Bluesphinx

So there I was, just recovering from the shock of almost being stitched up by my neighbour at the “Royal” Hotel.

  I left the police station that day with no sincere apology for the rough treatment I had received from the forces of law and order-they kicked me out without even offering me a lift home! Choice! Apart from being charged with wasting Police time, I have no idea what became of the feckless moron who lived next door to me.

  But at least I was now a free man, and the relief of that was balm enough to soothe my aching nerves.

  I had already made the decision that a life on the wrong side of the law was not a good career move-at least not for me and this incident only cemented that notion more firmly into my consciousness.

  I needed to prove to the law, my friends, my family, and the people who knew me in the town, that my scallywag days were well and truly behind me, and only the passage of time could prove it-time during which I had to keep my nose cleaner than the Royal Family’s best silver!

  I knew that inside this young rapscallion there was a pillar of the community screaming to get out, and I figured that in order to fully unfetter him I first needed to acquire two of life’s essential components. They were,

(1) A decent job,

(2) A much more salubrious address than The Royal Hotel.

  I was working at the time. It was just one in a long succession of unskilled labouring jobs that in the late seventies were two-a-penny. Back then, if you finished/were laid off on a Friday, it was quite easy to simply start afresh with another firm on the following Monday.

  No hassle from interfering busybodies like the Health and Safety Executive, who these days insist that any job, no matter how menial or lowly simply has to be accompanied by a ‘Ticket’.

  As you probably know, great disappointment followed by a terse order to take their leave awaits even the humblest tea boy or toilet cleaner should they dare set foot inside the gates of any building site before they have completed the relevant course, and are covered by a (usually very expensive) certificate of competence to prove it.

  

  One of the main employers in the town at that time was the local Steelworks. They had just installed two huge electric arc furnaces in the western end of the works, and were advertising for men to work there. So in the spirit of “nothing ventured, nothing gained”, I applied for a position with them.

  The job I got-to my great relief and no little surprise, was beyond my wildest dreams. I was to start work in the traffic department as a railway shunter, working with the steelwork’s internal fleet of diesel locomotives!

  It would mean that for the first time in my life I would be working split shifts,(Mornings, 6-2pm, Afternoons,2-10pm, and nights,10-6am.), and the salary reflected this, I would be taking home just under a hundred pounds per week! This was no King’s ransom, but for a nineteen year old lad in 1979, one who was only used to the meagre labourers’ pittance of about forty five to fifty quid tops, take home after tax, it was a fortune!

 

  The problem of my home address remained less easy to solve. There has never been such a misnomer than the name that was attached to the filthy doss-house known as the Royal Hotel!

  The main part of the property, which bore its name was located on one side of Station Road, and the annexe, (which is where I found myself holed up), was on the other.

  At one time, way back in a much more opulent heyday, they were both grand three storey mid-terraced houses, but due to years of indifference and neglect they had fallen on very hard and sad times, and when I took up residence they were both very run down, and also run by, shall we say, a less than scrupulous landlord.

  I do know that in the nineteen sixties, during the hotel’s sparkling and well-heeled salad days, such notable celebrities as Diana Doors, and I think Frankie Vaughn had over-nighted there.

  But those faded glories now hung drab and colourless within the musty, damp-smelling, and peeling walls.

  The leaking roof and the broken window panes of what by the time I moved in had become nothing more than a temporary shelter for passing low-rent whores, petty criminals, social security scroungers, perverts, and destitute or desperate human flotsam. And I was there too, as desperate as the worst!

  It had sunk to the kind of address that carried guilt by association. But for now, at least until a suitable alternative could be found, it remained my ever so humble abode.

 

  The Steelworks, was a private firm which apart from employing  me employed roughly two thousand people, and had been a feature of the town since 1901. Located near the coast, it covered an area about a mile long by around half a mile wide, and it had over the years gone through many changes and several upgrades, and now the latest project, (The electric arc furnace), brought about because of the high demand for good quality steel, was just another change in that long line.

 

  I soon found my feet there, I was permanently teamed up with a driver, (Dave) who turned out to be a good friend, rather than merely a colleague. He was quite the expert at the Japanese martial art of Aikido-at that time he already held the rank of brown belt.

 Dave introduced me to the local Aikido club, and as I learned the basic Katas, we would practice them in the works canteen, and even the cab of the loco as we trundled to our various duties around the massive site. We always had a great laugh.

  I was no longer at the bottom of the pecking order. In actual fact, I enjoyed working with all the lads, who regularly laughed at my jokes, and who I often joined in the social scene outside of work.

  For the first time in my life I felt truly accepted as part of the team.  

 

  I loved working there amongst the drama, and the excitement of the steelworks. The heat. The noise. The sheer scale of the steel working industry, that anyone who knows it will verify, whatever you call it, you cannot call it a cottage industry!

  What follows is taken from the Windfall of the Wise, and it perfectly describes the immensity of the works, and the thrill of my job.

 

  “Imagine, if you will, pouring a saucepan of boiling milk into a cup. That is the principle, but in the new furnace house of the Steelworks this principle is magnified hundreds of thousands of times.

  Standing about twenty feet above ground on a wide concrete mezzanine stage I am looking across to one of the two massive furnaces that is about to pour. But how did we reach this, the conclusion of the smelting process?

 

  The furnace itself is set into another mezzanine, roughly forty feet above the furnace house floor. It is a giant steel ‘saucepan’, about thirty feet deep, lined with refractory bricks, and with a long chute, or spout that juts outward, twenty feet or so. It has already been filled to the brim with scrap steel. 

  Above this, a huge forty foot diameter lid with three holes in it slides across the top to close it. Then three black carbon rods, themselves mighty in construction, consisting of four pieces. Each piece four feet in diameter and twelve feet in length, and weighing well over a tonne, male threaded at one end, and female threaded at the other.

  By use of massive machinery that is attached to the roof of the furnace house, these three carbon rods are thrust down through the holes in the lid, ramming down deep into the lattice of rusting scrap steel pieces collected from the strategic tip, (A ten acre area where dozens of lorries were constantly ferrying and dumping thousands of tons of crushed, and chopped scrap metal, forming a huge multi coloured, glinting and rusting mountain. This was the raw material that would be melted down and transformed into high grade steel.) And now everything waits in anticipation of the fury.

  An electric charge is switched on, and the man-made thunder explodes.

  Even while wearing ear protection the noise is overpowering, the nearest comparison would be standing directly beneath a thunder bolt.

 A machine throws in tonnes of bagged and palletted sulphur and other additives through a hatch which opens up in the side of the furnace, and this bubbling ferocity continues for over an hour until the innumerable steel fragments inside become transformed into a bubbling white hot metal soup.

 

  On the ear-piercing sounding of a klaxon, the juice is switched off and my ears ring in the silence.

  Soon another klaxon signals the next stage in the process.

  The entire construction-mezzanine floor, the furnace, its lid and all are set upon two massive steel cogged arcs that rotate along toothed rails. An engine the size of a house drives a pump the size of a shed that forces oil into two gigantic hydraulic rams set underneath, and at either side of the rear of the furnace.

  When the switch is thrown the hydraulic rams tip the whole gigantic edifice forward. The door to the chute is opened; and nebulous clouds of brown and black smoke, sparks, and the pungent smell of hot sulphur precede the bubbling, white hot liquid steel that flows out into a waiting receptacle-the ‘cup’, which hangs patiently beneath the spout, suspended on the cables of a massive yellow gantry crane.

 

  When the last drop of liquid steel drips from the chute into the waiting vessel it is immediately moved away over towards the ingot moulds. It is then discharged into these through a small hole in the bottom of the vessel.

  The steel moulds are about fifteen feet tall, four feet square, and a foot or so thick. They stand waiting in batches of six upon small bogies that are hauled in and out by locomotive. (Which by the way, I have probably helped move into position.)

 

  Meanwhile the house sized engine again roars into action, and the oil is diverted from the first two giant hydraulic rams to two other rams located at the side and front of the cogged arcs. They push upward, rotating the empty furnace and its surrounding square of mezzanine floor back to its original position.”

 

  This huge dramatic event was played out several times a day, and it was one which was so noisy and disruptive in the surrounding streets that the local residents even got double glazing grants, and a reduction in their rates. (Pre-poll-tax tax.)

 

  I loved working the night shift. I would be awake and busy while the rest of the town slept. Or at least tried to sleep, as in the case of my neighbours!

  By now I had got myself a regular girlfriend. A massively flame haired beauty, a couple of years my junior, and who was even more fiery than the furnaces I worked with! It was often a mission just to keep up with her, but I thought I loved her, and she knew she liked me.

  Added to my circle of friends were a local pop group. A club band who at the time I was convinced that even though they were the turn playing working men’s clubs, second fiddle between the bingo and the beer, they were on the road to success and greatness! At least they managed to get bookings most weekends.

   I had become acquainted via the drummer who was the older brother of one of my school friends.

  So dear reader, you can see that my star was at last in ascendance. I thought I was sorted! But the best, and worst was yet to come…

  More next time. ‘Till then, stay happy!

  Bluesphinx.