The Dark Threads by Jean Davison

Author:Jean Davison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Accent Press
Published: 2009-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

LOOKING BACK 8

‘I DON’T KNOW HOW I’ll be able to get a good job with no O levels,’ I said to my mother.

‘You don’t need those fancy things. Why don’t you get a job at the Fisk television factory like Edna Wright’s daughter? Now, that’s a sensible, down-to-earth job.’

‘I don’t want to work in a factory.’

‘I thought you’d turn your nose up at that, Lady Jane. When I was your age I worked in a mill. I don’t suppose you’d like to work in a mill either, would you?’

‘You’re dead right, I wouldn’t,’ I said.

‘I don’t understand you,’ she said in exasperation. ‘The mill was good enough for me and for my father before me and for his father before him. Why do you have to be so different? Even Edna’s lass doesn’t think a factory job’s beneath her, and I always thought she was too big for her boots. What’s wrong with working in a factory?’

‘Nowt’s wrong with working in a factory. I don’t think it’s beneath me. But I’m not interested in what Edna’s daughter or anyone else is doing. That’s up to them, but I am ME.’

I stormed out of the room, slamming the door.

Upstairs sitting on my bed I thought things over. Perhaps I should go for an interview at Fisk’s after all. Perhaps it was as good a job as any that was open to me. At least it would be an opportunity for a brand-new start, I told myself, trying to quell my apprehension. This time I would have to force myself to talk from the beginning. At all costs I had to avoid creating the same situation I’d been in at Rossfields.

‘Please, God, don’t let me mess up my brand-new start,’ I prayed on my knees on the eve of my launching into the World of Work.

My factory job consisted of brushing grease onto a metal rotor, slotting it into a part destined to fit somewhere inside a television, adding a few screws, wires and metal fixtures, two blobs of hot solder, then passing it on to the next person. A two-minute job which a monkey could be trained to do. Repeated over two hundred times per day: more than a thousand times a week. In less than a week I was struggling to bear boredom so excruciating it was like a physical pain. But my mother was pleased that I had given up my ‘high-and-mighty ideas’ and settled for a ‘sensible down-to-earth job’. If only I’d kicked harder in protest. Instead I tried, God knows how hard I tried, to conform to the role that was expected of me. And in so doing I almost destroyed myself.

On the assembly line I sat next to Joanne Foster who, like me, was a fifteen-year-old school leaver in her first job. After a few days, a pattern was establishing with me saying nothing all day while Joanne and the others laughed and talked. Rossfields loomed large. I must talk. I must talk. I must.

I felt uncomfortably warm, warmer, hot, now stifling hot.

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