I would walk the factory alone.
After a year of noise,
silence.
The hundred-ton brake press stood idle,
the rollers still,
the guillotine harmless for once.
My footsteps, usually swallowed by machinery,
followed me across the floor.
But the aroma remained.
Oil and steel,
cutting fluid, grease,
that unmistakable smell of making things
which clung to the building
even when we’d gone home.
And in their absence,
I saw them more clearly.
Dennis would have been there.
He had come with my father,
a works engineer fashioned
out of the industrial Midlands.
He could fix anything.
A machine, certainly.
But other things too.
He taught me more than he ever knew,
about machinery, about men,
about the man behind the machine.
All year the place had beaten around us:
steel cut and folded,
rollers turning,
orders coming in and going out,
problems solved and others waiting,
men earning their living
among the noise and oil.
It wasn't beautiful.
It wasn't glamorous.
Some days there was little joy in it.
It was a place of work.
We made things.
And those machines, brutal as some of them were,
gave succour to families
mortgages paid,
children clothed,
Christmases provided for.
Some men stayed long enough
for me to stand before them
with a few words
and a gold watch. So small a thing
for so much time.
Perhaps that was what caught me off guard
in those few quiet days each year.
For once there was nothing to mend,
nothing late,
no machine demanding attention,
no customer waiting.
Everyone had gone home.
And I had the privilege
of walking slowly through the silence
of the thing we had made together.
I can walk through it still.
The press is silent.
The rollers do not turn.
My footsteps echo again
across that empty floor.
And there is Dennis,
where he ought to be.
Fixing everything.
John H Davies
5 X 2026
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