Vivaldi And All That

                                     Shefton, a city in the 1950's

                                              Chapter One

Heavy rain lashing the bedroom window woke me early on that Monday.  The alarm clock's luminous dial on my bedside cabinet showed four o'clock. My head was aching after Sunday night's drinking session - not surprising since I hit the booze most weekends. I stretched luxuriously and bumped an elbow against the headboard. Four clock? Good, that meant I had another hour to relax.
     Laura stirred beside me. I took a lock of her hair between finger and thumb and rolled it gently to feel its smooth and lustrous texture. I could smell the fragrant shampoo she had used. I saw the outline of her face in the light of a street lamp outside our bedroom window.
     I sighed. She would be twenty-one next month. I whistled to myself at the quick passage of time. That started me thinking. What birthday present should I buy her? Maybe that ruby ring I had seen in Shefton? Whatever I did buy would have to be special: something exceptional that would freshen our lives and maybe bring back interest to two years of marriage, which, of late, had slid into boring mediocrity.
     I floated in and out of sleep thinking of her lovely brown eyes, her flowing dark hair and her exquisite body; remembering our marriage and the posing for photographs on the steps of the local church; the faint rain glistening on my grey top hat. Laura had wanted me to dress in black tuxedo and white shirt with bow tie, but I steadfastly refused to be married wearing a penguin suit.
     The alarm rang, jarring me awake. I turned it off and groaned. Laura moved slightly and settled down. I swore inwardly. There seemed absolutely no point getting up at five o'clock on a Monday morning and travelling to work in driving wind and rain.
Maybe I was becoming work-shy
     Here I was, twenty-three years old and already work was becoming a dreadful bind.
My thoughts went back to better days when my first days at work, when fifteen, were interesting and my new workmates a pleasure to know. Rain drumming on the roof brought me out of my reverie. More rain streamed down the window as I edged back the curtain. I slipped out of bed and collected my clothes from a chair. My 1938 Austin banger parked outside the front door had no chance of starting in this weather. I had choices: walk the half mile to work, ride my clapped-out bicycle - or stay home.
     I am not one for having weekdays off so I sneaked from the bedroom, tiptoed past daughter Edwina's bedroom and dressed at the stair bottom, my head still fuzzy from too many pints of Trundles beer at the White Horse pub.
     November's wind gusted rain against the front door, whining as though someone was in pain. A dustbin rolled down the street, clanking low notes like an out-of-tune piano. Knowing my luck, it was probably our bin.
     After dousing my face and neck at the kitchen sink I made a pot of tea and scoffed a corned beef sandwich while reading the Sunday newspaper sports pages. I read again the results of the football league First Division. Shefton City had started the season well but now they were sliding toward the bottom half of the table. I remembered having a trial with City when seventeen and I had a lousy match. It was my only game for them and at just eighteen I played with a local pub team before joining the Royal Engineers on National Service. Because my mother was seriously ill and I was an only child, they posted me to Liverpool so I could travel home each weekend to see her in hospital. They called it a compassionate posting. That was one thing I did like about National Service: if you needed help - you got it when it mattered.
     Time was rolling on. I had to make a move. Laura had fixed me sandwiches for work. They were in the pantry in a lunch box. I checked the weather. It was still raining. I decided to cycle, collected the lunch box and a small bottle of milk. These I added to a screwed up newspaper sheet in my coat pocket containing loose tea.
     I put on my rain cape and stepped out to the back yard. Dawn had yet to show over the fields past the last row of houses that stood on the bottom road. Those fields consisted of a football ground, a river, and beyond that on a steep embankment, the railway lines. A passenger train huffed northward, its clattering exertions echoing down the valley. The gusting rain beat against my cape. My bike lay flat against the house wall. I checked the tyres. There were no punctures. The front light was not working but that did not matter for the street lighting was good from here to the local factories on Eccles Road.
     Walking up the entry between our house and the house next door, I climbed three steps to the pavement, slung my right leg over the bike saddle and pedalled against a droning wind toward Cheadles Engineering Company, wondering what the works manager, Alex Dingle, would say to me for my missing the last Saturday morning shift.
     It was the same old route and the same prospects - another week of repetitive lathe work with hands and overalls reeking of protective jelly and of soluble oil. You always seemed to have these odours around you, no matter how of you washed or changed your clothing. Already I could visualize hearing the rhythmic thumps of the forge hammer against white-hot steel and the mixed whine of rotating machinery as steel tools cut into rings, bars and crankshafts.
     I reached the end of Paper Road, turned left down Belford Road, freewheeled to Eccles Road, and then more freewheeling onto Reap Lane and under the railway bridge. Rain spattered my cape as I swerved onto Cheadles' factory yard of cinder, ash and rainwater. The area was dark and uninviting even though the indoor factory lights were on. I shoved my bike into a rack under a tin roofed shelter, clocked in, passed through the forge and went to my lathe in the cold and damp machine shop. I was surprised not to see Joe Hillian singeing his pants beside the glowing red forge furnace door.
     Nobody bothered saying 'good morning'. Just a nod of the head was all you got when it was this early on a Monday. By six-thirty everybody was working and getting to grips with the start of another dreary working slog. My lathe stood in the middle of a line of seven; behind each other, all ancient belt-driven lathes powered by an overhead engine that stood ten feet above us on a platform.
     The machine shop noise grew louder and more insistent. The forge 30cwt hammer slammed onto sizzling steel, shaking the Anderson metal sheets of the factory roof and dislodging the weekend dust.
     An off-key voice was singing Jezebel. It had to be Jacky Ballinger. He always sang off key. Just before our nine o'clock break, a hand dropped heavily on my shoulders.
     "It's good of you to turn up, Mr Dibley," said a baritone voice.
     I turned and smiled at the stocky figure of our works manager. "Morning Mr Dingle," I said.
     With his grey hair parted fastidiously down the centre and glistening with oil, the tiny pencil moustache gave him the look of an old Errol Flynn. He didn't know we called him Errol behind his back. 
     He scowled. "Never mind this 'good morning' rubbish. You were absent last Saturday morning. Had you forgotten where we are, or did fog descend so you couldn't find the ruddy factory?" Alex Dingle was always annoyed when anyone missed working a Saturday morning shift. He hooked calloused thumbs behind his bracers and rose on his toes. "That's the second Saturday in a row you've missed. What's your excuse? And don't give me your usual pack of lies."
     "I couldn't kid you with lies, Mr Dingle."
     Dingle smirked. "I know that son, so don't try it." He came up on his toes again. He was the only man I knew who could swagger without moving. "Mr Cheadle came in on Saturday morning," Dingle said. "Do you recall who he is or have you left your memory at home?"
     "He's our boss."
     "Correct, and in case you have forgotten, we work for him. He employs us. In fact he is our God. That's why his name is in large white letters above our factory front doors and our names are trodden in the cinders and ash of our forecourt." Dingle smirked again and took another pull at his bracers. "Mr Dingle arrived at five minutes past six o'clock last Saturday morning."
     "You're saying he was late, Mr Dingle?"
     "I'm not saying he was late you clever young bugger, but he looked smart and trim in a new dark suit and a Trilby hat. He recovered the time cards from the clock and realised one man was missing. He gave me a rollicking in my office. Do you know what for?"
     "I haven't a clue, Mr Dingle."
     Dingle smiled without humour. "Mr Cheadle can count, Alan. We have a workforce of forty, that's including the forge workers and the lads here in the main factory. Mr Cheadle had in one hand thirty-nine cards of people who were present. In the other hand - he held one card. That's all - just one. Can you guess whose card it was?"
     "Mine?"
     "Correct again. So what do you think Mr Cheadle did then?"
     "He sent out a search party for me."
     Dingle glared, his dark brown eyes showing gold as they usually did when he was upset. ""No, he did not send out a search party, you clever bugger because he knows you go boozing at weekends and you have trouble rolling out of bed on Saturdays. He is not a fool." Dingle stretched his bracers outward and in front of himself as if doing this gave him more authority. Now balancing on his toes, he said, "What's wrong with Saturday morning shifts, eh. Don't you want the extra cash? Or have you won the pools and you're buggering off to the Caribbean?"
     I grinned. "If I'd won the pools I wouldn't be standing here, would I?"
     Dingled smiled thinly but without malice. Now fifty-eight, he'd been through the mill. A First World War veteran who demobbed in 1925 as Sergeant Major. Started at Cheadles and toiled his way to Works Manager. Hard but fair was Dingle.
     He lowered his voice, yet his next words were staccato at my left ear. "The Company order book is overflowing, Alan. We need our workforce to attend Saturday mornings so we can keep pace with the work. Mr Cheadle is close to clinching an important contract with a European country. If we get it. then a certain person will be asked to work extra hours. I can't name names but I'm standing very close to the left ear of the person involved."
     I knew orders were strong, for Ted Rollins, our Union rep had said so and therefore the Union was happy to support the Company's stance on additional overtime. I agreed to come in as requested in the future including Saturday mornings.
     Dingle smiled, nodded pleasantly, and thus appeased strode to his office in his new black sponge-soled boots.
     The nine o'clock buzzer sounded. A fitter turned off the overhead engine. It ran down slowly and came to a halt with a squeak.
     Wally Mullins came round from the lathe in front of me, carrying a mug of coffee, sandwiches, a newspaper, and an old orange box to sit on. "What did nosey old Errol want then?" he said with a voice hoarse from heavy smoking and too much beer.
     "He told me to come in on Saturdays - says the firm will go bust if I don't."
     Wally snickered. "Don't worry about him, Al. Dingle thinks he's still in the trenches at Verdun. Says he once routed a whole German Division of crack troops and shot down the Red Barron at the same time."
     I smiled at his drawn, pasty features, lank hair slicked back with cream, lacklustre brown eyes. He was skinny with slouched shoulders. At thirty-one, and still single, he seemed to wear most of life's problems yet sometimes came out with ingenious observations to surprise you. He unwrapped cheese and pickle sandwiches. "Were you at the Horse last night?" he asked.
     The White Horse was the local public house where most of Cheadles' workforce drank. "Yeah," I said. "I was there, but I've had enough of that dump. It's a dead-alive hole. They don't provide music and without music there's no atmosphere."
     Wally leaned forward as though in conspiracy. "Went into Shefton City centre with Terry Bonsall on Saturday night - and last night too. We had a few drinks at the Royal."
     "Is that the new hotel they opened in the city centre last year?"
     "That's the one. They built it on the site of the Alhambra theatre that was flattened during the Blitz." Wally slurped coffee and continued, "Tell you what, there's some great talent turns up there. It attracts the best birds in town. I've never seen so many lovely girls in one place at the same time. You should take a look - maybe pick up a piece of skirt on the side." He grinned lecherously. "You're a bit of a lad at chasing the girls. I reckon a couple of years ago you wore the hottest pants in Shefton, but what did you do? You got married - you silly sod!"
     "I don't need any spare now, Wally. I've got me a wife and a daughter."
     Wally guffawed, dangled the newspaper's photograph of a partially nude girl in front of me. "Come off it, Al. Would you turn down a bit of crackling if she was built like this?" He hutched the orange box closer. "Laura wouldn't mind if you had a bit on the side, would she?"
     I chewed a ham sandwich. "I don't play the field now, Wally."
     "You used to do - and you were good at it. So why the firkin hell don't you have a go now? You're a good-looking lad. If I looked like you I'd be among the birds that quick that they wouldn't have time to fly."
     I had to smile, for Wally scarcely talked of anything else: he read about crumpet, talked of crumpet, had numerous photographs of crumpet, but he never got any.
     The buzzer sounded with Wally holding his newspaper upside down while studying a girl's naked torso. He grinned at me. "Come with me and Terry to the Royal this Wednesday night. You never know, you might get lucky and pull a really nice bird."