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But the constant disturbance to my father’s sleep cycle wore him down. For the two weeks of the day shift, he was morose. My brothers and I, and my mother, too, saw less of him than we had when he’d been working in the park. He’d get home from work around the same time as I got home from school, unless he could get overtime, which he always worked if there was any to be had. Workers weren’t considered cooperative if they turned it down and were marked for the sack. For a while in the 1960s, overtime was guaranteed.
The two weeks of night shift turned our cramped house into a place of dark and terrible quiet. No one dared speak above a whisper while he was in bed during the day. He’d get up in a foul mood that got worse as the time to clock-in drew closer. His face became darker and greyer. The light caught the copper stubble on his cheeks. He hardly spoke at all. My mother talked a lot, often about her work, and that maddened him, and this lack of communication was desperately frustrating for her. In the evening, when my father was doing overtime, she would knit pullovers for all of us and eat boiled sweets in front of the little box of a television, with its volume down low because the baby was sleeping. Sometimes I heard my mother crying in the night and I never knew what for.
n 1965, we moved to a new three-bedroom council house with a garden and a lot of green in front of it. My father still did his two weeks of days and two weeks of nights but he had learned to cope: this was now normal life, a human being can get used to almost anything. Then the factory managers came up with a plan to change to a three-shift system: one week days, one week afternoons, one week nights. ‘At least it’s only one week of night shift,’ my father said, but it was yet another disturbance to his sleep pattern. Sleep disruption, as torturers in prison camps know, produces disorientation and then compliance. At Hoover, productivity increased.
[...] This was in the late 1970s, before Thatcher, during the years of industrial unrest that preceded her election victory. We were talking about an imminent strike on the railways.
‘Your mother reckons the communists are behind it,’ he said. ‘But it’s not communists. You got to stand by the union. You got to know what kind of people ordinary workers are up against.’
My father and I hadn’t talked about anything other than football or the weather for years. He knew my politics. He wanted to connect with me in some way.
‘A while ago, right? We had this time-and-motion bloke come around,’ he said. Time-and-motion men are despised in the valleys, but my father had a guileless look on his face.
‘In front of the machine where I work,’ he said, ‘there was this big window… Looking out over the mountain. This bloke decided that if they changed the windows for frosted glass, we’d spend less time staring out at the grass and trees, right? It would probably increase productivity. So they put the frosted glass in. And they were right. Productivity did go up.’
I remember how my father shifted in his seat, a bit nervous, and then looked straight at me.
‘So what they did next, right? They decided that if productivity went up when they put the frosted glass in, it would go up even more if they bricked the windows up completely. Now I’ve got a blank wall to look at, haven’t I?’ ‘That’s the kind of people we’re dealing with,’ he said.
fuck