Read Online The Unknown Industrial Prisoner by David Ireland - Free Book Online

reasons; you become a victim of intolerance, covered with the bruises of respectability, narrow and evil-minded. Compare this with our present seclusion with the eternal bottle as god. Let me give you an example of early man’s lead in the matter. One of my ancestors was a missionary in Northern Rhodesia—grog forgive him—and he found the noble savages in obedience to custom everlasting had grain for bread and grain for beer and every year or so they endured a cruel shortage of food rather than touch the grain set aside for the beer. With such a magnificent lead from primitive man, what else can we do but drink? Drink! And the deliverer from this bondage and the refuge to which you fly are in you!’
    The hoots stopped. A quickie.
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    TENTACLES Prison sounds followed prisoners wherever they went. Sleeping by day, off night shift, the scream of motor mowers and power tools brought the life of the factory into every backyard; and radio and television with their howl of advertising extended the market place into every private house.
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    CORROSIVE PRAYER The man next door to the Samurai was a fireman, also a shiftworker. His wife was working and he was alone with his dogs, for he was a great lover of dogs and of what they could do for him. His dogs were greyhounds and provided they had the best of care they were very little trouble. One had become sick with distemper before he could arrest the disease and although to his wife and relations and anyone who cared to listen he was overpowering on the subject of his love for dogs and the money they won in races, he was at the mercy of a disastrously quick temper. The Samurai was also at its mercy. He had a sleep of perhaps five hours to look forward to and had enjoyed only an hour, so that at nine o’clock, when the Great White Father was bounding amorously from shed to shed at the Home Beautiful, the Samurai was wakened from the deep, dreamless sleep of the shiftworker by sounds of terror and hysteria under his window. The man next door had despaired of the dog’s recovery and reacted with his usual speed.
    There he was, unselfconsciously wielding a hammer. He got in a good blow on the dog’s head, having thoughtfully taken the precaution of muzzling it, though if you asked him point blank he would have been surprised if you suggested one of his dogs might bite him. The dog’s legs gave out and the howling beast was reduced to dragging itself along on its underparts. The man was upset by this time and ended by dispatching the dog with several dozen poorly aimed blows with an axe, weeping all the time. He buried the dog behind his outside lavatory—an unsewered area—and because he was fond of animals and had a special love for that dog, he sliced off one of its ears and kept it in his pocket in a matchbox.
    The man went to bed and slept soundly, but sleep was gone for the Samurai. He was tortured by the man’s cruelty and by the inaction that his own private principles of conduct bound him to. First it was the other man’s dog and second, the man was smaller than the Samurai. The Samurai would have been less frustrated if he had been a smaller man: the range of his adversaries then would have been so much greater. He could with honour fight only an equal or larger man. Such a man might beat him, but defeat was honourable.
    A prayer on his wall, written on a piece of cardboard, consisted of three words: Help, Care, Listen. Confronted with a situation that did not call for violent action, he found that Help, Care, Listen often fitted well. Since he was a man of action, he had no fretful thoughts about the corrosive effect on himself of his short motto with its suggestive initials, HCL, which he repeated to himself as he tried to find a way to help the man next door. This good intention kept him awake for the remainder of his sleeping time.
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    PRIVATE MORALS Back at the plant by three, working a love-shift for a man who’d run