Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Alan Sillitoe

I’d hate to do a thousand and get them slung back at me by the viewers. Forty-five bob don’t grow on trees. Turn to chamfer and drill, then blade-chamfer, swing the turret until my arms are heavy and dead. Quick as lightning. Take out and fix in, shout for the trolley to take it away and bring more on, jotting down another hundred, not noticing the sud smells any more or belts over my head that gave me the screaming abdabs when I first came in the factory at fifteen, slapping and twisting and thumping and changing direction like Robboe the foreman’s mind. It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, so you grab like owt to earn a few quid, to take Brenda boozing and back to bed, or to the footpaths and woods up Strelley, passing the big council estate where Margaret my sister has a house and three kids from her useless husband, taking Brenda by all that to a broken-down shepherd’s cottage that I’ve known since I was a kid and laying her on the straw and both of us so loving to each other that we can hardly wait. Only less of this or there’ll be another handle on the lathe that I won’t know what to do with and another gallon of suds that will jam the works. Time flies and no mistake, and it’s about time it did because I’ve done another two hundred and I’m ready to go home and get some snap and read the Daily Mirror or look at what’s left of the bathing tarts in the Weekend Mail. But Brenda, I can’t wait to get at her. It serves you right, ducks, for being so lush and loving. And now this chamfer-blade wants sharpening, so I’ll give it to Jack this afternoon. And it’s too bad about him, but he’ll be going on nights soon which is too bad as well, for him, because Brenda and me’ll play merry hell in all the beds and nooks we can find. Bloomers flying, and legs waving in Strelley Woods, no matter how cold it gets.

      The minute you stepped out of the factory gates you thought no more about your work. But the funniest thing was that neither did you think about work when you were standing at your machine. You began the day by cutting and drilling steel cylinders with care, but gradually your actions became automatic and you forgot all about the machine and the quick working of your arms and hands and the fact that you were cutting and boring and rough-threading to within limits of only five-thousandths of an inch. The noise of motor-trolleys passing up and down the gangway and the excruciating din of flying and flapping belts slipping out of your consciousness after perhaps half an hour, without affecting the quality of the work you were turning out, and you forgot your past conflicts with the gaffer and turned to thinking of pleasant events that had at some time happened to you, or things that you hoped would happen to you in the future. If your machine was working well — the motor smooth, stops tight, jigs good — and you spring your actions into a favourable rhythm you became happy. You went off into pipe-dreams for the rest of the day. And in the evening, when admittedly you would be feeling as though your arms and legs had been stretched to breaking point on a torture-rack, you stepped out into a cosy world of pubs and noisy tarts that would one day provide you with the raw material for more pipe-dreams as you stood at your lathe.

      It was marvellous the things you remembered while you worked on the lathe, things that you thought were forgotten and would never come back into your mind, often things that you hoped would stay forgotten. Time flew while you wore out the oil-soaked floor and worked furiously without knowing it: you lived in a compatible world of pictures that passed through your mind like a magic-lantern, often in vivid and glorious loonycolour, a world where memory and imagination ran free and did acrobatic tricks with your past and with what might be your future, an amok that produced all sorts of agreeable visions. Like the corporal said about sitting on the lavatory: it was the only time you have to think, and to quote him further, you thought of some lovely and marvellous things.

      When Arthur went back to work in the afternoon he needed only four hundred cylinders to complete his daily stint. If he cared he could slow down, but he was unable to take it easy until every cylinder lay clean and finished in the box at his lathe, unwilling to drop off speed while work was yet to be done. He turned out the four hundred in three hours, in order to pass a pleasant time doing a well-disguised nothing, looking as though he were busy, perhaps cleaning his machine or talking to Jack during the ostensible business of getting his tools sharpened. Cunning, he told himself gleefully, as he began the first hundred, dropping them off one by one at a respectable speed. Don’t let the bastards grind you down, as Fred used to say when he was in the navy. Something about a carborundum wheel when he spouted it in Latin, but good advice just the same, though he didn’t need to tell me. I’ll never let anybody grind me down because I’m worth as much as any other man in the world, though when it comes to the lousy vote they give me I often feel like telling ‘em where to shove it, for all the good using it’ll do me. But if they said: ‘Look, Arthur, here’s a hundredweight of dynamite and a brand-new plunger, now blow up the factory,’ then I’d do it, because that’d be something worth doing. Action. I’d bale-out for Russia or the North Pole where I’d sit and laugh like a horse over what I’d done, at the wonderful sight of gaffers and machines and shining bikes going sky-high one wonderful moonlit night. Not that I’ve got owt against ‘em, but that’s just how I feel now and again. Me, I couldn’t care less if the world did blow up tomorrow, as long as I’m blown up with it. Not that I wouldn’t like to win ninety-thousand quid beforehand. But I’m having a good life and don’t care about anything, and it’d be a pity to leave Brenda, all said and done, especially now Jack’s been put on nights. Not that he minds, which is the funny part about it, because he’s happy about a bigger pay-packet and a change, and I’m happy, and I know Brenda’s happy. Everybody’s happy. It’s a fine world sometimes, if you don’t weaken, or if you don’t give the bastards a chance to get cracking with that carborundum.

      Robboe the Gaffer passed along the gangway talking to a tool-setter. Robboe was a bloke of about forty who had been with the firm since he was fourteen, having signed on as an apprentice and put in a lot of time at night-school, a man who had not suffered the rigours of short-time before the war — as my old man had, thought Arthur — and who had been in a ‘reserved occupation’ during the war so that he had kept out of the army. He now drew about twenty a week plus a good production bonus, a quiet man with a square face, tortured-looking eyes and brow, thin rubbery lips, and one hand always in his pocket twiddling on a micrometer. Robboe kept his job because he was clever at giving you the right answers, and took back-chat with a wry smile and a good face as long as you did it with a brutal couldn’t-care-less attitude and didn’t seem frightened of him. A terror to men like Jack, to Arthur he was a human being afflicted with the heavy lead-weight of authority when a rebellion always seemed on the point of breaking out.

      Arthur started with the firm as a messenger boy, carrying samples of bicycle parts from one branch of the factory to another, or doing errands around the city on a carrier-bike. He was fifteen at the time and every Thursday morning Robboe sent him on a mysterious errand to a chemist’s shop downtown, giving him a sealed envelope with a note and some money inside. Arthur reached the shop after an interesting and idling ride along canal banks and through narrow streets, and the chemist handed him a stronger brown envelope containing something flat and sponge-like, and the change from the money in the first envelope. After three months of such journeys Arthur discovered what Robboe sent him to buy, because one morning the chemist was in too much of a hurry to see that the envelope was firmly sealed. So Arthur was able to open it while waiting for the traffic-lights to change, to see what was inside, and seal it again, this time securely. He found what he had expected to find, and rode his bike back along Castle Boulevard laughing like a maniac, overtaking buses, milkcarts, even cars in his furious speed. Everyone stared at him, as if he had gone mad. ‘Three packets!’ he shouted out. ‘The dirty bogger! He’s got a fancy-woman! Nine times a week!’ So the news broke in the shop, and long afterwards, when Arthur had been taken off the messenger job and put on a drill, if he left his machine to walk out to the lavatory, someone would shout: ‘Where are you going, Arthur?’ And if Robboe was not in the shop he would yell back at the top of his voice: ‘I’m going downtown to get Robboe’s rubbers!’ — in his broad, deliberately brutalized Robin Hood accent that brought screams of laughter from the women, and guffaws from the men.

      Robboe stopped at his machine, picked up a piece of finished work, and checked its size carefully with a micrometer.

      Arthur paused while turning the capstan. ‘All right?’ he asked belligerently.

      Robboe, always with a cigarette in his mouth, blew smoke away from