Every time I smell diesel my mind drifts back. I was ten years old and together with my cousin Gerrie we worked for three partly summers at Ekema’s brick factory, on the Heekte, just before Holwierde, coming from Appingedam. Child labour did not yet exist. Our parents thought it a good apprenticeship and we, we reckoned ourselves rich.
You could see the chimney from far away and it was not really a long bike ride. Within the factory shafts of light shone between the square vertically hung slats that made up the walls. There could be a vicious draft and the dominant colour was grey.
The manager, Mr Eggens, was a stalwart man; the driving force who minded us with fatherly good nature.
The clay soil was excavated slightly past Marsum and was transported by rail in wagons to the factory. There it was plunged into the mixer pit and purged from impurities.
The beating heart of the factory was ‘the machine’ that squeezed out a bar of clay, which was cut by tightened wires into packets of three. These were placed upon racks by muscled men.
When the rack was filled on both sides it was transported by a fork-lift truck to one of the drying barns. There we were waiting to part the soft ‘bricks’, so that the clay would dry more evenly. This ‘parting’ was also known to us as ‘playing the piano’. It was an easily acquired dexterity that involved two different techniques, one for the upper three layers and an underhand one for the rest. This was nearly 50 years ago, but I could do it now as if it were today.
The delivery of the ‘bricks’ was sometimes far from regular: often the cutting wires broke and sometimes the mixing pit jammed. Then we had to wait and, when boredom struck, we went to play.
The ‘bricks’ were excellent clay for modelling. We lived our lives to the full on it with sculpturing and mischief. A ‘pharaoh’ head that I made was baked years later in the oven of a friend and is still displayed prominently at my mothers’.
The large vertical slats that made up the walls of the drying barns revolved slightly above their middle and could be placed in diverse positions by notched supports.
A favourite game was the ‘turd racing’. We each modelled a conical shape and put it each on his own lid. Subsequently we moved the lid ever faster and higher up and down, so the ‘turd’ went rolling around ever faster. Until it reached the velocity that spun it out by centrifugal force.
Less innocent was when we played with fire. It started with a small tray of clay into which we poured some diesel, put in a tuft of waste cotton and we had an oil lamp. It went even better with two adjoining trays. Until we tried it with six trays. This went ablaze so well that by the heat made the clay start to crack and burning diesel flowed over the slat. Fortunately Gerrie knew of a bucket in a ditch nearby, but this appeared to have no base. We lifted the slat from its pendants and threw it in the ditch. I remember very well the fear that I felt.
The burning heart of the factory was the oven, which, viewed from above, was a rectangle with rounded ends. The roasted bricks were wheeled out and the dried ones took their place. The fire went around in the roasting corridor. One of the men who pushed the wagons always wore a rimless hat and after a long life of pushing had rather pronounced buttocks. Gerrie christened him ‘techno-hat and juicy bottom’.
On top of the oven was a thick layer of sand. In this we buried a bottle of chocolate milk in the morning, so it would be nice and warm by the break. With this I flushed down the sandwiches of omelette and cheese that my mother had prepared.
We did not quite understand the mucky jokes the men made, but we were both impossibly, desperately in love with Gineke, the highly improbably beautiful daughter of the director. She was queen of the office where you could buy a bottle of orange fizz for 15 cents and that tasted like the best ever.
Because the extraction of clay stagnated in winter a stock of dried ‘bricks’ was stored. In order to save space these were built massively and this was called ‘packing’. One day Gerrie climbed on the backside of the dried bricks and imitated the bleating of sheep. The men could not figure it out: ‘What can be troub’ling them sheep?’
One very hot day we were thrown a can of carboleum and a tar brush in order to paint the slats. The spatters on our arms and legs burned in the sun, so badly that we looked for a radical cool down.
A ‘Heekte’ is Groningen dialect for a more or less canalised river and this one was used for the transport of baked bricks. On the bank was a pile of rusty, derelict rails. We shoved a plank under them and used it as a diving board. In good weather the men took their break outside, commenting, while we took care for the show.
We made 25 guilders a week, 5 a day. This was my first paid job, not counting the dime the newspaperman gave me when I helped him with a couple of streets. My parents thought I should save it, but I preferred to spend it on massay, liquorice and lace. And the money was mine, made in fairness and virtue.