AN UNEXPECTED MEETING ON ABSTRACT THURSDAY

I had a call yesterday from Margaret, who was our bridesmaid 49 years ago, to say she knew it was short notice, but she had to come into Swindon and asking if it would be possible for us to meet.  She said we could meet at the National Trust café, near the Designer Outlet so that was sorted - well until I got there just after 10 a.m. this morning to see her walking towards me and saying that the café and shop at the National Trust were closed for renovations.   

That didn’t bother us as there are plenty more cafés there, so we went to Giraffe instead and had a great time catching up and reminiscing.  She said that she is 70 next year (I told her it wasn’t much different to being 69!) so as it was our Golden Wedding Anniversary, she thought we should go out for a meal to celebrate both auspicious occasions and I agreed it was a great idea.

After we left each other, I went for a slow wander around - and saw the huge cranes that are in the roof of one of the buildings that once housed the Great Western Railway Works in Swindon.  Four of these huge cranes were built in 1884 at Swindon and ran the length of the building, allowing heavy pieces of equipment to be moved easily from one part of the workshop to another.  They had a lifting capacity of 10 tons and were originally hydraulically powered but were converted to run on electricity in 1908.

I asked Mr. HCB about these, as he did his apprenticeship in “The Works” or “inside” as it was known many years ago, and he said that even though you knew they were safe, it was still quite frightening and disconcerting to see these very large cranes with a water tank of a locomotive tender swinging about alarmingly coming towards you.  How much it was swinging - or not - depended on the skill of the crane driver.  I thought that the “illusion” of this abstract, with the mannequins from the Designer Outlet, gave quite a good effect of this.

When I had finished - and again, I didn’t buy anything - so a cheap day for me, I walked out to catch my bus and as I meandered, I was reading the inscription along the walkway, taken from a poem entitled "The Forgers" and written by a local poet, Alfred Williams.  

I didn’t know much about Alfred’s life, but I found out from the internet that he published “Life in a Railway Factory”, a warts-and-all account of his experiences 'inside', which could not have been published while in the employ of the GWR. Alfred must have known that the priceless insight that the book gives us into what life was really like for industrial workers on the eve of the First World War would mean the book spoke to the future even louder than it did the present. 

The words from one verse of the poem, which is quoted below, are in a long line and as I was reading them from the end and moving left along to the beginning, it must have looked rather strange - an old friend, June, was walking along with Gillian, a friend of hers (who also remembered me from our days of working for a local Solicitor) and said when she saw me bending over she thought I had a stiff neck! We chatted for a while and she said how much she enjoyed reading my Blips, so I hope she is happy to have an “honourable mention”! 

If you want to read the whole poem, you can find it here.

Now the heated mass of metal,
     Hoisted by the creaking crane,
          Slowly leaves the smoking furnace
And the door descends again…..
Alfred Williams 
(1877-1930)