REDUNDANT

Harry sat on a low stool beside his workbench. His toolbox was open in front of him and he was smoking the last cigarette of his last day as a patternmaker. . It was late afternoon and a beam of sunlight shafted through the high window at the end of the workshop, highlighting the dust that always hung in the air. His flat cap was pushed back on his head and he was wearing bib overalls with a tartan working shirt below. His elbows rested on his knees and his sleeves were rolled up. The muscles of his forearms arms stood out, tight and hard.

He was a small man, perhaps five foot six inches tall, lightly built and his grey flecked hair was short and neat. He was forty five years old and he was being made redundant. Patternmakers working in wood were a thing of the past now and the company was closing the pattern shop and the moulding shop. It was cheaper to buy in parts from the Far East than to maintain out workshops with out of date methods. He knew this was true but it made him sick all the same. He looked up at his workmates, tidying up their benches and packing their own tools away. There were only four patternmakers left now, soon to be none. He remembered when this shop had nearly thirty tradesman and half a dozen apprentices. Harry could put a name on every empty bench.

He breathed in through his nose and he noticed now, although he never normally did, the ever present smell of soft pinewood, resin, and glue. He remembered when he started here as a storeboy in nineteen fifty, almost exactly thirty years ago. And he thought of all the men he had worked with over the years, craftsmen, who had taken him under their wing when he was a young apprentice and showed him how to do things right. Some of the tools in the box in front of him were handed down from those old guys, lovely objects of wood, brass, and steel which would never wear out as long as they were cared for.

Harry looked down at his hands. In his right hand was his cigarette and the first two fingers were stained brown with nicotine. He turned his hands over and looked at his palms, the skin hard and calloused from years of chiselling and carving. He had loved this work, this craft, and the company of his workmates, and now he wondered how he would feel on Monday when he had no work to go to.