PART II: LONDON, ENGLAND
My second experience
of working in a factory was in London, following seven months of fruitlessly
searching for a job in which I could use my writing skills, seven months during
which we lived on Shirley’s earnings as a supply teacher in various London
schools, while I stayed at home and cooked terrible meals that have become a
famous family joke, especially my much-criticized lemon meringue pie. I went, as before, to the Labour Exchange,
and was directed to a food factory maintained in Hammersmith by the Lyons company
that operated hundreds of corner tea-shops as they were called, or cafes as
they might now be more correctly called.
The process at the Lyons employment
office differed markedly from what I had undergone at the Australian Jam Company
in Melbourne a couple of years before. Then I’d been greeted by a rough-looking
diamond in an open-necked shirt, no jacket or tie, the factory manager, no
less, who had me working within minutes.
In London, by contrast, I presented
my card to a woman behind a desk who told me the wages were six pounds four and
six with an eleven shilling bonus, forty-eight hours a week, seven-thirty to
five, with work every Saturday morning till twelve, and not much overtime.
After a long wait, I was shown into the office of the Personnel Officer, who
asked what had I been doing between December 1950 and February 1952? Just what had I been doing
in India? “Of course,” she said, sounding dissatisfied with my responses, “we will need two references….”
Next I went to a little man in a
white coat, the Superintendent of the department in which I was to work. He
seemed slightly put out that I could speak English rather better than he could,
and seemed nervous as to my intentions. “Are you just coming to us as a
stop-gap?” he asked. I stumbled that, well, in the absence of anything else,
after all…. He told me to report next morning. I reported, and sat for a long
time in a room with a group of girls destined to work “in the ice cream,” they
said, and a Ukrainian lion-tamer reading a copy of a newspaper called The Entertainer. Someone came and gave
us a booklet outlining the firm’s benefits. We would have two weeks’ holiday
after a year; after two years we could join the firm’s pension fund; after five
years, if we decided to marry, the firm would sell us a wedding cake at a
twenty per cent reduction. I read this out and everyone laughed. 
My first regular job was on the
baler. Some men and women stood at machines stitching the cardboard cartons in
which food was dispatched to Lyons restaurants throughout England. My job was
to pick up stray pieces of cardboard and rope and make them into bales. My
workmates couldn’t figure out, from my accent, why I was there. “Are you ’ere
reg’lar?” they asked me, day after day.
After all, I was evidently educated.
After a week I was replaced on the
baler by an Irishman called Pat, one of hundreds of Irish favored by the
company because they were so hard to organize into unions. Pat told me he never
went to school for more than a week at a time: instead, he worked on local
farms to help his widowed mother. At thirteen he got a job as a bootboy in a
London hotel, for which he left home. But he chucked up that job, and when the
war broke out enlisted. He’d been told that after the war they were going to create
an England fit for heroes. Discharged, he was given a ticket and told to
present it to his local Labour Exchange in Northern Ireland, and it would get
him a job. He turned up, along with two hundred others, to find no jobs on
offer. He returned to England, worked in automobile factories, coal mines,
steel works, before drifting to the food factory. He had been a member of
dozens of unions, and had no faith in them. He had learned one lesson in life:
“They’re all in it for what they can get out of it. It’s all just a big racket,
so it is.” Like me, he hated and distrusted conservatives, but when I tried to
convince him to be a socialist, he simply scoffed.
Next I fed raw material to a conveyor
belt on which a long line of women filled cardboard cartons with cakes (Swiss
rolls, cup cakes, etc, all inedible stuff). The work of pulling up the crates
came easily to Sailor and Dutchy, my workmates, but lifting the heavy trays out
of the crates taxed my strength to the limit. Dutchy (from Holland) talked all the
time about the great jobs he had held previously. He had a better education
than most of the others, and was regularly accused of being a fucking foreign
bastard.
Sailor had been twenty-six years in
the Navy as a bosun. He was cool to me at first because he had no time for New
Zealand. This was why: in 1926 one of his friends was stranded in Melbourne (as
close to New Zealand as Moscow is to London) after missing his ship, and he had
to pay his own fare north to Singapore! "There's more restrictions there
than what there is here,” he said, definitively. He’d been pushing the bins on
the conveyor belt for seventeen years, and was terribly rude to the women,
Navy-style. The younger women were flashy and rowdy, the middle-aged women
comfortable and cheerful. They all made life miserable for Christine, a strong,
nubile Greek girl, who had fallen among them. She was a bloody foreigner to all
of them. Sailor, pulling her bra straps and tickling her, was her protector,
but he hid it under a barrage of off- colour remarks that would have offended
her had she understood half of them. He informed me indignantly that one of the
women had described her as a Jewish pig. He told me the girl was of Jewish
origin. I said I thought she was Greek Orthodox. “Yes, she’s Greek Orthodox,”
he said, “but she’s Jewish,” a glorious example of his logic.
They all seemed still to be living
the war. “Trubble is,” said Mary, an adorable duck from Nottingham, “too many
furriners ruunin’ cuntry nawadays.” One day I told them I wouldn’t
fight in the next war. Ada screamed at me that I would think different if I’d
been through a war, as she had. Nora
weighed in: “We’re British to the backbone. We fight ’cause we know we’re in t’
right.” She invited Shirley and me home for dinner one night and confided in us
that “there’s one good thing Hitler done anyway.” What was that? I asked. “He
got rid of all them Jews.” Such a charmer, she was.
On the other side of the track were
Sid, Jack and Harry. Jack had once been an assistant stage manager; Harry had
six children and had lost his previous job as a wine cellarman for being drunk
on the job; Sid was the only one of the 8,800 workers in the factory who
professed to be a voting Conservative. The rest, though I could hardly call
them socialists, were Labour Party voters to a man.
I liked these people, but I found it
hard to credit that these meaningless jobs and restricted prospects were what
confronted them for the rest of their lives, and there was no escape for any of
them. The wages were minimal. The foremen were appalling little snitches who
were always trying to catch workers eating the goods they were packing, or
taking a surreptitious smoke. When one shouted at me on my second day, I
shouted back at him; and thereafter we weren’t on speaking terms. The Superintendent
seldom emerged from his office in a corner of the department. The factory
manager, of course, was never seen.
As I prepared to quit, I was again,
as in Australia, offered promotion to a more responsible job. I was even more
pleased than before to tell them I was leaving.
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