Southend U3A

Writing for Fun

October 2019

The Grudge - Pete Norman

You ask me do I still bear a grudge? I can assure you that time is no healer and burning bridges behind you does not stop you from turning around and looking back. I am not usually one to harbour resentment for so long but I’ll never forget what he did.

I suppose you have to say that it all started years ago at Harveys Machine Tools, my first job since leaving University. When I first walked across their threshold I knew that they were damned lucky to have someone as clever and talented as me. However, I was put in my place rather rapidly.

Reg must have been 120 years old if he was a day, with unkempt grey hair that was more salt than pepper. He was most definitely one of the old school. He believed fervently that moving away from apprenticeships was a retrograde step and when I was assigned a desk alongside him his greeting to me was, ‘You’ve got a head full of shit, son. If you think you’ll ever make an engineer, you’ll have to forget all that nonsense and watch . . . watch and learn how to do it properly. You’re in the real world now.’

It felt like a smack in the face with a piece of four by two and it took me a little while to come to terms with his forthright attitude but I quickly learned how fortunate I had been to have him as a mentor. He was a machine tool designer par excellence and there was nothing in Computer Aided Design that he did not know or could not put his hand to with just a few minutes consideration. He was a remarkable man who was actually able to think in three dimensions. If you showed him a 2D drawing he could create a 3D image of it in his mind and rotate it and examine it from every angle; he was able to identify weaknesses in the design long before any prototype was ever made and tested.

I listened carefully to his every word and I learnt quickly and before very long I was able to take the engineering brilliance of Reg and fuse it with the ‘head full of shit’ I came in with and bring some of their practises kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.

Reg was the most respected man in the business and it was little wonder that when the job became vacant he was promoted. There are engineers the world over who would sell their soul to the Devil to be the Departmental Head in Harveys but he moved across the management barrier with very little fuss. He stayed the same old Reg but in an ill-fitting suit that spent most of its time with the sleeves rolled up.

When Nigel started work in the department, with the ink on his degree still wet, Reg handed the responsibility to me. I cast my mind back to my formative years with Reg and tried hard to emulate him. I gave my utmost to provide Nigel with the very best start in his career that I possibly could.

He was a bit of a strange one, he had obviously gone to a much better school than I had but he lacked the common sense to be able to make the most of what he had been given. He quickly earned the nickname of ‘the educated idiot’. He never spoke much about himself, his family or his hobbies – except the fact that he ‘played about with motor cars’ in his spare time. After a while I gave up asking and stuck to the matter in hand.

He was a painfully slow learner and I sometimes wondered whether he might have given good money for his degree rather than wowing the adjudicators with his brilliance but I tried to put that thought behind me and kept up the pressure.

After a few years he became a passable engineer – but only passable – however he was capable of working unaided for most of the time provided that he had me close by as a crutch to support him.

Reg was not the kind of Departmental Head to hide away in his office, he spent a lot of his time wandering around chatting to the engineers and passing on his wisdom. He was very complimentary about my progress with Nigel and my progress in general. One day, over a cup of coffee in his office, he slipped me a bombshell. ‘When the opportunity comes up you must go for it. You’re the best man for the job.’ He coughed dramatically. ‘You didn’t have much choice, you had a very good teacher.’

I told him that I had not got a clue what he was talking about but he just smiled his lopsided smile and said, ‘My days in Harveys are numbered. The old body ain’t what it used to be . . . it’s in need of a bit of a rest.’

I shook my head in disbelief. Reg was old but surely retirement was a few more years away yet? However, it was noticeable that he had slowed down somewhat in the past few months and he had had a few periods of absence which he could never be drawn into talking about.

‘When the job comes up you make sure you go for it, big time . . . but until then you tell no one, absolutely no one, is that understood? This is just between you and me at the moment.’ As I got up to leave he said softly, ‘You’re the best engineer here by far and always will be but just you watch out for the snake in the grass.’

I wanted to question him further but he buried his head in a pile of papers and waved his hand towards the door in a curt dismissal and I knew that the conversation, though incomplete, was over.

Over the next few weeks I made a point of spending time with the other engineers, testing the water, trying to part the long grass and discover Reg’s snake but to no avail and after a while I let it drop and life went on as it always had. We were going through a busy period – good for the company but exhausting for the staff – however, there was a discernible buzz, a hive of industry. It was during that time that Reg went sick. He was off for a few weeks before the word came back to the office that he had submitted his resignation on medical grounds and that the position of Departmental Head was to be advertised.

The cunning old fox, he must have known for some time that it would come to this but he was either too proud to talk about it or else he had been silenced by the management to prevent speculation. Needless to say, as I had already been forewarned, I had prepared my application thoroughly. I heard that a couple of the other engineers had put their names forward but I knew that my reputation within the department was such that I had to be the clear favourite for the job.

It was two months later that the interviews were to be held and during that time I went back to basics and drew on all of my past experience with Reg and on the big day I was nervous but confident. I thought that the interview went rather well, I acquitted myself confidently, I never stumbled and I applied Reg’s thought processes whenever the low-ballers were thrown.

Nothing, nothing in the world could have prepared me for the news when the successful candidate was announced.

I sat at my bench in front of my two huge computer screens, full of drawings and vectors and tolerances and calculations and for the first time in my career these meant absolutely nothing to me. My life as I had come to know it had ended and the future was bleak and uncertain.

Nigel ignored me for the rest of that day and I made absolutely certain that I returned the favour, because I could not trust myself to hold my temper. That evening I drove round to Reg’s house and waited patiently while he struggled to the door. He was very frail now and it was hard to imagine that this was the same energetic and spirited man I had known for all these years.

He welcomed me in like a long lost friend and sat me down and offered me a beautiful crystal glass half filled with an expensive single malt. It was obvious from his reaction that he knew exactly why I had paid him this visit and he was careful not to ask me directly. We spent the first half hour discussing the progress of certain projects that he had been taking a more personal interest in and the increasing fragility of his health but in the end he simply closed his eyes and shook his head. In a quiet voice he said, ‘I am so sorry, Neil but I was sworn to secrecy and it would have caused mayhem if the truth ever came out before the day.’

I sat in stunned silence and waited while he took a healthy slug of the amber nectar. ‘In this world, my friend, it is not what you know but who you know . . . but, more especially, who you are born to. Nigel Clark is William Clark’s son – the CEO of Harveys – and, yes, they kept it very quiet. You were always by far the obvious choice but the job was never going to be yours if ever he went ahead with his application. I never thought he had it in him to do it but there you go – the snake in the grass. I did warn you.’

That night I hardly slept. I spent my time in the silent darkness compiling a mental list of everything I could do to exact revenge – some of them were actually not fatal but all of them were extremely inventive. By the time sleep finally overtook me I had worked out what I had to do.

I sent in a sick note the next day, which my helpful doctor had marked down as nervous debility and then I backed it up the following day with a very carefully worded notice of resignation. I never even went back to pick up my personal effects, I could not bear the thought of ever setting foot inside that place again.

My elder brother, Jim, had invited me to stop with him on his farm in Cumbria, a couple of miles outside Alston, just for a while, he said, until I had sorted out my future and I bit his hand off. The next few months were spent mostly in pumping food into one end of the cows, the pigs and the sheep and shovelling away the result from the other end. I was able to relax and think coherently but the future was still vague and uncertain . . . until that fateful day when Jim and I drove out to the Rose and Crown for a pint. One of his farmer friends was bemoaning the fact that a large and complicated piece of his tractor machinery had broken beyond repair. He sketched the piece very roughly on the Sports page of The Mirror and I tried my best to imagine it in 3D. It looked very similar to a piece I had worked on at Harveys.

He said that there was no way he could ever afford to pay to replace it – farmers up there are really struggling at the moment – but when I offered to make it for him for no charge he was over the moon. He even sent his nephew, Graham, over to lend a hand and to do the heavy lifting work. We got on very well together, Graham was very keen and quick on the uptake and the farmer soon had his machinery back together again.

After that it seemed as if every time I went to the pub some farmer or other would sidle up to me and offer to buy me a drink. The conversation always seemed to hinge on some broken piece of farm machinery or other and I was more than happy to accept the drinks and to make the pieces for them – it kept me out of mischief and kept my skills from getting rusty. Graham began to spend quite a lot of time with me, helping out and sometimes other farmers’ sons would drop over for the day and join in and before I knew it Jim had set me up in an old barn as a workshop.

The whole thing escalated until the youth of Cumbria were gravitating towards my workshop learning to be an engineer, to work with their hands and to think for themselves. They picked up life skills there that were not available to them anywhere else in the locality and the biggest draw was that I never charged one of them a single penny.

The next decade just slipped by without me really noticing it. Then, last year I heard that Harveys had gone into receivership and I was able to pick up some awesome machinery at a fraction of its true value. I wondered what had become of Nigel but I knew that whatever happened, daddy would pick up the pieces for him and I cared not a bit because . . .

I tugged it out of the top drawer. This box is so much smaller that I had imagined it would be for something so special. You can see that it is an elaborate gold cross topped with a crown and tied with a red ribbon. The engraving on the card reads ‘Neil Warner OBE for services to the community’ and that makes me proud beyond my wildest dreams.

So, you asked me do I still bear a grudge after all this water has flowed under the bridge? Damned right I do!