Free Polly by Jeff Smith Page B

this very smart man came in and spoke to us. He was terribly smart, wearing a suit and a tie, with a real upper class accent. Goodness knows what he saw when he looked at us because we were a raggedy, untidy bunch. I can’t remember what he said, but they took us all on. That is how I got my first job. I left school on the Friday afternoon and started work the following Monday morning, for 10 s a week.
    My first job was carrying trays of caramel up three flights of stairs. They must have been 2ft or more and weighed a ton – I could barely lift them. Goodness knows why they put me on the job because I was a skinny little thing then, there wasn’t anything of me. You wouldn’t let a kid do it these days, not any kid, but we didn’t think about it – it was a job. Still, that is what I did all day every day. Looking back I feel as though I was on that for about three years, but that doesn’t make much sense. The caramels and boxes of chocolates were for the Christmas trade, so that used to slacken off during October as the shops got their stock in. People then used to get moved over onto other things, the next big job being Easter eggs. For some reason, though, when I went over to chocolate they put me into ‘Enrobing’, that is, working the machines that coated the various centres with chocolate. It was very hot in there, I suppose the chocolate had to be kept warm while it was melted, but I enjoyed the work. I learned lots of jobs in that department. I got to be very good at marking the chocolates; making the squiggles on the tops that tell you what they are in the box. We used to have a pot of hot chocolate besideus and using either a finger or a stick had to pick up a blob of chocolate and make the design on each chocolate as it went by on the conveyor belt. It wasn’t hard work, but you had to be ever so quick. The other big job was packing. It was amazing how quick you could get at assembling a box (they came ready glued but flattened), picking out the right chocolates and putting them in the box. We used to do that from eight in the morning until five-thirty, with just an hour for lunch and no tea break or anything like that. Mind you, I was very good at it and also made some good friends. That was where I met Daisy, and we stayed the closest of friends for the rest of our lives, or rather, her life.
    One year, though, there was just not enough work and we got laid off. It was like that then, things were difficult and if there was no work you got laid off. I went down to the Labour [exchange] and they said that there were jobs up at Whitfields. That was a sweet factory just round the corner from the Greengate (a pub in the south of the borough). It was a terrible place, especially after Clarnico. I suppose Clarnico was a high-class firm making high-class chocolates, but not this place. It was dirty and tacky, and you never wanted to eat any of their sweets after you had worked there. I remember that when we arrived we had to wait in this big room and eventually a woman came out and said they wanted packers, ‘was there anybody with experience?’ she asked. Well, I had plenty of experience so I put my hand up, and so did this young woman standing beside me. As we were following the woman through the factory the other young woman asked in a whisper if I knew anything about packing.
    â€˜Well, of course,’ I replied. The truth is that I didn’t have the wit to lie about such a thing.
    â€˜Do you mind if I work with you then?’ she asked, ‘only I don’t know anything but I am absolutely desperate for the job so I lied.’ So she worked with me, and soon learnt. That lunchtime she asked where I was going to eat. There wasn’t much I could do really because it was far too far away for me to go home. So she invited me to go home with her for lunch, she only lived around the corner. From then on I used to go there every lunchtime.
    I didn’t work