One Summer

Nathan Forrest lived in Westburn, a town built by the river, its fading glories sprung from shipbuilding and marine engineering, many of its 80,000 souls sustained by stoicism and God’s Mercy. The workers were crammed into tenements and drab estates on the edges of the town; the better off enjoyed a spacious suburb to the west. The working people felt compensated by the beauty of the river and the views of the mountains. The middle classes took it all for granted.

Nathan saw only High Summer in Westburn, and was blind to winter coming. In 1958 orders replacing wartime losses had dried up, but the yards held on, building new ships.

When he left the Army, Nathan had mastered welding and now worked on the submarines building for the Royal Navy. Had he lifted his eyes he might have seen that this way of life was mouldering. But Nathan made good money and did not worry that class solidarity was dying, and management control of the business of shipbuilding was slipping.

The yard managers knew how to build ships, but they hadn’t a clue about leadership and had no respect for the men. At ten o’clock every morning, they sat in warm offices, drinking tea and nibbling biscuits served on Company china by liveried tea ladies from the Management Restaurant; the staff obtained refreshments from the Staff Canteen. The men took an unofficial break, hiding in draughty corners of part-built hulls and steel fabrications, sneaking a bite of egg roll, slurping hot, sweet tea from a thermos flask or a tea can. Sometimes the men’s meal was disrupted when an aggressive young manager, or an old management hard case feeling his oats, raided the hiding places, chasing the men back to work.

One Thursday, a senior manager, an old warhorse, ambushed a tea boy brewing up for his squad and booted the tin tea cans to the ground, trampling them underfoot. The boy, cowering from the manager’s rage, tripped on an upturned tea can and fell. It looked as if the manager had pushed the boy to the ground, and Nathan was outraged when the boy got sacked. The fury of the men erupted in a wildcat strike, emptying the yard in twenty minutes. Nathan joining the hate-filled throng milling at the yard gate, refusing to disperse until management summoned the police.
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The following Monday, management’s stomach for the fight collapsed and the Tea Boy Strike ended when the manager apologized and the boy was reinstated.

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“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” 
― G.K. Chesterton