Hugo Hamilton - The Sailor in the Wardrobe

It’s very different from working at the harbour. This is a real job where the foremen wear white coats and trilby hats. You can spot them a mile away. Some of them are good fun and make jokes, while others talk like cowboys and give orders in a Norfolk accent that Packer and all the other Irish lads have started imitating. There are lots of hard men around. Shapers. Lads who don’t say very much and look mean all the time, as if they’ve been in lots of fights and we should be afraid of them. But everybody is so bored with the mindless work of the pea factory that they all have to talk to each other in the end, just to pass the time. The women working there are mostly from Norfolk and their jobs are easy, sitting at a conveyor belt and picking out all the bad peas, throwing them on the floor so we can sweep them away. The machines do the rest. There are graders that shake all day and night, sorting out the different sizes of peas. My job is sweeping away the peas on the floor into a drain. Packer has got the job of lining big wooden bins with black plastic sacks before they are filled with peas and sent into a massive refrigeration vault. It’s all easy work, but we’re already dreaming about peas. I see nothing but mountains of peas in my sleep.

There’s one foreman that I like because he’s a little younger than the others and I see him talking to the girls sitting at the conveyor belt. He takes a brush in his hands like a guitar and starts singing: ‘A whiter shade of pale’, even though nobody can hear him with the noise of the machines all around him and it looks like he’s got no voice. He’s only miming. All the women and girls laugh silently, miming at him with their hands, throwing peas at him to shut him up. Sometimes the girls sneak up behind him and put peas down his neck, moving their hips while he’s not looking.

There are a lot of Ugandans working for Ross Foods, mostly medical students from London. You don’t see them in the canteen very much, because they are trying to save every penny they earn, even more than us, maybe to send money home. They don’t even smoke because that’s a waste of their earnings. Packer and I get talking to some of them and they tell us that Ugandan women are the best in the world at moving their hips. Ugandan women have Venus hills like no other women in the world. They want to know what Irish women are like when they move their hips, so Packer tells them that Irish women shake all day and all night like the pea graders, with breasts like the hills around Tara and Venus mounds like the Macgillycuddy Reeks. We tell them the Irish word for sex, which is bualadh craiceann: beating skin. Packer tells them the Irish word for prick is deabhailín and they tell us that the Ugandan word for bollix is Kabula.

So then the Irish lads all over the factory are calling each other Kabulas and deabhailíns . ‘You fucking Kabula’ is what you hear all the time, but they’re all joking. It’s the Irish way of being friendly, insulting each other. Once, one of our lads got into an argument with one of the lads from Uganda and said he would cut off his Kabula, but it came to an end very quickly when the Ugandan medical student said he would cut off the Irish lad’s Kabula and stuff it down his mouth.

Another one of the Irish lads has got a job working on the weighbridge. He weighs the trucks coming in loaded with peas and weighs them going back out again empty. He’s got the best job in the whole place and everybody envies him, sitting in the sun all day, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the next truck. I think everybody would prefer to be in the factory with all the other people, where the action is. But they still call him a lucky Kabula for having so little to do, even though I think he’s bored stupid and lonely out there when there are no trucks coming in. At the weekend, when all the office staff have gone home, he leaves the window of the weighbridge open, so that the Ugandans can go in and call their relatives. They queue up and talk away all night to their families back home, telling them what a great place England is. Nobody has anything against England or the fact that they were colonized like the Irish. It doesn’t bother them to be working for the people who occupied their country. They just think it’s nice to get reparations and make free phone calls. None of the Irish guys feel like phoning home that much, only one or two of them who pretend to call their girlfriends back in Dublin, but Packer says they’re probably just talking to their sisters.

This is one of the best places in the world, away from my father’s rules and away from the rules of school. I’m escaping from the wardrobe at last. I’ve been promoted to a job as fork-lift driver, lifting pallets and stacking them up. I’m responsible for driving the big cartons full of peas into the freezer, into the antarctic. When you drive back out again it’s like returning to the tropics. Sometimes Packer jumps onto the back of the fork-lift truck behind me to get a lift back to his station, and in the pallet yard outside I have races with other fork-lift truck drivers, chasing each other around like the film Bullitt , racing through alleys of empty pallets stacked up like skyscrapers.

The job at Ross Foods comes to an end very suddenly. Some of the people are very bored doing the same thing all day and all night, working three shifts in a row or just sleeping and working and eating apple tarts until they start going mad. Some of them decide to walk to the nearest town and see if they might be let into a pub. Packer wants to go with them, but we’re on the late shift and we want to hold our fire until we get down to London. We’re back in the Nissen huts trying our best to sleep on the lumpy straw mattresses when the lads come back from the pub, drunk and singing, boasting about all the girls they met and the great time they had with them. They describe their hips and keep shouting at the Ugandan lads who are all asleep.

‘English women have the best hips in the world,’ one of them shouts.

‘Wow, man,’ another one says while the Ugandans are waking up, sitting up on their elbows, blinded and bleary with sleep, begging them to switch off the lights.

‘Your Kabula goes on fire just watching them,’ one of the Irish lads shouts as he moves his hips.

‘Shut up, you fucking Irish deabhailíns,’ the Ugandans say. By then everybody is annoyed at being kept up. One of them has started getting sick outside the door of the barracks and everybody is moaning.

‘Would you mind puking somewhere else,’ Packer shouts.

You can see that young people are like old men when it comes to sleep. There is anger all over the hut after and a fight breaks out, with one of the guys in his underpants trying to expel the drunken people. Eventually they leave and go up to the weighbridge where they can drink a bit more and phone their girlfriends in the middle of the night and everybody in our hut goes back to sleep.

But it’s not long before we’re awake again, because one of them has come back, this time with a shovel in his hands. We can hear him shouting outside.

‘You fucking British bastards.’

It’s almost dawn now, and there is a terrible cracking noise. Massive holes have been stabbed through the side of the barracks and now the sun is shining in, like a new torch beam through each hole. We can hear him shouting and cursing the British, running at the Nissen hut as if he’s some kind of croppy boy coming back to get revenge with a pike in his hands.

‘Aaaargh,’ he shouts each time like he’s still in the comic books, and then he collapses with laughter.

He’s made about eight or nine holes already before anyone can get out there and take the shovel off him. Two lads in underpants, one purple, one white, take the shovel into the hut and hide it under one of the beds. But the damage is done. Packer says the place looks like a fuckin’ upturned colander. When the rain comes, we’ll all be soaked. Outside the drunken guy finally falls down asleep in the sun until one of his mates pulls him in like a dead man.