I suppose that all small boys look at their fathers in order to learn what makes a man a man. There must be as many answers as there are men. Certainly I’m glad my father didn’t display his manhood by driving large cars too fast, drinking large whiskies too fast, fertilizing a lot of strange women or killing a large number of birds or animals with a smoking shotgun. His magic was infinitely more potent than any of those. In reality, he was the foreman fitter at the local gasworks but to me, aged 4 or 5, he was the oily wizard.
It wasn’t that he didn’t wash as much as anybody else, but mere washing wasn’t enough to remove the marks of his oily trade. When he first came home he was often as black as a coal miner; his work clothes, his black greasy cap and dungarees, and especially his dreadful black sooty boots that lived beside the gas stove in the kitchen, smelt of the pit: sulphur and benzene and carbon. Even washed and dressed in his best, he had the swarthy good looks of Rudolph Valentino, the Twenties’ film star. His smell went everywhere before him and lingered after him. On the perilous journey to the outside loo in the dark of a winter’s night, with only the comfort of a wavering torch, I would be reassured on arrival to find that lingering smell of benzene. It added to his fascination that he smoked twenty full-strength Capstan cigarettes a day: when he cut me a slice of bread and handed it to me, there would be that comforting faint smell of nicotine on it.
Certainly I never had a trace of the ‘wolves under the stairs’ syndrome that many children suffer from. The benzene smell banished them. If they dared show their glittering fangs my father would certainly fix them, as he fixed any stubborn engine that refused to work. He wouldn’t slaughter them, he would just fix them so they went to the place that was proper for them, and do the things that were proper for them: they’d probably end up behind bars in a benzene-smelling zoo. It added to his fascination that the thumbnail of his right hand grew in five dreadful segments, from where he had hit it with a hammer while he was an apprentice. I would press hard on it to see if I could make it hurt, but he just grinned. He worked in a place eminently suitable for a wizard. It was only a quarter of a mile from home (I got the smell of benzene even when he was at work, if the wind was in the right direction) and sometimes when he forgot his bait I would be sent along with it by my mother. Even his ‘bait’ was extraordinary, and wizard-like.
Something mysterious in a tin, wrapped always in a red and-white spotted handkerchief. And a tall lidded can, full of an awful mixture of sugar, condensed milk and black tea leaves, which he referred to as his ‘makings’.
The works, as I approached, resembled nothing I have come across since except the black land of Mordor in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. A cloud of brown darkness hung over it, always. My father said that was the reason he never had a cold: the germs withered in that blasted air. He said that no child in the primary school that cowered under its walls ever had a cold either, for the same reason.
The wall around the works was livid red brick, fifteen feet high, with black iron spikes and broken glass on top. Above the wall thrust two immense red-brick chimneys, day and night belching wreaths of black smoke that sometimes enveloped you as you approached, leaving you coughing helplessly.
There was only one gate, and here lived my only enemy, the timekeeper, a man I deeply hated and distrusted. For one thing he had a clean white face, and a clean white collar with tie. The only work he ever seemed to do was to write things in a large book. Nothing passed the gate but he wrote it down in his book. But, far worse, he had once denied knowing who my father was, the first time I had been sent alone with the bait. What was more, he had made me give him the bait and said he would make enquiries, in a voice that hinted there would be serious trouble all round. Stripped of my sacred trust, for my mother had said that I was to give the bait to no one but my father, I went home in hysterical floods of tears.
Next time I was wiser. Holding my breath, I would duck down and creep beneath the monster’s window. This was not easy, for in front of that window was a monstrous metal plate, studded with screws and strange writing. The weighbridge, where the coke carts parked as they passed in and out: my enemy would read a dial inside his office and give out yet another sheet of his endless white paper. If I trod on the weigh-plate, my enemy’s dial needle would swing and he would know I was there. So, doubled-up, I would work my way along the six-inch strip of cobble between gatehouse and weigh-plate. I knew he was my father’s enemy because my father called everybody else in the works by their Christian name, but this man he simply referred to as ‘the timekeeper’.
But now I was safe inside my father’s kingdom. Cobbles beneath my feet and, between the cobbles, huge puddles upon which the greeny-yellowy-blue swirls of oil endlessly writhed like jagged snakes. Black brick walls, crusted with soot an inch thick; glass windows smeared with a yellow oily coating so thick you could hardly see an electric light shining through. There were great black doorways from which came the heavy clink of hammers in the darkness; others in which huge, sweating engines turned endlessly, hissing softly to themselves, with no one to tend them. Some huge doorways were full of the dreadful glow of red and yellow light, in which men with shovels toiled, reduced to black skeletons by the glare, feeding the furnaces. Above my head pipes stuck out, puffing huge fat clouds of green smoke, or dripping unknown blackness that might burn your hand away as it touched you. Great stinking heaps of still-hot white ash; pits full of brown bubbling water of a bottomless depth; a weathered, scarcely decipher able sign ‘Number Four Retort House’. Sometimes I would wander fearless for ages, until I found a man who had time to speak to me. Fearless, for my father was lord of all this.
I have great respect for Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and yet I cannot find the fear in it that others feel. Tolkien’s Hell was my Heaven. And eventually, a bent dark figure would emerge, white-eyed and white-toothed. No orc, but an honest man, because black-faced. Men with black faces were workers, and my father’s friends. Men with clean faces were bosses, or worse still ‘Boss’s men’ and my father’s sworn enemies. This blackened figure would recognize me with a cry. ‘It’s Bobby’s bairn!’ Others would emerge and take up the chorus. ‘Bobby’s lad . . . Bob’s bairn. He’s brought Bobby’s bait!’ And they would make me feel like the hero that carried the good news from Ghent to Aix. Then the burning question: ‘Where’s Bobby? Where’s Bobby?’ was passed from shed to shed, gantry to gantry, until it seemed the only question of importance in the world. Bobby was in number three retort house. Bobby was up on the dread-named coke-crusher. Bobby was on number one conveyor. Bobby seemed to be everywhere, omnipresent, like God.
And then he would arrive, hurrying always but flustered never, ramming his way through the day’s crises like a little tramp steamer butting through heavy seas, always with a man or two clustering round him as he walked, asking what was to be done, in a stream of wizardly incantations involving cranks and sumps, steam valves and condensers.
Mission accomplished, I would run out of the gate wildly, at full speed across the weighbridge, leaving my enemy the timekeeper mouthing and waving his arms helplessly behind his glass window.
The best time of all was a Saturday morning, when he came off a week of night shifts to two days’ holiday, while it was still dark at six o’clock in winter. He would be in a mood to celebrate. He would stop at the newsagent’s and buy me a model cannon he knew I had long coveted. Or else he would call at the baker’s and buy bread buns fresh from the oven and bring them to me in bed, still scalding hot and dripping butter (and tasting faintly of benzene). Then he would sit for a few minutes and tell me strange things, like how there were always rats gathered under the railway bridge, and how they would turn and stare at him as he passed, quite bold, their eyes red points in the light of his cycle lamp. The gasworks was full of rats. They used to nibble the hooves of the carthorses as they slept, and the horses, that pulled the coke carts, never seemed to notice. He told me about Ginger, the works cat, who could pick out the one pool of clean rainwater from the many pools of poison, and never came to harm, but the stupid rats couldn’t, and burnt their paws and mouths off. Oh, he was an oily wizard indeed, stranger than Gandalf the Grey, and he only once broke my heart. I was with my mother in his great engine room, watching him start a great forty-foot engine, by pushing the eight-foot flywheel around with his shoulder. There was a much smaller engine, which seemed an exact replica, four feet long, screwed to the floor nearby, standing silent. I asked what it was for. Divining my lust, he asked me if I wanted it. I said, ‘Yes.’ He said he would bring it for me when he came off his shift.
I spent eight hours in a fever of expectation, not realizing he was joking. When he arrived without it, I burst into tears and was inconsolable for days. But he did bring me a full-sized model of a Browning machine gun on its own tripod, made in his spare time, for a surprise. And a three-foot scale model of a battle cruiser. Our house was full of the brass working models of machinery that he had made. I had watched him start making a cabinet with wood and when he had finished, a voice came out of the loudspeaker, voices from London and Luxembourg and Hilversum. It was hard for a 5-year-old to see just exactly where the magic ended.
He taught me that real men put the world straight when it got broken. Real men created endlessly, out of almost nothing but a few bits of wood and brass pipe and a lick of paint. And he also drew things for me on demand. He could draw a car, or Charlie Chaplin with his bowler hat and cane, or a full-rigged sailing ship. He had a gift for drawing, but thought it only fit to amuse the bairn with. Nevertheless, by the time I got to school, it seemed quite natural to draw. I was quite surprised that everyone couldn’t do it.
Extract from The Making of Me
Robert Westall © 2006
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