‘It’s a bit nippy,’ his father remarked, buttoning his coat as they turned into the street.
‘What do you expect for November?’ Arthur said. Not that he didn’t have an overcoat, but you never went to work in one, not even when snow was on the ground and it was freezing. An overcoat was for going out in at night when you had your Teddy-suit on. Living only five minutes from the factory, walking kept you warm on your way there, and once inside at your machine the working of it kept your blood running. Only those that came from Mansfield and Kirkby wore overcoats, because it was cold in the buses.
Fat Mrs Bull the gossiper stood with her fat arms folded over her apron at the yard-end, watching people pass by on their way to work. With pink face and beady eyes, she was a tight-fisted defender of her tribe, queen of the yard because she had lived there for twenty-two years, earning names like ‘The News of the World’ and the ‘Loudspeaker’ because she watched the factory go in every morning and afternoon to glean choice gossip for retail later on. Neither Arthur nor his father greeted her as they passed, and neither did they speak to each other until they were halfway down the street.
It was long, straight, and cobble-stoned, with lamp-posts and intersections at regular intervals, terraces branching off here and there. You stepped out of the front door and found yourself on the pavement. Red-ochre had been blackened by soot, paint was faded and cracked, everything was a hundred years old except the furniture inside.
‘What will they think on next!’ Seaton said, after glancing upwards and seeing a television aerial hooked on to almost every chimney, like a string of radar stations, each installed on the never-never.
They turned on to Eddison Road by the big red-bricked canteen. The November sky was clear and dark-blue, with some stars still showing whitely. ‘Everybody’ll ‘ave little baby ‘elicopters,’ Arthur answered readily. ‘You’ll see. Five-bob-a-week-and-misses for ten years and you can go and see your mate at Derby in lunch-hour.’
‘Some ‘opes,’ the old man scoffed.
‘I read it in the paper,’ Arthur said. ‘It was the one last Thursday, I think, because my snap was wrapped-up in it, that they’ll get to the moon in five years. In ten they’ll be having cheap-day returns. It’s true right enough.’
Seaton laughed. ‘You’re crackers, Arthur. You’ll grow-up one day and stop telling these tales. You’re nearly twenty-two. You should know better. I thought they’d a cured you on it in the army, but I can see they didn’t.’
‘The on’y thing the army cures you on,’ Arthur retorted, ‘is never to join the army again. They’re dead good at that.’
‘When I was a lad they din’t even have wireless sets,’ Seaton ruminated. ‘And now look at what they’ve got: television. Pictures in your own ‘ouse.’
They were caught by the main ingoing stream: bicycles, buses, motor-bikes, and pedestrians on a last-minute rush to breach one of the seven gates before half-past. Arthur and his father walked in by the hexagonal commissionaires’ office, a building in the centre of a wide roadway dividing the factory into two unequal parts. Seaton was on viewing in the three-speed shop, so turned off after a hundred yards.
‘See yer’t dinnertime, Arthur.’
‘Tarr-ar, Dad.’
Arthur walked into a huge corridor, searching an inside pocket for his clocking-in card and noticing, as on every morning since he was fifteen — except for a two-year break in the army — the factory smell of oil-suds, machinery, and shaved steel that surrounded you with an air in which pimples grew and prospered on your face and shoulders, that would have turned you into one big pimple if you did not spend half an hour over the scullery sink every night getting rid of the biggest bastards. What a life, he thought. Hard work and good wages, and a smell all day that turns your guts.
The bright Monday-morning ring of the clocking-in machine made a jarring note, different from the tune that played inside Arthur. It was dead on half-past seven. Once in the shop he allowed himself to be swallowed by its diverse noises, walked along lanes of capstan lathes and millers, drills and polishers and hand-presses, worked by a multiplicity of belts and pulleys turning and twisting and slapping on heavy well-oiled wheels overhead, dependent for power on a motor stooping at the far end of the hall like the black shining bulk of a stranded whale. Machines with their own small motors started with a jerk and a whine under the shadows of their operators, increasing a noise that made the brain reel and ache because the weekend had been too tranquil by contrast, a weekend that had terminated for Arthur in fishing for trout in the cool shade of a willow-sleeved canal near the Balloon Houses, miles away from the city. Motor-trolleys moved up and down the main gangways carrying boxes of work — pedals, hubs, nuts, and bolts — from one part of the shop to another. Robboe the foreman bent over a stack of new timesheets behind his glass partition; women and girls wearing turbans and hair-nets and men and boys in clean blue overalls, settled down to their work, eager to get a good start on their day’s stint; while sweepers and cleaners at everybody’s beck and call already patrolled the gangways and looked busy.
Arthur reached his capstan lathe and took off his jacket, hanging it on a nearby nail so that he could keep an eye on his belongings. He pressed the starter button, and his motor came to life with a gentle thump. Looking around, it did not seem, despite the infernal noise of hurrying machinery, that anyone was working with particular speed. He smiled to himself and picked up a glittering steel cylinder from the top box of a pile beside him, and fixed it into the spindle. He jettisoned his cigarette into the sud-pan, drew back the capstan, and swung the turret on to its broadest drill. Two minutes passed while he contemplated the precise position of tools and cylinder; finally he spat on to both hands and rubbed them together, then switched on the sud-tap from the movable brass pipe, pressed a button that set the spindle running, and ran in the drill to a neat chamfer. Monday morning had lost its terror.
At a piecework rate of four-and-six a hundred you could make your money if you knocked-up fourteen hundred a day — possible without grabbing too much — and if you went all out for a thousand in the morning you could dawdle through the afternoon and lark about with the women and talk to your mates now and again. Such leisure often brought him near to trouble, for some weeks ago he stunned a mouse — that the overfed factory cats had missed — and laid it beneath a woman’s drill, and Robboe the gaffer ran out of his office when he heard her screaming blue-murder, thinking that some bloody silly woman had gone and got her hair caught in a belt (big notices said that women must wear hair-nets, but who could tell with women?) and Robboe was glad that it was nothing more than a dead mouse she was kicking up such a fuss about. But he paced up and down the gangways asking who was responsible for the stunned mouse, and when he came to Arthur, who denied having anything to do with it, he said: ‘I’ll bet you did it, you young bogger.’ ‘Me, Mr Robboe?’ Arthur said, the picture of innocence, standing up tall with offended pride. ‘I’ve got so much work to do I can’t move from my lathe. Anyway, I don’t believe in tormenting women, you know that. It’s against my principles.’ Robboe glared at him: ‘Well, I don’t know. Somebody did it, and I reckon it’s you. You’re a bit of a Red if you ask me, that’s what you are.’ ‘Now then, that’s slander,’ Arthur said. ‘I’ll see my lawyers about you. There’s tons of witnesses.’ Robboe went back to his office, bearing a black look for the girl inside, and for any tool-setter that might require his advice in the next half-hour; and Arthur worked on his lathe like a model of industry.