Washers

To the four year boy that I was, the majesty of that imposing grey flour mill - stained with eons of white flour, stood proud like some unscalable Norman castle Keep. To me it seemed romantic, but impenetrable, an enigma, yet I was to witness trucks laden with floury sacks heave past me, dragging up that small road, past our house with the green door - 11 Mill Lane.

In the early 1950s my father worked as a mill hand. He laboured at the flour mill for seemingly unimaginable hours, appearing home then disappearing back in a mist of flour dust. For a while my father became almost legendary, mythical, as we barely saw him, and when we did he would grasp my hand and run it roughly on his beard stubble. When I tried to snatch that delicate hand away, he held it fast, letting his beard bristles scratch my young skin. To him, no doubt, it was a game. To me it was brutish – I cried and was chastised for being a baby. His hand was like the vice he later used to tie plugs and lures for coarse fishing, his browning fingers – steel, his breath reeking of Woodbines.

My parents had moved out from the confines of Clapham. My father recently de-mobbed from the army and repairing Harley Davidson’s left over from the American occupation, wanted to give his children the benefit of the country-life he had never experienced. As a Norfolk boy he worked at fish gutting, then on North Sea trawlers. His single mother encouraged him to undergo Merchant Navy training. My father-to-be sailed off into a shrinking world. Years later he regained his land-legs as a career soldier, washed up in India.

That mysterious mill beckoned to me. As a pre-school, I had little to do with my time but to wander around that old mill. There were few children in Mill Lane - about four, and only one other my age – Peter.

Immediately beyond the mill - on the estuary, floated barges - they came up to from the sea, but I wasn’t to know that age four. I would sneak through the mill to get to its riverside. There, amongst mud and brush I would hide, watching white dusted men load or unload barges like some edited, and forgotten, scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The coarse flour sacks weighed heavily. The men would trudge them out slowly, from the mill, and carefully load them onto the waiting barges, the white flour dust sprinkled over their head protection, over their burly shoulders, emphasising the darkness of their jackets, the brownness of their overalls.

I’d made friends with the old blacksmith. If he was in a good mood, not too busy, he would allow me to pump the leather bellows, or watch him work as sparks of metal few to the tune of his hammer on metal. It was fireworks, magic sprinklers, shooting stars in the privacy of the forge - bearing life for just a few seconds, leaving that curious afterglow on the retina which appeared just as real as the sparks themselves.

Opposite the blacksmith’s forge was a mill pond. In that turbid pond were copious treasures. Metal sprues from the forge, sharp metal shavings, odd shaped clinkers from the forge fire and a multitude of small objects - used as ballast from the wooden barges, intermingled and intertwined in a fascinating array.

I thrilled at playing with both the new and rusted metal washers, skimming them across the dank, rust coloured pond, making them jump, one, two, three jumps until they landed on the junk pile at the other side. I would pull thin twists of metal out of a tangled heap and watch them spring coyly back - shavings from either the blacksmith or from the ballast. I would twist those shavings, turn them with all kinds of imaginings fuelled by adventurous Superman stories.

When mum came back home from working at the electrical plug factory and found my grey shirt and shorts dirty with the pond’s rusty water I’d get a clip round the ear, and told to stay clear of the mill - it was dangerous, I’d come a cropper. I was an adventurer with little concept of the word dangerous.

That day, the day I remember the most, a fresh barge had unloaded its ballast. It was ready to be filled with sacks of flour. Unwanted metal was dredged from the vessel, tipped into the ‘pond’. I sifting through the new treasure, finding small metal bars, more springy shavings and this time found some quite curious washers. I hadn’t seen washers like those before; they were round like the others, but heavier and chunkier and made of an altogether different metal. In the centre, around the hole, there was an engraved square and worn squiggles, which even to my child brain registered as some kind of writing. These were fascinating objects quite unlike any others I had seen. I took some, put them in my shorts’ pockets, along with all the usual accoutrements of a four year old boy’s pocket, and carried them home to be carefully squirreled away.

A couple of years later, those long since forgotten objects were rediscovered - at the bottom of a wooden draw. We were about to move. My father had a new job as a tractor driver, on an apple farm. My mother was to work in the owner’s house as a housekeeper. The table was cleared, ready to be loaded onto the removal van - and there they were; those curious washers, only they weren’t washers at all - but Chinese coins from the days when Chinese coins were strung onto metal rods, as part of the finishing process. It was my introduction to races outside of my own.

Later, at the manor house where my mother worked, I encountered the gentleness of the Chinese maid – she came with the family back from Hong Kong. She taught me how to write my name in Mandarin, introduced me to silk worms and mulberry leaves, stroked my hair and called me Ma Din. I never saw the mill again, the pond, the washers and sometimes wonder if it was all a fiction, the dream of a small boy left to his own devices and encumbered with too much imagination.. The mill still exists - but my parents are gone, the Chinese maid grown old and only extant in a black and white photograph taken at her wedding where I smiled a cocked-head smile, before the maid moved to America with her new husband.