The Last Telegram

‘Shall I come and help?’ I said, surprising myself.

‘Why should you? You’ve done a day’s work already.’

‘It’s important to me too you know, the future of the mill and all that.’ He raised his eyebrows. I barely understood how it had happened, but my apprenticeship no longer felt like filling in time until something better came along. I was starting to care.

‘Come on then,’ he said, pushing away his chair and getting up from the table. ‘A pair of fresh eyes won’t do any harm.’

Unlike the weaving shed, with its oily smells and dark looms, the finishing plant was dazzling – brightly lit and newly whitewashed, with shiny stainless steel vats and tubes, steamy and clean-smelling like a laundry.

Although I’d seen the machinery being installed I hadn’t watched it working before. John showed me how the silk went through two large baths of boiling water to be de-gummed and rinsed, and how to lift the silk onto hooks called stenters which stretched it back to its previous width. After that it was hung in a hot air cupboard to dry, and run through yet more rollers to be pressed.

‘Looks simple, doesn’t it? But it’s not. The silk has to go over the rollers at exactly the right speeds, and at the same time the temperature in the vats has to be exact.’

He wiped his brow. ‘And even supposing we get all that right, we have to make sure the silk goes through the drier at the right speed and temperature so that it’s just damp enough to be put through hot rollers to iron it – what we call calendering.’

Stacked on a rack were rolls of the untreated white silk Stefan and I had woven. ‘I’ve had the vats heating and the thermostat says they’re at the right temperature, so shall we have another go? Help me up with this roll, would you?’

‘Hang on a sec,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you say there was a problem with the thermostat?’

He frowned. Why was I asking difficult questions when I knew nothing about it? ‘How am I supposed to know if we don’t try it first?’

‘Use a thermometer? Good old-fashioned kind?’

‘Where on earth can we get one of those at this time of night?’

I had a moment of inspiration. ‘Mother’s jam thermometer, the brass one on the hook above the stove. I’ll run back and get it.’

We lowered the thermometer into the vat on a piece of wire and, once the rolls were in place, John clicked a switch and the machinery started, pulling the silk through the first two vats. The steam ran in rivulets down our faces as we worked side by side hooking the silk onto the stenters. John turned his attention to the control panel and checking the thermometer. I went outside to cool off.