14

As I look back now, life at Factory 19 was at its happiest for me at that time. I had found a personal contentedness that had seemed impossible in the depths of my breakdown. Managing the factory could still occasionally be stressful – there was so much to do that I wondered if I would ever fully get on top of it. But even when factory life was at its most stretched, with overtime at its peak, there was a natural rhythm to the 1948 way of living that prevented you from feeling tired or strung out in the way that modern people often did. The simple act of eliminating digital technology – the smartphone, email and social media – freed up several hours each day for added rest and relaxation. Once we left the factory or the office, work ceased to matter. Yes, we still cared about Factory 19’s fate – it put food on our tables and roofs over heads, after all – but it seemed somehow improper to let silly worries about production levels ruin our evenings, weekends and holidays. In addition to elevenses, we had generous lunch breaks, afternoon tea stops and the post-work pub or cocktail hour. In an emergency, we might be summoned back to the office by telephone, but such interruptions were infrequent. D.F. attributed our rising production levels to this general mental restedness, as well as to the disappearance of obvious time-wasting occupations like management consultancy, public relations and human resources, which substituted activity for concrete achievement. All hands were to the pumps, not wasting time. The result was that we all felt incredibly satisfied with our lives.

Much of our fun was, of course, had at The Moon Under Water, which in those mostly still pre-television days acted as a sort of lounge room for us. Shop talk was strictly forbidden. I even got married there, which I need to explain.

It happened one evening after work. Dundas and Bobbie had managed to patch things up and had asked Penelope and me to join them for a night out. Left alone momentarily with Bobbie, I was absent-mindedly rubbing a bump on my forehead and she asked what had happened.

‘Knocked my head again on one of the Catalina’s bulkheads. That plane’s positively dangerous.’

D.F. was at the bar, chatting with Art, who was laughing loudly with the two shop stewards from whom he had become inseparable. They seemed to be affecting Northern English accents, like the one Art had recently adopted. Something about them looked different that evening. Art was wearing brown flared trousers, a floral shirt with a big collar and, over it, a parka. The miners had longish, greasy hair. The taller and less intelligent-looking one was wearing a denim jacket with an open-necked shirt that displayed voluminous chest hair, reminding me vaguely of John Travolta. The other wore a donkey jacket over a pair of surprisingly clean overalls. The nicknames John Travolta and Donkey Jacket stuck. While they were chatting, Gladys joined them. She too had changed her look, from Lauren Bacall to Julie Christie, and was once again glued to Donkey Jacket’s arm, as at the village fair. In a pub full of people wearing 1940s tweeds, flannels and bowler hats, they naturally stood out.

‘They look like they’re in a glam rock band,’ Bobbie said. ‘A fashion crime.’

‘I’ve heard the longshore workers are smuggling in contraband clothing. There’s a black market for Levis and lumber jackets. They’re calling it the Starsky and Hutch look.’

‘I wanted to crack down on it, but Dundy thinks they’ll stop wearing it once they realise how ridiculous they appear.’

Dundas set a tray of pints down heavily on our table along with two packs of cigarettes. Penelope also appeared with a parcel of hot chips that smelled like they were soaked in vinegar. There being no seat for her in the crowded pub, she plopped herself on my lap and gave me a kiss. She still smelled of aviation fuel and sweat from that afternoon’s engine maintenance.

‘Sorry, rough landing,’ she said. ‘How’s your head?’

‘Sore.’

Dundas raised his glass for our usual salute: ‘To the past.’

Hearing us, Art turned and touched his cap.

‘Comrade Art seems not to know which past we’re toasting,’ said Bobbie. She looked daggers at him. ‘Nineteen-seventy, I should think. Something should be done about that man, Dundas, I tell you.’

‘I take it none of us are unhappy about life in the Forties?’ D.F. asked.

‘Not apart from the housing shortages,’ I said. ‘A flat would be nice.’

‘Unfortunately, married couples have priority.’

‘Rules, I’m afraid,’ said Bobbie. ‘There was no living in sin until the late Sixties at least. Sex wasn’t even invented until just before that. Even then, only for the upper classes.’

I rubbed my sore head once again. ‘You couldn’t make an exception, could you? I don’t want to have to sneak Penelope past Mrs D’Agostino.’

‘Oh, that could be fun,’ Penelope said, eating a chip.

‘She rules my hostel like a sergeant major. No female guests after 9.30 pm.’

‘As the leaders of Factory 19, we have to set an example.’

Penelope fumbled in the pockets of her greasy overalls. ‘I think I have a remedy.’ She produced two rubber O-rings. ‘Voila! From fuel leads. I’ve been saving them up for an emergency.’ She bent down on one knee and held one of the rubber rings in front of me. ‘Hold out your hand.’

People in the pub started clapping, although Gladys looked stony.

I raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you realise the drudgery that lies ahead?’ I said.

‘Actually, I’ve heard the factory is releasing new models of vacuum cleaners and washing machines soon, to make things easier for us housewives.’

‘Latest models from the States,’ D.F. said. ‘Women’s liberation from domestic servitude is here. Technology has the answers.’

‘It would mean changing your name,’ said Bobbie. ‘No getting around that, I’m afraid.’

‘I’d agree to hyphenate it. Winstanley-Bird-Richey has a sort of grandness to it, don’t you think?’ She kissed me. ‘Anyway, what do you think? Do you or don’t you, Paul?’

I kept my hand outstretched. She slipped the black rubber onto my ring finger, then held out hers for the same.

‘Dundas, I suppose we have to make it official,’ I said. ‘Who conducts marriages in Factory 19?’

‘That’s my job,’ Bobbie said. ‘As mayor of Bobbietown.’ She drained her pint and stood up. ‘Under the authority invested in me by – well, me – I pronounce you man and wife. Now give your new spouse a kiss while I get the champagne.’

Some hours later, Bobbie tossed me a set of keys. ‘We’ll sort out your married quarters tomorrow. You can honeymoon tonight in our flat.’

‘But where will you sleep?’

‘There’s a decent captain’s birth on that Liberty ship that’s just docked.’

We stumbled our way past the factory. D.F. and Penelope were skipping along, singing some Frank Sinatra number. Bobbie had disappeared. Looking around, we saw she had halted 20 or 30 yards back, inspecting, intently, something on the factory wall. It was a bronze plaque. ‘Listen to this.’

GENERAL MOTORS SIT-DOWN STRIKE

Starting 30 December 1936, this building was occupied for forty-four days by striking members of the United Auto Workers.

UAW Local 659.

‘Who put that there?’ she said.

‘Art and his union friends,’ said D.F. ‘Last week.’

‘You gave them permission?’

‘I dedicated it, actually. They put up a nice little curtain for me to open. I even gave a brief speech about the importance of preserving the past.’

‘Are you mad?’ Bobbie said, suddenly sounding sober.

‘It’s a perfectly harmless piece of history. One of those shop steward fellows brought the plaque over from the States. Some union boss had rescued it from a junk pile after the factory initially closed. Apparently, this building once played a major role in the class struggle.’

‘Harmless? You think so?’

‘Why not?’

‘It’ll give people ideas.’

‘It’s heritage, that’s all.’

‘That’s all? Do we really want people to be inspired by the 1930s? Our world was created out of the rubble of that shitty decade, Dundas. History is a source of potential trouble. We of all people should know that.’

‘We can take people back to 1948, but we can’t erase what happened before then.’

‘Well, maybe we should bloody well try.’

Their spat was interrupted by an unusual noise. A whoosh, followed by a loud smack. For a second afterwards there was silence, followed by a blast that shattered some of the factory windows and sprayed us with water. We turned around to see the Liberty ship that was tied to the wharf rapidly sinking.

By the time we reached the water’s edge, she had gone further down at the bow.

‘The crew!’ D.F. said. With typical recklessness, he and Penelope leapt onto the vessel and disappeared below deck. We could hear them yelling out for the crew through the open hatches. The ship began sinking faster, which drove them back to the deck, from where they managed to scurry up the derrick and onto the wharf. All that could then be seen of the ship was the top of its bridge and funnel. Within minutes, a black oil slick spreading out across the brownish water of the harbour was the only thing that remained.

The crew showed up. They had been at a dockside nightclub (the place was technically illegal, but the area around the docks was a law unto itself), and all seemed to be accounted for. The cargo-master was hurriedly found – in an illegal dockside brothel, as it happens – and summoned to Dundas’s office to give us a report. There were, he stated, most definitely no explosives on the vessel; it couldn’t have been an accident.

D.F. dismissed him and turned to Bobbie, Penelope and me. ‘Sabotage,’ he said. ‘Sabotage.’ He had a look of genuine shock on his face.

He and Bobbie bade us good night and disappeared together in a stream of whispers. Penelope and I ended up spending our wedding night back in the Catalina after all.

D.F. never let me see the diver’s report, which came out the next day. He seemed strangely reluctant to discuss the whole event, mumbling something about a disgruntled former employee setting off some sort of charge, even though we had all clearly heard something hitting the harbour waters at the time of the explosion. Who the so-called disgruntled employee was, he wouldn’t say. ‘Went up in the blast most likely,’ he said, before changing the subject.

The day after, a story appeared in The Better Times about an accidental explosion of unstable chemicals needed for manufacturing high-grade paint for the vehicle production line. The file on the subject was closed.