Though you couldn’t grumble at four-and-six a hundred the rate-checker sometimes came and watched you work, so that if he saw you knock up a hundred in less than an hour Robboe would come and tell you one fine morning that your rate had been dropped by sixpence or a bob. So when you felt the shadow of the rate-checker breathing down your neck you knew what to do if you had any brains at alclass="underline" make every move more complicated, though not slow because that was cutting your own throat, and do everything deliberately yet with a crafty show of speed. Though cursed as public enemy number one the rate-checker was an innocuous-looking man who carried a slight stoop everywhere he went and wore spectacles, smoking the same fags as you were smoking, and protecting his blue pinstriped suit with a brown staff-overall, bald as a mushroom and as sly as a fox. They said he got commission on what reductions he recommended, but that was only a rumour, Arthur decided, something said out of rancour if you had just been done down for a bob. If you saw the rate-checker on your way home from work he might say good evening to you, and you responded to this according to whether or not your rate had been tampered with lately. Arthur always returned such signs with affability, for whenever the rate-checker stood behind him he switched his speed down to a normal hundred, though once he had averaged four hundred when late on his daily stint. He worked out for fun how high his wages would be if, like a madman, he pursued this cramp-inducing, back-breaking, knuckle-knocking undiplomatic speed of four hundred for a week, and his calculations on the Daily Mirror margins gave an answer of thirty-six pounds. Which would never do, he swore to himself, because they’d be down on me like a ton of bricks, and the next week I’d be grabbing at the same flat-out lick for next to nowt. So he settled for a comfortable wage of fourteen pounds. Anything bigger than that would be like shovelling hard-earned money into the big windows of the income-tax office — feeding pigs on cherries, as mam used to say — which is something else against my principles.
So you earned your living in spite of the firm, the rate-checker, the foreman, and the tool-setters, who always seemed to be at each other’s throats except when they ganged-up to get at yours, though most of the time you didn’t give a sod about them but worked quite happily for a cool fourteen nicker, spinning the turret to chamfer in a smell of suds and steel, actions without thought so that all through the day you filled your mind with vivid and more agreeable pictures than those round about. It was an easier job than driving a lorry for instance where you had to have your wits about you — spin the turret and ease in the blade-chamfer with your right hand — and you remembered the corporal in the army who said what a marvel it was the things you thought of when you were on the lavatory, which was the only time you ever had to think. But now whole days could be given up to wool-gathering. Hour after hour quickly disappeared when once you started thinking, and before you knew where you were a flashing light from the foreman’s office signalled ten o’clock, time for white-overalled women to wheel in tea-urns and pour out their wicked mash as fast as they could from a row of shining taps.
Arthur refused the firm’s tea because it was strong, not from best Ceylon tips but from sweepings-up in the tea warehouse and the soda they doused it with in the canteen. One day he spilled some of their orange brew on a bench — thus went his story — and tried for three hours to rub out the stain, and even the ingenuity of the mechanics could make no inroads against the faint testament of unswallowable tea that stayed there as a warning to all who saw it, telling them to bring their own drink to work, though few bothered to take the hint. ‘If it makes that stain on an old wooden bench covered with oil, what do you think it does to your guts?’ Arthur asked his mates. ‘It don’t bear thinking about.’ He complained at the head office about it and they listened to him. A director examined the canteen tea urns and found the insides coated with an even depth of tea and soda sediment. Because Arthur stood up for his rights a big noise was made, and thereafter the quality improved, though not enough to induce Arthur to drink it. He still came to the factory with a flask sticking out of his pocket, and took it out now after switching off his machine, because the light began flashing from Robboe’s office, and men were unwrapping packets of sandwiches.
He walked over to Brenda’s husband, Jack, who sat on his tool-setter’s bench between a clamped-on vice and a carborundum wheel, a mug of the firm’s tea in one hand and a cheese sandwich in the other; half the cheese sandwich was already in his mouth, and the other half was on its way there.
‘Udge-up,’ Arthur said, sitting beside him on the bench. ‘Mek room for a rabbit-arse!’
‘Don’t knock my tea over,’ Jack said.
Arthur unscrewed the cap from his flask and poured out a cup of scalding tea. ‘Try a drop,’ he offered. ‘That stuff you’ve got’ll give yer a bilious-bout.’
Jack unwrapped another sandwich. Arthur had a big enough pack himself, but he wished Jack would offer him one, cut and spread by Brenda’s own hands. Even if he did, I wouldn’t take it, he cursed to himself. Christ, I’ll give myself away one of these days.
‘This tea’s good enough for the others,’ Jack said, ‘so it’s good enough for me. I’m not fussy.’ His Monday-morning overalls were stiff and clean, with as yet only a few file-stains near the breast pocket, and his collarless plain blue shirt was fastened loosely by a stud at the neck. He had a young fresh-looking face of twenty-nine or thirty, but marred by a continual frown that subjected him to pitiless teasing by the men whose machines he looked after.
‘Then you should be fussy,’ Arthur said with deep conviction. ‘Everybody should be fussy. Some blokes ‘ud drink piss if it was handed to ‘em in China cups.’
Jack’s face relaxed. Not swearing himself, it didn’t put him out to hear it from other people. ‘No,’ he said, ‘they wouldn’t go that far. I suppose I could get Brenda to make me a flask up in the mornings, but I don’t want to put her to the trouble.’
‘It’s no trouble,’ Arthur said, snapping a piece out of his sandwich.
‘It might be, with two kids to look after. Young Jacky’s a bogger. He fell down the stairs yesterday afternoon.’