VT Coughtrey - in the dark

NOTES	My mother wasted no time in taking me back to the Youth Employment Office. It was just before Christmas 1959, so I had lasted about 8 months in my first job and had only just turned 17. There was no talk of continuing my education this time. I was sent straight to Hegarty & Merry’s silk screen printing works in Park Road, High Barnet.
	Hegarty and Merry had recently started their firm with £100 they had won on the Football Pools. They claimed to have been responsible for turning the ancient Chinese craft of silk screen printing into a commercially viable method of producing posters, by pioneering the use of photographic rather than hand-cut stencils. They had about a dozen home-made printing benches and employed about 30 people. I was taken on as a printer's labourer at 50 bob (£2.50) a week. My mother was prepared to let me keep £1 of this, a considerable improvement in my fortunes.
	This first encounter with factory workers in an all-male environment was a bit of a shock at first. Of course, school had been an all-male environment too, but even the coarseness and cynicism of schoolboys was no match for that of factory hands. These people could only relate to each other by way of banter, explicit sexual and lavatorial remarks, accounts of drinking exploits (almost certainly fictitious) and football results. Actually, sex and going to the lavatory were pretty much the same thing - bodily functions to be held in bitter contempt. You felt that the endless contest of crudity was some sort of howl of protest or desperate attempt to punish whatever idiotic force had invented the human body.
	Of course, I encountered all this whenever and wherever I worked in factories subsequently, although it gradually seemed to abate over the years with the lessening of the segregation of the sexes. In the late fifties and early sixties, your conversation had to become instantly clean and inoccuous whenever a female, a tea lady for example, approached, but as soon as the alien was out of earshot it was obligatory to say either "You could always put a sack over its 'ead, it's all 'ole" or "Christ, I could't 'arf slip that a length", according to whether the lady was plain or pretty. I wasn't altogether out of tune with these sentiments, insofar as they had a certain anti-intellectual ring to them that accorded with my lack of sympathy with the erudite. Furthermore, there was no attempt to exclude me: I was one of the lads at last, and this cut some ice with me. Nevertheless, it all got rather tedious at times, and the silly business of having to protect women from it really got up my nose. In fact, although I found it a strain to force myself to join in when among men, I delighted in being unacceptably vulgar to women (although I only dared try it with the girls in the packaging department, on the rare occasions when it was necessary to invade their territory on some errand). I didn't like the way that women went along with the idea that they needed to be cushioned and protected. Equality of the sexes was on my agenda long before most women got interested in it ! Anyway, I felt the least I could do was to give them an inkling of how men talked about them behind their backs. They didn't like it.
	My job as a labourer entailed simply taking each poster from the printer after he had printed it (by dragging paint over the screen with a squeegee), and placing it carefully in a rack to dry. I discovered a couple of things that seem to surprise most people. Firstly, no matter how simple and repetitive a task is, there is always scope for becoming better than average at doing it. Secondly, having become good at it, one automatically begins to take a pride in it or, at least, I do. I've rarely encountered any sympathy with this trait. Certainly, in the hayday of the liberal sociologists, in the sixties, I found it all too easy to provoke the anger of the middle-class left as well as the contempt of one's fellow workers by confessing to getting satisfaction from very simple and repetitive jobs requiring no education. This sort of work was supposed to destroy you, but I was always happy enough to do it (while paradoxically hating the bosses for exploiting me).
I'm delighted to report that Mac, the photostencil maker's assistant I took over from, has contacted me after reading this chapter. He now lives in the USA.	Of course, the fumes of the PVC and cellulose paints were terrible, causing dizziness and a touch of painter's colic at times. Fortunately, after a few weeks, I was summoned to Jack Merry's office and told that there was something better for me. The photostencil maker's assistant was leaving and the foreman had suggested me as a replacement. I accepted the job. From that moment, there was something of a change of attitude towards me on the part of the printers and their labourers. They had all coveted the job, yet I, the most recent arrival, had been offered it. Apart from the relatively high status of the job, it was thought that it paid well. In fact, being under 21, I was still to be paid only £3 a week. (I was careful not to tell my mother about this modest improvement in my fortunes). For a while, due to the resentment engendered by my promotion I experienced bullying, including daily minor assaults by one or two of the youngsters. It was too much like being back in school and I was on the point of simply walking out of the job when the ringleader was sacked for theft. After that, things quietened down again.
	The photographic department was in two parts. There was a small darkroom with a home-made angle-iron track running down the middle. Mounted on this track was a trolley bearing a huge old plate camera modified to take sheet film. Artwork was pinned to the wall and photographed. When the negative had been developed a positive transparency was printed from it. Outside of the darkroom was a large space containing an ancient carbon arc lamp suspended from the ceiling and a very large stone sink. Sheets of gelatin were sensitized with potassium bichromate, then sandwiched with the photographic positives and exposed to the carbon arc for about 15 minutes (there was never any mention of goggles to protect my eyes from the ultra violet light). When placed in the sink and hosed down with hot water, the gelatine dissolved where it had been covered with the black parts of the positive, but was insoluble where exposed to the ultra violet. While still wet, the stencil thus produced had to be stuck to a tightly-stretched silk screen. When dry, a protective layer of latex had to be rubbed off with the fingers. It was all too easy to rub some of the stencil off with it, in which case the stencil had to be made all over again and there was hell to pay. Usually the poster to be produced had more than one colour in it - sometimes several. It was then necessary to produce a separate stencil for each colour, and the artwork had to be photographed several times, using different kinds of film and various methods of processing to produce a separate black and white positive for each color.
	The department had a staff of two - myself and my boss, Eddy Saddington. Eddy was an energetic and efficient character of about 30, very jovial for most of the time, in the usual sex-and-lavatory fashion, but capable of getting into foul moods when I made mistakes. An odd thing about him was his middle class accent. I had been doing my best to reverse the attempts of my school to iron out my working class accent, in order to be accepted by the printers, but now felt the need to swing back again. I've been swinging backwards and forwards accent-wise ever since, to suit the circumstances. The ability can be useful. Eddy did the photography and darkroom processing, I mixed the chemicals, made the stencils and stuck them to the screens as described above, removed old stencils with caustic soda and roughed-up new screens with scouring powder to improve adhesion. Making the tea for the whole factory at break times was also my job at first, but the tea I made was so dire that I was soon taken off that duty. Another job that was supposed to be mine was making new screens, but I hadn't the strength to stretch the silk tightly enough over the frames, so Eddy was forced to do this himself.
	Occasionally I had to visit Bert the framemaker in the cellar to pick up some new frames. Bert was an extremely morose, uncommunicative character of about 60. He stood all day at a bench in his filthy, rubbish-filled cellar hammering away at frames, and he greatly resented intruders in his domain. He appeared to live on baked beans - there were empty cans all over the place. This pit stank of stale baked beans, mould - and Bert. A great pile of rotting tea-leaves in a dark space between the bottom of the steps and his door didn't help. Tea boys (including me) had long dumped them there. Bert always worked in a ragged old overcoat and scarf. I never saw him coming or going - he was always just there, and I suspected he slept there.
	An important part of my job was to keep Eddy company during some of his long hours in the darkroom. Eventually he sensed that I wasn't really enthusiastic about the usual manner of conversing, so we began to sing duets instead. After hundreds of hours locked up in there together, we were a passable act, singing mostly Flanagan & Allen and other stuff of that sort. From time to time Eddy couldn't resist taking a break from singing to trot out his limited repertoire of sickenly crude 'jokes'. I think he felt a desperate need to shock me. Meanwhile, aspects of my life outside of work would possibly have shocked Eddy more . . .