung beetles. Hundreds of blue boiler-suited workers sweep forward pushed by the irresistible force that presses at their backs.

 

It is only a matter of minutes before I find myself in the machine shop, elbowed along by the mass. Rows of centre lathes, capstan lathes, milling, drilling, and pressing machines. Overhead a maze of motionless countershafts, and rows of driving belts that cross and connect to the pulleys of the machinery below.

 

At various points, men form into queues, from which comes the quick repetitive “ping-ping-ping “of bells. People are clocking on and swearing if anybody fumbles their time card. They have to take it out of one of the racks, slip it into a slot in the time recorder, depress the lever, and restore the card to its appropriate place in a similar frame on the other side of the clock. On the wall above, there is a notice in bold letters.

Any man found to be clocking in another person’s card will be immediately sacked!

My day, like so many other days, is beginning.

 

I walk down the factory floor between the painted white lines to the far end of a row of Capstan lathes and waiting for me there is Jack Hanna, in his long white linen coat that buttons up the front the distinguishing regalia for the machine shop Foreman.

“‘Ere young Snow go and get these ‘ere tools lad.”

He gives me a list of items to get out of the store. Then once I have them, he says to me,

“Today for a change you’re going ta set the machine up. Now I’ve taught thee enough over these past few months for ya ta be able ta sort out what needs doing. There’s the plan, and ya can sort it out and get on wi it. Oh, yes! And don’t forget to get a sample passed by yon Bottomley in the Inspection Team before you press on. I don’t want any fiascos like last week wi all them rejects.”

 

My heart sinks when I look at what I have to make, one thousand two-inch screws with a knurled head and a slot cut in the top. There is a two-millimetre tolerance on all dimensions.

 

Metal, as to be ordered and placed by the machine and cutting tools, have to get ground to the correct angle and then set correctly and specific knurling tools to fit the hexagonal turret on the capstan lathe, at the right height. And calculations have to be done for the speed of the machine and various ratios to work out so that the BSF thread for the screw will cut accurately. 

 

I fiddle with Allen keys and spanners, micrometres and rulers, the sweat on my forehead I wipe off with a bit of oily rag. I light a little Woodbine cigarette from my packet of five, to calm my nerves, and looking up, watch the smoke spiral to the ceiling, where generations of unwashed brown-stained nicotine cling.

 

Then a sense of boredom begins setting in. I know that once I’ve set the machine up and got the metal sorted out. I am finally on my way, I would have to stand there probably for the better part of three days, and from the time, I came in, until the time I went home, duplicating the exercise like a detached robot for hours on end. I could hear Jack Hanna’s voice inside my head.

 

“Now then, Snow, is tha paying attention lad? Once you’ve got this ‘ere calculation reet, tha locks this wheel’ ere at this position and whatever tha does don’t muck around wi it leave it alone. Is that understood?”

 

I would nod. I would nod as I have nodded for the past two years. I would keep on nodding after Jack Hannah left and had gone off whistling a merry tune, his self-confidence, and cocky gait the mark of a person in total control not only of his senses but also of us, his not-so-merry apprentices.

 

“Today, we have the making of parts. Yesterday we cleaned, and tomorrow morning, we shall have what to do after firing. But today, today, we have the making of parts.”

 

I direct the White coolant onto the cutting tool and set the machine going. Looking up I see the tea trolley that is making its way between the white lines, the silver urn glistening in a shaft of a single light that streams through the roof window, and shines on Betty’s ginger hair as she pours mugs of hot tea.

 

Betty “Knockers” she is known as, for obvious reasons. Most of the older men give them a quick squeeze before getting their custard creams, or maybe they get their custard creams first. 

 

At dinnertime, I sit in the large, noisy, canteen with the other apprentices, eat my dripping sandwiches, slurp my strong, brown, tea, and look at the segregation.

The bosses, Charge-Hands, Foremen and those from the wages office sit in a roped-off area at the far end. They get white tablecloths. It is spotless, not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. Silver-service is provided by waitresses who stand, smile, and bring their dinner from the serving hatches. 

 

I can see and smell slices of beef in onion gravy, with cauliflower florets, and spoons full of steaming cabbage. Off to one side are hot roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, and a fat, juicy-looking Yorkshire pudding, slightly browned on top gets followed by choice of rice pudding with skin or spotted dick with hot, runny custard.

My stomach grumbles like an alpine moose with a sore head. It is little wonder I am skin and bone, hungry, and always tired. After two years on low wages, I have no money, no resources, and no hopes. I try not to be cynical but cannot help thinking of how the apprentices get used for cheap labour.

 

We get led on with the promise of carrots. Life seems to be full of delayed carrots. The constant reassurances of more significant things at some point down the line fools only the unthinking. Most of us come each day and make mountains of screws and bolts that eventually will fit onto fighter jets that are at this moment gleaming in the hanger of some Royal Air Force station down in Singapore.

 

I’ve never seen a jet close up. I sometimes hear one in the sky, the faint drone when it goes overhead many thousands of feet above, their white, condensation-trail spewing from their rear, marking the blue sky. Then they silently disappear over the horizon on the far-off remote moors and hillsides, and days pass before I see another.

 

I’ve often wondered what it would be like up there looking out over the curved Earth. I would love to see the valleys and mountains: the green fields, the forests, the rivers and the deep blue sea, all laid out before me in the clean, breathable air that flamed past my cockpit in the sunny heavens. Soaring with the eagles Ma, “Top of the World! Top of the World”

 

I come back to Earth with a bump.

“Here, Michael, as tha’ heard latest?” It was Billy Roberts, the machine shop know-it-all. I think he’s run out of fingers for the number of pies he has them in.

“I’ve just got told that yon Derek Entwhistle’s missus as ran off with his best mate from t’ milling shop, ya know that fella he allus went ta football with – that Priestley bloke, him with a big nose, and big ears, and sideburns. Fancied himself summat rotten, allus combing his ‘air and posturing. You’d think he was Rudolph ruddy Valentino, the way he behaved. “

“O aye.” I try not to show any interest, but still, he presses on.

“Derek thought it was a bit odd like … what with him being a life-long supporter of City, he was an acknowledged fanatic that Priestley was. At one time, they used to go ta every match ya know, week in and week out. He said he couldn’t figure it out at the time, how he’d virtually over neet stopped going to even ‘ome games…let alone away ones.”

“O aye.” I roll my shoulders, stretch upwards, rock back on the chair, and do not attempt to stifle a yawn.

“This fella was telling me that Derek would come in on a Monday morning and when he’d caught up with Priestley, he’d say what a blinding match he’d missed. Well, yon fella would say that his interests lay elsewhere now, never explaining where. And even when the weekend game approached, and the team sheet was printed int’ local Argus,