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| $OŁUTION$ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| by Squarge Splinter | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The fat Bourgeois came to the small town of Sweeping with his black top-hat and his bags of gold. He set himself up in business in an old school building which was put to the task of chemical production. A small, local workforce was recruited. It was but a matter of weeks before the gaseous emanations and odourous clouds from the factory turned the red-brick school and our red-brick houses coaldust black There was an outcry and an outpouring and a public meeting was held at which all stood to decry the noxious outsider. Yet, as the clock struck fourteen minutes past eight, the church-hall door burst open wide and in strode the arrogant interloper, the cuckoo in our peaceful nest. And the portly Overseer, in his black top-hat, with his bags of gold, brought forth samples of his chemical brew, the Omniversal Solvent. His tongue dripped honeyed words of reconciliation and a hackneyed economic cant and the throng was swayed. The meeting voted with its feet of clay and issued a glowing paeon of praise to the entrepreneur in our midst. Only I, Squardge Splinter, being deformed about the nose-thrills and impervious to reek, sat unmoved. But, I feared the lynch and did not pipe forth. The factory prospered, year on year, belching forth pollutants and sucking in young workers to make Omnisolve. It grew into a hellish, toxic bastion; a black-walled sore topped with an incinerator tower. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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The other townsfolk grew fond and fiercely protective of 'their' factory and they waxed lyrical with short odes and epic sagas devoted to its virtues. About the walls, whole families came to live. Throwing up a shanty town of corrugated iron, asbestos and chipboard, they breathed daily the sweet beauty of brimstone. Early each morning the workers trooped gaily to their labours and each night they skulked home in sullen silence. Often workers would hide in the factory at night in order to continue thier vital work at fume-wrapped engines. The wrought iron gates of the school still bore the words SWEEPING MIXED INFANTS until some wag playfully rearranged the letters to read ARBEIT MACHT FREI. I was never invited to join this merry congregation and every attempt by an outsider to unionise the plant ended in the same way with zealous, young Trots transformed overnight into Stakhanovite shock troops. Lightning raids by Health and Safety inspectors always met a frosty, if not violent, response from the workers as they opened paint-sealed windows and unblocked ventilation shafts which had been clogged with paper and earth or, inexplicably, boarded-up. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| All village life, and death, revolved around the plant.It was said that no-one ever retired from there. perhaps they lied about their ages, just as the youngsters often did to get taken on as apprentices. i never knew. It was rumoured, in those parts, that elderly workers who were no longer fit would often chain themselves to their benches to avoid eviction. I have seen many former employees removed in boxes to their finbal resting place; a specially built cemetary just yards from the Bastille walls. I avoid that grove like the plague but, I am told, the worms there are juicy and black- sated on solvent saturated human flesh. And the blackbirds, too, cluster thickly in the scrub, living on the rich pickingsuntil they are too torpid to flutter and their stomachs erupt in neoplastic excresanses. I can live no longer in Sweeping, amongst these hollow-socketed drones, these lotus-eaters. Sometimes when I fail to sleep I envy my erstwhile friends the living death which I cannot share. I have contemplated emptying my veins onto the sooty earth but I cannot bear the thought of eternal sleep in that God-forsaken grove of cloying horror. So, I will run: northwards and onwards, the wind at my heels and sulphur shrouded vats of Omnisolve far behind.
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