VT Coughtrey - cotton wool

NOTES There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me.	As soon as I parted company with Sid I got another job. This was as a lap carrier in the cotton wool department of Maw's pharmaceutical factory in Cromer Road, New Barnet. Lap carrying was no doubt a very common occupation in the mills of Lancashire, but I suspect I was the only lap carrier in the whole of Southern England. The job consisted of shouldering fairly heavy rolls ('laps') of raw cotton, running with them into the carding room and loading them onto the carding machines, which turned them into cotton wool. There were about twenty machines in two rows and it was necessary to run with the laps continuously (except in the tea breaks) in order to keep the machines supplied. Several women stood at the end of the conveyor belt leading from the rows of machines. Their job was to roll up precise lengths of the cotton wool and stuff each roll into a carton. They were on piece-work and therefore worked at a tremendous pace. When I first started I was not always able to keep all twenty machines loaded. At such times the cotton wool arriving at the point where the women boxed it up was obviously thinner than it was supposed to be, so the inspector would reject it and the women would lose money. The women could tell instantly when the stuff was coming through underweight. There would be howls of rage. Not only would they swear and scream abuse at me themselves, they would also complain to the foreman, who would then tell me in no uncertain terms how useless I was. He was himself afraid of these women, because the loss of a few pence turned them into the most vile harridans. I was in effect their slave, working myself to exhaustion so that they could earn considerably more than I.
	I don't know how or why I stuck it out during the first few weeks, but the fact is that I soon began to feel stronger and fitter than ever before and managed to get on top of the job. After that, I started to get on quite well with the women and learned how to make them laugh by such devices as miming sexual acts of various sorts from time to time. This was also a way of demonstrating that I was now such an accomplished and dynamic lap carrier that I could actually spare the time for such nonsense. I am indebted to that job for the discovery that I probably had more stamina than all those boys at school who had made such fun of my supposedly puny physique.
	Not many men worked in that department. There were a couple of mechanics, the foreman and the two men, Geoff and Dave, who ran the great scutching machine. (This turned bales of compressed raw cotton into the laps that I carried). Les was amiable enough but Geoff was just about the most militantly cynical and viciously coarse individual that I've ever come across. His chief delight was in describing in minute detail all the most unpleasant aspects of the sex he had had with his wife the night before. There was nothing particularly unusual about male factory workers describing their bedroom activities in a very unromantic manner in order to raise raucous laughter from their colleagues, but Geoff didn't intend it to be funny. He described everything in the vilest and crudest possible terms and seemed genuinely angry about the necessity for sex. You were not supposed to laugh. The other men were uneasy about it, but tended to be a bit scared of him because he seemed to be bottling up so much anger. Years later I read that he had been jailed for life for chopping up his wife.
	Although I was as irritated as much as anyone else by Geoff, he wasn't really the worst aspect of the job as far as I was concerned. Many years earlier, probably in the 1940s, there had been a terrible accident in the carding room. In those days the machines were all powered by one great engine, which was outside in the yard. The machines were connected to it by a system of huge drive belts that ran across the ceiling and out through the wall. A mechanic had got caught up in these belts. From workers who had been there at the time, there were graphic descriptions of how the fire brigade had to scrape what was left of him off the wall. Each machine had long since been converted to run off its own electric motor, so there was no possibility of such an accident happening again, but I was somehow haunted by this dreadful event. My eyes were drawn over and over again to the place high up on the filthy wall where this unfortunate worker ended up. It didn't help that there were dark reddish patches of mould in those gloomy regions above the inadequate lighting. It may seem ridiculous that I should have been affected so constantly by a tragedy that had happened perhaps fifteen years earlier and which, furthermore, couldn't possibly happen again, but it definitely cast a shadow over the job.
	A much lesser problem, which diminished almost to nothing as I built up an immunity, was the result of the laps providing a cosy hiding place for wasps. This warm shelter somehow interrupted their natural cycle, and kept them alive all the year round. They would crawl out of the laps and down my neck. But after I had been stung a few dozen times, my body ceased to react very much, and it no longer bothered me.
	The most positive aspects of working there were the Twins and John Stone. The Twins were probably a bit older than I (I was 19). They were not only attractive, but obviously virgins. They spent their working hours in splendid isolation in a wide open space in the middle of the carding room perched on the tops of things resembling step ladders. Between them was a tower from the top of which issued sanitary towels made by this unaccountably vertical machine from some of the cotton wool I was producing. Their job was to take turns at grabbing the sanitary towels as they emerged and stuff them into packets. I became quite obsessed with these girls and stared at them longingly while loading the laps onto the machines. I even tried to date them (you couldn't date just one of them - they were inseparable). They discussed the idea earnestly, but decided it would not be a good idea. One day they beckoned me over to them, looking very conspiratorial, so I got quite excited. "What did the foreman mean?" one of them asked. "We asked him how he could bear being away from his wife for so long when he was in the Navy and he just said that you had to take matters in hand." I explained to them in straightforward terms what the the foreman had meant, but they still didn't seem to get it. At this point I realised that even in the unlikely event of their agreeing to a date, nothing interesting could possibly happen, so I lost interest in them. I liked the idea of their being virgins, but not the idea of their remaining so after a night out with me.
	John Stone was a lugubrious mechanic who turned out to be teaching himself to play the clarinet. I began to take my banjo round to his house on a fairly regular basis and we played duets. It wasn't exactly jazz, just 1930s tunes played straight with banjo chord accompaniment. We practised a lot and got fairly good. This was something of a revival for me, as I hadn't touched my banjo for some time. It even prompted me to buy a new instrument, still junk really, but a bit of an improvement on the old one. I was keen to introduce John to jazz, although I only tried him with the trad variety. We went to a lot of trad clubs around London in his old van and he became quite keen.
	After about a year in the job the foreman began to get on my nerves badly. It didn't matter how hard I worked, everything that went wrong, such as lumps in the laps causing the machines to jam had to be my fault, however illogical this was. One day I told him in no uncertain terms what he could do with the job and walked out.