Machine Aid!

While the deep rumble of a passing slag train blended with the metallic thump of a high pressure hammer and the sharp acidic smoke of a tall chimney was wreathed at its base with wisps of steam from the coke furnaces, a small group of platelayers was gathered round a hapless student working during his summer vacation.

He was the only one working. The sun was strong for once and the murky depths of the steel works gleamed in the unexpected radiance and the air glittered as the airborne coal dust reflected the light like tiny diamonds.

All eyes focused on the student as sweat slowly trickled down his forehead and dripped with increasing rapidity from his chin. He was trying, for the first time, to use a pneumatic drill. Part of the permanent way was set in concrete and, during an intensive period of woks restoration this piece of the rail network was being replaced.

The student tried vainly to manipulate the unwieldy piece of machinery to gain some sort of purchase on the smooth concrete and then to direct the force of the metal spike to break up the seemingly indestructible stone. As he struggled and fumbled he was acutely aware of the contemptuous looks of the other men as they waited for what they saw as an effete interloper cynically tasting their work until he was able to brush off the dust and dirt and return to the physically undemanding world of academe.

As my more perceptive readers will have gathered, the embarrassed student was my good self working as a platelayer in the (now defunct) East Moors Steel Works. This was a place which was able to terrify me on a fairly constant basis as I frequently came into contact with machinery and situations which could not only kill you, but do it without effort or even noticing your demise.

To be fair to me, I did make an effort and one worker actually gave me the grudging commendation that I was better than most of the damned students that they had had. Except he didn’t use the word ‘damned’; I have to admit that, up until that point in time, I had never heard the f-word used so much and in so many grammatical forms. No sentence was complete without the f-word; no phrase was uttered without the accompanying expletive. There was no emotion, aspiration, frustration, achievement, horror, pleasure or incisive political comment which could not be conveyed by the f-word alone. Chinese is an inflected language where the same word has a variety of differing meanings depending on the tone in which the word is spoken. The Chinese could have learned a thing or two by listening to the tonal nuances in the language of steel workers whereby they were able to restrict themselves to a single f-word yet, by tonal inflection alone, convey whole novels of meaning with a vocabulary of one word.

Out of sheer devilment I made an executive decision not to use the f-word myself, which was noticed by my fellow workers with a sort of grudging astonishment. I preserved this linguistic oddity right up until I dropped a steel bar on my foot. The only person near me was a fellow student who gleefully told me that my linguistic purity would be denounced to our colleagues as soon as there was a break. Which he did, and I (bless me!) stoutly maintained that I said no such thing and that the student was just being malicious. And they believed me! And mocked my fellow students as a scoundrel. Ha!

Meanwhile, the pneumatic drill: in spite of dripping with sweat and using all my strength to keep the bloody point of the drill on the same spot to penetrate the concrete, it remained stubbornly whole and without crack. The other workers in my gang watched with restrained hilarity until they could stand it no longer and urged a young lad to take over from me. This muscled school leaver picked up the drill with easy nonchalance and then by apparently resting the pulsating tip of the drill on the concrete caused the material to crumble. It is my personal belief that he (luckily) found the ‘sweet spot’ of the slab and used the sympathetic vibrations of the drill to do the work for him.

One member of our gang was an older worker who had been a gang leader himself when younger and was now working his way towards an easy retirement. He had the undemanding task of greasing the points on the railway system in the works, which he did with quiet dignity. However, sometimes the work load of the gang was so heavy that he was encouraged to help us in the more physical stuff that we had to complete and then you saw the experience of years of work. I was young and active and enthusiastic and yet, with all my effort, I did not actually achieve as much as the methodical, ergonomic method of working that he had developed over decades. He used directed effort to achieve more, whereas my effort dissipated itself in all directions!

So I’m not au fait with mechanical equipment; especially equipment that is electrically driven and is dangerous. So the de grouting machine has been something less than convincing in my hands. I hope to God that Paul Squared will be able to inject some sort of common sense and mechanical aptitude into the disaster area that is the shower cubical; has to be re-grouted by Thursday.

House viewing is tyranny!