Aw for fucksake Jimmy, how did ye no tell me?
Because ye wouldnay have come.
Aye, ye are fucking right I wouldnay.
We bought two bags of chips and went to find the nearest Department of Social Security.
Eventually we got a start at a Salford copper mill producing coils of copper wire. We left the down-and-outs’ hostel, found a room at a place doing dinner, bed and breakfast. Huge meals.
It was heavy, difficult work, semi-skilled. For Colin it was temporary; I was enquiring about pension schemes. A week into the job and they tried us on a section where we had to grab white-hot lengths of copper bar with a pair of extreme clamps. We had thick gloves to protect our hands. Often the material had worn away; you had to be careful the clamps did not connect with your skin. The first time Colin was given the clamps, he managed to get them round the white-hot copper bar but was unable to connect in a move, thus he took the full weight of the copper length, could not hold it, it rolled off the bogey onto the floor. Being a decent football player Colin did the instinctive thing, he ‘trapped’ the white-hot bar, and his shoe burst into flames. He threw his clamps to one side, threw me a look and off he went. The gaffer came to find out the problem. Colin threw him a look as well, and continued walking, shoe smouldering. A few days later he got a proper job as an electrician. He was 21 and had only finished his apprenticeship weeks previously. I used that incident in a story.
A while later I lifted my insurance cards and P45, collected the week’s lying time, and went home for a holiday. I had some dirty laundry my mother insisted on washing. They were still living in a two-room flat down a dunny in Gibson Street, my mother and father in the kitchen, the four of us in two double beds. I stayed in my Govan grannie’s some of the time. My mother showed me the dirty-washing water left by my jeans and working clothes. It was full of a thick green dye. Aye, right enough, I remembered also when ye smoked a fag it always tasted sweet, and every hour or so the gaffer told ye to swallow some green solution that tasted like concentrated lime.
I planned to return to England. I took a job on the buses to save enough money for the fare and the settling-in period. Thoughts of industrial disease or injury were not to the fore; I returned to the same factory.
One time I was showing a new guy how we coiled the copper wire. This was the end of the wire-making process. The wire would have been between a half and three quarters of an inch in diameter. I do not know what length it was, maybe 50 or 60 yards. The big coiling machine was shaped like a ship’s steering wheel. Once the wire coiled onto it one man got a pair of heavy-duty clamps and gripped the end of the wire to keep it secure, otherwise the coil sprung. He kept one foot on the bottom of the wheel to stop it spinning. The man needs to use his wrist and arm muscles, at the same time concentrate on gripping the end. At this stage the wire is not yet trained into its coil, and is very powerful, fighting to spring. If it does the wire is ruined, no longer malleable and cannot be recoiled. Of course that spring is also dangerous, its whiplash is unpredictable.
While the one man grips tightly the end of the wire his mate has another pair of clamps which he uses to twist the wire some ten inches or so from the end. He inserts this twisted end into the coil so that it cannot spring. The first man continues gripping the end until certain that his mate has made the twist and can take the strain.
I was showing the new guy how this was to be done when he lost concentration, and thus control, and the coil sprung, the end lashed me across the cheek and eye. It was my cheekbone saved me from losing the eye. My face was cut open across there and my eyebrow. The new man was crestfallen. Nay fucking wonder. I did not have much sympathy for him. He was a strong cunt as well, it was his concentration that faltered.
I sat in the doctor’s waiting room holding a rag to my eye to stop it landing on the floor. In this factory they used dropped eyes as ball bearings. I was offered a job in the boiler room after that; twelve-hour shifts, alternate nightshift, dayshift. They also had a snooker table in their welfare club. And a works football team that played on grass pitches. And down the road was Salford Greyhound Track, with a casino at the first bend.
I was still there when Germany were denied the World Cup. Denis Law spent the afternoon playing golf; we went for a game of snooker. A guy called Charlie had moved into the rooming house. He wanted to play on a regular basis and, next to myself, was the finest loser I ever met. I made a story out of it, ‘Charlie’.
Next time in Manchester four friends came along, one has been a friend since boyhood, Ian Lithgow, another great reader. Two of us got a start in a Trafford Park factory with the cleanest working conditions I ever encountered. This was a huge asbestos company.
Our workmates in the asbestos plant were mainly Jamaicans, Poles, Ukrainians and Hungarians. I learned not to assume a person’s politics because of their background. You never knew people’s lives, what their families had experienced. They were generous men and shared their grub and tobacco, but discussions could veer off track. The East Europeans did not say much in English, just looked and smiled. An older Hungarian was respected by the other men. He spoke better English and had a certain mildness of manner, indicating one used to authority. Ian Lithgow worked with him. On one occasion he was close to losing his temper with me over politics. I had referred to communism in a positive way. It was my own naïvety. I wanted to know why they were here. I wanted to talk about life in a ‘socialist country’.
Of course they had not come from any socialist country, they had come from Stalin’s brand of so-called communism. I was 19 and probably had not connected that there was a link between a real live Hungarian person and the actual events that had occurred ten years earlier in Hungary. His and Ian’s job was weighing out the white asbestos fibre and cement in tubs. Ian had red hair. Half an hour into the shift and the pair were like snowmen, fibre clinging to their eyebrows, in their ears and up their nose.
The wee guy who taught me my job was Polish and spoke no English. He shared everything. Rye bread and thick salami, hot sweet tea and roll-ups thicker than a cigar, and loaned me dough if I was skint. He was very patient, and showed me how not to clean the chute and asbestos mixer by hand. But he occasionally did it himself and if he caught me looking just grinned and shrugged, cigarette dowt hanging from his mouth. Eventually I took over the mixing operation at that machine, and he moved to a different shift.
The biggest man on the floor was a Ukrainian who moved with the slow precision of a weightlifter. He rarely spoke but laughed a lot. In Anglo-American litrachuhh the narrator would describe him as ‘a hulking brute’, unless the upper-class hero was not intimidated by his physicality in which case he would be described as ‘a great oaf’ or ‘a lumbering jackass’, and be felled by the hero ‘with one mighty swoop to the jaw’. My grannie would have called him ‘a big handsome man’.
The best-dressed guy on the floor was a Jamaican whose name I think was Danny. He worked directly beneath me on the spreading table. The asbestos and cement came from Ian Lithgow to me. I mixed a concrete that consisted of a tub of asbestos fibre and half a tub of cement, and a certain amount of water. Then I dumped it down a chute. On the level below me the ‘spreader’, the Jamaican, opened the trapdoor, and let the mix pour out. He spread it then rolled it into asbestos sheets. Each month we did a batch of blue asbestos, the deadliest fibre. When I was learning I erred and forgot to put in the cement element of the composition. Danny released the chute trapdoor and out splashed a tidal wave of asbestos paste. I had forgotten to put in the solidifier. I looked over the rail to apologise. He was covered in stuff, wiping it out his eyes and mouth. The spreading job was supposed to be one of the cleaner ones, that was how he could wear decent clothes doing it. It was my first experience with the less familiar aspects of Jamaican English, beginning with a paean to the old ska song ‘Judge Dread in Court’, with slightly different lyrics to Prince Buster; I will kill you I will torture you I will fucking lynch you ras clat fuck blood scotch twat fucker blaaad claat.