Four Thousand Bags a Night, and the Sound I Could Hear From the Car Park

The car park test

There is a thing I have never been able to explain properly to anyone who has not worked nights in a small factory. I could stand in the car park, at ten to ten, with my keys still in my hand and my coat zipped to my chin, and I could tell you what mood the line was in before I walked through the door.

It was the sealing bar mostly. When it was happy it made a sound like a woman patting a child's back, steady, unhurried, four thousand of those pats between ten at night and six in the morning. When it was unhappy it added a little scrape on the way up, so soft you would swear you imagined it. Kiri, who came to us at nineteen, used to laugh at me the first winter. She said I was making it up. Then one night in August she came running down the length of the floor with her hairnet half off and said, Marion, it is doing the thing, the scrape thing, and I said yes love, it has been doing it since Tuesday, I was waiting to see how long you would take.

We packed oats. That is the whole glamour of it. Rolled oats and muesli and, for about six weeks of the year, a Christmas thing with dried cranberries in it that jammed everything and made us all short tempered. Our factory sat on the edge of town in Victoria with a gravel yard and a roller door that never quite closed on the left side, and if you stood outside at three in the morning in July you could see your own breath and hear absolutely nothing else in the world except that machine going pat, pat, pat.

I started there at thirty-four. I left at fifty-six. In between I buried a husband, raised a boy who is now taller than the doorframe, and learned more about my own character from a piece of metal than I ever learned from anything anybody said to me.

The year I did not want to go home

Ross died in the March. He was fifty-one and he was fixing the gutter and he came down off the ladder and sat on the step and said he felt funny, and that was more or less it. People are very kind for about three weeks and then, quite rightly, they have their own lives.

The trouble with grief, and nobody tells you this, is the shape of the day. Not the sadness. The shape. I could not be in that house between nine at night and six in the morning. I simply could not do it. The fridge made a noise. The hallway had a particular smell of his jacket. So I asked for permanent nights and my supervisor at the time, a man called Bevan who had all the emotional vocabulary of a paving slab, said, right, fine, nights then, and never once asked me why, and I have loved him quietly ever since for that.

Nights saved me. I want to be honest about that because it sounds like a small thing to say about a factory that packs breakfast cereal. From ten to six I had a job to do and a machine to listen to and eight people who needed me to be a person with answers. I could not lie on the floor of my own kitchen at two in the morning because at two in the morning I was standing at the end of the line with a clipboard, arguing with Danny about whether the film tension had drifted again.

Grief has to go somewhere. Mine went into that line. I knew the moisture in a bag by the way it fell. I knew when the coder was going to smudge before it smudged. I once stopped the whole run because a bag felt wrong in my palm, and I could not say why, and it turned out a seal jaw had a hairline crack in it that would have opened up an hour later and given us three thousand bags of oats with a slow leak in the corner. Bevan wrote that up as operator diligence. It was not diligence. It was a woman with nowhere else to put her attention.

Kiri

Kiri arrived the second winter. Nineteen, from up the road, doing it for a year before she went off to study something sensible. She is thirty-one now and she runs the whole floor, which is the single best thing I have to show for twenty-two years.

She was hopeless at first. Not stupid, hopeless, which is different and much more forgivable. She would stand there watching the machine like it was a television. I said, no, do not watch it, that is the mistake everyone makes. Close your eyes. Tell me what you hear.

She thought I was being a witch about it. But that is genuinely the job. Anybody can watch a bag come out. The skill is knowing, in the dark, with the extractor roaring and somebody's radio on low in the corner, that the third pat in every four is coming a fraction late.

She started bringing me tea at two. Never asked for anything. Just put it on the shelf by the reject bin and went back to her station. I do not think she knew about Ross for about the first eight months. Then one night she said, very casually, my mum said you lost your husband, and I said yes, and she said, that is rubbish, isn't it, and I said yes it is, and she said, do you want a biscuit, and honestly that remains the best bereavement counselling I have ever received.

The night we knew it was over

The old sealer finally went in a way that could not be argued with. It was a Thursday in the November, in the middle of the cranberry run, which is the worst possible time for anything to happen, and it stopped dead with a bag half in its teeth and a smell of hot electrics that made everybody look up at once.

Danny had it apart within the hour. He is one of those men who can fix anything and cannot say a kind word out loud, so he expresses affection by rebuilding your gearbox. He came and found me and wiped his hands and said, Marion, I can get you through tonight, and probably through Christmas, and after that I am lying to you.

We had all known for about two years. You always know. The machine had been telling us in that scrape, in the way it needed babying on cold nights, in the fact that Danny had started keeping a spare part in his own toolbox because ordering it took eleven weeks.

Management brought in a consultant, because management always brings in a consultant. Nice enough man, lanyard, very confident about things he had never touched. He wanted to talk about throughput. Danny wanted to talk about whether the frame was going to be a nightmare to clean at four in the morning when the oat dust has gone sticky and there is one man on site. Those are not the same conversation and I have watched a great many businesses spend a great deal of money learning that.

I sat in on the meetings because Bevan had retired by then and, without anybody ever announcing it, I had become the person who knew things. Kiri sat in too, taking notes, being twenty-four and quietly furious about being the only person in the room asked to take notes.

They shortlisted three suppliers. One of them sent a salesman who talked to Danny's chest and looked at his phone. One of them sent nothing at all for six weeks. And one of them sent an engineer, an actual engineer, who arrived at eleven at night because I had said, if you want to sell us a machine, come and see the floor at the hour we actually run it.

He stood there for two hours. Barely spoke. Watched Kiri change a reel. Asked her, not me, what she hated most about the current setup, and she said the guard you have to take off with a tool to clear a jam, because that is the guard that ends up not going back on at five in the morning when everybody is tired, and I watched him write that down, and I thought, right, you at least understand what a human being is. He had come out from a packaging machine manufacturer that our procurement people had found somewhere, and I remember thinking, well, at last, somebody who arrived at the right time of night.

What I actually learned

The thing I would say to anyone standing where I stood, and I say this having watched three of these decisions get made badly and one get made well, is that the machine is not the point. The machine is the easy part. Every one of them looks marvellous in the brochure and every one of them will run beautifully for the first fortnight while somebody from head office is standing there watching.

The point is the fifth Tuesday in February at half past four in the morning, when it is nine degrees on the floor, when Kiri is on her own because two people have flu, when a bag has gone in sideways, and the question is whether she can clear it in ninety seconds with her hands and get the line back or whether she has to phone Danny at home and wake his wife.

That is what you are buying. Nobody puts that in a specification. I had to learn to ask for it out loud, and I was fifty-one before I had the confidence to sit in a room with men in better shoes than mine and say, no, I do not care about that number, I care about the guard.

We went with the engineer's lot in the end, and it was not the cheapest, and there was a fight about it. The thing that decided it, honestly, was that when Danny rang their office with a question at half six one morning, somebody answered. That is the entire test. A packaging machine supplier who answers the phone at six thirty is worth more than one who has a nicer stand at the trade show, and I will die on that hill.

The last night

I retired on a Friday. Kiri organised it, which meant it was organised properly. There was a cake with an oat bag drawn on it in icing, badly, and someone had made a banner.

At about four in the morning, when the fuss had died down and it was just the two of us at the end of the line, she said, go on then, one last time. And I closed my eyes.

Pat. Pat. Pat.

And it was fine. It was completely fine. Steady as anything, no scrape, no drift, a machine doing exactly what it was asked to do at four in the morning in a cold shed in Victoria while the rest of the town slept.

I stood there with my eyes shut and I thought about Ross on the step. I thought about a nineteen year old with her hairnet half off running down the floor to tell me something I already knew. I thought about how a woman can lose the person she built her whole life around and can still, somehow, be held upright for twenty-two years by four thousand small sounds a night.

Kiri rang me last month. They are looking at a second line. She said she had told them she was going to insist on visiting the packing machine manufacturer herself before anything got signed, and did I think that was cheeky, and I said no love, that is the job, that has always been the job.

Then she said, and this is the bit that got me, she said, I still do the car park thing. Every night. Before I go in.

Good, I said. Good.

I do not miss the oats. I miss the sound.