Washers (2008)

 

To the four year boy I was the majesty of the flour mill loomed large in my life, literally and figuratively. In the early 1950s my father worked as a mill hand, at the flour mill. My parents had moved out from London after my father was de-mobbed from the army and wanted to give their children the benefit of country life. From early on the mill beckoned to me. From the moment I first saw that mill there was huge fascination within me, and me being pre-school had little to do with my time but to wander around the fascinating environs of that old mill, playing where I supposed my elders couldn’t see me. At the grain grinding mill I had no sense of danger whatsoever, no concept of accident or jeopardy and would cheerfully poke my nose in here, and peek inside there to my innocent heart’s content. I was one of the few children in Mill Lane, there were, I remember, about four and only one other my age, Peter, though my recollections are mostly of my solo expeditions around the ever calling Mill and its surrounds. Just beyond the mill, the barges always fascinated me. They came up to the flour mill from the estuary river, probably from the sea but I wasn’t to know that at age four. I would have to sneak through the outer reaches of the mill to get to its riverside, and there amongst the mud and brush I would hide and watch the white dusted men load or unload the barges, like some edited and forgotten scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but set at a mill in rural England. The coarse flour sacks obviously weighed heavily as 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, and over their burly shoulders and only sought to emphasise the darkness of their jacket, and the brownness of their overalls. Even at that early age I could feel the tragedy of lives spent bowed to that weight, the harshness of the working-class reality and the continuing austerity of coupon governed post-war Britain. I’d made friends with the old blacksmith. If he was in a good mood, and not too busy, he would allow me to pump the heat smelling leather bellows, or watch him work as sparks of metal few to the tune of his hammer on metal. It must have seemed like fireworks to the boy I was, magic sprinklers, shooting stars in the privacy of the forge bearing life for just a few seconds, then leaving that curious afterglow on the retina which appeared just as real as the sparks themselves. Directly opposite the blacksmith’s forge was a mill pond. It was probably a small pond but to a four year old it seemed relatively large. In this turbid pond were copious unusual and exciting treasures; sprues of metal 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. I recall the thrill of playing with new and rusted metal washers of all sizes, skimming them across the 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 them and turn them with all kinds of imaginings in my small head, no doubt fuelled by the adventurous Superman stories I loved to watch on the family’s small new TV. When mum came back 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, and that I’d come a cropper. But I was an adventurer and had little concept of the word dangerous. Mum was away at work all day so she had no way of preventing my expeditions, and Dad, of course, was working up to his eyebrows in flour and couldn’t keep an eye on me even if he wanted to. My elder brother was at school, so there was just me and my imagination to keep each other company. That day, the day I remember the most, a fresh barge had unloaded its ballast ready to be filled with the sacks of flour, and the unwanted metal was taken from the vessel and tipped onto the ‘pond’. I had a thrilling time 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 these 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, so 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 stored away. A couple of years later these long since forgotten objects were rediscovered at the bottom of a wooden draw. We were about to move. My father had a new job on an apple farm. He was to be a tractor driver and general farm hand, my mother was to work in the owner’s house as a housekeeper. The table was being cleared ready to be loaded onto the removal van and there they were; the curious washers, only they weren’t washers but Chinese coins from the days when Chinese coins were strung onto metal rods, as part of the finishing process. Those Chinese coins are long since buried in the dust of my youth but the memory of them lingers now I am into my half century, I often think about them and my introduction to foreign climes as I live here in rural South East Asia, where one of the three races of this country is Chinese.