The Iraq inquiry. Well, the plebs on the street, that’s you andme, will never get the real answers to that. There’s a bloody great new boat that swanning a round the Med at the moment that can carry 9,000 passengers. Let’s hope they’ve got enough lifeboats! Oh, and there was a few drops of rain over Cumbria last week, which pretty much flooded most of Cockermouth, but nothing that really took my fancy. So this week I’ll add another part of my next book.
This story comes from one of the happiest periods of my life, back in the days when I worked in the lithographic trade. To this day I don’t know how we used to get any work done, as we seemed to spend most of the time annoying the tea lady’s, laughing, and winding up the boys in the firm. The place was known as ‘The Mad House’ by anyone who worked there, and it was the scene of many a silly situation. This particular episode concerns one of lads in the office. He came a cropper when he walked into the plate making department one day, at a time when the work had dropped off, and the plate makers were bored…
The apprentices were our main targets for japes and entertainment when the work dropped off, but the boys in the office weren’t immune from the windups, ritual verbal abuse and the odd light beating. Some were afraid to walk through the proofing department, and one kid left the day after joining the firm as I believe the first words he heard from one of the proofers was, “I’ve shagged yer mum, and yer dad,” and he followed it up with, “You haven’t got a sister ‘ave you?” Another boy filled his shoes a week later, and the proofers jumped on him, posing a mock query on a job spec. A client wanted a bunch of special colours to wrap around his biscuit tin, so they asked the fresh lamb to pop along to see our ever jovial store man, to see if the tartan ink had been delivered! He arrived, job bag in hand, only to be to, “Fuck off, and stop asking stupid bloody questions.”
The next day he was walking through my department, when a workmate noticed his brightly coloured tie. He engaged him in a futile conversation and then said to me, “‘ere Neil, look at that tie, I bet you wouldn’t cut in half.” I said, “How much?” “Thruppence,” came the reply. “Done,” I said, and with that I snipped it in two with my scissors. Witnessing that clothing wasn’t a barrier to us, the office boyss came up with a new survival technique to get them through the day. A few would exit the firm and re-enter at another point, just to bypass the proofers and plate makers. Others would feign leg injures or death to drop someone else in it, rather than face the walk of certain ridicule themselves.
Come the morning of ‘The Great Soaking’ the plate makers were in fine fettle. The work had eased off, and it was playtime, where quite honestly anything could happen. Our Irish tea lady copped the first wave of inane banter, and she was now in charge of going out for our mid-morning grub. This was the woman that came into the firm one day complaining that her feet hurt; when we looked down we saw that she had her boots on the wrong feet! As usual, she already had a certain amount of dubious request on her list. Item one was a whelk yogurt, and from the bakers she was asked if she could get a fresh pie, a bun cup and two pregnant tarts! Anyway, as she was doing the rounds in our department one of the office boys drifted in, and as he was walking past one of our sinks, our foreman, Mick asked if he would fill it up. He put the plug in, turned on the tap, and began searching through our job rack looking for a bag of films.
At this point I should explain that our sinks were a tad larger then your average household fitting, quite a lot larger actually. A six foot man would’ve had no trouble in lying flat out in one, with his arms and legs spread open. He could also have had a bath if he wanted too, as they were roughly two feet deep. Well, our victim had been rifling through the job rack for 15 minutes or more, and he eventually found what he was looking for, and he was just about to return to the office when Mick asked him to turn the tap off for him. Then he made a fatal mistake. He asked our foreman if there was anything else he wanted him to do before he disappeared. “Well, get in of course,” Mick replied. There was a sort of stunned silence, followed by a look of impending doom about his face when he realised what department he was in. Then, in a fit of peak, he made a break for the door, the door that somebody had locked quite recently!
He put up a hell of a struggle for someone of his slight stature and weight, but overall he was only ever going one place before making his way back to the safety of the office. Splash he went; soaked from head to foot, an excellent way to start the day off. He gave up in the end of course, and ended up laughing his face off, we grabbed him some overalls, and a coat from the stores, and someone lent him a pair of trainers. He dried himself off, and eventually made it back to the office in his new attire. Just over an hour later he returned with a jubilant smile of acceptance on his face, and he’d come back to check on his clothes, which were drying off in the boiler room. His shirt, boxers and socks were nearly wearable, but his jeans and shoes were still way off being dry. He still had a good few hours to go before clocking off, but he was concerned about his shoes, so one of our apprentices said he’d spend some time blowing warm air into them using one of our plate driers, which was just like a big hair drier. He seemed happy with that and went on his way.
An hour before knocking off, Martin returned to see if his strides were ready to wear, but they weren’t. The legs were almost dry, but the waist band, the pockets and parts of the seat of his jeans were still damp. As he was beginning to look despondent, and I didn’t want to see him upset further, I said he might as well put them in out plate oven to speed up the process. What I didn’t know, because I’d been working in another part of the firm for most of the afternoon, was that the oven had been on for most of the day.
We used to bake some of our plates as it gave the images on them a longer life when they were used for long print runs for jobs like Dulux paint tins. I felt the side of the oven and, although it was still hot, it was starting to cool down, so I hooked his jeans onto one of the oven racks, slide it in and closed the door. I told Martin to come back in 15 minutes, so he wondered off, and I picked up another job from the rack. Another key factor that I wasn’t aware of was that the oven, which was electric, had only just been turned off. Worse still it was cooling down from a temperature of 700 degrees – whoops!
The time slipped by, as it does when you’ve got your head buried in your work, and I’d completely forgotten about what was simmering in the oven. Suddenly, a frantic office boy burst back into my department, with a worried look on his face, as he knew he was five minutes later than he should have been. Now having the attention of the whole plate making staff, I un-clipped the oven door and pulled out the rack with a pair of heavy-duty heat resistant gloves. At first glance you couldn’t help but notice that something wasn’t quite as it should have been. My co-workers reinforced this observation by collapsing, one by one, over their workbenches. The jeans entered the oven with the dark blue colour usually associated with this apparel. However, on their exit from Satan’s sandwich maker they were now an unhealthy shade of brown. “Well,” I said with straight face, “at least they seem to be dry now.” The whole floor burst out laughing. Martin looked at me, and then at his well cooked jeans in total disbelief. Gingerly he touched one of the legs with the tip of a solitary forefinger, and then watched as they disintegrated into dust on the floor before him. It was just like watching a clip form a Tommy and Jerry cartoon…
No apprentices were harmed in the production of this episode.
All material is under copyright.
