Eddie Botevski was the slingsman on the weighbridge in one of the rolling mills in the steelworks and it was a job that he liked very much as it didn’t require him to climb high into the racks of bundled steel bars like the other slingsmen. Eddie was not all that keen on heights and over the last twenty years had seen a few slingsmen fall from the tall racks resulting in smashed limbs and sometimes worse. The weighbridge slingsman used hand signals and whistles to guide the gantry crane driver in placing the bundles of hot steel bars that were straight off the mill onto the weighing cradle and, when the bundle was settled, take a card that had been placed on one of the slings and push it into a chute on the wall where the weighbridge operator would take the card and enter the weight of the bundle on the card and place the details in a big black ledger. Once the bundle was weighed, the weighbridge operator would give a wave to the slingsman who would then wave to the crane driver to tell him that the steel had been weighed and could be lifted off the cradle and taken to one of the many storage racks in the yard.
On night shifts, particularly in winter, Eddie liked to help keep himself warm by taking the occasional swig from a bottle of home-made slivovitz that he kept hidden in his little shelter that was not much more than some steel plates welded into a box that Eddie joked was only a bit bigger than a coffin standing on its end and without a lid. There was room for a little shelf where some of the slingsmen kept their cowboy paperback, a couple of hooks for a raincoat and crib bag and an empty kerosene tin with a couple of folded potato bags sitting on top to serve as a seat. The shelter, or humpy as the men called it, was designed to keep the worker out of the rain but not too comfortable so that they might go to sleep on dogwatch. Sleeping on the job could get you into trouble if one of the goons from the main gate came snooping around and sleeping in what was called ‘a made up bed’ was a cause for instant dismissal because the sleeper had intended to sleep and couldn’t claim to have accidentally nodded off while the work was quiet for some reason like a breakdown in the mill.
Sometimes when it was cold, Eddie would look in through the window and be envious of Drew, the weighbridge operator. Drew had a little bar heater at his feet and when the work was slow, Drew would fold a jumper into a makeshift pillow and sleep with his head on the desk. Sometimes Drew would wake suddenly, especially if he had been in a deep sleep, and when he woke, he sometimes had the sense that somebody was watching him and more than once, Drew had looked out the window to see Eddie standing on the other side, grinning away, his big gold front tooth shining in the yellow pool of light illuminating the weighbridge. When this happened, Eddie would give Drew a little wave and then head back to his own humpy for another small mouthful of Slivovitz.
Until he had come to work at the steelworks, Drew had not met many people who weren’t of British descent and the town where he grew up had primarily been populated by coal miners from Northumberland, while the small town to the west had been established by Welsh coal miners and the larger town to the east by Scots from Fife (to the north of the main street) and Lanarkshire (to the south of the main street) with a small sprinkling of people from Yorkshire and Durham in a little corner towards the Hospital Hill that the locals called ‘Pommy Town’. The steelworks were different to anything that Drew had experienced with a wide variety of people that Drew’s schoolmate Mullet referred to as wogs. Mullet’s older brother, Chook, had done his apprenticeship at the steelworks and was full of stories of the ‘wogs’ and their strange behaviour, food and drink.
‘They’re alright’ Drew said to Mullet at the Hebburn Workingmen’s Club a month or two after he started at the plant and a few days before Mullet was due to move away to Armidale for Teachers’ College.
‘The wogs?’
‘Yair. Some of the older ones are nice blokes. I sit with a group of them in the crib room. Mostly eyties in the group I sit with but there’s a lot of Yugoslavs in our department.’
‘Ya wanna watch yourself, some of them old blokes probably have ugly daughters at home, and they’d be looking for some bloke to marry them.’
‘Why would their daughters be ugly?’ Drew asked Mullet, shaking his head at the strange way that he thought that Mullet’s mind worked at times.
‘I’m not saying all their daughters are ugly. Some of them eytie sheilas are hot but if they’ve got ugly daughters, they’d be wanting to marry them off. It stands to reason.’
‘I don’t reckon a lot of the blokes I know would be keen on their daughters marrying a skip whether they were ugly or not.’
‘Skip?’ Mullet asked.
‘It’s what the wogs call us Aussies, you know, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo?’
Mullet laughed and held his hand up like kangaroo paws and made a clicking noise with his mouth. ‘What’s that Skip? Sonny’s getting’ hitched to an ugly wog chick? His Mum’ll ‘ave kittens.’
‘Yair, especially if she’s a tyke’ Drew said and they both laughed. Drew’s mother’s dislike of Catholics was well known and every time that Drew had expressed any interest in a girl, the first thing his mother would say is ‘she’s not a Catholic, is she?’ Drew was never sure where his mother’s anti-Catholicism sprang from, but he suspected it had something to do with what happened to her favourite brother, Drew’s Uncle Barry. Barry had started dating a young girl of his acquaintance, Bernadette, who worked as an usherette at the Olympia Cinema in Richmond. According to family legend, Barry had only been out with Bernadette once or twice when she announced that she was pregnant and Bernadette and Barry were married so quickly, Drew’s mother didn’t know about the wedding until after it happened. Barry had asked his father if he could borrow his suit to wear to a wedding and a couple of days after the wedding Barry’s father asked him whose wedding he had been to and his reply, much to his parent’s surprise was ‘my bloody own’. It wasn’t a happy marriage and didn’t last and Drew’s mother blamed the Pope and the Priests and bans on birth control for Barry’s predicament and fed her dislike of Catholic women who, she thought, were all out to trap young men in marriage.
Drew was glad for his job on the weighbridge. He had spent his first year at the steelworks on the bar presses where lengths of angle iron were straightened by heavy rollers and then stacked into two tonne bundles ready to be shipped to customers. It was necessary to straighten the bars because, when they cooled after they came off the mill, the bars would bend like bananas and, so, needed the second cold straightening process. The press that Drew mainly worked on was outside, exposed to the elements and as winter came around, the nights grew colder and the only heating was a couple of wire racks filled with bricks that were plugged into the works gas supply and used as makeshift heaters. The gas was a by-product of the coke ovens and if you spent too long, too close to the heaters you would end up with a headache from the fumes. The weighbridge was controlled from a desk in one corner to the side of the mill office and was a clean place to work that was warm in winter and cool in summer.
There was a high demand for steel in Drew’s second year and that made a lot of his workmates happy because the mill had to work seven days a week to keep up with production and so there was overtime almost every weekend including public holidays and public holidays paid more than a standard weekend. Drew was on day shift on the Monday and it was a quick shift turnaround from finishing at midnight the night before. He was never keen on the quick shifts, getting home to bed around one in the morning following the forty-minute drive in his old Falcon from the steelworks to Hebburn and then getting up at six in the morning to make the return trip ready for an eight-a.m. start.
Around lunchtime the mill had to change over to a different type of product. This meant that all the shaped rolls in the stands on the mill floor had to be changed to roll a different shaped bar. This process took several hours and so, for Drew on the weighbridge, it meant that he had nothing to do until the mill started up again which was unlikely to occur before his shift ended at four in the afternoon. The foreman would find alternative work for the labourers in the yard and on the mill platform and this generally meant cleaning up. The crane crews were left in place in case they were needed for anything and the foreman left Drew to his own devices. This suited him because he could sit back and spend the afternoon reading a book while getting paid two and half times his normal rate of pay. From the bottom of his crib bag, Drew pulled out a paperback copy of Visions of Cody and found his way to where he had marked a page with an improvised book mark that was a cardboard ticket the despatch clerks filled in and put on the side of the loaded rail wagons in the mill. Drew also pulled out of his bag a black covered lined notebook with red corners on the covers and a red fabric covering on the spine. The notebook was a bit bigger than the novel and slightly smaller than the school exercise books he had used in junior year of high school until they were replaced with sheets of paper in ring binders where the holes in the paper sheets were reinforced with little doughnut shaped pieces of sticky paper dispensed from a cardboard box. Drew also took a pencil out of his crib bag and checked to see how sharp it was. He had been writing his poems and other things in pencil since he had read the diaries John Steinbeck kept while writing East of Eden where Steinbeck talked about his writing ritual of starting each morning by sharpening a row of pencils for the day’s work. Drew was interested in the rituals of writers and hope that if he emulated them, it might make him a better writer.
Drew hoped that if he read a few pages of the Kerouac, it might inspire him to write some descriptions of what he saw around him in the mill so that people who later read what he wrote would come to understand that Drew was more than just a steelworker but that he was also a poet with gifts of observation and understanding. His problem was he just didn’t know what to actually write down on the page.
As he started to read his book, there was a knocking on the window from outside on the weighbridge and when Drew looked up, he could see the smiling face of Eddie and not just Eddie, but also Eddie’s made Dragan who was also a slingsman but who worked on the mill platform, hooking up the hot bundles of steel in the cradles where the cradlemen had loosely tied the bundles together with loops of wire ready for the crane to take them to be weighed. Drew couldn’t hear what Eddie was saying but he was laughing and pointing to him while speaking to Dragan, who was also laughing. Eddie was waving a one litre Coca Cola bottle in Drew’s direction and pointing to the bottle and then back at Drew. The bottle was three quarters full, but it wasn’t Coca Cola but some clear liquid that seemed to have a slight bluish or greenish tinge that made Drew suspect that it wasn’t water. Drew beckoned Eddie and Dragan to come into the office.
When the two men came in the back door of the office, they both whipped off their hard hats and held them behind their backs and this was something that Drew had noticed happened a lot. The men who worked on the mill floor or in the yard who were generally loud and boisterous, when they came into the office, were often like timid children. Apart from the section where Drew operated the weighbridge and another section next to his where the shipping tallymen worked out the loads for the rail trucks and lorries, there was the office of the general foreman and the office of the superintendent and this is where the workers came if there was something that couldn’t be dealt with by the shift foreman in his humpy in the doorway of the middle warehouse. Being summoned to the office where Drew worked often ended up with a worker being suspended or even sacked.
Eddie and Dragan approached Drew’s desk in a way that made Drew think of them as being like a pair of naughty schoolboys but not ones who were in trouble outside of the principal’s office but rather like two kids up to a bit of mischief that they thought was very funny. They kept pushing each other in the upper arms.
‘You ask’ said Dragan to Eddie and Eddie laughed back and said that it was Dragan’s idea.
‘It is birthday for the Queen, yes?’ Dragan asked. His speech was much more accented that Eddie’s who had lived in the country much longer.
‘Well, it’s the holiday for the Queen’s Birthday’, Drew said, ‘I think her actual birthday is back in April, somewhere around Anzac Day.’
‘You like the Queen?’ Dragan asked.
‘Well I don’t know her personally, never even met her.’ Drew said, spinning around in his swivel chair, wondering what the pair of them were up to.
‘Of course, not’ Eddie said, ‘why would the Queen want to meet somebody like you eh? Some scruffy fellow with the long hair and the whiskers?’
‘We like the Queen’ Dragan said gravely, nodding to Eddie.
‘We drink eh? To the Queen!’ Eddie said and then unscrewed the cap from the Coca Cola bottle before taking a big swig and, as he swallowed, screwing up his eyes tight. ‘You, you make toast for the Queen’ Eddie said and passed the bottle to Drew.
Drew took the bottle and looked at the two slingsmen who were both smiling at him. His first instinct was to wipe the top of the bottle where Eddie had just been drinking but he worried that it might make him look a bit sissy and might even be some terrible cultural faux pas that could see him in all sorts of trouble for insulting Eddie.
‘Is good’ Dragan said as a statement and not a question.
Drew looked around the room and outside the window to see if anybody was watching because he was certain the bottle contained alcohol of some sort and that drinking on the plant was an instant dismissal matter, if caught he would be sacked on the spot and sent straight home in disgrace.
‘Go on’ urged Eddie, ‘put hair on you back’.
‘Hair on his balls’ Dragan said and he and Eddie erupted in a bout of giggles.
Drew put the bottle to his lips and took a decent mouthful and swallowed it without tasting. The slightly oily liquid seemed to burn all the way down and took Drew’s breath away.
‘Jesus! What is that?’ Drew asked, gasping a little. He had drunk straight spirits once or twice before, like some whisky with his grandfather and he and his mate Mullet had once had a couple of straight shots of rum when they were daring each other and wanted to prove that they were truly men.
‘Slivovitz’ said Dragan and Drew looked at him none the wiser.
‘Plum brandy. My brother-in-law make it in his garage’ Eddie said, taking a swig and then passing the bottle to Dragan who also had a big mouthful.
‘Moonshine’ Drew said and laughed. ‘It’s got a bloody kick and doesn’t taste like any plums I’ve had.’
‘We drink for the Queen, to say happy birthday’ Dragan said and handed the bottle back to Drew.
‘It’s enough to make me want to turn monarchist’ Drew said and took another mouthful. Within a minute or two he thought that he head was spinning a little bit.
‘Here, to wash it down’ Eddie said and reaching into the pocket of his old greasy greatcoat, he pulled out a brown paper bag that had in it long yellow chillies. Dragan took one of the chillies and crunched on it as it was an apple. Drew decided that it was a day for firsts and also took a chilli and when he bit into it, he was expecting a real burn and thought that this was a further test of his manhood. He was surprised that it was peppery and there was a little chilli burn but it was also a little sweet and quite fruity and he quickly ate the whole chilli. This set Eddie and Dragan off with some more laughing and back slapping that was only interrupted by the blast of the crane siren telling Dragan that he was needed back on the mill floor and that production was about to start again.
Drew felt proud to be accepted by ‘the wogs’ and thought he had acquitted himself quite well. The next day, when he reported to work, he found, on his desk a big paper bag of the chillies and, looking out of the window, Eddie was grinning and waving at him.
THE END