VT Coughtrey - Headrow Clothes (2)

NOTES	Over the next few days I became increasingly frustrated by the leisurely or perhaps moribund pace of life in the clips cellar. I was desperate to start filling and sewing sacks about four times as fast as poor old George was doing it or indeed allowing me to do it. When a bogie was finally emptied of clips, I grabbed it and, with the help of my new friend Arthur the cantankerous hoistman, I toured every floor of the factory, astounding the tailors by reducing their clip mountains, making myself very popular in the process. I wanted to tour again and again until all clips had been cleared and all floors around machines thoroughly swept, but there were as yet no more empty bogies, just a great queue of full ones. In any case, my one excursion had already annoyed George and Joss.
	When the surly rag merchant came down to the cellar to remove a few token sacks, I quietly intimated to him that things were going to change once George had left. Sacks would be taken to the loading bay, and there would be a lot more of them. More care would be taken not to mix types of material as well. The merchant became a lot less surly on hearing this. God, I was beginning to talk as though I were thinking of hanging around for longer than two weeks!
	Maggie the canteen lady gave me, as well as George, free meals because I helped him with the daily spud-bashing. In fact, when I told her my National Assistance had finally run out, she started giving me secret packs of sandwiches to take home. Her meals were the usual institutional fare of that time - thin slices of gristly meat, lumpy watery mashed potatoes, overboiled cabbage and cloying pudding with atrocious custard - that sort of thing, but the nine months of my Grand Tour had left me with a totally undiscriminating appetite. I simply shovelled down with gratitude anything vaguely edible, without forming any opinion as to its quality.
	At lunch times people always kept to the same tables. There was a spare place at a long table occupied almost entirely by girls who had jobs such as sewing buttons on shirts. I soon learned that Leeds working girls, though coarse and over-fond of lewd banter, were entirely open, honest, warm and friendly. In those days a Cockney (which to northern people meant anyone from south of Nottingham) was a great novelty in Leeds. Curiously, the Asian population of Bradford had not yet started to find its way along the ten-mile road into Leeds, except for a few curry house owners and staff, and Leeds residents and workers seemed to be all white West Yorkshire folk born and bred (apart from the university students, who kept very much to their own area of the city).
	I struck an instant rapport with the factory girls and had soon told them everything of my recent history. You couldn't shock or scandalize them, only fascinate them. Lunchtime footsie (their stockinged feet, my crotch) under the table became a daily routine. They took it in turns. Any conversation that wasn't about me was about sex. They were all virgins, so they said, and to prove their ignorance of sexual matters they had a tendency to ask alarming questions in the bluntest terms. I obliged with equally blunt answers, not that I always knew quite what I was talking about, but I liked to pretend. No doubt they eventually discovered for themselves some of the hilarious errors in my answers. They also kept on threatening me with some mysterious initiation rite called 'packing up'. This was apparently carried out on new young male workers by the girls in any Leeds factory and the ordeal began by being dragged into a hoist after work, after the hoistman had gone. The hoist was then stopped between two floors to ensure privacy. What the hell happened after that I mercifully never discovered. For some reason I must have been rejected as a victim - possibly I was too old at 23. To this day I have wondered what this 'packing up' involved. Does anyone know and does it still go on?
	As the end of the second week approached I found that it was not only my first pay packet I was looking forward to (largely with drink in mind - I'd hardly managed to get my hands on any for months), I was also keen to roar into action with those sacks and bogies, following the retirement of George on Friday. All thoughts of disappearing on the Friday night were now forgotten
	Friday night came at last, George said his goodbyes, and armed with my first pay packet I headed for the nearest pub. I fell in love instantly with Leeds pubs and Tetley's mild - very superior to Tamplin's or any other southern mild! The pubs were still largely of the civilized traditional kind, consisting of separate small rooms called the smoke (for men only), the snug (for women only), the parlour (mixed but still lacking in one or two pubs) and the bar. You could fetch your own drinks from the bar but waiters 'waited on' in the other rooms. Unfortunately, some large pubs in the city centre were already beginning to modernise. There will be a lot more about Leeds pubs in the next chapter!
	Presumably, on that first pay night I got very drunk, but I can't remember. Anyway, I certainly returned to work on Monday morning. Now without George to restrain me, but with the scowling disapproval of Joss, I rushed headlong into the task of emptying bogies into sacks, weighing, sewing up and labelling the sacks, and touring the factory with bogies. Within a week I had a train of empty bogies and very little to put in them, as I had by now cleared all floors of the factory of their mounds of clips and deep rubbish around the machines. I soon found that the clips were in fact produced at a very slow rate, so the backlog must have taken months or years to accumulate. On rag merchant day, I humped a couple of hundred sacks up to the loading bay (mostly still George's half-full ones) and even helped the man load his lorry. I'd soon made a great pal there.
	For the next couple of weeks rag merchant day was the one heavy day of the week, but when the great backlog was finally cleared, even that day was a doddle, with not all that many sacks to go each time. The main work of each day was sweeping up the night's rat droppings and the rubbish, including sanitary towels, that they had ripped out of the sacks. Now and again, attempts would be made by a pest controller to get rid of these constant companions, but in general only young inexperienced rats took the poison or got caught in the traps. In the latter case, older rats would sometimes gnaw a victim's leg off to rescue him. The old hands knew how to take bait from a trap without springing it. Nevertheless, a huge mature specimen would occasionally be found dead in the morning and I delighted in holding the corpse by the tail and taking into the canteen to show Maggie. She acted impressed but you could tell she wasn't, by that or anything else. She'd seen it all.
	I took to adding up the columns of figures for the weights of the various materials myself, and only took the book to the office about once a month. They trusted my results, arrived at without the help of a calculator. In clearing the cellar of sacks, I uncovered a filthy, crumbling old desk, which I cleaned and managed to patch up with the help of a maintenance man. I found a stool to go with it, and spent a good deal of each day reading the newspapers that came down to Joss with the waste paper. The fumes from the boiler and the lack of oxygen caused me to doze at the desk for much of each day. Joss temporarily brightened towards me now that I was not doing so much 'fert bloody bosses'.
	One day, round about my fourth week there, Rowling, the big bald pompous director who had taken me on, paid one of his rare visits to the cellar to see how things were going. Fortunately, I was actually stuffing a sack at the time. He glanced round in astonishment at the empty space, the relatively clean floor and the desk with ledger and pen placed neatly in the middle of it. "To my office, Victor, if you please!" he commanded. I sensed part of what was coming.
	"Well now, lad," he said, "I must say you have rather exceeded expectations. I think we can manage a modest increase in your wages to, say, ₤9 per week. In addition, I am placing you in charge of the waste paper disposal. Joss is under your direction from now on. And you can start by stopping him from smoking among the waste paper. Do I make myself clear?" Somewhat startled, I assured him that he was very clear. I returned to the cellar with a mixture of jubilation and anxiety. I told Joss he had to stop smoking while working and that furthermore I wanted all the backlog of waste paper and cardboard, among which he was barely visible, cleared within days. He looked utterly astounded. "Who says?" "I do, Joss. I've been put in overall charge of the clips and waste paper department." He seemed about to explode. "Put in charge?" He stammered. "Bloody Cockney, here for five minutes, put in charge?" No doubt he spat before letting lose a long string of obscenities. Anyway, the net result was that he was not going to do anything I asked, under any circumstances and there was mounting tension for a few weeks, continuing after the Christmas break, until I barged into Rowling's office and demanded: "Tell me who's in charge down there, Mr Rowling !" "I've already told you as plainly as can be - you are ! Now what's the problem?" When I told him, he came storming down to the cellar with me and bawled at Joss "This man is in charge. You will do as he says. Do you understand?"
Does anyone know how clips are managed in a present-day tailoring factory? Presumably, the clips are still recycled? The material produced from most of the clips was called 'shoddy', hence the use of the word to mean poor quality. Bradford was the main area of the shoddy mills.	I can't remember how Joss reacted to this but the upshot was that within a week he was collecting his cards. He was out - whether sacked or quitting voluntarily, I don't recall. Rowling said he would find a more reasonable replacement. "The fact is, Mr Rowling," I said, "I could do that job as well in addition to my own, easily enough. Why take on anyone else? I know you've kindly just given me a rise, but for another small one I could do both jobs" He looked quite shocked for a few seconds, then replied "What about ₤10?" This, of course, was a huge bargain for him, but I readily accepted. It wasn't so much the money I was after.