Campus Trilogy : Changing Places; Small World; Nice Work (9781101577127)

by Lodge, David

  Wilcox led her up a twisted and worn steel staircase to a prefabricated office perched on stilts in the middle of the building, and introduced her to the general manager, Tom Rigby, who looked her up and down once and then ignored her. Rigby’s young assistant regarded her with more interest, but was soon drawn into a discussion about production schedules. Robyn looked around the office. She had never seen a room that had such a forlorn, unloved look. The furniture was dirty, damaged and mismatched. The lino on the floor was scuffed and torn, the windows nearly opaque with grime, and the walls looked as if they had never been repainted since the place was constructed. Fluorescent strip lighting relentlessly illuminated every sordid detail. The only splash of colour in the drab decor was the inevitable pin-up, on the wall above the desk of Rigby’s young assistant: last year’s calendar, turned to the page for December, depicting a grinning topless model tricked out in fur boots and ermine-trimmed bikini pants. Apart from her, the only item in the room that didn’t look old and obsolete was the computer over which the three men were crouched, talking earnestly.

  Bored, she stepped outside, onto a steel gallery overlooking the factory floor. She surveyed the scene, feeling more than ever like Dante in the Inferno. All was noise, smoke, fumes and flames. Overalled figures, wearing goggles, facemasks, helmets or turbans, moved slowly through the sulphurous gloom or crouched over their inscrutable tasks beside furnaces and machines.

  “Here—Tom said you’d better put this on.”

  Wilcox had appeared at her side. He thrust into her hands a blue plastic safety helmet with a transparent visor.

  “What about you?” she asked, as she put it on. He shrugged and shook his head. He hadn’t even got a coat or overall to cover his business suit. Some kind of macho pride, presumably. The boss must appear invulnerable.

  “Visitors have to,” said Tom Rigby. “We’re responsible, like.”

  A very loud hooter started bleating frantically, and made Robyn jump.

  Rigby grinned: “That’s the KW, they’ve got it going again.”

  “What was the matter with it?” said Wilcox.

  “Just a valve, I think. You should show her.” He jerked his head in Robyn’s direction. “Something worth seeing, the KW, when she’s on song.”

  “What’s a KW?” Robyn asked.

  “Kunkel Wagner Automatic Moulding Line,” said Wilcox.

  “The boss’s pride and joy,” said Rigby. “Only installed a few weeks back. You should show her,” he said again to Wilcox.

  “All in due course,” said Wilcox. “The pattern shop first.”

  The pattern shop was a haven of relative peace and quiet, reminiscent of cottage industry, a place where carpenters fashioned the wooden shapes that contributed the first stage of the moulding process. After that she saw men making sand moulds, first by hand, and then with machines that looked like giant waffle-irons. It was there that she saw women working alongside the men, lifting the heavy-looking mouldings, reeking of hot resin, from the machines, and stacking them on trolleys. She listened uncomprehendingly to Wilcox’s technical explanations about the drag and the cope, core boxes and coffin moulds. “Now we’ll have a dekko at the cupola,” he shouted. “Watch your step.”

  The cupola turned out to be a kind of gigantic cauldron erected high in one corner of the building where she had earlier noticed what looked like volcanic lava trickling downwards. “They fill it up continuously with layers of coke and iron—scrap-iron and pig-iron—and limestone, and fire it with oxygenated air. The iron melts, picking up the correct amount of carbon from the coke, and runs out of the taphole at the bottom.” He led her up another tortuous steel staircase, its steps worn and buckled, across improvised bridges and ricketty gangways, up higher and higher, until they were crouching next to the very source of the molten metal. The white-hot stream flowed down a crudely-fashioned open conduit, passing only a couple of feet from Robyn’s toecaps. It was like a small pinnacle in Pandemonium, dark and hot, and the two squatting Sikhs who rolled their white eyeballs and flashed their teeth in her direction, poking with steel rods at the molten metal for no discernible purpose, looked just like demons on an old fresco.

  The situation was so bizarre, so totally unlike her usual environment, that there was a kind of exhilaration to be found in it, in its very discomfort and danger, such as explorers must feel, she supposed, in a remote and barbarous country. She thought of what her colleagues and students might be doing this Wednesday morning—earnestly discussing the poetry of John Donne or the novels of Jane Austen or the nature of modernism, in centrally heated, carpeted rooms. She thought of Charles at the University of Suffolk, giving a lecture, perhaps, on Romantic landscape poetry, illustrated with slides. Penny Black would be feeding more statistics on wife-beating in the West Midlands into her data-base, and Robyn’s mother would be giving a coffee morning for some charitable cause in her Liberty-curtained lounge with a view of the sea. What would they all think if they could see her now?

  “Something funny?” Wilcox yelled in her ear, and she realized that she was grinning broadly at her own thoughts. She straightened her features and shook her head. He shot her a suspicious glance, and continued his commentary: “The molten metal is received into that holding furnace down there. Its temperature is regulated electrically, so we only use what we need. Before I installed it, they had to use all the iron they melted, or else waste it.” He stood up abruptly, and without explanation or offer of assistance, set off on the descent to the factory floor. Robyn followed as best she could, her high-heeled boots skidding on the slippery surfaces, polished by generations of men grinding black sand underfoot. Wilcox waited impatiently for her at the bottom of the final staircase. “Now we can have a look at the KW,” he said, marching off again. “Better hurry, or they’ll soon be knocking off for lunch.”

  “I thought the man in the office, Mr. Rigby, said it was a new machine,” was Robyn’s first comment, when they stood before its massive bulk. “It doesn’t look new.”

  “It’s not new,” said Wilcox. “I can’t afford to buy machines like that brand new. I got it second-hand from a foundry in Sunderland that closed down last year. A snip, it was.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Makes moulds for cylinder blocks.”

  “It seems quieter than the other machines,” said Robyn.

  “It’s not running at the moment,” Wilcox said, with a pitying look. “What’s up?” he demanded, addressing the back of a blue-overalled worker who was standing beside the machine.

  “Fookin’ pallet’s jammed,” said the man, without turning his head. “Fitter’s workin’ on it.”

  “Watch your language,” said Wilcox. “There’s a lady present.”

  The man turned round and looked at Robyn with startled eyes. “No offence,” he muttered.

  The hooter recommenced its strident blasts.

  “Right—here we go,” said Wilcox.

  The workman manipulated some knobs and levers, closed a cage, stood back, and pressed a button on a console. The huge complex of steel shuddered into life. Something moved forward, something turned over, something began to make a most appalling noise, like a pneumatic drill greatly amplified. Robyn covered her ears. Wilcox jerked his head to indicate that they should move on. He led her up some stairs to a steel gallery from which he said they would get a bird’s-eye view of the operation. They overlooked a platform on which several men were standing. A moving track brought to the platform, from the machine that was making the appalling noise, a series of boxes containing moulds shaped out of black sand (though Wilcox called it green). The men lowered core moulds made of orange sand into the boxes, which were turned over and joined to boxes containing the other half of the moulds (the bottom half was the drag, the top the cope—the first bit of jargon she had managed to master) and moved forward on the track to the casting area. Two men brought the molten metal from a holding furnace to the moulds. It was contained in huge ladles suspended from hoists which
they guided with pushbutton controls on the end of electric cables, held in one hand. The other hand grasped a kind of huge steering wheel attached to the side of the ladle, which they turned to tip the molten metal into the small holes in the mould-boxes. The two men, working in rotation, turn and turn about, moved with the slow deliberate gait of astronauts or deep-sea divers. She couldn’t see their features, because they wore facemasks and goggles—not without reason, for when they tipped the ladles to pour, white-hot metal splashed like pancake batter and sparks flew through the air.

  “Do they do that job all day?” Robyn asked.

  “All day, every day.”

  “It must be frightfully hot work.”

  “Not so bad in winter. But in summer… the temperature can go up to a hundred and twenty Fahrenheit down there.”

  “Surely they could refuse to work in conditions like that?”

  “They could. The office staff start whingeing if it gets above eighty. But those two are men.” Wilcox gave this noun a solemn emphasis. “The track makes a ninety-degree turn down there,” he went on, shooting out an arm to point, “and the castings go into a cooling tunnel. And the end of it, they’re still hot, but hard. The sand gets shaken off them at the knockout.”

  The knockout was aptly named. It certainly stunned Robyn. It seemed to her like the anus of the entire factory: a black tunnel that extruded the castings, still encased in black sand, like hot, reeking, iron turds, onto a metal grid that vibrated violently and continuously to shake off the sand. A gigantic West Indian, his black face glistening with sweat, bracing himself with legs astride in the midst of the fumes and the heat and the din, dragged the heavy castings from the grid with a steel rod, and attached them to hooks on a conveyor belt by which they were carried away, looking now like carcasses of meat, to another stage of the cooling process.

  It was the most terrible place she had ever been in in her life. To say that to herself restored the original meaning of the word “terrible”: it provoked terror, even a kind of awe. To think of being that man, wrestling with the heavy awkward lumps of metal in that maelstrom of heat, dust and stench, deafened by the unspeakable noise of the vibrating grid, working like that for hour after hour, day after day… That he was black seemed the final indignity: her heart swelled with the recognition of the spectacle’s powerful symbolism. He was the noble savage, the Negro in chains, the archetype of exploited humanity, quintessential victim of the capitalist-imperialist-industrial system. It was as much as she could do to restrain herself from rushing forward to grasp his hand in a gesture of sympathy and solidarity.

  …

  “You have a lot of Asians and Caribbeans working in the foundry, but not so many in the other part,” Robyn observed, when they were back in the peaceful calm and comparative luxury of Wilcox’s office.

  “Foundry work is heavy work, dirty work.”

  “So I noticed.”

  “The Asians and some of the West Indians are willing to do it. The locals aren’t any more. I’ve no complaints. They work hard, especially the Asians. It’s like poetry, Tom Rigby says, when they’re working well. Mind you, they have to be handled carefully. They stick together. If one walks out, they all walk out.”

  “It seems to me the whole set-up is racist,” said Robyn.

  “Rubbish!” said Wilcox angrily. He pronounced it “Roobish”—it was a word in which his Rummidge accent was particularly noticeable. “The only race trouble we have is between the Indians and the Pakis, or the Hindus and the Sikhs.”

  “You just admitted blacks do all the worst jobs, the dirtiest, hardest jobs.”

  “Somebody’s got to do them. It’s supply and demand. If we were to advertise a job today—a labouring job in the foundry—I guarantee we’d have two hundred black and brown faces at the gates tomorrow morning, and maybe one white.”

  “And what if you advertise a skilled job?”

  “We have plenty of coloureds in skilled jobs. Foremen, too.”

  “Any coloured managers?” Robyn asked.

  Wilcox fumbled for a cigarette, lit it, and exhaled smoke through his nostrils like an angry dragon. “Don’t ask me to solve society’s problems,” he said.

  “Who is going to solve them, then,” said Robyn, “if it isn’t people with power, like you?”

  “Who said I have power?”

  “I should have thought it was obvious,” said Robyn with an airy gesture that embraced the room and its furnishings.

  “Oh, I have a big office, and a secretary, and a company car. I can hire and, with a bit more difficulty, fire people. I’m the biggest cog in this particular machine. But a small cog in a much bigger one—Midland Amalgamated. They can get rid of me whenever they like.”

  “Isn’t there something called a golden handshake?” Robyn enquired drily.

  “A year’s salary, two if I was lucky. That doesn’t last for ever, and it’s not easy to psych yourself up to get another job after you’ve been given the push. I’ve seen it happen to a lot of good MDs that got fired. It wasn’t their fault, usually, that the firm was doing badly, but they had to carry the can. You can have the greatest ideas in the world for improving competitive edge, but you have to rely on other people to carry them out, from senior managers down to labourers.”

  “Perhaps if everybody had a stake in the business, they would work better,” said Robyn.

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Well, if they had a share in the profits.”

  “And in the losses, too?”

  Robyn pondered this awkward point. “Well,” she shrugged, “that’s the trouble with capitalism, isn’t it? It’s a lottery. There are winners and losers.”

  “It’s the trouble with life,” said Wilcox, looking at his watch. “We’d better get some lunch.”

  …

  Lunch was, in its way, as obnoxious to the senses as everything else in the factory. Rather to Robyn’s surprise, there were no special eating arrangements for management. “Pringle’s used to have a Directors’ Dining Room, with their own cook,” Wilcox explained as he led her through the drab corridors of the administration block, and out across a yard where fresh snow was already covering the footpath that had been cleared. “I used to have lunch there occasionally when I worked for Lewis & Arbuckle—marvellous grub, it was. And there was a separate restaurant for middle management, too. All that went by the board with the first wave of redundancies. Now there’s just the canteen.”

  “Well, it’s more democratic,” said Robyn approvingly.

  “Not really,” said Wilcox. “My senior managers go to the local pub, and the men prefer to bring their own snap. So it’s mostly technical and clerical who eat here.” He ushered her into a dismal canteen with strip lighting, Formica-topped tables and moulded plastic stacking chairs. The windows were steamed over, and there was a smell in the air that reminded Robyn nauseatingly of school dinners. The food was predictably stodgy—steak pie or fish fried in batter, chips, boiled cabbage and tinned peas, sponge pudding and custard—but it was astonishingly cheap: 50p for the whole menu. Robyn wondered why more workmen didn’t take advantage.

  “Because they’d have to take off their overalls,” said Wilcox, “and they can’t be bothered. They’d rather sit on the factory floor and eat their snap, without even washing their hands. You don’t want to get too sentimental about the operatives, you know,” he went on. “They’re a pretty crude lot. They seem to like dirt. We put new toilets in the fettling shop last November. In two weeks they were all vandalised. Disgusting it was, what they did to those toilets.”

  “Perhaps it was a form of revenge,” said Robyn.

  “Revenge?” Wilcox stared. “Revenge against who? Me, for giving them new toilets?”

  “Revenge against the system.”

  “What system?”

  “The factory system. It must generate enormous resentment.”

  “Nobody forces them to work here,” said Wilcox, stabbing the crust of his steak pie with a fork.
/>
  “That’s what I mean, it’s the return of the repressed. It’s unconscious.”

  “Oh? Who says?” Wilcox enquired, cocking his eyebrow.

  “Freud, for one,” said Robyn. “Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis.”

  “I know who you mean,” said Wilcox sharply. “I’m not completely solid between the ears, you know, even if I do work in a factory.”

  “I wasn’t implying that you were,” said Robyn, flushing. “Have you read Freud, then?”