Short story · 4 min read · Set in The Harrow Works ·
The Tape of the Late Apprentices
When the last of Harrow Works' old intake retired together, the training shop recorded their final shift to make an induction tape, and the new men have begun answering it in the pauses.
In 1985 eleven men retired from the machine shop at Harrow Works on the same Friday, because they had signed as apprentices in the same week of 1938 and declined to be parted by a pension schedule. The works called them the late apprentices. At the retirement do somebody asked the training officer whether late meant recently or deceased, and Reg Cullis said that at Harrow Works it meant after hours, and that was accepted works-wide as an answer.
Reg looked after induction. Before that final shift he fixed a cassette recorder to the bench by the inspection lamp and recorded the eleven at their machines for one side of a C90. The result is 47 minutes of instruction laid over belt and machine noise: loosen the dogs before you back the belt out; measure twice, we don't cast twice; keep your thumb out of it, Frank, for the last time. Between the dicta the men talk as men talk on a last shift: football results, a niece's wedding, the price of a pint at the Ship. Then the works bell. The tape was copied for induction as Tape 3, the copies are the works', and the original stayed in Reg's drawer.
It is played to each new intake on their first Friday. Reg pauses after every dictum and asks the bench to say it back. From the third Friday they said it back before he cued them, into the pauses, evenly, the way you answer a foreman you have decided to get along with. The training register grew a column for it: REPLIES. Nothing on paper queries the fact of trainees answering a machine. The replies are initialled monthly and personnel keeps the totals, and the totals are unremarkable, because a works full of new men answering an induction tape in good order is, on paper, exactly what the tape was made for.
The arithmetic is where it sits uneasy. The works log records the session at 46 minutes, entered as end of shift, bell. The cassette side runs 47 minutes 12. The extra lies after the bell, unlabelled: half a minute of hiss, then one voice, which Reg believes to be Frank Mott's but will not certify, saying that's us, then four seconds of room tone with nobody moving in it. Nothing in the log accounts for the minute. The log is countersigned, and the countersignature says as recorded, which is true of the tape and not of the log, and both documents passed the same filing clerk the same morning, so the discrepancy is now filed, which is where the works keeps its disagreements.
Reg timed the pauses from the start because the pauses were uniform: four seconds, dictum to dictum, as if the speakers had left a room in every sentence for a reply and had learned, over forty years of shift nights, four seconds' worth of patience. By the third month of playings the pauses read 3.8 seconds. By spring they read 3.6. A tenth a week, steady as wear. He charted it on graph paper and pinned the chart inside the cupboard where Tape 3 lives between sessions, and the chart now has its own column in the register: GAP.
A transcript was typed once, for file. The typist declined, politely, to type the last minute, her note saying that it was not training, and the file note beneath hers says: last minute held as room tone. Nobody has queried the holding. The bell on the tape rings when the log says it rings, and the eleven say what they say at dictum length, and neither document gives the other the lie in any way a forms committee could act on.
Of that first intake, the youngest is a fitter named Colin Traynor, who answers fastest and was moved to the fitting shop in autumn. He asked to take a copy of the tape with him, and the copy register carries his entry: one copy, reason personal. There is no rule against personal, so the copy went out of the works in a lunch tin, and the register's carbon has never been wanted since.
The Friday before his own retirement, Reg played the tape once more, alone, after the shop had gone quiet, and timed the final gap against the works bell for a reference. It held at 2.9. He has taken the cassette home since with his union card in the same drawer, and he has not taken the matter anywhere official, because there is nowhere official for it: the log and the cassette disagree by one minute, the bench and the tape are converging by a tenth a week, and nothing in either direction is broken enough to report. The question he did not put on the docket, the docket being for machines' faults, is the one he unwinds the tape to on the bad nights, never past the bell: when the gaps close to nothing and the tape is all instruction with no room left in it, what will the new men be answering into?