Read Online Balancing Act by Joanna Trollope - Free Book Online Page B

they were in before six in the morning and gone by three in the afternoon, leaving behind them the ghostly racks of cast but undecorated ware to be fired in the kilns overnight.
    Grace was always soothed by the factory. It was partly those long, dusty, brilliantly lit rooms dedicated to the steady application to making something; partly the people – the casters and the fettlers, the jiggers and jolliers, the girls cutting the sponge shapes with soldering irons, the women decorating and banding on their paint-splashed revolving tables, the glaziers dipping each piece into the lavender-hued tanks of glaze, all by hand, every piece touched by handand it was also partly being out of the studio, away from the telephone, away from problems. There was no point taking her phone into the factory. She couldn’t have heard herself think, let alone speak. And there was such a luxury in switching the thing to mute and leaving it behind on her desk, as if it were no more important than an empty notepad.
    The casting shop was always impressive. Fourteen casters working between pairs of immense slatted benches, with the liquid clay slip in which they worked piped along the ceiling in great yellow hoses. Seven tons of it each day, seven tons of china clay and chemicals and water mixed each night in the blunger until it was the right consistency to run down the hoses and into those plaster-of-Paris moulds which produced the mugs and the jugs, the teapots and the vases, the bowls and the cups – over four hundred pieces from each man every day, lined up on the wooden trucks to be wheeled away for fettling.
    Grace paused beside Barney Jilkes. He had a visible gold tooth, a snake tattooed around his neck and had left school at fifteen, following his father down the mines for a year – ‘Only a thousand feet down. I were too young to work the coalface’ – before taking a trade test to work at Wedgwood. His mother had been on the switchboard there; she was known as the Voice of Wedgwood. He’d applied for a job at Snape Pottery the moment Susie had taken it over, almost as a prank. ‘I’d never worked for a woman before. Thought it’d be a laugh. Best thing I’ve ever done.’
    ‘Bloody awful day,’ he said to Grace now, not pausing in what he was doing for a second.
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘Three losses! Three! I never have losses. I haven’t lost anything in months!’
    ‘There you go, then. Think of those months, not today.’
    ‘I’ve let myself down,’ Barney said. He reached forward to fill a mould and the snake on his neck rippled faintly.
    Grace said, ‘Nobody’ll say anything.’
    ‘They don’t say. But they think it. They know. Me dogs’ll know, the minute they see me.’
    ‘Forget it, Barney. The rest of us will. You’re a brilliant caster.’
    ‘Five hundred and fifty-two pieces, me best day.’
    ‘How are the whippets, talking of dogs?’
    Barney’s expression softened. He rubbed a plaster-flecked fist against his temple. ‘Champion, Grace. Especially the little blue.’
    ‘If it’s any comfort,’ Grace said, ‘I’m having a mildly shit day, too.’
    Barney wagged a finger at her. ‘Now, now, language.’
    ‘You’re a fine one to talk.’
    ‘I’m a fella, Grace. And you’re a—’
    ‘Please don’t say lady.’
    He grinned, and stepped sideways to set a small tureen on the truck beside him.
    ‘Dogs,’ Barney said, ‘is easier than this lady-and-gentleman malarkey. They don’t bother messing about. They’re just dogs and bitches.’
    Grace moved on, smiling, down the casting shed, through the area where the dense great discs of china clay awaited the blunger and on into the fettling shop, where rough edges and seams were smoothed off with knives and sponges. She always paused here, among the regimented shelves of unfired ware and the blue-overalled women – always women, in a fettling shop – and thought of her great-grandmother, coming here in search of a job and finding herself in front of the