Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood Page B

organization.
    The forge, too, where, amongst others, old Pa Scodger worked. Mr Scodger was a blacksmith. A blacksmith, though! Ha! A diminutive, harassed fellow with a bald head and a huge moustache. He worked in the tiny smithy adjoining the forge, and, out of working hours, sometimes afforded amusement to the boys of North Street by the differences that occurred between him and his termagant wife. As though he hadn’t enough dinning in his ears where he worked.
    The forge! Impossible to stand still here. Rows and rows of drop hammers, small and large; ten ton to over a hundred. Great blocks of steel lifted by eccentric pulleys shaped like an egg, motivated by electricity and compressed air; blocks of steel crashing upon the white-hot forgings with a shattering bump. Earth shook, trembled beneath your feet. If you stood within yards of the largest hammers you actually were lifted off your feet A most peculiar sensation; a tickling of the stomach, a giddiness. Outside the works’ walls even, three hundred yards away, the reverberations of the enormous things could still be felt
    As for the riveting shop. Bedlam.
    The din here was insufferable. On the walls were the furnaces, each a little smaller than a kitchen oven, one every four yards or so; a fire-clay-lined box without a front. They were fed by two pipes, one gas, the other compressed air: the air roared, centrifugally, driving the gas in fierce orange-coloured spirals, making white-hot the rivets lying within. The operatives were adept as jugglers. A pair of long-handled pincers shot into the furnace; out came a white-hot rivet, plump into the rivet hole; then a steel bar was rammed on to the rivet head to hold it secure whilst the riveter, with a revolver-like pneumatic riveter, jammed it home, pressed the trigger, and: ‘tat-tat-tat-tat-tat’. Such a row. As though a million boys were running stakes along iron railings, simultaneously. Every man stone deaf after a six months’ spell of work here. Phew! But they were men.
    And such as would take advantage of a greenhorn’s inexperience and credulity in playing him tricks. Such as when Billy Higgs, one of the senior apprentices whose behests it was Harry’s duty to obey, sent him to the stores for the ‘long stand’. Harry went, unsuspectingly, made his request, wondering on the shape and use of the instrument. The storekeeper answered, solemnly: ‘Long stand? Oh, aye, just stand there,’ and went on with his work. Minutes elapsed: Harry watched the traffic of boys coming with brass checks and going with tools. Jack Lindsay, a thickset boy with a ready grin and a fondness of striking pugilistic attitudes for no reason at all, came up whistling: ‘ ‘Allo, ‘Any.’ he said, ‘What y’ standin’ there for?’ Harry told him. Jack shook his head and said, sympathetically: ‘They mek y’ wait for that summat awful.’ He went off chuckling. Soon Harry began to blush and to wonder why all the apprentices who now came up looked at him as though he was some odd animal: they grinned or laughed, nudged each other and winked. Bill Simmons, blue-eyed, over-grown, with an unruly mop of hair and a chronic habit of prefixing almost every noun he used with the idiomatic term for copulation, laughed and said to his companion, Sam Hardie, an undersized, bow-legged, low browed boy with long, strong, ape-like arms: ‘Did y’ ever, Sam. They ain’t gev him the - stand yet!’
    With a sickly grin Harry asked him the meaning of the joke. Sam, grinning, advised him to ask the storekeeper. Blushing, Harry turned to the busy man who bad forgotten all about him: ‘Hey,’ he protested, mildly indignant: ‘Hey, what about that there long stand?’
    The man looked up: ‘What! Ain’t you gone yet?’ he asked, raising his brows,
    ‘I come here for long stand an’ you told me … ‘
    ‘Well, y’ bin standin’ there hafe an hour. … Ain’t that long enough?’
    Truth dawned; red in the face Harry licked his lips,