Seventies Nadir

Looking back over my posts, I’ve written a lot about things that happened in my life in the 1970s. The tail end of school. My university years. My abortive attempt to be a waiter in Switzerland. My trip to the USA and Canada. So I ask myself: what part of the seventies haven’t I covered?

Well I trained as a teacher in 1977/78 and taught from 1978 onwards. I suppose I could write about that, but my teaching career isn’t a subject that appeals to me – yet. It continued until 2013 for a start, so a lot of things happened. Also it’s difficult to be honest about it – at the moment – and what’s the point of writing if you’re not going to be honest?

So what I’m left with is the job I did before I started teaching and after I left university. During that period – 18 months – I worked in a small engineering firm in northwest England. This interlude – though unglamorous – will give the reader a snapshot of the seventies. Universities and so on are, after all, rather rarefied places – especially the one I attended. This job also enabled me to put the words Development Engineer on my CV. What a joke.

In fact it took me several months to get a job after uni. I signed on at the job centre in my home town and they told me I’d be better off going to a specialist agency for graduates. So in the end it was the latter that found me employment.

My first day was hardly encouraging. The agency had told me to go to an address in a run-down part of town, and take it from there. When I arrived it seemed that our first task was to break into the property by smashing a window. The firm was a new start-up and this slum was to be their premises. The guys who did the smashing of the window – my future colleagues – were a little loutish, I thought. None of this boded well.

And it took me a while to figure out what the firm was about. It seemed that a bunch of employees of a large and famous UK company had quit en masse to form their own tiny company. They were on a shoestring and had to be content with insalubrious surroundings.

Over the next few days I met more of these people, and they too were rather unappealing. It soon became clear that the top brass were Freemasons for the most part. I would hear them whispering stuff about their rituals and meetings. I gathered that the firm’s Christmas dinner was to be in the Masonic Hall.

One of them – a huge fat Brummie – drove a Volvo. The joke was that this great lump of lard needed a tank-like car to convey him around. Another had the sleek appearance of a spiv, though he was well-spoken – a southerner I gathered. A third was quite sympathetic. The rumour was that he had an agoraphobic wife who couldn’t leave the house. A fourth was an affable Scot. A fifth was a lugubrious lecher. These were the managers.

Below them were some competent people who did seem to have specific and useful skills. An older and a younger man operated a drill and a lathe. I’ll call them Drill and Lathe. Then there were a couple of guys in their thirties who understood the ins and outs of the devices that the firm made. One of these was a grumpy Geordie. He was too young to be grumpy, I thought, but he did know his stuff. I gathered he’d been on the oil rigs in the North Sea where they used our devices. The other guys described him as bitter and twisted. I’ll call these two employees Competent and Grumpy.

Then there was me and another young graduate with a higher degree in some branch of nuclear physics. I gathered the firm wanted a couple of recent graduates on their books to burnish their image. The salary wasn’t great – £2300 a year – with a measly two weeks’ annual leave. This was US-level holiday stinginess. And what’s worse, I was so unsure of myself during my 18 months with the firm that I never dared to ask for any of this time off.

Then there were the devices themselves, which struck me as being like little sweeties. By that I mean they had no moving or electronic parts – only a coating and a filling. The coating was aluminium and the filling was plastic, epoxy and ceramic – with a wire and solder. I gathered they cost about £40 to buy. This was both too much for what they were and too little to pay our salaries, I thought. Especially so, since the firm had made only a few hundred and was making only a handful of new ones. The devices looked homemade, as cakes do when they’re irregular. We’re apt to see this as a virtue in a cake but less so in a product used for serious technical purposes.

My job was to dig inside these devices when they came back for repair. Usually all I needed to do was re-solder the wire or attach a new piece of ceramic to the plastic using superglue. If anything says the seventies to me, it’s superglue. People had a thing about it in those days and it was horrible to work with. Your fingers would get stuck together and only prolonged soaking would separate them. I’d learnt about Schrödinger at uni, only to end up with a soldering iron in one hand and webbed fingers on the other.

But all the while in the background Competent was working on a more important project. I came to realise that the firm was like a snake – it survived on an occasional good meal that lasted it for months. The sweeties were an irrelevance. The managers, it seemed, had contacts they’d made during their time in the larger company. They’d secured a contract with a Dutch nuclear power station to do a job on their reactor. Competent was creating a sort of super sweetie. We were to take this to Holland and apply it to some crucial reactor component by way of a safety check. And I was to tag along.

They gave me a big wad of guilders as spending money and I flew to Schiphol with manager Spiv and young minion Lathe. Spiv then drove us southwest in a hire car to a seaside hotel where we were to stay with our colleagues. At a lunch stop, Spiv recommended we order uitsmijter with salad. The salad, he said, would cleanse our palates after the greasy uitsmijter. We knew no better, so we did as he said.

---

In the reactor I had no role to play. I was there for the ride – which was fine by me, though a little tedious. At the beginning of a shift you’d strip off all your clothes and put them in a locker. Then you’d don an orange Guantanamo suit with underwear to match. At the end of the shift you’d take off your orange clothes and enter a shower. Next to the shower was a radiation detection chamber through which you had no choice but to exit. If a bell went ding when you pressed a button you could leave and get dressed. If it didn’t you had to go back and shower again. Rinse and repeat, as they say.

Manager Lecher was with us too. It may be unfair to single him out, I admit, given that the dominant vibe of the whole firm was lechery. There was a historic town a few miles from our hotel and one day Lecher drove Lathe and me there. But he didn’t take us to this town to see the stained glass windows in the Oostkerk. Rather he parked the car and led us down a sleazy side street. It’s here if you need it, he said, pointing to a shop stacked with paper-based pornography. This was his contribution to our comfort and well-being in Holland.

In the evenings we would gather in a bar near the hotel. The managers liked this place because you could watch the tarts coming and going. Gossip had it that Grumpy had used the services of one of these ladies the year before. He’d grown attached to her and begun to feel they had something special between them. Returning this year, he’d expected to renew their passionate relationship. But in blunt Dutch fashion the lady had reminded him that a thousand men had fucked her since they’d last met. Of course, he was welcome to be the thousand and first – if he had the cash. This, they said, was the chief reason for Grumpy’s extra grumpiness in the Netherlands.

One late evening in the hotel a knock came on my door. There was a party in one of the manager’s rooms and all were invited. When I entered they were all there. Volvo, Spiv, Lecher et al were lounging on the bed with a bottle of whisky and a stack of garish magazines from the ancient town. Every new person that joined the party was given a glass and invited to grab a mag. This hideous situation was an aesthetic offence, I thought, rather than a moral one.

At the end of the Dutch job, Spiv drove me and Lathe back to Amsterdam. It’s the weekend – you should stay here another night, said Spiv to me. You’re young and single – enjoy yourself. We’ll see you on Monday. Have a black one for me, added Lathe. So I stayed on as Spiv had instructed, but wasn’t clear what he expected me to do. I wandered along the canals of De Wallen and hit upon a cheap-looking hotel. The manager showed me to a room resembling a bottle dungeon. It had no windows – only a skylight twenty feet above the floor. I wandered out into the streets again, found a grubby cinema, and watched Emmanuelle. This was the naughtiest thing I was up for, and I resigned myself to the fact that it would make a poor story on Monday.

---

An older man joined the team during the latter half of my time with the company. He’d been a bomber pilot in the Second World War – and I’ll call him Ronald. He and I worked in the same room and got on well together. In fact it got to the point where I was the only person in the company he got on with. I understood that they’d employed him to take charge of the stuff we did with the sweetie devices.

Ronald told me, among other things, that they’d called their bomber’s autopilot George. They’d played cards in the cockpit while George had kept them on track on their way home from Germany. On one occasion the aeroplane had suffered some kind of damage. They hadn’t been able to maintain their altitude and had crash-landed short of the home runway. Ronald had a noticeable dent in the middle of his forehead.

By this time we also had two girls in the department – doing some of the soldering and glueing. They had a radio they would tune to a music station – and this song by Bonnie Tyler sticks in my mind:

I was lost in France
In the fields the birds were singing
I was lost in France
And the day was just beginning

But Ronald wasn’t happy about the radio. I’m not sure whether this was because he was under pressure from managers to put a sock in it, or he didn’t like it himself. Anyway, he told the girls to switch it off – and they ignored him. The girls were nice enough but they didn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t listen to music. What harm was it doing?

One of the girls came from a place a little to the north of my home town, where the accent was more Lancastrian. Drill used to say that she talked like a pit prop. Lathe would then add in a lascivious tone that she didn’t look like a pit prop. One day Pitprop burnt her hand on the soldering iron and said shit. That’s not the kind of language a young lady should be using, said Ronald. Rather than say that broken things were buggered, Ronald would say they were sugared.

One day Sympathetic called Ronald into his office – and Ronald returned, ashen-faced. Sympathetic had told him in a gentle and roundabout way that he wasn’t up to running things. They demoted him but still kept him on. This struck me as odd since all Ronald had to do was manage the sweeties, and I felt sure he was capable of that. But Ronald did have an uneasy manner about him. I reckoned the bombing sorties had shot his nerves to pieces.

---

When I finally decided to quit the firm and start teacher training I confided first in Lathe. We talked about how I would phrase my letter of resignation. Lathe suggested that I needed to put Re: Jacking it in in the letter heading. What will you do when the kids roll blotting paper up into little balls, soak them in ink and throw them at you? he asked. I had to confess I had no idea.