It was repetitive, relentless work, but well paid because of the unsociable hours, and the noise meant one could switch off, attending only to Nobby calling the breaks and rotations. A pneumatic boom-bap, a ker-clunk as satisfying as the librarian’s stamp, as plastic bottles of all sizes and colours took shape, from giant old-fashioned sweetie jars rich in inclusions to the pure white smoothness that brought the impossible glamour of the Timotei waterfall within reach of clamouring millions. No one wanted a repeat of the IKEA riots. 

Night shifts comprised mostly old men, several of whom bore a disability, a missing eye or a gammy leg. This earned the company brownie points, as did the exemplary safety record, a consequence of not writing down any of the accidents that occurred. Among them were highly skilled, intelligent, well-travelled survivors who were, nonetheless, not above resolving their differences with a ‘bunch of fives’: a submarine commander, a Polish fighter pilot, an American soldier who never went home, a ship’s engineer – a bow-legged bear of a man, hands like a bunch of bananas, grip of iron, crucial attributes when waist deep in the engine room of a torpedoed cruiser; people who knew about winds and tides, radar and compass, rats and horses; flinty buccaneers forced ashore, with out-of-focus tattoos that spoke of risky ventures and capricious lovers well beyond Suffolk’s quiet backwaters. Breaks were spent playing cards at speed, cigarettes bobbing on bottom lips, one eye on the clock.

Peppered among the permanent staff was the odd ‘temp’, betrayed by their college reading material and vibrant packed lunch, a veritable still-life against the whites and browns offered by the vending machine. Temps didn’t start conversations but occasionally stopped them. Pausing mid-shuffle, the dealer remarked that his ageing dog could now see ghosts and spirits. A temp in a ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ T-shirt responded that angels can only be seen in reflection, which is why the windows in churches are high up or coloured in. Nobody swore for a bit.

Every evening, a quiet, respectful man would bring in a cardboard box tied up with string, leave it in the canteen unopened, and take it home again in the morning. Whether it contained his life savings or hibernating tortoise, nobody knew. Perhaps it was empty. If he had wanted the others to know what was in the box he would have told them, but he didn’t, so they didn’t ask. ‘It’s good to carry something external to oneself’, he thought, ‘It demands trust of us all’.

Clocked out, they scatter into first light, like crows on the coolness of the morning, summarily dismissed by well-rested but recklessly overperfumed young women trapped in basic pay, amid a degrading flourish of air freshener.

Time grinds old pirates to sand, like the tumbling of shells at the shoreline. The factory is long gone and the old men have died. But if God needs any bottles packing (never say never), Nobby will sort it.

Colin Davey