The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (12 page)

 

THE FASCINATION OF WAR The Glass Canoe was a sailor once and read avidly every book he could lay hands on that told of the war in which he had been a number. Now he was perched aloft a gas-burning Peabody heater. His duty was to watch the flame through a peephole in case it went out and to give the fire more gas each time the order came. If the fire went out, and he didn't notice it in time, there would be a build-up of gas in the heater and when it was lit again the lot would go up, the Glass Canoe with it. The Peabody was heating air, which in turn was heating the regenerator. Now and then he swallowed a tranquillizer so he could pass the night feeling nothing. In order to crouch against the warm flanks of the fat regenerator and read his book, he had a scrap of polished aluminium propped on the sight hole. He could see the reflected flicker of flame at the end of each sentence as he glanced up. He talked to himself continually.

He looked up, grinning at the nothing in the sky. ‘God pulled the chain, the doors of heaven were opened and all the piss pots in heaven were emptied,' he shouted and made a two-finger sign at the rain.

He had scrounged a huge slab of cardboard from the sides of a carton in the catalyst shed, bent it in the middle and held it propped on his head in an inverted V shape to keep off the driving rain. There is no shelter on a refinery plant. He was soaking wet.

The Glass Canoe had been away in hospital for treatment and was discharged with a paper to say he was sane. Picked for promotion and ambitious not because of overwhelming interest in refining but rather out of an overwhelming idea that he was better than the next man, he was sent away to study to be a senior man on this new cracker, but the strain of holding tightly to his conviction of superiority was too great and he started to do wild things in the control room. They took him away, strapped him down and dug away at his insides with pentothal, electrodes, drugs and group therapy, but all they did was get him to talk interminably about himself and accept new ideas quickly. He flitted from interest to interest, hobby to hobby. He was never without an aim. They didn't touch his sense of being better than other men. Sport? He could be a champion. Business? Could have made a fortune. A week after the Python got his guts on the subject of toy car racing, someone casually enquired after his hobby. He was lost. What hobby? He'd forgotten all about model cars.

He read nothing but war novels. He was mad on war, a fitting representative of the island race which suffered less than any European combatant nation. Here he was in the open at 3.30 in the morning, soaking wet, reading of Hitler's glorious panzer divisions grinding across the face of eastern Europe and people dying like flies in a storm. Small areas of wet decorated each corner of his mouth.

 

THE EFFECTS OF ENCLOSURE It had been raining for days. The world smelled like a diseased lung. The high wire fence enclosing the Refinery, Termitary and Grinding Works dripped freely in the driving rain.

Why was there no one to investigate the harm done by this high barbed wire? Sometimes it was as if the wire stretched from one side of the 350 acres of rich industrial land to the other at head height, the rusty barbs constantly threatening to furrow vulnerable human skulls. Those that were once men, and still often were when they had gone outside the blue gates, walked about with bowed-down heads as if in a vast, intimidating cathedral.

Would it be inquiring perhaps too closely to ask whether the fumes from the men's slowly corrosive discontent were not making thinner and more brittle the wires caging them? But it was only an experimental plant; there would be more plants built and new and tougher wires extruded to hold and cage more securely these men who came daily to the blue gates offering their lives in return for the means to continue them.

 

FEAR OF NUMBERS When the Samurai left the Termitary for the larger and more exhilarating life of the works, his former fellows felt the first breath of uncertainty about their earning future. They were comfortable prisoners of the trusty class and looked anxiously beyond the Samurai's leaving for a sinister reason. They saw not far off the computer processing of the work they did, and were afraid. Within three months the staff which previously had 2 per cent Union membership, added 93 per cent. The boys of the personnel office gracefully refrained from paying Union dues out of a nice feeling to those above them that as they knew many secrets of the company's industrial dealings, they should not be thought to share them with the rank and file of an industrial Union. They thought of this as loyalty. The cashier, a Unionist, refused one day to handle pay dockets prepared by non-Union labour, the company ordered the 5 per cent into the Union, and that was that. They were amazed the company didn't need their loyalty.

The Samurai was happy to hear the first result of the landslide. Most increases in pay had been absorbed into their above-award wages for some years until they were back on award rates; entry to the Union changed all that. The threat of a white-collar strike—unheard of—put the next wage increase into their pockets. The Samurai smiled when he thought of the distaste with which most of those trusties would have approached a defiant attitude to almighty Puroil, and of the wonder in their struggling hearts when they saw Puroil back off from all its righteous protests and offer five dollars it didn't have.

The Samurai was a little ashamed he hadn't stayed with them to fight, but had the good sense to realize that his action in leaving their ranks spoke more eloquently than words.

The two things were of course not connected, but shortly after this, in the interests of economy, white-collar prisoners were denied the use of their separate dining-room and were obliged to eat the company lunch in the larger mess-hall, rubbing reluctant white shoulders with storemen and packers, fitters, electricians, riggers, drivers, gardeners, drum-rollers—anyone. Khaki overalls, boots, ragged shorts and buttonless shirts, grease on the chairs, chipped tables; there was a lot to put up with. The trusties were no longer separate. The staff dining-room was no longer. And for those whose lives were bounded by Puroil and felt a glow when they saw its advertising on television and who used to feel they were dining out in society when they sat elegantly at the staff tables with no roughly dressed prisoners in sight, this was bitter punishment. To sit and lunch at their work desks in sight of the depressing evidence of their indeterminate sentence of industrial imprisonment brought on feelings too heavy to be borne and thoughts too sharp and offensive to be allowed to become conscious. There was only one place to eat. Nibbling a packet of sandwiches in the sun was no solution, for trespassing on the attractive lawns was forbidden, they were only to be looked at. Only employees saw them, and salesmen trying to get favours from the company, but the principle was the same.

The energy tensions that create the illusion to our eyes of a solid substance, in this case a group of persons and a demarcation of one group from another, had broken down. Molecules of fitter and administration officer were seen to mingle. Nothing was the same again.

The only consolation left to the trusties was they were not branded as lower grades were. They didn't punch a card under the eyes of Heels or Hanging Five or the Prohibited Import or the Black Snake: all they had was Luxaflex peeping out through venetian blinds. They had no numbers stencilled on chests and backs or on the foreheads of their safety hats, although they learned gradually that they did have numbers. The new machine payroll system required a number inserted as a key-figure on their monthly salary entry, but so far they avoided the indignity of being addressed directly by number and the self-destructive habit of thinking of themselves as numbers rather than persons.

 

NEW DEAL The Wandering Jew, the newest manager, altered office working hours, came down hard for punctuality and saved money on plant maintenance. Even more privileged prisoners were not exempt. One fine morning the Whispering Baritone arrived at five after eight to find the Manager in his chair. Their conversation was reported by a typist talking to the Manager's secretary in the next office.

‘Where the hell were you at eight o'clock?' chattered the Wandering Jew in his inadequate voice.

‘Ah—I must apologize for being a trifle—er, late!' stammered the Whispering Baritone. He twisted his head quickly sideways, his collar had become tight. His thin face grew red. His fingers picked at the tips of his other fingers, the dry skin flaked and came away. He was temperate and ate sparingly; he had no buffer of alcohol or surplus of good food to fall back on in emergencies. Glorious Devon, the previous Manager, had never done this to a man of his status. The Baritone was a devout supporter of the new economy cuts but had never considered that he might be cut.

Just in case he thought of leaving Puroil in a huff, the Wandering Jew took away his big title of Admin Superintendent and gave him a smaller one to reduce his bargaining power with other employers.

The maintenance bill was reduced by the simple expedient of taking men off shift maintenance work, cutting regular maintenance programmes and reclassifying fitters so that expenditure on their wages could be charged elsewhere. Managers who saved the company money were rewarded: the Wandering Jew wanted rewards. The crew left on maintenance shrugged, tore a few pages of reports out of the loose-leaf maintenance book and drifted on as usual. Breakdown maintenance became the order of the day.

 

RELATIVITY Pixie, a Puroil man born and bred for obedience, now stationary in about the middle orders of the local hierarchy and with little hope from ability, connections or cunning to get any further, first heard of the ructions that followed these economy cuts on a day when he had a Credit Union meeting. They were standing around waiting for the rest of the nine directors. He was full of the ingratitude of the hard-case prisoners who complained bitterly about their maintenance overtime being taken away and the wickedness of their transfer from shift to day work with its consequent loss of penalty rates.

‘If anyone complains about conditions at Puroil you feel like taking them by the scruff of the neck and shotting them to the shouse!' This last word was indelicate, an indication of powerful feelings.

‘Tossing them anywhere!' said Luxaflex mildly. He tried to turn the edge of Pixie's speech by his tone of voice; there were bottom-of-the-barrel prisoners present who might resent a meeting of a common interest society being turned into a forum for orthodox Puroil doctrine.

‘It's everywhere!' said the Garfish, also a member.

‘Why, over at Aluminium,' said Pixie, ‘the telephone operator walks six hundred yards to a toilet and makes her own tea. Yet our lazy buggers of girls here only have to turn a corner to find a toilet and have their tea brought to them. They get it too easy! They don't know when they're well off! The more they get the more they want!' He kept an eye on Luxaflex, to see if he was on the right track.

‘And at Pax,' said the Garfish, mentioning a nearby refinery, ‘the Manager himself is often up on the pipelines wielding a pair of stillsons, yet here they walk off the job if a staff man so much as touches a set of tools.' He, too, watched Luxaflex keenly. Alert for any reaction.

The Two Pot Screamer, the operating prisoners' representative, took out his notebook. He was elated by the stupidity of their remarks, and copied them faithfully. He knew they had been down to the plants at least once a year and knew nothing of the processes.

Another man, looking round a corner of the building from outside, grabbed the opportunity of reminding his fellow prisoners of the eternal verities. He wrote the word Eternity in yellow marking crayon in odd corners of the refinery, imitating a famous Australian who for many years did the same thing on Sydney footpaths. Or perhaps consciously carrying on his good work, for the other man had died and was even then tasting his beloved or dreaded Eternity. He stooped and wrote carefully on the concrete.

 

THE DISEASE OF WEAKNESS The Samurai was aware most strongly of his own desire always to have the power to do to others what they did to him. But a little beyond that feeling there was another. It was on a little prayer he had copied out from the writings of an uncanonized nineteenth-century saint and carried in his pocket. The Samurai was a natural equalizer, but there was in him a calmness and strength that could find the ring of these words echoing quietly in his own mind. He took out the prayer and read the words half-aloud.

He had to go out in the rain and check a series of valve positions before the power recovery boiler was brought on line. The night was dark, without purpose, mindless as rags flapping in the air. The rain wet his strong jaw and splashed unnoticed down his thick neck and up into his boots; his mind went over the pathetic letter he had in his pocket. One of the men, young, vague and poorly educated, as most of them were, had written a plea to the Samurai. His young sister of twelve had been raped, but being genuinely frightened of the mess the newspapers would make of the affair, he had not gone to the police, some of whom made a lucrative sideline of selling news tips in cases where the victims didn't have money enough to object. The man, known as Pigeon Post for his interest in racing pigeons, had found the rapist from his sister's description of him and of the car in which she was raped, but he didn't know what to do.