I had never seen the inside of a factory apart from when I stood outside the one where Dad worked, while Mom went inside to collect his wages for the few days that he had managed to work the week before. I was about six years old and immediately took a dislike to factories.
Dad worked intermittently; years of standing in front of a grinding machine to remove the rough edges from sand castings had permanently damaged his lungs. The doors of the factory were wide open, but I struggled to see inside as it was pitch black apart from rows and rows of what I thought were Catherine wheels that briefly lit up the darkness. As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I realized behind each wheel was a face. Dad told me later that these were grinding wheels, and the lights were sparks as they spun around, removing the excess metal from the castings.
It was 1957, I was fifteen years old and just finished my education at Hunters Hill Open Air School. My sister got me a job in a local factory as a toolmaker. I wasn’t very happy about it, but Dad said a Toolmaker was almost like a God. They were people who created things. So he was right, they were the same as God, I thought, because he had created the Earth in seven days. Back then, I wasn’t that ambitious.
The reality was a shock. On my first day, I was taken into a workshop full of strange-looking machines. Some of the older ones were driven by wide leather belts that spun around a long metal shaft, the same type that drove the spinning machines in the cotton mills centuries before. There were no guards on any of them. Every so often, there were clicks as the brass couplings holding the two halves of the belt together passed over the drive roller. Alf the forman, who was showing me around, said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Don’t go anywhere near them, because if they break, they will cut your bloody head off’. While I am not very keen on my head now, I quite liked it back then.
The second week I was there, Alf asked me to take some drawings up to the offices two floors up and explained how to get there. I went through two sets of doors and entered a long, dark passage. It was very narrow, and when I was halfway, a dim figure emerged from the gloom. It was a young girl, she stopped walking and put her back to the wall and said, ‘queeze past,’ but there was not enough room. I put my back to the wall and pressed as hard as I could, then shuffled sideways. It was only when I got level with her that I realized it was inevitable that my chest would touch hers.
She put her right arm out and placed it against the wall opposite, stopping me from going any further, then she did the same with her left arm. I was trapped. She smiled and said confidently, ‘You must be new here. tell me all about yourself.’ Her chest was right in front of me and seemed to have expanded substantially in size, pushing my back even further into the brick wall. I realized I wasn’t God after all, just an apprentice toolmaker.
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