CHAPTER 7
On the morning of his first day with the Company, Dave had arrived at the Personnel Office ten minutes early, pinkly scrubbed and wearing a new shirt and tie which his wife had insisted on, to sign the necessary forms before he was allowed to join his department. An hour later he was still there. The Personnel Manager had rolled in half an hour late, waved cheerfully in his direction, ignored the office girl and disappeared into his inner sanctum without a word being spoken. A few minutes later, the tea lady had come in, deposited two cups on the girl's desk and departed before he had had the wit to enquire whether there was any going spare.
He had given up any attempt to communicate with her. She was so painfully shy that she had blushed furiously when he bade her 'good morning' and almost let go of the file she was holding. She had then retreated to the filing cabinet, turned her back on him and pretended to be looking for something ever since. The arrival of the tea had broken the deadlock and she took the manager's cup into his office with such a pitiable expression of relief that he resisted the temptation to wink at her in case she dropped it. He was left admiring the view from the office window and a spectacular view it was too. On the other side of the valley, hills rose majestically to fill the skyline, carpeted with an irregular patchwork of Forestry Commission trees and marred by the occasional abandoned coal working and derelict car. "I think I will like it here for this view alone" he thought. "One of these days I'm going to climb those mountains and see what lies beyond them."
Eventually, the manager put his head round the door. "You're Mr Folklore's new man? Do come in. Sorry to have kept you. You've not had any tea? Miss Jones, see to it, would you."
She edged past him and made off hastily after the departed tea lady.
"Do please sit down." He lowered his voice. "Don't take any notice of Miss Jones. Poor girl is so self-conscious that she wouldn't survive anywhere in the factory, so I have to keep her with me. It's taken me six weeks to get her to speak!"
"How did she get to be taken on, then?"
"Entirely down to me, I'm afraid. I had a dreadful hangover when I interviewed her and the fact that she didn't make any noise was enough of a recommendation to my fevered mind."
He opened up a file which had Dave's name on it, flicked briefly through it and put it down again. "Come from London. I don't quite recognise the tie. Haberdasher's Askes? Clark's College? Not Harrow, certainly! Where did you go to school?"
"Clapham Technical High."
"Oh. I see." He reopened the folder and pencilled something into it. "Never mind!" He brightened with an effort. "Couple of forms for you to sign."
He slid a sheet of paper across the desk. "This is the Inventions Form. You have to sign it as a condition of employment - basically assigning any patent rights to the Company. Don't want you going off and setting up in competition, do we? You sign here, here, here and here" indicating with his pencil. "Then there's the Secrecy Agreement. You agree not to divulge any confidential information to anyone outside the Company for two years after you leave us, if you should ever do so. Don't want you leaving to work for the Competition, you see. Sign here, here and here"
"And this one is the Overseas Form. It asks if you are willing to work for the Company or any of its subsidiaries abroad. It's in your interest to sign it, shows keenness but doesn't mean a thing otherwise because there's a queue a mile long to get out of Britain so you have to know somebody in the right place and with your background", he glanced pointedly at Dave's tie, "I don't suppose that you do. Sign here, here, write 'any' here..."
"Why any?"
"Places you are willing to go."
"I see." He wrote 'anywhere except South Africa', signed it at the bottom and handed it back. The Personnel Manager gave him a hard stare, sighed and slipped it into the file. "You've got your insurance cards? P45? Academic Qualifications? Good. That's all settled, then." He smiled weakly. "Welcome to the Company. The hours are 9.00 to 5.30 and you get paid overtime if you earn less than œ2000 per annum. Above that you work for love and the benefit of First Class travel on Company business but in your case, that doesn't apply. You eat in the Staff Canteen and today's menu is mince with boiled potatoes and cabbage. Rice pudding to follow. I hope you will be happy with us."
He rose from behind his desk, came round and held the door open. "You know your way to the Development Department? Good. Any problems, don't hesitate to come and see me, that's what I'm here for!"
On his way to the Technical Block he fell in with Smith whom he had met when he had been shown around on the day of his interview. He was in a cheerful mood. "You were fool enough to come and join us, then!"
"Mr Folklore told me it was such a wonderful place that I could scarcely do otherwise."
"You'll get used to him, in time, I daresay. He means well. It's just that fact and fantasy get a bit muddled in his mind sometimes."
"You seem to be happy enough, though."
"Ah, well, I'm in an especially good position here because I'm the only physicist in the place. No offence meant, of course, but you chemists are ten a penny. I like to compare my situation with that of one of my old school friends who was the only one in his year to take 'O-level' Greek. He won the annual prize for it even though he only just scraped a pass. No competition, you see."
"And what prize are you after?"
"One of these days I shall persuade old Folklore to make me up to Chief Physicist, and when he has committed himself too far to back out, I shall demand a bigger office."
"Is that all?"
"That is plenty. Bigger office, higher status. Visitors from Head Office treat you better, lesser mortals bow and scrape. It's another step up the golden ladder that leads straight to the GM's door."
"I think you really mean it!"
"I do, believe me. By the way, bit of advice to a beginner - watch out for the one they call Mr Happy. He'd stab his own grandmother in the back for the price of a packet of fags!"
With Smith's words still in his ears, he turned into the Technical Block and came face to face with Grey who was in an evil humour after a fruitless session with Folklore concerning the inadequacy of his office. "You must be mad, coming to work in this dump! That man..." he waved a hand in the direction of Folklore's office "...spends half his life in cloud cuckoo land."
"What does he do with the other half?"
"Divides it between the Executive Toilet and the Executive Dining Room (second sitting)."
"Look here, I'm too newly arrived for all this. I had better go and pay my respects to him and then I suppose I report to you?"
"That's right, he'll give you the flannel and I'll give you the hard truth."
Grey called after him as he hastily made off towards Folklore's office. "He's busy making his contribution to the 'Torrey Canyon' crisis, you'll find him outside by the static water tank, if you really want to see him in action. Try to stop him falling in, if you can." * (See Author's note Page 61)
He came upon the extraordinary sight of Folklore peering short-sightedly over a soggy block of polyether foam floating in a small reservoir which served the factory's sprinkler system while a photographer was busily engaged in rubbing chemicals over the surface of the instant photograph he had just taken of the event. "Wonderful invention", he eulogised. "From the click of the shutter to the finished print in less than two minutes! Wonderful!"
Dave surveyed the litter of discarded photographic materials around his feet. "Careful, don't let it touch your skin or clothes. Caustic gel, you see"
"What was that?" Folklore leaned forward to catch the conversation, the block floated forward and he leaned forward perilously with it. Dave leapt to save him, slipped on the caustic residues of the Instamatic Photography Process, threw his arms out to protect himself and by pure luck fetched up against the block, saving both of them from a wetting.
"Let me look at the picture", Folklore seemed unaware of his near miss, "Good
man! Excellent. That'll convince Head Office that we're playing our part." He noticed Dave. "Why, good morning. You're the New Man. Have you hurt yourself?" He leaned close to him and Dave caught a gust of his halitosis.
"No, no! I'm fine. Just tripped on the film, that's all."
"Oh, Good man, good man! Come over to my office - I'll join you when I've had a couple more pictures taken."
An hour later, he emerged from Folklore's office floating on a cloud of euphoria and ready to solve any problem that might be thrown at him. His new boss's magnificent speal had completely dazzled his mind but his descent to reality was hastened by an immediate encounter with Rees.
"Good morning. My name's Rees. You're my replacement, I presume?"
"What do you mean?"
"Folklore has got me lined up for the chop, but as I do most of the actual work he couldn't do it without having somebody on hand to take over - and now you've arrived."
"Has he told you that?"
"He wouldn't do anything so silly. I might rush off and join the Union or something. As you may be aware", he continued "there's a bit of a trade recession in the offing, hardly the best time to take on extra new staff, don't you think? In a couple of months, and hopefully by then you'll be reasonably trained up, there is bound to be a redundancy and it's 'goodbye Rees'."
Dave was shocked. "If there is any redundancy the usual rules should apply - last in, first out."
"You'll find out otherwise, I promise you. You need have no fears on your own account, it would look very bad for the old so-and-so if he took you on and then got rid of you before you had even had time to get your feet under the table. He is far too good a politician for that."
"Well, why don't you join the Union and kick up a fuss, like you just said?"
"What's the point? My face doesn't seem to fit around here, and I can't stand the sight of him - we are hardly speaking to one another - I might as well go gracefully and get the redundancy money. He's just as likely to find a way of doing me out of it if I make it awkward for him, and this way, I can screw him for a reasonable reference."
"I'm sorry, then. You mustn't think I knew anything about this."
"Don't worry in the slightest. After all it's nothing whatever to do with you, but it should give you some insight into the kind of man you're working for. Oh, and by the way..." he picked up a gallon can and handed it to Dave "...your first assignment. One gallon of Kuwait crude, same as is leaking from the 'Torrey Canyon'. Grey says you've got a week at most to find a way of using polyether foam to solve the pollution problem other than putting foam barriers around it - someone else has got the credit for that one. The main thing is to write a good report so that Folklore can be seen to have thrown all the might of our resources into the fray."
"Is that why he was having his picture taken in the water tank?"
"Absolutely! Wonderful, isn't it! I should see what ideas Grey has got to contribute. While we're on the subject of Grey" he glanced up and down the corridor and continued in a quieter voice "I've no doubt you'll sum up Folklore quickly enough, but keep a weather eye open for him."
"What's the matter with him?"
"Bit of a crawler. Don't trust him with anything important."
"Thanks for the advice. In fact, I was just on my way to see him, so you'll have to excuse me" and he set off for Grey's office with the can in his hand, wondering who else he was going to run across.
Grey had recovered his more usual composure by the time Dave found him, chuckling over the cartoon in the 'P & R Weekly'.
"Forget what I said earlier, sometimes Sir can be a bit exasperating and I wasn't in the mood, this morning. I had a bad round on the links yesterday against that Bastard Burton from Sales and he will keep on about it for the rest of the week. You don't play, I suppose?"
Dave shook his head.
"Pity. Folklore's slipping in his selection procedures."
"Perhaps you could explain my duties to me" Dave hastily changed the subject "and what am I supposed to do with this?" he put the can down on his desk.
Grey took a file from his cabinet. "I'd like you to make a start in the pilot plant. Get yourself familiar with the machine and the compounding methods and formulae and so on, Rees will show you the ropes." He lowered his tone slightly. "You might find him a little offhand. Between you and me, he's being taken off the job and put on to a minor project. Folklore isn't too pleased with his performance so you can read it that he would like him to look elsewhere for employment."
"I have already spoken to him. It's not going to make things all that pleasant for me, though, is it?"
"He can't hold any grudge against you personally, can he? Try to ride out the situation and if he gets too difficult, let me know and I'll have a word with Folklore. He'll have to do something."
"And what about the oil?"
Grey smiled faintly. "Slop a bit about in the sink or something and see if you can blot it up in a bit of foam. Find out how much it will absorb. Get a few percentage figures versus grade and write it into a neat little report. Let me have it by next Monday, only don't spend a lot of time on it."
"Oh, thanks. Folklore told me that a new pilot machine is due in any time."
"Yes. The latest of it's kind. We are buying it for the High Impact-Strength Chair Shell Moulding project, and incidentally, we have managed to increase the strength of our establishment, i.e. you, on the strength of it, if you'll excuse the pun" he grinned feebly. "You've got to hand it to Folklore, he knows how to manipulate things. I've been after a new machine ever since he took over after the E2 fire, but our budget would nowhere near cover it. Sales are buying it for us. I expect the project will run for a year or so and then we shall be able to use it for our own purposes. But meanwhile," he continued "you can cut your teeth on the old one and it won't matter all that much if you knock it about."
Dave and Rees were in the pilot plant. It was a dingy, poorly lit area, all cluttered up with drums of chemicals and overflowing bins of scrap. The old machine stood in a corner, a hotch-potch of trailing pipework and electric wiring. The extractor hood, which was to remove the less pleasant vapours it produced, was hanging from the ceiling on what Rees referred to as 'Company Brackets', string and bits of wire knotted together and someone had written 'CLEAN ME' in the thick dust on the side of it.
"This is it" he said with an expansive gesture. "You see before you the results of Folklore pinching all the money for his office furniture. "This Plant is known throughout the factory as 'The Old Four D', to whit - Dirty, Dilapidated, Disgusting and downright Dangerous and in my opinion ought to be scrapped. Sadly, it is the only part of Dr.Edwards' old Development empire to survive the E2 fire - and that was only because Folklore had so much substandard stock in the building that the machine couldn't be moved over from here."
"E2 fire?"
"I used to work for a nice old chap called Dr.Edwards, who was Development Manager before Folklore got the job. Our lab. and offices were on the first floor of the old E2 building - there's a new stores on the site now. One afternoon, just after I had gone home it went up in flames and poor old Doc went up with it. Folklore's scrap accelerated the fire, they say. Anyway, it's an ill wind that does nobody any good and Folklore is reputed to have been very glad to see the back of it - the scrap that is, and I don't suppose he was that grief-stricken either over Doc Edwards, even though he got into trouble at the inquest."
"Because of the scrap?"
"The building wasn't suitable. Old Doc was hopping mad about it, kept complaining to Anderson, the Works Manager but nothing ever got done. Bad business!"
Rees shrugged his shoulders. "Anyway, back to this business - 'The Old Four D'."
"What's wrong with it, then, that you want to see it scrapped?"
"Where do I start? There are no pressure cutouts on any of the lines, the wiring is archaic and soaked in chemicals and the extractor hood is in the wrong place and h
ardly sucks anything up. Oh, and watch your fingers in the pump gears, the safety guard is missing."
"Is that all?"
"No. Be careful of the flush. When you have finished running" explained Rees "you operate the flush by pressing this button, here" he pointed to a knob on what was evidently a control console under the grime "and it puts a dose of solvent through the Head to clean out all the foam residues. If you ever have to operate it without the nozzle in place and you get a bit of a blockage, it goes all over you. It's one of its nastier habits!"
"Why do it, then?"
"Sometimes you have to check the action. You can't see with the nozzle up."
"Well now that you've thoroughly put me off the thing, you'd better show me how it works before my nerve breaks altogether."
He lifted a greasy clipboard from its position beside the console. "This is the current formulation we are running. I topped up the tanks yesterday so we can go straight into the calibration and try a couple of shots into a mould."
The procedure was not unduly difficult and they had calibrated all the chemicals except the TDI which, he explained, was always left until last because of the fumes. "Oh, and about the pressure gauge..."
"There you are!" A girl in a white lab. coat had put her head round the open pilot plant doorway. "Telephone for you Ken. Who's your friend?" but she had departed without waiting for an answer.
"Leave this one to me" said Dave to Rees' departing back. He carefully talked himself through the procedure. "Check stream number. One on, four off. Tare beaker, check pump running. Check gauge pressure (it was steady at 20psi). Safety glasses on (he touched the spectacles through the polythene disposable glove Rees had made him wear). Sequence timer to neutral.Interval timer to 5 seconds. Hold beaker under jet and operate 'start' button.
He jabbed his finger flamboyantly on to it, watching the pressure gauge. There was a loud report and a cloud of atomised chemical sprayed from the depths of the machine, raining tiny droplets of vileness over his safety glasses, face, hair, hands and arms and down the front of his lab. coat. He dropped the beaker and fell back, coughing and gagging in the reek of TDI while the burst pipe reared like an angry snake and continued to spit its venom at him for the remainder of its preordained five seconds. He was still reeling from the shock and already feeling as though he wanted to throw up when Rees reappeared at a dead run, sliding ungracefully through the brown paper strips which had been freshly rolled out over the floor that morning to protect it. Pausing only to throw the lid off a drum labelled 'DECONTAMINANT' which was close by, evidently in readiness for this kind of event, he hauled Dave over it and proceeded to sponge him down with a large squeegee of polyether foam. The odour of ammonia was equally as strong as the TDI, but at least seemed to counteract his growing nausea. When he was satisfied that he had sponged over all Dave's contaminated skin, he peeled off the stinking lab. coat, hurling it into a scrap bin. "I think your shirt, shoes and trousers are clear. Let's get out, the place is reeking!"
In Rees' cubby hole of an office, Dave sat, drinking from a large mug of tea as his hair dried and the nausea gradually subsided. His new shirt and tie were stained and grimy. Grey had picked up the news and come in, making the small place overcrowded. "What happened?" he demanded.
"I haven't had a chance to ask him, yet" interjected Rees.
"The pipe burst all over me. I tried to calibrate the TDI just like you showed me for the other streams and I was most careful to keep an eye on the pressure, it was..."
"20psi. It reads that all the time since there was a line blockage just after Christmas and it got wound around the dial about five times! I was about to tell you that when we were interrupted." He glared at Grey. "I've been on about that gauge for four months. You've got more influence than I have in this place. Do you think you can get something done now?"
"I asked Folklore" replied Grey defensively "and he said that no more money was to be spent on the machine because the new replacement is coming in any day now. I can see his point" he added almost pleadingly.
"He'd be the first to complain if the work wasn't done, though. Wouldn't he?"
"I hate to appear bolshie on my first day here" interrupted Dave "but I am not going within twenty paces of that machine until it is in proper working order."
Folklore's secretary appeared in the doorway "He would like to see you, if you are fit enough."
"I'm on my way." Dave drained his tea and squeezed past Grey to the door.
"Don't say anything you might regret later, will you" offered Grey. "He has a long memory."
"What do you think I might say, then?"
"Just that you might be a bit undiplomatic about the blowout. He has to make all sort of compromises just to keep the Department going at all."
"You shouldn't compromise with safety!" he replied as a parting shot, following the secretary down the corridor.
Folklore was floridly and effusively full of concern and Dave was so hard put to it to reassure him that he was not permanently crippled that he quite forgot the unkind remarks which had begun to form in his mind when he entered the office. With Dave thus smoothed, and with another cup of tea brought in specially by his secretary, Folklore moved on to the real reason for his summons.
"I've just had your overseas form in from personnel for my signature, along with your other papers. What's all this nonsense about South Africa?"
"Well, I wouldn't want to go there. I'm opposed to Apartheid."
"Well, that's as maybe, but I urge you to think carefully. Who knows who you might offend at Head Office if they see this - and that is where it will be kept on file. After all, we do have quite a sizeable operation over there and our own production manager, who is the Works Director's son-in-law was promoted to this factory from the South African operation. It would be silly to antagonise somebody and maybe affect your future career over it, now wouldn't it?"
"Suppose they asked me to go there?"
"In practice it's most unlikely, but even if it did arise, you can always turn it down. That way you don't tread on anybody's toes. And especially anybody at Head Office!"
He thought it better not to make an issue of it, especially on his first day and allowed Folklore to have his secretary collect a duplicate form from the personnel office for him to fill in with a bland 'all' in place of the offending remark. "I suppose he has my best interests at heart" he mused.
Dinner was mince, boiled potatoes, cabbage and rice pudding to follow. He made the mistake of enquiring after the health of Flo the serving lady and the meat slowly congealed on his plate as she told him in prolonged and intimate detail, the cabbage ladle poised above it and the queue of hungry staff muttering behind. Feeling suddenly that he had lost his appetite following the jucier parts of Flo's description of her hysterectomy he made the further error of sitting in the foreman maintenance engineer's chair and was rescued from it only seconds before the man himself appeared round the corner of the servery by Howell, whom he had not previously met.
"I could see that you were about to commit an indiscretion." he observed. "The foreman engineer has sat in that seat since the factory was opened, before the war. As you can see, it is at the head of the engineer's and storemen's table. You would be out of place there, anyway."
Looking round, Dave could see that the table was filling up with a collection of green boiler-suited individuals who were unmistakeably engineers.
"Keep themselves to themselves, do they?"
"Engineers are always a law unto themselves. It's one of the fundamental facts of Industry. If you cross them, you'll never get anything done, so it pays to be nice to them. Even the Works Manager treats them with respect!"
"What do you do, here?"
"I'm the electronics engineer. Not that they want one, because the electrical systems are strictly kept at the lowest level of sophistication possible. The place is distinctly Luddite in outlook. As an example, they bought in a m
achine from West Germany which would do all the sheeting automatically to preset tolerances and preset dimensions. Must have cost a fortune! First time it developed a fault after the warranty had run out, that is, they stripped out all the systems and now it's hand operated and takes two men to set up. It's the same story all over the factory."
"How does that place you, then?"
"I wear a permanently hunted look - hadn't you noticed?"
Returning to the department after lunch, Dave fell into step with Mr Happy who was also on his way back from the canteen, but from the Executive Dining Room (first sitting).
"You'll be Rees' replacement, then. You'll be seeing quite a lot of me when the new machine comes in, because they're putting me in charge on the production side - it's our machine, really, but on loan to your department during its trials."
"I thought it's supposed to be our machine, period. After the trials are finished, we will use it for other projects."
"That's what Folklore thinks! He is expecting the project to fold up after a few months so that it will become redundant and the machine will fall to him on the basis that property is nine-tenths of the law and the engineers are too bloody idle to move it even if they are told to."
"Is that what you think?"
"More or less. Except that I'm after a replacement unit for the No.5 moulding line and the High Impact-Strength Chair Shell machine would do very nicely."
"If you take it, Development won't have anything except that dreadful old heap of rubbish in the pilot plant."
"I heard that it spat all over you this morning. Bad luck. The new machine would be hopeless for your kind of work, though. It's all fixed pipework and big tanks - it takes about ten gallons of mix just to prime the pumps. If you are changing formulations it would cost a fortune just to wash through and clean out the old stuff and it would take you half a day to set it up. You want something like the one you've got now, only in decent condition and if Folklore hadn't spent all the money on..."
"...his office furniture? I've heard that from so many different sources this morning that it must be true!"
They had reached the Technical Block. Mr Happy made to turn off towards the main Plant building, paused and leaned towards Dave's ear. "By the way", he slid out of the corner of his mouth, "bit of advice since you're new here, though I've no doubt you'll find out for yourself after a while - Don't trust old Watkins an inch. He's as slippery as they come!"
Rees let Dave come up to him after his encounter with Mr Happy. "I forgot to warn you about him. Slimy bastard if ever there was one, watch him like a hawk and don't tell him anything whatsoever!"
Dave sighed wearily. "And what's your opinion of Howell, the electronics man?"
"Why do you ask?"
"I just met him, and also he's about the only one nobody's warned me against."
"Nice chap. Got a persecution complex, but I think he has his reasons. An odd ball he may be but you can trust him - and that's a glowing testimonial for this place!"
Author's note.
The loss of the supertanker 'Torrey Canyon' marked an oilshed in pollution history. At 210 000 tons deadweight, she was the thirteenth largest ship in the world when she went aground on the Seven Stones reef midway between Lands End and the Scilly Isles on the morning of 18th March 1967, just in time for the Easter holidays. An estimated 30 000 tons of her crude oil cargo eventually came ashore in a dreadful black tide on the beaches of Cornwall and the Brittany Coast, causing immense ecological and economic damage.
For a long time afterwards we had a cartoon on our kitchen wall which my wife had clipped from the 'Guardian', portraying Harold Wilson sitting in Canute's chair on the beach at Old Town, St Mary's (where he had a holiday home). On the sea was a mighty oil slick and he was saying "Work, of course it will work!"
It seems that the Captain had been undecided whether he would go outside the Scillies or between them and the mainland when he retired from the bridge while the ship was still in the Bay of Biscay, so he ordered the helmsman to set course for the Seven Stones for the time being. (He would have preferred to go wide, but it depended on whether he would reach Milford Haven in time for the high tide - fully laden she drew about 53 feet and would just about make it). There are 21 miles of clear, deep water between Penzance and the Scillies, interrupted only by the reef and the course set so accurately that when, at the last moment, the Captain attempted to change, a combination of a recalcitrant autopilot and the proximity of fishing boats fatally delayed him.
When attempts to refloat her were finally abandoned, the RAF were sent to open up her tanks by bombing to release any remaining oil and burn it off. It was to the great amusement of everybody except the pilot of the first strike that he missed by half a mile. Much was made of the cost of bombs at £1000 each and, of course how he could have missed a static target the size of three football pitches on a clear day and without any hostile returning fire, to boot!
Aeropreen came up with the unique concept of attempting to confine the oil by putting a ring of blocks of polyether foam around the wreck. The factory flogged away all over the Easter Weekend to manufacture threequarters of a mile of it and, although it was not deployed as designed, it was used to successfully protect Falmouth Harbour.
The Works engineer knows it all, the Design Engineer knows fuck all and the Maintenance Engineer doesn't want to know."
W.T. 1973