We were having a baby, who is the eldest son Bartholomew now, and had rented a tiny cottage on Waycombe, Portland, having run away from home and family.
Funds were non-existant, and I was lucky to get a job with the Stone Firms, a conglomerate which encompassed all the quarrying and stone-machining on the island, and which employed thousands of men. Employment which soon collapsed, whilst I was actually working there, putting those thousands out of work, and an entire island economy in free-fall. Really, it wasn’t my fault.
My actual job was horrible. I worked in a huge tin shed, vacant except for two large bench-grinders, which machined the quartzite slabs, stacked in their thousands in the yard outside. These slabs were of a sort of laminar granite, which could be cleft into sheets, like slate, at roughly three-quarters of an inch thickness. They were extremely heavy, hard, and abrasive; an ideal paving stone.
Wearing massive steel-studded leather gauntlets, I would carry a slab to an iron bench and mark out an over-size yard-square on it from a template, then carry the slab to a primitive hand-operated guillotine, which, with great effort, could crunch away the excess to the line, leaving an under-cut shattered edge, but a reasonably neat top.
This rough edge had to be machined to a perfect and accurate yard-square paver, on one of the bench-grinders. The carborundum discs screamed as they reached cutting-speed, and icy water sprayed all over the sliding work-surface. A rough-cut slab was wound through the grinding-wheel to produce one finely-milled side, then turned through ninety degrees to mill the adjacent side. The angle was then checked with a steel set-square, then the third side milled to an exact yard, angle checked, then the remaining side.
The foreman checked my work. Was horrified. Suggested sacking if I couldn’t get the slabs square and accurate. I tried again, with great care; all the angles dead-on, the size exact. Well……I hadn’t checked the fourth angle, assuming it to be ok if three were right. Oops! What had I done wrong?
Of course the steel square itself was out, the inaccuracy compounding itself with each rotation of the slab. In fact this was an impossible method of arriving at a perfect square, and the operation had to be completely redesigned. No steel square proved to be absolutely accurate. Even the work-bench had play in what should have been perfect movement. The foreman apologised.
Using the available equipment made accuracy almost impossible, and I made a perfect full-size steel template to mark the slabs from, grinding to the mark and adjusting the bed of the grinder with each cut; very slow, deafening, very cold, wet, heavy and frustrating work, slab after slab.
Working through a pile of guillotined slabs stacked next to the screaming, spraying grinder, and wearing a huge rubber apron, steel gloves, ear-mufflers, wellies and waterproofs, I screamed along with the machine, yelling songs and swearing and shouting obscenities at the world, to out-noise the horrible machine.
One day, as I was finishing the last of the slabs of my guillotined batch, perhaps an hours work, and clicked the dreadful grinder off, and its water-spray, I pulled off my earmuffs and turned around to face an audience of laughing, clapping workers.
Attracted by my lunatic screaming, they had assembled a semicircle of benches behind me, the bastards, without me being the slightest aware, waiting for me to finish.
Later, a new cutting-rig was designed, with a diamond-toothed blade on a nicely-engineered rolling bed, aiming for trouble-free and perfectly accurate machining of the quartzite slabs. I was there for the inaugural test, and it was to be my job, using the new equipment. A large group of engineers and bosses stood around.
The diamond blade was started, and whined to cutting-speed; strangely, there was no water-lubrication. The first slab was wound slowly to the blade, and as it touched, a strange and frightening shock-wave hit the assembly, and the slab progressed no further. The motor was switched off and the costly blade was inspected. No teeth.
A perfect row of holes sparkled sunshine through the corrugated-iron roof, holes made by the diamond teeth as they were fired through. Luckily no-one had been standing either directly behind or in front of the saw.
It was soon after this event that I, and thousands of others, were laid off, made redundant by the mis-management and over-pricing of the end products of the Stone Firms. Factories around the world had opened-up the industry and put Portland out of business. Even in my short stay, my wages had increased almost on a weekly basis as our blind union forced change on a hopeless management, until a point of no return was reached. The decision was to close the entire operation, sack the workers and the union, mothball all production, and re-open with a clean sheet, new staff, no union. I don’t know if it ever happened. We were on our way to Guernsey and a new life.