by Alan Hackney
“Don’t muck about. How about first half of June?”
“Oh no, that’d be quite hopeless,” said Stanley. “I wouldn’t know where to find any snow then.”
Mr Morris put down his pencil and the half-completed holiday roster.
“Are you taking the mickey?” he asked accusingly.
“Oh no, certainly not. The snow’s all gone by April, and you get avalanches after February. So is February all right?”
Mr Morris breathed hard.
“Don’t mind me,” he said, “I’ll put you down February. February.”
Stanley went back to Knowlesy, who was unplugging his truck.
“All right, Squire?”
“Yes. He just wanted to know when I wanted my holiday next year.”
“I hope you didn’t say August.”
“No, I told him February.”
“And he didn’t give you a thick ear? Very touchy sometimes, you know, if you try and take the mickey.”
“No. I explained I wanted to ski.”
“Well, you picked a dead stupid time.”
“Why? It’s the best time.”
“No, no. I mean a stupid time for a holiday. February’s about the cushiest time here. Either there’s a lot of power cuts and you get your basic for just ’anging about, or else we usually have a nice stoppage on account of it’s too cold to work some days. You miss the best part of the year if you go off then.”
“Well, perhaps I could make it March, but you’ve got to be careful of avalanches.”
“Never mind avalanches,” said Knowlesy. “You don’t want to go in March either. March is the time for a new wage-claim, and we usually work in a nice little stoppage while it’s being thrashed out. You’ll get a few days off, any’ow. No, you don’t want to go in March.”
“Well, it’s done now. Who’s this big man with a moustache coming this way?”
“Eh? Blimey, get a shift on. That’s old Creepy Crawley.”
Mr Knowles mounted his fork-lift truck and hummed busily away.
Stanley, with a nervous smile for Mr Crawley, made to follow suit, but the vehicle seemed to lack all power. He remembered once more that he had not plugged in to charge the batteries.
The truck bore down at snail’s pace on the foreman, who waved Stanley to a halt.
“May I make a suggestion?” said Mr Crawley. “Put that back where you got it and plug it in. Get another one. Only for Christ’s sake stop rushing about like that or you’ll drive me stark raving bonkers.”
Stanley reversed his vehicle interminably towards its plug. Mr Crawley watched the whole business with considerable impatience.
“You don’t want to look so worried,” he said. “I’m not stopwatching you, only have some consideration for my state of health. Gorblimey, I dunno.”
Mr Morris appeared from his cabin and stood eating a sandwich beside the foreman. He showed him a paper.
“February?” said Mr Crawley. “How can he have his leave in February? I doubt he’ll’ve got that truck back there by then.”
When Stanley finally arrived to help Knowlesy he asked: “Why couldn’t the mechanic have plugged my truck in if he saw the plug was out?”
“I told you,” said Knowlesy. “It’s not his job. It’s a question of demarcation. He daren’t touch it.”
“But I thought we workers were all solid together?”
“’Aven’t you ’ad no education? He’s in a different union, the Amalgamated, so we can go and take a running jump as far as he’s concerned, and so can he take a running jump as far as we’re concerned in the General. Otherwise someone might be out of a job and it might be me.”
“I see.”
“Any case, ’ow’d they go on for wage claims? If the Amalgamated gets a rise, the General press for a rise too, so’s to maintain parity. Otherwise we wouldn’t none of us get a rise.”
“You sound like an active union member.”
“Active? No, I leave that to people like Kitey who can talk the lingo. I never know what they’re on about half the time. Nor do most of the blokes. Suppose we want another fivepence an hour and the management say they can’t pay. You’d reckon that was simple enough, wouldn’t you? But no. You listen to the General Secretary when ’e’s on the telly next time, makin’ a statement. You can’t make ’ead or tail. They go on about referring the prior recommendations for discussion on joint procedure and all that there. No, Stan mate. You pay your dues on Friday and buy your raffle tickets and leave all that caper to Kitey and them. They understand it.”
“Oh, I thought it was just me who didn’t understand it.”
“Oh no, mate. There’s only Brother Kite understands it in this shop.”
CHAPTER 10
“SORRY I’M a bit late,” said Wallace Hardy-Freeman. “I’ve been recalled to the Office. My re-posting seems to have been postponed a bit.”
“Bad luck,” commiserated Stanley. “But why’s that?”
“It appears HE in Bangkok’s not all that keen to have me back just yet. Anyway, they seem to be short of a Charlie to take these coloured gentlemen around, and they’ve put me down for it.”
“Is that wretched Coloured Conference still on?”
“Heavens, yes. Oh, and a jolly surprise for you. The day after tomorrow I’m going round with one party who are going to have a look at Missiles Limited.”
“God forbid. I didn’t know anything about that. Of course, the management never tells you anything. I suppose they’ll stop for little chats with the workers and ask them questions.”
“Oh, I imagine so. They’re mad keen on information.”
“Well, I hope they don’t ask old Knowlesy anything. He always gives the same answer.”
*
“Did you know there’s a lot of black men coming round this afternoon?” asked Stanley during the morning break.
“No,” said Knowlesy. “We had some Chinamen round a year or so ago. Some bloke with a camera took a picture of them all coming out of the toilets. They’d been inspecting them. Dead funny it looked.”
“That was old Sid done that,” said Perce Carter, looking up from his tea. “Tried to get the local paper to buy it, I remember.”
“Talking of papers,” said Knowlesy, “have a look at page five of that Reveille.”
“She couldn’t’ve climbed up that tree dressed like that,” said Perce, looking critically at the picture. “Otherwise that bra would’ve come clean off. I dunno why I buy this every week.”
“It refreshes your memory,” said Knowlesy. “And it’s all education. Let old Stan ’ave a look. What d’you go on that, Stan?”
*
In the afternoon the delegates from the Coloured Conference came round. Missiles Limited was a large, sprawling place and the management staff accompanying the delegates was soon exhausted by the tireless inspecting and questioning, and the lengthy discussions in foreign tongues held by most of the delegates with technical advisers they had brought with them.
Stanley was uncomfortable about it. If Mr Mahommed, the Indonesians, the Sikh and the Etonian Burmese were among the party, he wanted at all costs to avoid them. There had been some delay over his afternoon schedule, which allocated him to the avenue of lathes in the main turning shop. Missiles were doing a large contract for flywheels, and Stanley’s fork-lift truck was to carry those which had been completed from the lathes to stacks for crating. This meant that a stout prong had to be fixed to the front of the truck, but when Mr Kite was consulted he ruled that the job should be done by one of the mechanics.
“No question about it,” said Kitey, blowing through his teeth, as was his wont. “That’s not in our contract.”
“We got no one free for another half-hour,” objected Mr Crawley.
“Can’t be done,” said Kitey. “That’s Setting Up. Doesn’t come into driving, and you know as well as I do——”
“Oh, if there’s no one available,” said Stanley, “I could quite easily bolt it on.”
&nb
sp; “If you was to do that, lad,” said Kitey, “you’d ’ave the Amalgamated down on you like a ton of bricks, and all our lads’d most likely refuse to work with you.”
“Just for that?”
“Ain’t you got any principles?” asked Kitey. “It’s neither right nor fair, taking work that doesn’t belong to you.”
Mr Crawley went off muttering to arrange for a mechanic.
“You got to keep it strict in front of old Creepy, you know,” said Kitey in a friendly tone. “You know what the boss-class is like. Give ’em an inch and they take a mile.”
“Oh, of course. Sorry.”
“Very difficult getting the boys to toe the line sometimes,” observed Kitey, offering a cigarette. “Do you indulge? They don’t appreciate all the ins and outs of demarcation. You need education. But naturally you got to fight for that too, like everything else. Mind you, I did happen to hear in a roundabout sort of way that you was at a college in Oxford. You don’t mind me asking, do you?”
“No, not at all. Yes, I was.”
“I was up at Oxford once,” said Kitey.
“Were you really?”
“Oh yes. I went to summer school at Balliol College one week in 1946. Very interesting. Very good toast and preserves they give you at tea-time, as you probably know, of course.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yes. Very interesting too, the way the intelligentsia were sympathetic to the Party, you know. I spoke to a number of them.”
“The Communist Party, you mean?”
Kitey winked.
“Now, now, Brother Windrush. My opinions are between me and my conscience and the ballot box, as they say. Only I did happen to hear in a roundabout sort of way that you was given the push from the Foreign Office for sympathies with the Party.”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
Kitey nodded gravely.
“Typical,” he said. “Typical. Privilege and the Press Lords, it’s always the same story. Muzzle the free voice of the citizen. Sack the lot. Lock ’em out.”
“Well, they certainly gave me the push.”
“And of course,” said Kitey, waving his hand around them, “no idea how to run an industry. Look at this hanging about all the time. A scandal.”
He shook his thin head sadly.
“You might be interested in some books I’ve got at home,” he went on. “I spend a good deal of my spare time reading, you know. Not like some people.”
“That’s very good of you.”
“No, it’s a pleasure. Drop in after work. We’re not far from the main entrance—it’s on your way to the station. It’s number eighteen, third road to your left, on the left. Street of terraced houses.”
“Thanks very much.”
“Not at all. It’s a pleasure to find people take a serious interest in reading.”
Mr Kite went off, and Stanley stood despondently at the door of the shop waiting for the mechanic. Kitey seemed determined to improve and recruit him. In the distance he could see the coloured delegates coming out of the canteen and going into the foundry. After twenty minutes they emerged, picking at their clothing where flying droplets of metal had singed it. One or two appeared to go home, but the remainder went resolutely on and disappeared into the engine fitting shop.
Presently the mechanic came back from the other end of the works and fixed on Stanley’s prong.
“I hope you don’t mind coming all the way back just to do this,” said Stanley. “But it’s a question of demarcation.”
“It doesn’t worry me, mate,” said the mechanic. “It’s your bonus you’re losing. You want to complain to Kitey the management’s inefficient not having a mechanic on the spot to do it.”
Stanley reported to the lathes and was soon scooping up flywheels on his prong, taking them twenty at a time to the far end of the shop to be pulled off the prong and stacked by two men called Chalky and Jimmo.
The work in the lathe shop was going on busily and smoothly but suddenly the whole tempo slackened. The high hum of the machines climbed down almost at once to a lower, slower tone and the practised movements of the operators became instantly more careful and studied. Chalky and Jimmo slowed their dexterous snatching-off of the heavy flywheels to a clumsy laboured heaving.
“What’s going on?” asked Stanley, from the seat of his truck.
“Ain’t you got eyes?” asked the man Chalky. “Look up the far end.”
Into the far door had come a brightly clad group of the coloured gentlemen, accompanied by limping members of the management.
“Well, I’d have thought you’d work a bit faster if anything when you’re being watched,” said Stanley. “But everyone’s slowed down to a crawl.”
“What’s up with you?” asked Jimmo. “We’re on piece rates. You got to keep your eyes open. It don’t matter about supervisors, and it don’t matter about that Bertram Mills outfit taking a look, but you never know who tags on to a party like that.”
“Well, who might?”
“The Time and Motion bloke, of course,” said Chalky. “They get up to all sorts of tricks, them blokes. When they reckon the rates are fixed a bit high they try to sneak in and stopwatch some poor unsuspecting geezer to try and see how long it really takes to do some movement. Only you usually get a chance to give the bloke the tip-off and he slows down. So what they do is, say, just walk through with the supervisor or someone, chatting away just as if they was too interested to do any timing, but all the time they got their pockets full of stopwatches and next day you find there’s a new rate for some jobs. So the only thing to do is all slow down while there’s anyone you don’t know passing through.”
“And does that work?”
“Not always. Once or twice in the summer, when the windows are open, one of them timed a bloke on a gang-milling job just with binoculars through a window across the way, without even coming in the shop. The blokes was wild, of course, but they couldn’t say nothing, only keep the windows shut in future.”
“You got to keep on the quivvy vivvy,” said Jimmo.
“Mind you, if we was on day-work,” conceded Chalky, “instead of piece-rates, I dare say a lot of people might work better when they’re being watched, but nobody stands to gain by that, do they? You get a nasty atmosphere with the supervisory grades standing over you all day.”
“And everyone keeping an eye open for the foreman?”
“That’s right. I seen in the paper some industrial psychologist saying he’s known workers go home dead exhausted from trying to dodge work all day, when they was on day-work. He reckoned actually doing the work was easier these days.”
“Watch it,” advised Jimmo. “Here comes the Church Lads’ Brigade.”
The inspecting group thus referred to had come a lot closer during this conversation and were now clustered round one of the lathes to watch a skimming operation. This was just the same operation as they had watched further up the line, but this time it seemed novel in that a ginger-haired man was doing it. Most of the accompanying management staff were hanging back, looking occasionally at their watches and at each other.
Stanley could make out everyone he had met at Mr Mahommed’s party and tried to slink by unobserved, but Wallace, who was standing on the fringe, the tedium of it all showing in his face, caught sight of him with some relief.
“Wotcher, Stanley,” he said, ignoring Stanley’s frantic signals. “I’ve been looking out for you. There’s a wonderful girl works here called Cynthia Kite. We were all inspecting her just now. She spends her entire time checking whether little injectors are a sliding fit or not, it seems. I’m surprised you’ve been a whole week here without noticing her.”
“Really? Well, if old Kitey’s her father I’m invited round to tea.”
“Is that so? Here, wait a minute.”
“No talking to the driver,” said Stanley firmly, moving away, “or else the lads’ll say I’m a creep.”
He hummed and clicked back to Chalky and
Jimmo with a fresh load.
“Bit of a creep, aren’t you?” said Chalky. “Talking to the bosses. Look at ’em. I dunno.”
The Personnel Manager was explaining something to one of the Indonesians, a strange ingratiating expression on his face. Against a background of continuous noise he was making himself understood with elaborate gestures, at times seeming like an angler demonstrating the great length of a fish, then rapidly changing to a hammering motion. The Indonesian looked on politely while the demonstration changed to a winding-up motion and ended with a complicated two-handed process in which the Personnel Manager seemed to be pulling an invisible lever to and fro with one hand, while describing circles with the forefinger of the other.
In the course of this performance the other delegates craned round curiously to look on, and then the whole lot of them, to Stanley’s relief, flocked out the way they had come.
“Funny the way they got their shirts hanging out,” observed Jimmo. “With the money they get. Be round again later, I expect.”
But the delegates, many now DCL (Oxon), had gone to tea.
CHAPTER 11
THERE WAS no doubt in Stanley’s mind, from the minute she opened the door to him, that Cynthia Kite was the most beautiful girl he had seen. It struck him that she looked like an advertisement, and this was astonishingly true. This, had Stanley but known it, was high though unoriginal praise in Cynthia’s own circles, where ‘She looks like an advert’ was the pinnacle of appreciation.
A cry of “Show the gentleman in, then” from the rear of the house was the only manifestation for some time of Mrs Kite, who did not actually appear till she came to lay the table, but Mr Kite came in at once from his wash to greet his guest. Cynthia disappeared mysteriously upstairs.
“Ah,” said Kitey. “Right now, you’ll take a cup of tea, I expect? Right. Well, the books I was speaking to you of are up here.” He ferreted among the contents of a shelf, packed with piles of Russia Today and a number of cheap, red-bound editions with names like Next Phase of the Struggle and V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin: Their Achievements in Historical Perspective, and Concrete Materialist Approach, perhaps ten in all. It was in these books that Kitey had submerged himself in several years of evenings while Mrs Kite ironed. She had been a great ironer in her time, but once non-iron materials were said to have caught on in Russia Kitey had taken to them and Mrs Kite now spent much of her evening time at the cinema.