Snow, 1979
- Nov 21, 2023
- 2 min read
by Alan Beard
The first day there I was given over by the foreman to this brash lad, all darts, car and disco. As he showed me how to fit the pit prop together he gave me some chat about girls, about his souped-up car. He made allowances as it was my first day for my incompetence with the handheld crane. The foreman frog-eyed and plump was friendly to me, told me about his sons in the army.
I worked at it, applied myself — not too successfully. One bloke, scrawny, with a big Adam’s apple, sat on a pile of crates swigging from a plastic cup of coffee. As I did things, wrongly, I could feel his scrutiny.
It snowed later and after our eighth pit-prop, our daily quota, we went over to the windows — one whole wall of the place was windows, rattling in their frames. We watched the snow steadily cover everything. The air was white, but if you were out there and looked up a great swirl of black flakes would crowd all vision. A couple of workers, black figures, hurried between the stacks of separate units waiting to be moved, assembled. Left footprints that smudged into fresh white. A Polish man operating a small lathe nearby said something half intelligible against the echoing and humming background noise. Something about the snow in Poland before the war. He talked fast and accented, and I strained to hear. He spoke of making a hole in the ice to fish, and what kind of fish they caught, and matey, my work colleague, got restless and chomped his teeth a couple of times before talking to me also. How he’d escaped breathalysing, bantered his way out of it. I nodded at them both in turn. The Polish man was talking about when he was my age; matey, about dumping his bird. The snow landed in patches on the window and joined together. The world was softening and lining itself, factory noise seemed to abate, and I heard the lathe operator’s voice more clearly, as he talked about Christmas and ice in Poland, before the Nazis appeared on the streets and accumulated.
Alan Beard has published two story collections, Taking Doreen Out of the Sky (Picador, 1999) and You Don’t Have to Say (Tindal Street Press, 2010). He has had numerous stories and flashes in magazines and anthologies, in the UK, USA and Canada including Malahat Review, London Magazine, Warwick Review, Critical Quarterly, Best British Short Stories (Salt).
