When I was student, the long summer vacations were usually spent in Greece, either sailing between the islands or just simply lying on a beach sipping retsina and reading the latest Robbe-Grillet novel. No they weren’t. They were spent earning money and gaining work experience, which in my case amounted to having bad experiences at work.
I had always fondly imagined toy factories to be bright, primary-coloured places full of rosy-cheeked craftspersons whistling while they worked, but the one I spent a miserable two and a half months in was a large shed of Dickensian squalor beneath the railway bridge, where workers who still had ten fingers were regarded as cissies. We made money boxes out of metal sheets and I was part of a production line that pressed out the various shapes on a machine with an iron bar on the right-hand side that you pulled across, remembering to lean backwards as it swung both ways in front of you. The small metal pieces were Stanley-knife sharp and at the end of my first day my fingertips were like arterial road maps. Because of the smoke-blackened windows, even in August the place was dark, and the smell of oil and sweat made me pine for the taste of retsina.
My part in the metal-money-box-making process was to take the small sheet of pressed metal from the worker next to me, secure it on to the anvil-shaped base of my machine and punch out the coin slot. On my right sat a young man not much older than me with a cleft palate and severe learning difficulties, and one morning during my second week he managed to leave his thumb on the ‘anvil’ as the heavy press descended. ‘Ugh ugh …’ I believe is what he said, as he held up what appeared to be a large raspberry lollipop. When it exploded he slipped off his stool to the floor in a dead faint. The machine was hosed down and the worker replaced. I never saw the lad again but it was rumoured that he was hitchhiking around Europe and having no difficulty getting lifts.
Now I am in a large, airy, sun-filled room the size of an aircraft hangar, proud to wear the brown overall of this well-respected Merseyside bakery. The mistake that was always made in those days (and perhaps still is) by workers who were put in charge of students was the assumption that because they were at college they must be intelligent. So, inevitably, the horny-handed son of the toil would explain the rudiments of the job and then skive off, leaving the student to carry on. In my case a big mistake. Lenny’s job was to lift the freshly baked tin loaves off the conveyor belt and put them into a tray, and when the tray was full take out another and carry on. Every fifteen minutes or so a driver would come and remove the trays steaming with the bakery’s delicious, factory-fresh tin loaves and deliver them to shops in the area. Lenny showed me what to do and disappeared. I was suddenly alone in the airy, sun-filled room the size of an aircraft hangar as the loaves, the bastards, trundled towards me like enemy tanks. Lenny was not horny-handed without reason and had failed to point out that the loaves were pipingly, excruciatingly, painfully hot, and after placing a few loaves gingerly in the tray my hands burst into flames. That’s an exaggeration, but my palms were red raw with the heat. (Gloves? Now that would have been a good idea. Hygienic as well as more comfortable for the worker at the loaf-face.)
While bending down to pick up the loaves I had dropped, the steaming convoy would trundle past on the moving belt above, and while I was attempting to retrieve them more would be swept on to the floor. And so on. Within minutes my main concern was not to fill the trays, but to prevent the loaves from travelling twenty yards along the track before disappearing through a black, rubber-flapped door into an ominously large machine. I knew I was failing when the Heath Robinson contraption started to make groaning noises, followed by a sustained hiss. Next thing, squashed loaves began to issue forth from the top of the machine, and it became a volcano erupting floury lava. Like the Roman soldier at the gates of the burning city, I remained steadfastly at my post until one of the drivers arrived to collect the trays and pushed the stop button on the conveyor belt. That afternoon the good soldier was posted to the tray-scrubbing shed.
I don’t know what it is about me and machines, but we just don’t get on, which is surprising considering my infant bonding with that mechanical cheese. Tate & Lyle had a huge factory on the Dock road and employed an army of students during the summer vacations. One day I would be part of a gang humping bags of sugar on to the back of lorries and the next I would be stacking boxes in the stacking-box shed. For a month I worked the night shift in the Char House, or Charcoal House, a Victorian building on three floors where raw sugar was filtered through charcoal as part of the cleansing process. I enjoyed working through the night and watching the sun rise each morning over the river, and I liked the company of the men I worked with. The constant breaks for tea and toast and roll-ups in the furnace room with a group of surreal Scouse philosophers, who shared with the dockers an aptitude for bestowing colourful names on their colleagues – the Balloon foreman: ‘Don’t let me down, lads’; the Sheriff foreman: ‘Where’s the hold-up?’; ‘Lino’: ‘He’s always on the floor’; ‘Phil the Cot: ‘He’s got fourteen kids’.
Instead of loaves, it was charcoal dust that did for me this time when the chargehand left me on my own at 2 a.m. on the third floor. The huge space with its tiled walls and clanking metal pipes was like the engine room on some abandoned liner: ‘All you’ve gorra do is stand by this big pipe here, and when the noise changes hit that button there.’
‘What about these dials?’ I asked, pointing to a handful of quivering fingers.
‘Take no notice. See yer, lad.’
So I pulled up a chair and sat down in front of what looked like a small ship’s funnel and waited for the noise to change. What noise? I couldn’t hear anything. Oh, yes I could. Did he mean that faint sifting noise, like the sound of icing sugar passing gently through a sieve? Or did he mean the ticking noise coming from one of the dials? No, he’d told me to forget about the dials. Could he have meant the scuffling noise coming from the far corner? No, that’s a rat, take no notice. It’s amazing the sounds you can hear when you’re cast adrift in an ocean liner above the rooftops of a sleeping city. Foghorns, of course, out on the river. A baby crying in a tenement block? Two lovers giggling in Paradise Street? In the empty jazz cellar, the pianist plays a final blues. Eyes closed now, I feel myself drifting into a sweet aural reverie. Drifting … drifting …
Suddenly, what’s that noise? Snoring? The sound of somebody snoring? When I realised that I’d been asleep but not snoring, it was time to panic. The noise, and it was increasingly deafening, was coming from the blasted funnel and it was time for me to spring into action as I’d been trained to do. I hit the button. The trouble is that five minutes is a long time for charcoal to be pumped along lengths of piping and the eruption, though lacking the glorious yeasty smell of the bakery volcano, was a good deal more volatile and disruptive. Black clouds billowed around the room and the charcoal dust settled to a depth of several feet. It was like a satanic snowstorm. My Al Jolson impersonation failed to impress the chargehand when he arrived, but at least he helped me shovel out the dust and hose down the room. The next day the good soldier was transferred to humping bags of sugar on to the backs of lorries.
Before I took up my first teaching post, an advert in the Liverpool Echo caught my eye. It was from a holiday firm seeking a suitably qualified person to act as a courier and take a group of holidaymakers to Italy. I’m not suitably qualified, I thought, so it sounds just the job for me. In retrospect, I should have been suspicious of Mr Gerovski from the moment I walked into his tiny office in the city centre and confessed, ‘I’m afraid I don’t speak Italian.’
He waved my concerns away: ‘Schno matter, schno matter.’
‘I do have a degree in French and Geography, though.’
‘Schit down, schit down.’ So I schat down.
As he passed over bundles of tickets, passports, visas, dockets and forms, he explained that it was to Rimini on Italy’s Adriatic coast that I was to lead the charge of thirty-six Scousers. No charter flights in those days, but ferries and trains, and on arrival in Milan I had strict instructions to ring him and find out which hotels we would be staying at. And it was there, on the vast, marble concourse of Milan Central Station, eighteen hours after setting off from Liverpool, that he confided we weren’t actually going to Rimini, but to Cesanatico, a few miles up the coast. ‘You needn’t tell them,’ he assured me, ‘they won’t know the difference.’
By the grand central station I sat down and wept.
On the Monday morning I was arrested and taken to the police station at Forli. I wish I had been tortured. Obviously it wouldn’t have been very nice at the time, but now I could describe to you in sickening detail how the carabinieri had attached electrodes to my genitals and beaten me with grissini sticks … ‘No, I won’t tell you his name, not in a million years … Oh, all right then, it was Mr Gerovski.’
Apparently, his scam had been to book English holidaymakers into various resorts along the coast and, when the bills came in, to move them along to the next town. He had invested all the money he’d received at the beginning of the season in the hope that by the end of it he’d be in profit, but it had all collapsed and he was in jail awaiting trial in Liverpool. This was not good news and even though I was released without charge, I was concerned for the group. Would it be warm enough at night on the beach, and would there be enough lilos for them to sleep on? To their great credit, the hotel owners let them all stay on, providing full board even though they knew they wouldn’t be getting paid.
‘Un saluto agli albergatori del Adriatico.’