The Dodleston Timelines 2

Barry drove the minibus through the stargate.
"Why are we going down here?" asked Stanley, looking a bit embarrassed as he fingered his favourite jeans and realised that they had a hole in them. "Is a minibus allowed to go down a bus lane?"
"It's not really a bus lane," said Barry, "it's a stargate."
"What's a stargate?"
"It takes you to another time," said Sarah.
"No."
"Yes it does," said Julie. "Look, we're coming back into Chester. There's no white lines on the road. The no overtaking lines have gone." One car was coming the other way. It had a black cab and a very tall bonnet. It slowed down and popped out an orange metal indicator as it waited to turn right.
"I've never seen a car like that before," said David. The minibus drove into Chester.
"That cinema used to be there when we were kids," said Jimmy, who looked as if he was slightly over 60.
"The people are all wearing really horrible old fashioned clothes," said Susan. "The men are wearing overalls or suit jackets. The women look like they're in school uniform." 
"People didn't have much money," said Barry. "It's a few years after the war." Barry drove to the high street.
"We're coming back to the jobclub," said David. "Except it isn't the jobclub. It's the same building but it's different. You can drive up to it and park right outside it." Barry parked the minibus outside the building.

They went inside the building.
"Where are the computers?" asked David.
"There are no computers," said Barry. "The adverts are written on cards that are pinned to a board on the wall. You need to take a pen and a piece of paper and write the number down."
"Why can't  I get a signal on my mobile phone?" asked Susan.
"Mobile phones haven't been invented yet," said Jimmy.
"When were they invented?"
"In the 1990s. In 1949 they're unimaginable."
"What did people do if they had to contact someone with an urgent message?"
"Look for a house with a telephone pole outside it, knock on the door and say, 'My wife's having a baby, can I use your phone?"
"Now you're just being silly." Susan looked at one of the job adverts on the wall. "I want to work in a telephone exchange. People will bring they're ugly old telephones and exchange them for bright shiny new ones." David and Colin looked at one of the adverts.
"Factory operatives," said Colin. "That should be a steady job. I know where the industrial estate is. You can walk it from here." Jimmy looked at an advert.
"I fancy this job as a collier. Working in a quarry, blasting rocks." Colin and David took their job number, written on a piece of paper to the woman behind the desk.
"We want this job," said David.
"Do you know the way to Shaw's biscuit factory?"
"Yes."
"Just turn up. They open at 8 in the morning and close at 10 at night."

David and Colin walked to the factory. David spoke to the woman behind the desk.
"We've come about the job as factory operatives."
"I'll get the manager." She disappeared and returned a few minutes later with a middle aged man in a blue suit, who was slightly fat and slightly bald.
"Michael," she said, "these 2 men have come about the advert for factory operatives."
"Hello, yes. I'm Michael."
"I'm David."
"I'm Colin."
"We're always looking for new people. How soon can you start?"
"Any time," said Colin. "As soon as possible."
"Can you get here tomorrow at 8 o' clock?"

Susan had arrived at the telephone exchange. She was terrified by what she saw. Huge wooden boards covered in what looked like headphone sockets. Women plugging long leads with plugs on either end into the sockets. The words of the callers could be heard thinly and scratchily through the headphones everyone was wearing.
"Operator, give me 291."
"Putting you through now," the operator would reply, plugging another line into another socket. One of the women spoke to Susan.
"I'm Nancy."
"Susan."
"You look terrified, Love."
"Is this what you have to do all day?"
"It's not hard to understand. You'll soon get used to it. There are 60 sockets on the desk. Those are incoming calls. You just have to put the lead in the next empty socket, the caller's always on the next line after the one you've just connected. Then the other end goes to one of the sockets on the wall." Susan still looked terrified. "Look, it's not  difficult. They've all got numbers on them. If you don't know what they are, you look them up in the book. I can't remember the number for Turkey but if the caller wants a long distance call to Turkey, I can look it up in this book. Turkey is Ankara, 1481. And you will say, 'Hello Ankara, this is Chester. I have a long distance phone call from England.' You'll soon learn."
"I thought it all happened automatically."
"They've got telephones with dials on them in London, some people have them now. But Chester is a small town. Not an automatic exchange. Then there's the call boxes. They don't have dials on them. On this board you've got 200 sockets, one for each capital city in the world. You don't use that very often. On this board you've got 600 sockets for every telephone exchange in the UK. On this board you've got 900 sockets for every telephone in Chester."
"There can't be 900 telephones in Chester."
"I assure you there are. I know it seems like a lot. I remember when there used to be 200."
"No. I mean there must be more than 900 telephones in a whole town. Why isn't there one for every person?"
"You think everybody should have a phone? How could they afford it?"

Jimmy arrived at the colliery. He looked down into a bell pit where a ladder led up from a hole cut in the ground to something that looked like the entrance to a cave.
"Hello," he said to a group of men wearing flat cloth caps. They appeared to be having a lunch break. They were eating baked potatoes, two or three of which were still in the fire the men had built on the ground with wooden sticks. They were drinking mugs of tea, made with water from the kettle that was sitting in the fire. "I've come about the job as a collier. Could I just ask you a few quick questions about the colliery. What minerals do you extract?" The men laughed.
"It's a coal mine. The mineral we extract is coal."
"Is it an open cast coal mine?"
"Well, it looks fairly open to me. You can see it. You go up the ladder and you climb into it."
"I was thinking of open cast where you drill holes in the ground, fill them with explosives and collect the coal by driving a mechanical digger. Didn't think you'd have to go down there and get it yourself." The men laughed even louder. "Do I get a hard hat?"
"What do you want one of those for? It's hardly going to protect you if 100 feet of rock come crashing down on your head."
"But with no hard hat, where am I going to put my electric light?"
"Electric light? We've got gas lamps."
"Do I get a pneumatic drill?"
"You get a pick axe and a bucket."
"If you had a pneumatic drill, wouldn't it be quicker?"
"I am the owner of this colliery," said a man in green overalls who was aged about 60. "It is a waste of time modernising it because it has only a small amount of coal left. I could have given people pneumatic drills and hats with electric lights but it wouldn't be worth the money for this little pit. I think that, with traditional mining methods, these seams will be exhausted in the next five years. Are you happy enough to work under these conditions?"
"Yes."
"Can you get here for 5 o' clock tomorrow morning?"
"Yes. Of course."

That afternoon they made their way back to the guest house, where they were staying, which the Job Club had booked for two weeks.
"How did we all get on?" asked Barry. "Have we all got jobs?"
"We've got jobs," said Susan, "but not the kind of jobs we had imagined."
"I think we'll have to accept that life in the late 1940s will be totally different to what any of us could imagine."
"I'm working in a coal mine," said Jimmy. "I've got to get there at 5 o' clock tomorrow morning. Can you give me a lift?"
"Jimmy, here is £1." Barry handed him an envelope full of money. "Go down to that shop on the high street and buy yourself a second hand bike."
"David and me are working in a factory," said Colin.
"I'm going to become a bus driver," said Stanley.
"So it seems like we've all been successful," said Sarah.
"All got jobs in one day," said Julie. "I knew you would."

David and Colin began work the next morning at the factory. One of their first jobs was to take the biscuits off the conveyor belt, wrap them in cardboard tubes, and then insert each cardboard tube into a cardboard box. This was how you made each packet of biscuits. Then the finished packets of biscuits were put into crates, which were quite heavy, and these were manually stacked in piles 6 feet high in the warehouse. David watched a man carry 3 crates into the warehouse. He picked up 3 crates himself and started puffing and panting.
"Just take 2," said one of the men. "We're used to it."
"You think they'd have a fork lift truck," said Colin.
"What's one of those, then?" asked the man who had now returned from carrying his 3 crates down to the warehouse.

Stanley was sitting in the driver's seat of a bus, driving out of the station with an instructor who looked like a bus conductor. All felt good until Stanley tried to change gear. There was a deafening grinding, grating sound.
"There's something wrong with the gears."
"They're not synchromesh," said the instructor. "You have to double declutch."
"How do I do that?"
"Look at the speed of the bus and listen to the sound of the engine. When the bus is at a certain speed, and the engine is a certain speed, declutch and disengage the gear. Now accelerate the engine. When the engine reaches exactly the right speed, declutch again and engage the next gear." By the end of the first day, the instructor had decided that Stanley would be much better employed as a bus conductor.

Jimmy was standing with the men at the pit having a baked potato and a cup of tea when the boss slapped a two shilling piece into his hand.
"What's this for?"
"It's today's wages." Jimmy looked troubled.
"What's wrong?" asked one of the men.
"I just thought you'd pay me a little bit more than ten shillings a week."
"You know what, Jimmy, you're right. We will be," said one of the men, laughing. "You're earning twelve shillings a week. You're coming here on Saturday as well."

David and Colin went into the factory canteen.
"Fish and chips, twice," said David and pulled out a two shilling piece.
"Haven't you got anything smaller?" asked the shop keeper.
"It's ten pence."
"No it's not. Two shillings is twenty four pence, fish and chips is tuppence ha'penny. I don't want to have to give you a big bag of change." David tried to remember what his grandad had told him about old money. He pulled out a sixpence.
"That's more like it," said the shopkeeper and gave them a penny change.

At the telephone exchange, Susan was given her first pay packet.
"What's this?" she asked.
"Your wages," said Nancy.
"But why the brown paper envelope? Don't they just put it into my bank account?"
"She's got a vivid imagination," Nancy said to the other girls, hoping to spare Susan from laughter and abuse. "Really good ideas. Why don't telephones dial themselves? Why don't they pay our wages straight into our bank accounts? I wonder if Sue was meant to be a university professor, or an inventor, or something." Susan emptied the coins from the envelope into her hand.
"It's all coins. I thought it would be notes." The girls burst out laughing.
"If you want to earn notes instead of coins, you'd better go to that university of yours and become a professor."

At the factory, everybody had received their pay packet except David and Colin.
"Don't we get paid?"
"You have to work a week in hand," said Michael. "Did Doris not tell you?"
"Doris?"
"The woman you saw at the desk."
"What's a week in hand?" asked Colin.
"Work a week without getting paid."
"That's ridiculous."
"No it's not. I had to let you work unpaid for a week so I could know what you were like. Now that I've seen that you're two hard working individuals, I'll give you a paid job next week."
"That's why they've booked the guest house for two weeks," said David. "They knew that some of us would have to work a week in hand."