Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Don’t talk to me about harassment, I’ve had my share. When I was sixteen I worked in a bread factory full of women. Some of them were lasses my own age but they were tough as stale cheese. Stroppy and foul mouthed they were. To cross a room full of them was murder. It wasn’t just the jibes about my virginity, they used to grab my crotch or come up behind me and pinch my bum. I wouldn’t have minded if they actually fancied me but I was just an object, a relief from the boredom of the factory floor. They used to bar my way, open their overalls and show their whatsits. “Shall I tek thee in t’ware’ouse an’ show thee what it’s all about?”

It didn’t matter what I said in reply, it was always greeted with derisive laughter. What made it worse was that I was in love with Eilene on the Bun Belt. I was in love a right lot in them days. I’d been in the same class at school as Eilene but she hadn’t been dead brazen then, just well developed. I used to sit in the row next to her and spend hours staring at the side of her blouse.

I worked with Herbert Shuttleworth in a warehouse stacked with boxes of currents, sacks of flour and huge slabs of cooking chocolate which we unloaded from lorries. We had this diabolical foreman called Long John not because he had one leg and a parrot but because he was six feet six and rotten in word and deed. I mean, in slack periods he could choose to ignore me and Herbert sitting on the top of a stack of current boxes singing or else give us an easy job like leaning on a brush but what he usually did was make us move a stack of several thousand hundredweight boxes from one place in the warehouse to another. Next time there was a slack period he’d make us move them all back again. We got dead skilful at building towers of boxes ten feet high and twelve feet square.

Long John wasn’t polite either. He used a lot of words beginning with f and b.... “Get your f-ing fingers out of your f-ing arses”, he used to scream in a voice that could be heard above the roar of the traffic half a mile away. One slack period Long John was busy in the office and me and Herbert were practising a song on top of a tower of boxes when Eilene and another lass came for some stuff for the conveyor belt. They’d seen Herbert performing on stage the Saturday before and, instead of abusing us, they had a bit of a dance together. Well he was good was Herbert. He got off the tower to get closer to the lasses while I stood on the top, posing a bit.

“WHAT THE F-ING………!” forget the exact words except that most of then began with f and b but the gist was that me and Herbert were a pair of idle fairies trying to corrupt innocent womanhood. He wasn’t into logic, Long John, just volume. Eilene and her mate collapsed into a fit of giggles and he humiliated us in front of them by making us move this huge tower of hundredweight boxes six feet to the left.

I began passing boxes from the top of the tower for Herbert to make the first row of the new stack while Long John kept up a thousand decibel rollicking.

“Not like that you f-ing b,” he bellowed, pushing Herbert out of the way. He screamed at me to throw him the next box and he would show us how to do it as it was obvious that our poxy brains couldn’t cope with f-ing English.

Trembling I passed him a hundredweight box.

“Not like that!” he roared, “Throw the f-ing b!” He slung the box at Herbert almost knocking him over.

Practically paralytic with fear I dropped the next box into Long John’s out-stretched hands. I swear I didn’t throw it hard but it slipped through his fingers and hit him on the head. Long John’s great body crumpled and fell. I once saw a film of the demolition of a tall chimney in slow motion. Long John fell like that. The film was then reversed to the chimney falling upwards and reconstructing itself. That didn’t happen to Long John. For a while he lay as if dead. Eilene giggled.

And then, like the scene in a horror film where the monster, riddled with bullets, rises from the ruins of the castle to claim its revenge, Long John staggered to his feet. The explosion of fs and bs never came. He tottered groggily away shaking his head. I climbed off the tower and found Eilene gazing at me. She slipped her arms round my waist and said: “Blinkin’ eck.”

Her breasts were crushed into my chest but I was too amazed to respond.

“Gi’ us them currents luv,” she whispered. I managed to slide my hands down her back.

“In a hurry, are you?”

“E might come back....I’ll see you later.”

She did an’ all. What was even more unexpected was that I didn’t get the sack. Not that week anyroad. Long John had me in his office and told me to thank my f-ing stars that he had a f-ing sense of humour but I better watch my f-ing step or I’d f-ing regret the day I’d been f-ing born.

The box tower I built with Herbert that day was left hollow inside with a low gap, like a window, in the narrow aisle out of sight, the perfect hiding place. I told Eilene about it. “Tha’s not getting me on there, tha dirty beggar,” she said. But she came round one snap time and crawled into the cosy space in the centre of the tower. There was no room to lie down and it wasn’t particularly comfortable but Eilene was near naked under her overall and I’d not expected more than a snog. It made the continual harassment just about bearable.