Sticky Bottle by Carlton Kirby;

Author:Carlton Kirby;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472994615
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK (Trade)
Published: 2023-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty

Tro-Bro Léon

Watch the Piggy

‘What do you reckon?’

Mark had just twisted out a whelk from its spiral home. And it didn’t look right.

‘Honestly, Mark, you’re asking the wrong guy. I’m not a whelk man. I chewed on one for ten whole minutes once and, when I took it out of my mouth again, it didn’t have a mark on it. Rubber snails; no thanks. And anyway, it’s black. Aren’t they supposed to be green?’ I went back to my sandwich and watching the Tour de France on the café’s TV.

Mark pondered for a moment before he shrugged his shoulders and popped the black whelk into his mouth.

Two hours later we were in hospital. It was a rough start to a tough holiday job.

Mark and I were in La Haye-du-Puits in deepest Normandy. We’d got the job because Mark’s dad Ralph was on the management team at Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts in Sheffield. They had bought La Biscuiterie Rouger in Normandy, so we managed to grab ourselves a summer job helping to make gaufrettes in a hot, steamy biscuit factory. It wasn’t glam.

On our arrival a big foreman asked wearily what we wanted to do. I said ‘casual labour’, meaning we would do anything. But the translation didn’t really go down too well. His face went a little redder than it already was as he blustered: ‘We work hard in this place and you will be expected to do the same.’ Apparently in my terrible French I had said we wanted to do ‘lazy work’; didn’t go down too well.

The foreman did however give me a sitting-down job driving a forklift; a machine I had claimed to be familiar with. I wasn’t, of course, but thought How hard can it be? Well, I found out that rear-wheel steering takes some mastering. Turn the steering wheel left and the rear turns left, so you face right. Right?

At the end of the first day, I was shown a charge sheet that detailed the total loss. I admit that the 10m/33ft-high stack of Raspberry Specials did come down a bit hard when I hit the base of it. I remember the smell as I panicked and ran over the strewn bales as I charged off, coming up just short of spearing the foreman into another bail of Vanilla Supremes. Sweet. Bizarrely, they let me keep the job.

Mark was a little guy and was given a big stick. He had to stand at the back of a line of rather Victorian waffle presses that opened after going through an oven tunnel. These cast-iron crocodile mouths opened to reveal a cooked waffle about half a metre square, which was then supposed to drop onto a conveyor belt taking it off to be cut into smaller biscuits. Mark’s stick was to knock off any biscuits that stuck to the metal jaws before they clamped shut again to be injected with more waffle mix heading back into the oven tunnel.

If he got this wrong – and he did get this

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