VT Coughtrey - Vic Stevens

NOTES There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me.	In the car, on the way to the mysterious house, Windlock explained that he was the warden of a very nice hostel set up by himself but financed generously by a committee of prominent people of Leeds, including a magistrate, the vicar of St George's, and various business people. He himself was responsible for choosing the residents and he carefully picked only those he felt were genuinely interested in rehabilitation and stood a very good chance of becoming model citizens. His instinct for this, he said, was widely respected. "What a gullible twit" I thought to myself.
	It was well past midnight when we arrived at this large detached house in a smart outer suburb, and the house was in silence. Having shown me the luxurious bathroom, Windlock took me straight to my room. The large beautifully furnished bedroom would have put many a four-star hotel to shame. I had a quick bath, changed into the pyjamas he had issued me with and climbed into the bed, which must have been the most comfortable I had ever experienced. There was no call the next morning, but when I heard people moving about I got dressed and went downstairs. Windlock greeted me cordially and showed me to the breakfast room. About a dozen well-scrubbed but strangely subdued young men - mostly younger than myself - sat round the long table. They greeted me politely, but without enthusiasm and invited me to tuck into the sumptuous feast spread out all along the table. I certainly didn't need prompting twice. This bunch seemed to have little appetite, so I took it upon myself to make sure that not much went back to the kitchen. It was the best feed I'd had for a very long time.
	Washing-up and general housework was done on a strict rota basis, but people kept saying that I looked as though I needed a good rest, and that there was really no hurry for me to get involved in the chores. I didn't argue. I don't remember anyone going off to work. Sometime during the morning, which I spent lounging on the luxurious sofa, Windlock called me into his office. He said that I was welcome to take it easy for a few weeks until I was fully recovered from the rigours of the road - there was no hurry to start thinking about getting a job. He gave me a letter for the NAB, and said that there would be no difficulty getting a generous amount off them each week while I was staying there. A letter from him carried a lot of weight, he said, so there would be none of the usual nonsense about green cards and having to apply for a job before being able to get National Assistance. The hostel committee required a much smaller rent than he quoted in these letters, he said, and the surplus, added to the 'pocket money' provided by the NAB over and above the rent meant that I would have a fair bit to spend on new clothes, or whatever.
	Gullible or not, this man was one of the very best, I thought, as I went off into town with his letter. On the way, I passed a large clothing factory (of which there were very many in Leeds), at the western end of the Headrow, called Headrow Clothes (surely not still there?). It had the usual sign outside, advertising masses of vacances. It was the 'general labourer' job that caught my eye. I was still thinking in terms of doing the usual two weeks' work for a week's wages, to supplement whatever I was going to score from the NAB, and jobs involving any training or responsibility were a pointless pain when you were planning to disappear after a couple of weeks. I walked in and applied for the job. This turned out to be no ordinary labouring job. For a start it was one of those strange jobs where none of the foremen or even the production manager had any authority over you. For unskilled jobs, it was at that time still the usual thing to apply simply to the foreman of the department in question, who gave you the job there and then if he liked the look of you, or even if he didn't, when labour was so scarce. Some of the lowliest jobs, however, were (and probably still are) a one or two-man department in their own right, so you were answerable only to the directors. The director I saw was Mr Rowling. He was a large and enormously pompous man, but he took me on with hardly a question, informing me that I would get £8 a week (wages had been rising fast recently, so this now seemed a miserable amount).
	He ordered the timekeeper, a most likeable man nearing retirement age, whose name was Tom, to show me the job (after I'd agreed to take it !). He led me down a steep and narrow flight of stone steps to a dingy and cavernous cellar. I was immediately hit by the sulphurous fumes from the great boiler, which was also down there. There seemed to be no ventilation. The cellar was divided into several large areas, the boiler room being one. Tom showed me into another of these areas. One half was stacked from floor to ceiling with hundreds of half-full sacks (the old-fashioned hessian variety) and the other was almost equally full of piles of cardboard and brown paper. The little remaining free floor space was deeply covered with rubbish - general litter, scraps of cloth and dirt. Much of this appeared to have spilled out from ragged holes in many of the sacks. High up in the gloom of the ceiling were a couple of glass-brick windows, set in the pavement of the street above and long since incapable of producing more than a dim glow of natural light. The walls were all black with thick ancient dirt (and soot from the boiler, no doubt). It was obvious that nothing in this filthy hole had been cleaned for decades, possibly not even since the factory was built nearly a hundred years earlier.
	Set among this salubrious scene were two wizened little old men (they were younger than I am now, actually), both wearing filthy ragged old clothes and cloth caps. One, who was sowing up a sack he had just filled, was lacking an eye. The other, whose name was Joss, was very slowly tearing up sheets of crumpled brown wrapping paper and placing the pieces in a hand-operated baling machine. He paused for a rest, breathing heavily, after placing each piece in the machine. It was obvious that these jobs, whatever they were, were considered suitable only for the near-unemployable.
	When Tom introduced me, they grunted sullenly and carried on with their slow work. Tom said that they had both been there for many years but that the one-eyed man was leaving. It was his job - 'clipsman' - that I would be taking over. The work theoretically consisted of touring the entire factory with a large bogie, collecting up the clips (off-cuts of material) from bins under each tailoring machine, bringing them down to the cellar in the hoist, sorting them into various types of material and bagging them up. The sacks then had to be weighed on the ancient weighing machine, and labelled with the weight and the type of material. Once a week the sacks had to be put on the loading bay for the ragman, who would then pay for them in the General Office. The floors around the machines had to be swept and the sweepings bagged up as well - the ragman could sell them to farmers as mulch. However, Tom confided in me that the one eyed clipsman rarely toured with a bogie. He pointed out several overflowing ones in a passageway and explained that the exasperated tailors from each floor often had to come down to the cellar, try to find a couple of empty bogies, take them up to their floors, fill them with clips and bring them down again. Similarly, the ragman and the waste-paper merchant were obliged to come down to the cellar to collect the rags and Joss's bales of paper themselves and consequently knocked a lot off the prices. He next took me on a tour of the whole factory and I could see the problem - the tailors seemed to be up to their waists in clips. There was plenty of brown paper and cardboard around too, not yet collected by Joss for baling.
	As I headed for the NAB I rather doubted that I would be turning up for that job at all, otherwise I might not be able to stick it for more than a few days, then I would get no pay out of it. From my wide experience of NAB offices I was very doubtful of Windlock's claim that getting money off them with his letter would be a piece of cake. For one thing, I believed that I would need to get yet another National Insurance number and adopt yet another name to go with it, to be safe from prosecution for defrauding the State or failing to maintain myself, so I went to the National Insurance Office first. Actually, as I hadn't used my real name and original NI number for a long time to tap the NAB, and never for booking into a spike, I could probably have reverted to them without danger, but the constant name-changing had become something of a habit. Anyway, this was the point at which I adopted the name Vic Stevens, by which I am still widely known, although the dual identity has been no secret for decades. I have used both names equally openly since almost that time.
	Although I had already got a job, off my own bat, it should still have been necessary to call at the Labour Exchange to collect a form B1 for the NAB. However I decided to put Windlock's boast to the test and went straight to the NAB. Sure enough, as soon as the clerk read the letter, he became very friendly and everthing went very smoothly. It soon became apparent that Windlock was held in great esteem, even awe, by these people. "How amazing" said the clerk, "that you've settled down and got yourself a job the day after arriving in this city. It's quite miraculous what that man is doing up at that place. We can manage some extra money for you, as you've already got a job to start tomorrow."
	I can't remember how much money he gave me (welfare handouts were still in immediate cash over the counter, at that time), but I know it was by far the most I'd ever scored off them. ;When I got back to the house, by the luxury of a bus ride, I asked Windlock how much the rent was. True to his word, he asked me for a lot less than he had apparently said in the letter. Dinner (like the dining room itself) was impressive, to say the least. In fact, it seemed a veritable banquet to me. Again, all appetites but mine were poor. Again, I did my best to make the biggest possible hole in the mounds of food. Windlock jokingly said "The man's a human dustbin!" I liked that. In fact, I've quite liked the image ever since. It's got something to do with being very thin. It implies a powerful engine that guzzles large quantities of fuel but turns it all efficiently into energy. I can't imagine fat people wanting to be called human dustbins.
	It was after dinner, while trying to strike up some sort of conversation in the lounge, that the whole set-up began to take on a darker tone. "Where's Dave disappeared to?" I asked casually. Dave was about the youngest resident, perhaps not more than sixteen. They looked cautiously at one another before one of them replied "Windlock has decided to turn in early tonight." A hot wave of understanding hit me. I could tell that I was supposed to let the subject drop, but I couldn't. "How long has this been going on?" I ventured. "What do you mean?" "Windlock and Dave." "Windlock and Dave? Do you really not get what this place is all about? Dave is just the favourite of the week, for Christ's sake!" After a long silence I asked them why they didn't leave. "Leave?" someone growled contemptuously. "Where would you like us to go?" I didn't sleep too well that night and resolved to disappear from Leeds the next day.