Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

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 all: 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.’

More quickly than was necessary, Arthur asked: ‘Did he do hisself any damage?’

‘A few bruises and screaming for two hours. But he’s all right. He’s like iron, if you ask me.’

Time to change the subject. Like treading on a haystack, he told himself, you dirty sinner. Will this be a quick enough change?

‘How did you go on at the races?’

‘All right. I won five quid.’

It was. ‘Lucky bastard,’ he swore. ‘I put ten bob each way on the three-thirty at Redcar on Sat’day and I didn’t get a penny back. I’ll smash that bookie one of these days.’

‘Why smash the bookie?’ reasonable Jack asked. ‘You’re too superstitious. You either win or you don’t. I don’t believe in luck.’

Arthur screwed his sandwich paper into a ball and threw it across the gangway into somebody’s work-box. ‘Spot-on,’ he cried. ‘See that, Jack? Couldn’t a done better if I’d ‘ave aimed.’

‘I don’t think luck ever did anybody any good, in the end,’ Jack went on.

‘I do,’ Arthur affirmed. ‘Mostly I’m lucky and all. But sometimes I get a smack between the eyes. Not often though. So I’m superstitious and I believe in luck.’

‘You was only telling me you believed in communism the other week,’ Jack said reproachfully, ‘and now you talk about luck and superstition. The comrades wouldn’t like that,’ he ended with a dry laugh.

‘Well,’ Arthur said, his mouth full of second sandwich and tea, ‘if they don’t like it, they can lump it.’

‘That’s because you’ve got nowt to do wi’ ‘em.’

‘I said I was as good as anybody else in the world, din’t I.’ Arthur demanded. ‘And I mean it. Do you think if I won the football pools I’d gi’ yo’ a penny on it? Or gi’ anybody else owt? Not likely. I’d keep it all mysen, except for seeing my family right. I’d buy ‘em a house and set ‘em up for life, but anybody else could whistle for it. I’ve ‘eard that blokes as win football pools get thousands o’ beggin’ letters, but yer know what I’d do if I got ‘em? I’ll tell yer what I’d do: I’d mek a bonfire of ‘em. Because I don’t believe in share and share alike, Jack. Tek them blokes as spout on boxes outside the factory sometimes. I like to hear ‘em talk about Russia, about farms and power-stations they’ve got, because it’s interestin’, but when they say that when they get in government everybody’s got to share and share alike, then that’s another thing. I ain’t a communist, I tell you. I like ‘em though, because they’re different from these big fat Tory bastards in parliament. And them Labour bleeders too. They rob our wage packets every week with insurance and income tax and try to tell us it’s all for our own good. I know what I’d like to do with the government. I’d like ter go round every factory in England with books and books of little numbers and raffle off the ‘Ouses o’ Parliament. “Sixpence a time, lads,” I’d say. “A nice big ‘ouse for the winner” — and then when I’d made a big packet I’d settle down somewhere with fifteen women and fifteen cars, that I would.

‘But did I tell yer, Jack, I voted communist at the last election? I did it because I thought the poor bloke wouldn’t get any votes. I allus like to ‘elp the losin’ side. You see, I shouldn’t have voted either, because I was under twenty-one, but I used Dad’s vote because he was in bed wi’ a bad back. I took ‘is votin’ card out of ‘is coat pocket wi’out ‘im knowin’, and at the booth I towd the copper outside and the bloke at the desk inside that I was ‘Arold Seaton and they didn’t even bother to look at the card, and I went in and voted. Just like that. I didn’t believe it mysen till I was outside again. I’d do owt like that though, I would.’

‘You’d have got ten years in clink if they’d caught you,’ Jack said. ‘It’s a serious thing. You were lucky.’

Arthur was triumphant. ‘I told yer I was. But that’s what all these looney laws are for, yer know: to be broken by blokes like me.’

‘Don’t be too cocky though,’ Jack rebuked him. ‘You might cop it, one day.’

‘’What for? Like gettin’ married, you mean? I’m not that daft.’

Jack defended where Arthur had made him feel vulnerable: ‘I’m not saying you are. Neither was I daft when I got married. I wanted to do it, that’s all. I went into it wi’ my eyes open. I like it, and all. I like Brenda, and Brenda likes me, and we get on well together. If you’re good to each other, married life is all right.’

‘I’ll believe you then. Thousands wouldn’t, though.’

Who would believe anyway that I was carrying on with his missis? One day he’ll know, I suppose, but don’t be too cocky, you cocky bastard. If you’re too cocky your luck changes, so be careful. The worst of it is that I like Jack. Jack is a good bloke, one of the best. It’s a pity it’s such a cruel world. But he’s one up on me because he sleeps with Brenda every night. I suppose I should keep on hoping he gets knocked down by a double-decker bus so that I can marry Brenda and sleep with her every night, but somehow I don’t want him to get knocked down by a bus.

‘I haven’t told you this, have I?’ Jack said gravely after a long pause of munching, as though something big and heavy had suddenly climbed up to his conscience.

Arthur wondered. Has he? Was it possible? His face looked thoughtful. What was it? No one could have told Jack about his carrying-ons. Or could they, the nosy gossiping spies? Not much they couldn’t. He does seem a bit funny this morning.

‘What about, Jack?’ he asked, screwing the top back on his flask.

‘Nothing much. Only Robboe came up to me the other day and told me that I was to start on nights next week in the Press Shop. They’re short-handed there and want another tool-setter. A week on nights and a week on days.’

‘That’s a bastard,’ Arthur commiserated, thinking he was saying the right thing under the circumstances. ‘I’m sorry, Jack.’

Then he saw his mistake. Jack was really happy at his transfer. ‘I don’t know about that. It’ll mean a bit more money. Brenda’s been on about a television set lately, and I might be able to get her one like that.’

He accepted a cigarette from Arthur, who said: ‘All the same, who am I going to talk to in tea-break?’

Jack laughed, a curious laugh, since the frown managed somehow to stay on his face. ‘You’ll be all right,’ and slapped him — not very hard — on the shoulder, saying:

‘I’ll see you again.’

The light flashed: tea-break over.

I’m just too lucky for this world, Arthur told himself as he set his lathe going, too lucky by half, so I’d better enjoy it while I can. I don’t suppose Jack’s told Brenda yet about going on nights, but I’ll bet she’ll die laughing at the good news when he does. I might not see her at weekends, but I’ll get there every night, which is even better. Turn to chamfer, then to drill, then blade-chamfer. Done. Take out and fix in a new piece, checking now and again for size because I’d hate to do a thousand and get them slung back at me by the viewers. Forty-five bob don’t grow on trees. Turn to chamfer and drill, then blade-chamfer, swing the turret until my arms are heavy and dead. Quick as lightning. Take out and fix in, shout for the trolley to take it away and bring more on, jotting down another hundred, not noticing the sud smells any more or belts over my head that gave me the screaming abdabs when I first came in the factory at fifteen, slapping and twisting and thumping and changing direction like Robboe the foreman’s mind. It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, so you grab like owt to earn a few quid, to take Brenda boozing and back to bed, or to the footpaths and woods up Strelley, passing the big council estate where Margaret my sister has a house and three kids from her useless husband, taking Brenda by all that to a broken-down shepherd’s cottage that I’ve known since I was a kid and laying her on the straw and both of us so loving to each other that we can hardly wait. Only less of this or there’ll be another handle on the lathe that I won’t know what to do with and another gallon of suds that will jam the works. Time flies and no mistake, and it’s about time it did because I’ve done another two hundred and I’m ready to go home and get some snap and read the Daily Mirror or look at what’s left of the bathing tarts in the Weekend Mail. But Brenda, I can’t wait to get at her. It serves you right, ducks, for being so lush and loving. And now this chamfer-blade wants sharpening, so I’ll give it to Jack this afternoon. And it’s too bad about him, but he’ll be going on nights soon which is too bad as well, for him, because Brenda and me’ll play merry hell in all the beds and nooks we can find. Bloomers flying, and legs waving in Strelley Woods, no matter how cold it gets.

The minute you stepped out of the factory gates you thought no more about your work. But the funniest thing was that neither did you think about work when you were standing at your machine. You began the day by cutting and drilling steel cylinders with care, but gradually your actions became automatic and you forgot all about the machine and the quick working of your arms and hands and the fact that you were cutting and boring and rough-threading to within limits of only five-thousandths of an inch. The noise of motor-trolleys passing up and down the gangway and the excruciating din of flying and flapping belts slipping out of your consciousness after perhaps half an hour, without affecting the quality of the work you were turning out, and you forgot your past conflicts with the gaffer and turned to thinking of pleasant events that had at some time happened to you, or things that you hoped would happen to you in the future. If your machine was working well — the motor smooth, stops tight, jigs good — and you spring your actions into a favourable rhythm you became happy. You went off into pipe-dreams for the rest of the day. And in the evening, when admittedly you would be feeling as though your arms and legs had been stretched to breaking point on a torture-rack, you stepped out into a cosy world of pubs and noisy tarts that would one day provide you with the raw material for more pipe-dreams as you stood at your lathe.

It was marvellous the things you remembered while you worked on the lathe, things that you thought were forgotten and would never come back into your mind, often things that you hoped would stay forgotten. Time flew while you wore out the oil-soaked floor and worked furiously without knowing it: you lived in a compatible world of pictures that passed through your mind like a magic-lantern, often in vivid and glorious loonycolour, a world where memory and imagination ran free and did acrobatic tricks with your past and with what might be your future, an amok that produced all sorts of agreeable visions. Like the corporal said about sitting on the lavatory: it was the only time you have to think, and to quote him further, you thought of some lovely and marvellous things.

When Arthur went back to work in the afternoon he needed only four hundred cylinders to complete his daily stint. If he cared he could slow down, but he was unable to take it easy until every cylinder lay clean and finished in the box at his lathe, unwilling to drop off speed while work was yet to be done. He turned out the four hundred in three hours, in order to pass a pleasant time doing a well-disguised nothing, looking as though he were busy, perhaps cleaning his machine or talking to Jack during the ostensible business of getting his tools sharpened. Cunning, he told himself gleefully, as he began the first hundred, dropping them off one by one at a respectable speed. Don’t let the bastards grind you down, as Fred used to say when he was in the navy. Something about a carborundum wheel when he spouted it in Latin, but good advice just the same, though he didn’t need to tell me. I’ll never let anybody grind me down because I’m worth as much as any other man in the world, though when it comes to the lousy vote they give me I often feel like telling ‘em where to shove it, for all the good using it’ll do me. But if they said: ‘Look, Arthur, here’s a hundredweight of dynamite and a brand-new plunger, now blow up the factory,’ then I’d do it, because that’d be something worth doing. Action. I’d bale-out for Russia or the North Pole where I’d sit and laugh like a horse over what I’d done, at the wonderful sight of gaffers and machines and shining bikes going sky-high one wonderful moonlit night. Not that I’ve got owt against ‘em, but that’s just how I feel now and again. Me, I couldn’t care less if the world did blow up tomorrow, as long as I’m blown up with it. Not that I wouldn’t like to win ninety-thousand quid beforehand. But I’m having a good life and don’t care about anything, and it’d be a pity to leave Brenda, all said and done, especially now Jack’s been put on nights. Not that he minds, which is the funny part about it, because he’s happy about a bigger pay-packet and a change, and I’m happy, and I know Brenda’s happy. Everybody’s happy. It’s a fine world sometimes, if you don’t weaken, or if you don’t give the bastards a chance to get cracking with that carborundum.

Robboe the Gaffer passed along the gangway talking to a tool-setter. Robboe was a bloke of about forty who had been with the firm since he was fourteen, having signed on as an apprentice and put in a lot of time at night-school, a man who had not suffered the rigours of short-time before the war — as my old man had, thought Arthur — and who had been in a ‘reserved occupation’ during the war so that he had kept out of the army. He now drew about twenty a week plus a good production bonus, a quiet man with a square face, tortured-looking eyes and brow, thin rubbery lips, and one hand always in his pocket twiddling on a micrometer. Robboe kept his job because he was clever at giving you the right answers, and took back-chat with a wry smile and a good face as long as you did it with a brutal couldn’t-care-less attitude and didn’t seem frightened of him. A terror to men like Jack, to Arthur he was a human being afflicted with the heavy lead-weight of authority when a rebellion always seemed on the point of breaking out.

Arthur started with the firm as a messenger boy, carrying samples of bicycle parts from one branch of the factory to another, or doing errands around the city on a carrier-bike. He was fifteen at the time and every Thursday morning Robboe sent him on a mysterious errand to a chemist’s shop downtown, giving him a sealed envelope with a note and some money inside. Arthur reached the shop after an interesting and idling ride along canal banks and through narrow streets, and the chemist handed him a stronger brown envelope containing something flat and sponge-like, and the change from the money in the first envelope. After three months of such journeys Arthur discovered what Robboe sent him to buy, because one morning the chemist was in too much of a hurry to see that the envelope was firmly sealed. So Arthur was able to open it while waiting for the traffic-lights to change, to see what was inside, and seal it again, this time securely. He found what he had expected to find, and rode his bike back along Castle Boulevard laughing like a maniac, overtaking buses, milkcarts, even cars in his furious speed. Everyone stared at him, as if he had gone mad. ‘Three packets!’ he shouted out. ‘The dirty bogger! He’s got a fancy-woman! Nine times a week!’ So the news broke in the shop, and long afterwards, when Arthur had been taken off the messenger job and put on a drill, if he left his machine to walk out to the lavatory, someone would shout: ‘Where are you going, Arthur?’ And if Robboe was not in the shop he would yell back at the top of his voice: ‘I’m going downtown to get Robboe’s rubbers!’ — in his broad, deliberately brutalized Robin Hood accent that brought screams of laughter from the women, and guffaws from the men.

Robboe stopped at his machine, picked up a piece of finished work, and checked its size carefully with a micrometer.

Arthur paused while turning the capstan. ‘All right?’ he asked belligerently.

Robboe, always with a cigarette in his mouth, blew smoke away from his eyes, and ash fell on to his brown overall-coat. He made the last measurement with a depth-gauge. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nothing wrong’ — and walked off.

Arthur and Robboe tolerated and trusted each other. The enemy in them stayed dormant, a black animal stifling the noise of its growls as if commanded by a greater master to lie low, an animal that had perhaps been passed on for some generations from father to son on either side. They respected this lineage in each other, recognized it when they asked or answered tersely the few brusque questions that passed between them speaking with loud mouths and passionless eyes.

Robboe had a car — admitted, an ancient Morris — and a semidetached in a posh district, and Arthur held these pretensions against him because basically they were of equal stock, and he would therefore have felt friendlier had Robboe lived in the same kind of four-roomed house as himself. For Robboe was in no way better than him, he ruminated, spinning the turret and lightly applying its chamfer-tool to one of the last dozen cylinders of the day, and no better than anybody else if it came to that. Arthur did not assess men on their knowledge or achievement, but by a blind and passionate method that weighed their more basic worth. It was an emotional gauge, always accurate when set by him, and those to whom it was applied either passed or did not pass the test. Within the limits of its narrow definitions he used it as a reliable guide as to who was and who was not his friend, and up to what point he could trust a person who might become his friend.

So when Arthur looked at a man, or heard the inflexion in his voice, or saw him walk, he made a snap judgment that turned out to be as accurate as one made after weeks of acquaintance. His first assessment of Robboe had never altered. In fact it had gained ground. His half-conscious conclusions proved to him that no one man was better than the other in this particular case, that they shared with plain openness a world of enmity that demanded a certain amount of trust. And Arthur did not doubt that Robboe had applied a similar test to him, with the same conclusions. So the respect they had for each other was based on a form of judgment that neither could give words to.