Franklyn: A path of twisting reality

coincidental.

Chapter 1

Memory, as though frustrated by its own passive existence and lack of physical form, often sets traps for the over confident. For instance, you may be sure of the exact place where you put something only to find that it’s not there. You can return many times to that place in the same belief that it must be there, it never is. It never was. Then it turns up somewhere else. Of course! Now you remember!

Then there are the occasions when you are angered by others whose memory is obviously at fault; their recall is gravely flawed and in some instances they weren’t even there for the events of which they speak. Then someone else corroborates their memory by precisely matching it to their own and you fall silent, dismayed. That’s memory for you. But what of the memories that cannot be corroborated? What then - when there’s only you to remember? Where, on a scale of six to a thousand and three, does truth then rest its weary haunches?

Well, the story that I am about to tell doubtless lies as a shifting thing somewhere along that scale. Not scientific truth, not truth that you could lay any amount of money on, just my truth as believed and lived by me. I hope you’ll find it interesting, even though you are probably not my age and did not live and work where I did. Nonetheless, we may have encountered the same sorts of people. After all, they do tend to replicate themselves across many divides.

I was born in 1952 - now there’s a monochrome, factory hooter image for you! Anyway, I was born into a working class part of a working class town that often held pea soup fogs as part of its DNA. Everyone worked; full-time for Dads, part-time for Mums. Then cars came along, and televisions, and three-piece suites, all paid for with something called HP which stood for hire purchase and meant that people without cash could hurtle out and buy these things. They did.

Then it became full-time for Dads and full-time for Mums. It was an age of new. Bright new everything. Today, whatever of it can still be found is referred to as retro and bang on trend. Back then it was referred to as getting with-it and meant not being square any more. My junior school years saw all this evolve. On going in at five years of age, just another chestnut foppy-haired kid, it was quite common to see boys wear their Dad’s cut down trousers, hilariously gathered at the waist. No one laughed, it was too normal for that.

On leaving aged eleven, those same kids would sport brand new football boots for games periods. For me, both then and in looking back, those junior school years held the best of my early times. It never rained, it didn’t and the hot summers were only interrupted by seasonal white Christmases. I’m sure you know where this is going. It was another world back then. Well, it was, and I loved it. It was a time of playing-out until ten o’clock at night, when you would wander home untroubled; a time when the cobbled streets were newly laid with tar that you could pull away, pick out the stones and roll it into - frankly, anything. All you had to do was avoid the bully in the next street and put your hand up in class to every question asked, despite not knowing the answer. Life was sweet and friends plentiful. Good friends too, mostly ragamuffins like myself, all skinny and full of it.

This never included the quiet ones in class, the bright ones with the different shaped heads that had the extra bit at the back. Good for copying off in maths, though, if you could curve your eyesight around their crab-like elbows. They were a totally separate breed who never suffered from not understanding things like I did. Their heads would dive halfway down the pen’s length towards the paper to answer the sums suddenly displayed on the blackboard and leave me to stare in silent panic.

In fairness, none of my lot faired any better than I did, it just didn’t trouble them. I admit I was jealous of the clever ones. They never sought the approval of others, never felt the absolute need to play the clown. You never saw them anywhere outside of school, goodness only knows what they all did while the rest of us were scavenging footballs off a roof somewhere or trying to make a raft from wooden pallets. Fifty years on, I can still recall their names, they won’t recall mine of course, if indeed, they ever did.

It was in this larky manner that those early school years passed by. Kindly dinner ladies would lovingly dole out thick gravy for the asking, the girls kept themselves to themselves and we always had a hot plan going on. Life was an absolute breeze. Just occasionally, though, as if to remind me of its serious purpose, letters of concern from school would fall through the letterbox at home; along with the various term reports that invariably flagged up problems with my maths. These occasions always resulted in Mum sitting me down for an hour or so in the evenings to trawl through the supposed troubling bits.

The trouble then was there weren’t any troubling bits. It all seemed so straightforward and obvious when Mum went through it. Later in the evening I would sometimes overhear Dad ask how our little learning sessions had gone to which Mum always replied, ‘Well, he seems to be all right to me’. Which was fine because a couple of times, I’d heard mention of private tuition in order to fix the problem. So that kept that particular wolf from the door.

But as time eased by, wouldn’t you know it, everything changed. Something came along called the eleven plus. This was a life changing exam that we were told you couldn’t fail, you would simply be channelled into the senior school that best suited your learning requirements. Anyway, as expected, us wasters failed and went off to secondary school to then fill the factories. The clever ones passed and went off to grammar school to then fill the universities. I never saw them again.

My first problem then was that all my chums, living where they did, went to some Victorian shouting house in the middle of town. I, living where I did, fell outside that particular catchment area and so, went to a vast and soulless pile of honey coloured bricks that housed miles of emulsion-washed corridors and traded under the name ‘Oldbank Secondary Modern School’. I think it was the first time I’d known real fear. I wanted to run back to my primary school, to those wonderful dinner ladies who I knew would fix everything for me if I did. Could I wander around town perhaps, for five years and pretend? After all, none of the riotous kids that laughed stupidly before me were friends of mine. There wasn’t a friendly face to be seen anywhere, which included the teachers empowered by it all.

It rained for the next four years, dismally and depressingly. It was a place without hope, a place with no future promise and I hated it with a passion. The only subject that held any spark of interest for me was music, something which I’d always had a hankering for; mostly, though, the one hour a week lessons turned into an eighteenth century history drone about some Austrian, or whatever, composer. Never was there any attempt made to teach us how to play an instrument or to read sheet music, things which I would readily have warmed to.

In my fifth year at secondary school, the rain stopped. Surrounded again by good friends, there was fresh excitement in the air. It was then the late-60s and the world was ablaze - with us. Gone was that back-beat dross music and the black and white dress code that had us copy men with lantern jaws. Suddenly, it was an open choice, as long as you wore faded denim. It was fabulous. Collectively, we couldn’t decide whether to slip down to London to the American embassy and sign up for the Vietnam War or get ourselves to California for the surfing cum music scene. The world was a happening place and we wanted in. Of course, we did none of those things but somehow that didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was believing that we could, that, and the never ending rush of good ideas.

As though to bring us all back down to earth one afternoon, Mr. Bailey, the English teacher strolled into class bearing his usual grizzled look and with obviously no learning on the agenda, asked each of us what we’d be doing on leaving school; something which was then imminent. One by one, we reeled off the engineering companies that each of us was destined to be apprenticed to, which included my own, Newsome Tools Limited.

There was to be no taking time out to do any of the things that we talked of, no California, no surfing, just the waiting factory gates as though we had no control over any part of our lives. It immediately struck me that this was another end of days. I remember looking at Mr. Bailey, at his non-comprehending face and thinking, ‘What do you know, you never left school in all your life?’ I still think I was right.

A few weeks later we left school for good. For me, it couldn’t come quick enough.

Chapter 2

What replaced it was something even more dismal. Without even the freedom soak of a long summer’s break, I stepped like a frightened child, mug in hand, into the darkest recesses of industry. It looked like the most dangerous place on earth. Of course, I had seen Newsome Tools from the outside over many years but never given a moment’s thought to what actually went on in there.

Now, I was to be part of it, with its thunderously rolling overhead crane, flashing welding arcs and rows of lathes and milling machines that seemed to go on forever. Everywhere, either spinning or traversing steel was being cut as blue-hot entrails of swarf streamed from whining machines like razor scribble. The smell was that of hot oil and the whole place, dim and noisy, looked like it was made as some hellish place of punishment. No one came to me, no one even looked at me as I stood there, shocked.

A forklift truck, spinning an orange light, screamed past so I stepped backwards without need. Not even slowing, it then disappeared through slapping polythene doors, if anyone had been coming the other way! Along a broad aisle between machines, I could see men stood about, they looked totally at ease and untroubled by the intense mayhem that went on all around as they talked. I wanted to go over and ask them where I should report but that meant going further inside which seemed far from wise. How they even got there was unclear. As I stood there, unsure about everything, a combat fatigued electric tug that was once yellow, pulled up to a halt beside me and the man in overalls driving it said, ‘You the new apprentice?’

‘Yes.’ I replied keenly and only just managed not to add ‘sir’.

He shuffled himself sideways on the cover ripped seat, pulled a nod for me to join him and off we went as though on a ghost train ride.

That was my introduction to the next four years. Marvellous. Naturally, I hated the place, it was the last environment that I wished to find myself in. On the plus side, I grew up in there. Probably because I had to, there’s no room in a place like that for dreamers or fakers. For the younger ones it was a macho climb, for the just-marrieds it was about proving to demanding wives that they hadn’t made a mistake and that they could have it all. They worked every hour that came their way.

For the older ones, it was about acceptance, that and perceived wisdom which they harnessed in various, subtle ways. One old stalwart always wore a beret, no one ever asked him why. Another was never seen without a tie, always the same one with some secret insignia embroidered upon it. Others would sport a dictionary at their work station or some intellectual sort of daily newspaper, one, even a bible. It was a place of savage humour where you were given no quarter - and gave none.

Sam Levi was the bane of the factory floor. He was an apprentice in his final year who always gave the younger ones a hard time. He would hang around the store’s counter, stiff-necked, as he chewed gum open-mouthed and waited for one of them to show up wanting something. Then it would be ‘What do you want that for’ or ‘Make sure that comes back.’ For me to be considered even tallish, I would have needed to grow another three inches, which meant that Sam Levi looked down on me in every way. He was a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work who never smiled. In fact, he was about as anti-social as anyone could get.

In fairness, though, the place threw me an unexpected lifeline - I had to attend college. With college came exams, exams with technical and mathematical intensity, exams that had to be passed. At first encounter, I asked old Walter on the workshop floor why anyone would need to know anything about the ‘bending moment of a steel beam’ or the ‘frictional resistance’ of one material as opposed to another.

For me, his considered reply was to change everything. ‘See them!’ he invited, as he nodded in an all-around manner. ‘Well, they don’t know anything about that. That’s why they’re here, it’s why they’ll always be here. Unless you want to be like them, doing this until you’re sixty five, then my advice to you is to pass every damned exam they put in front of you. It’s your ticket out of this place.’

For me, it was a bitter-sweet answer. There was a way out, all I had to do was crack the maths. So, crack the maths I did.

At the end of