A group of over-sixteens had already done a ten-till-six night shift. Light stemmed from the door at the end of the corridor, and stars shone above the sheer windowless walls of it — one wall taller than another so that the sky looked like the jewel-studded underside of an enormous cutting blade. At his feet was a manhole with the lid off, and half the gangway was choked by piles of soot and clinker excavated from the factory bowels. So this is what we have to shift, the sight of it already making his throat dry and wanting cups of tea. He looked down into the boiler room, at a host of pipes and dials upside down over a cavernous circular door out of which, arse backward and legs kicking, came Jack Parker. His face, hands, and boiler suit were blacker than the back of dominoes, and he stood up cursing because of it. “I’m glad I don’t have to clean that lot out in there. There’s mountains of soot and it’s still ’ot yet at back.”
“I suppose the young ’uns ’ull ’ev ter do it then,” Ted Bosely the mechanic said. Brian had been told by Samson the manager not to clock in for this extra work: “It’s against the Factory Act, seeing as you aren’t sixteen yet,” Bosely said, “so keep it quiet.” He walked through the shadowless cellars, between huge rolls of paper stacked almost to the sprinkler valves. What a fire there’d be if this lot went up, he thought, warmed by the image of it. There’d be no black-out then. ’Appen the Jerries’ll get it one night, though I suppose the raids wain’t start any more. A nub-end might do it, and if it did I’ll bet it’d tek more than the sprinklers to put it out. Parker was taking off his beret as he went into the stoke-hole, revealing a springy mop of flaming auburn hair. “Your turn now,” he said, seeing Brian.
“It ain’t six yet,” Brian answered, watching his rights. Nevertheless he took the spade. On either side of the furnace mouth were two flue holes about a foot square, the left one going parallel with the furnace, then rounding the back and emerging to the right of it. “I’ve shovelled a good bit from the front,” Parker said, taking out a pocket mirror: “Christ, I look like a bleeding collier.”
“Aye,” Bosely said, also ready to go off, “they’ll ’ev yer in the pit yet.”
Just after six Brian looked into the stoke-hole flue but could see nothing, then got on his knees and pushed himself in to the waist, to find it black and suffocatingly warm. With one heave he was right in and flat on his stomach, taking care to drag the shovel and keep it by for when he needed to begin excavations. He wriggled forward over brick flooring, intrigued at the lugubrious new world he had pitched into. It was black and tight around him, all sounds blocked from the outside. He lay still, astonished, pleased in a way that he’d been allowed to stumble into this fabulous mechanism of the industrial world, unwilling to start work before revelling a moment in it. It was warm, and frightening if he thought too much, but he went on a few feet until reaching drifts of hot dust piled almost to the top bricks. It was impossible to stay there, and he went on for as far as he could go, his body and face almost immersed in the powder, nose eyes ears filled with it. He tried to turn round, and the discovery that he couldn’t in the confined space sent a spear of panic through him. Dust kicked up by movement stopped his breath and he lay as if dead in his endless coffin, yet breathing quickly so as to make the least ferment. He had been out of school more than a year and this was his second job, so he regarded himself as an experienced member of the labour market, a man of the factory world already, smoking and passing himself off for eighteen in pubs where the waiters turned a blind eye; also he was courting what girl he could get hold of, and had been in a fight last Saturday so he wasn’t going to be beaten by a bit of tubercular soot.
Lying still, his apprehension went. I’ll just drop out for a breather, then get stuck in proper. He had to move because the bricks were too warm for much hugging. It’s hot and I’m smothercating, though I suppose there’s worse things at sea. The impression was of a coffin with lid on tight but minus head and foot, and having to work in the dark set him thinking of coal mines and pit ponies, and the fact that he would go crackers if he didn’t get out and prove he wasn’t buried a thousand feet underground. Jean Valjean traipsing through the sewers was better off than this, though I expect Edmond Dantès in his tunnels didn’t feel too good either. He gripped a handful of soot, hoping it would solidify, but it fell like the fine sand of an eggtimer through his opened fingers. If I had to do this to escape from prison I wouldn’t give a bogger, would get crackin’ and work my balls off, be out in no time, but as for the slave-driving penny-pinching poxetten getts of this flyblown factory — I’ll do as I like; and if they don’t like it they can whistle, because they wain’t be able to see me for a start. Knees and hands were burning, so he pushed backwards until his feet hung in mid-air and light over his shoulder told him he was in the clear breath of the open cellar.
The bulbs dazzled him. “That was a quick look round,” Mr. Wheatcroft said. “You was only in two minutes.”
“It felt like a bleeding year.” Brian rubbed hands and knees, batted soot from his clothes, wanted to look at his face but couldn’t see a mirror anywhere. “I’ll get back now, though, and dig a bit out.”
“That’s a good lad,” Wheatcroft said. “Don’t stay in too long at a time or you might conk out on us. I’ll set Bill Eddison starting from the other side. You’ll soon ’ave it done between yer.”
Per’aps, Brian said to himself, back into the black soot of the tunnel. “Don’t volunteer for owt,” the old man had told him time and time again, but he’d never taken notice of him, though his common sense should have said that anything needing to be volunteered for was sure to land you smack into the clutches of hardship. “Don’t join owt, not even a Christmas club, not two pieces of effing string.” And Brian realized, from the deep passion of experience ringing in the old man’s words, that he couldn’t but be right. The trouble was, though, that you joined or volunteered even before you knew you were going to do so. A trait you knew nothing about and certainly could never trust lurked within, waiting for a weak moment when somebody asked you to volunteer or join, and then before you knew where you were, you were fighting for breath like now in the Black Hole of Calcutta, shovelling soot for all you were worth at seventeen pence an hour. Sweat flowed out of him. This is how you get TB, he thought, by breathing black dust like this for hour after hour. I’m cracking already.
He devised a system: dragged a load of soot, shovel by shovel from in front, then (having found a doubling-up technique after many try-outs) turned himself to face the isolated mound and push it bit by bit to the opening. Then back to the soot-face to part off another load. I’ll get an X-ray next week, he thought. He’d been asked by Jim Skelton to go with him for one weeks ago, but hadn’t been able to make up his mind. He knew he was afraid, and wasn’t shy of admitting it, but now thought he ought to go because of the double doses of fine dust already causing him to cough for half a minute at a time. If I’ve got it I’ve got it, and if I ain’t I ain’t. You’ve only got to die once. It was a disease he’d been afraid of all his life because everybody seemed to die of it, even more than war. Aunt Lydia’s bloke Tom had kicked the bucket, eaten to a shadow by it. Less to feed maybe, but it was a bleddy shame. Mrs. Coutts died of it as well, and so had a good many more whose names he’d forgotten. It was a disease he was yellow of, just as he’d been frightened of being blown up when bombs were falling a year or so back. So I’ll keep that X-ray date with Jim Skelton and see where I stand.