Most of the foremen and chargehands had been at Robinson’s anything from twenty to forty years, for the firm had a fixed reputation in the neighbourhood: if you get a job there, even though the pay would shame any union into calling out a strike, you could be sure of being kept on for as long as you worked like a slave and touched your cap to the gaffers every time you passed. It was one of those firms that had a tradition of benevolence behind it, meaning hard work and little pay to the right sort of people — those who would serve the firm through their thick and your thin. And before the war, when men were scrabbling for work, those at Robinson’s were careful not to give offence to the gaffers and get pitched on to the dole, even though it would have meant a mere few bob a week less, with no work or arse-kissing or danger of getting sacked into the bargain. Wage rates at Robinson’s had been carefully regulated — set at a fraction above the dole money, enough to give the incentive of a regular job, but hardly enough to keep its employees far from a harrowing exercise in near starvation. Brian laughed to think of it. Thank God there was a war on: I can allus go somewhere else if they try to come the hard gaffer with me, though I’m not much of a lad at swapping jobs and would rather stay at one place a couple of years to get my hand in and make a few pals. I can’t understand people being here forty years — worse than a life sentence — especially when they can get better money at other places. And what do they end up wi’ if they plod on here for that long? A cup o’ cocoa, a copy of the Bible, and a five-bob pocket-watch to time out the days of idleness left to them. Not even that, though: I’m making it up. They’re lucky to get a thank you, and become hot and bothered with gratitude if they do, or only spit the smell of thank you out when it’s too late to do much else about it, such as drop a nub-end on a heap of paraffin rags, or trip one of the gaffers into a manhole. It’s too late then, no matter how they feel. Earlier on they thought they’d got a trade and wouldn’t turn to labouring — put up with blood-tubs telling ’em what to do as if they was skivvies. But forty years is a lifetime, a waste of breathing in which you could have lived in every country in the world, seen everything, done everything, instead of staying a cap-touching loon in Robinson’s rat-warren.
Talking to Bob Thorpe the other day, I said that old Robinson was a Bible-backed slave-driver, a two-faced twisting dead-head who’d sell his grandmother wholesale if they came more than two at a time. Old Thorpe said I shouldn’t talk like that, and had better not let Robinson or any of the other gaffers hear it. “What would happen if they did?” I asked, laughing to myself. “Why,” he said, an almost terrified look on his long face, “you’d get the sack.” He’s a pasty little bloke of sixty. “That’d be terrible,” I said. “I’d have to get another job, wouldn’t I?” Then he brightened up and said: “You won’t be so cocky after the war, when jobs is hard to get again.” “Don’t bother,” I said, quick off the mark. “Old Fatguts with the big cigar will be out when the war’s over, on his neck with the rest of his government. It wain’t be the same again. Them days is over.” At least they’d better be. Yet nobody could be sure, and neither was Brian, despite the look of dead certainty on his face; for he dreaded the return of his father’s means-test fate on himself. I’ll shoot myself first, he thought. No, better shoot the other bastards, then maybe it’ll alter before I do it to myself.
After three months’ general work at Robinson’s, the foreman set him on as a paste-boy, mixing water and flour into brown paste at the bins, a sprinkling of alum added as the whole mass came to the boil. He carried hundredweight sacks of flour from a nearby stack and poured it in from the encrusted wooden rim of the bin. There was only one thing to compare the stench to: and his spit at the end of a day’s work was coloured orange. A plug under the bin could be released by a lever from the rolling-room in the cellar where the cardboard was made. When both vats were full he would stand in the spare minutes at the top of the steps and watch the three or four sheets of paper being drawn into the set of old-fashioned trundling rollers. Bob Thorpe was in charge of the whole operation, a master cardboard-maker who had been thirty years with these same machines, an old bald bachelor, gentle and quiet-spoken, said to read books, only ferocious when enough paste from the bins in heaven above wasn’t available to feed his beloved and all-powerful rollers. Then a cornered gleam would come in his eyes and fear of the sack would make him shout to Brian all the filthy words under the sun. Brian cursed back, though set to making more paste. The rollers ran only two days a week, and it was pandemonium in the cellars and around the pastebins, the antiquated machinery jangling and shaking the cellar roof, and even the ceiling of the department above that. Brian became strong in carrying sacks and mixing paste, felt his body and muscles hardening so that what had been almost intolerable burdens were now easily tackled. The heavier the work, the more he revelled, drew both physical and spiritual elation from it, going home in the evening tired and dead to the wide on the surface, yet feeling alive and glowing with a sort of interior energy that kept him vivid and active for his long walks with Pauline in the fields and woods.
For the rest of the week he transported trolleys of wet cardboard up on the hoist to the steam-heated drying-rooms at the top of the factory; hanging the sheets to dry with a row of other boys, then wheeling them back to the presses, and from there to the cutting-room; finally to the women packers, and stacking the bales for railway vans to take away. There was often a time lag when the last wet sheets were finally clipped up and weren’t yet dry, a recognized perk that allowed the boys on the job to lounge around until the boards were crisp and so razor-sharp at the ragged edges that they had to be careful not to slice their fingers in taking them down. It was a pleasant relaxed greenhouse atmosphere that reigned, the half-dozen of them sprawled on the warm and dusty floorboards talking or reading comics, far above the drone of traffic and engines working below, left in the heaven of the factory that Brian — from the black flues of the boiler-room — realized was the opposite of constriction and soot.
Now and again in his underground burrow he put down his spade for no reason and stared open-eyed, unseeing, at the darkness, too aware of the roof an inch or so above his head, and the wall on either side nudging at his elbows. The sensation that it was getting smaller struck him like a knife across the eyes: he lay flat on his belly and drew his arms in, stiff and silent to create the illusion of more space around, slowing his blood by an act of will, whistling a made-up tune in the hope that the theme music from a recent film he’d been trying to remember all day would come back to him. When bored with being calm, he resumed work. Sometimes the attack was too quick, and he was in a panic before any control was possible, so he wriggled back to the opening with the speed of a snake, fell out on to the stoke-room floor, and stood five minutes for a breather and smoke, laughing at the shock he had given the others. He spent much spare time in the drying-rooms teaching Bill Eddison map-reading. Sixteen-year-old Bill was a corporal in the Army Cadets who had been promised a third stripe when he passed his Cert A examination. He was a strong, forceful, bull-like youth, quick on the draw with wit when talking about jazz and women, but dense on such mathematical subjects as cartography. He played knick-knacks to accompany his dirty songs, jumping up and down to the ballad of “Eskimo Nell” or swinging away to a neatly worded march of Sousa.