Electric Arc to the Past - If You Could Go Back

By Calvert Render

Electric Arc To The Past is a time travel novel, set primarily in the industrial North of England in the 1970s. In 2016, Vinnie Johnson is a printer from the Northern steel town of Rotherham. His life is changed forever when he sets out on a journey across time. Leaving the world of the internet and social media far behind, Vinnie goes back to a place where steel is king and the fashions are fun. A world of big cars and reel-to-reel tape recorders,and beer at 20 pence a pint. In this Land of Ago, Vinnie falls in love with Lizzie, a beautiful laboratory technician. Life is good, but how long can it last? Vinnie is changing things just by living in the past. When time gradually becomes more resistant to that change, Vinnie tries desperately to repair the damage that he has done, setting out on an insane, but possible mission to stop the evil that he has created.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9780244969714

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Electric Arc to the Past - If You Could Go Back

Electric Arc To The Past

Calvert

Render

Calvert Render - 2018

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2018 CALVERT RENDER.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the permission of the publisher.

Published by CALVERT RENDER

First Year of Printing   2018

ISBN 978-0-244-96971-4

For Emma, with all my love.

Prologue

If you asked any number of people at random to name a city in England, associated with steel, most of those people would think of Sheffield. They would not be wrong as Sheffield, situated as it is, on the edge of the Pennine hills in South Yorkshire, has all the right qualities that allowed the city to develop and thrive as one of the major steel producing places in the country.

Standing on seven hills, with seven river valleys in-between them, Sheffield rapidly developed after the start of the industrial revolution. First water power, provided by the rivers and streams in the valleys, then steam power, provided the impetus for many firms to base themselves in the city.

The raw materials for iron and steel production, coal, iron ore and limestone, were readily available locally, and the transport network of canals and railways that sprang up nationally, passed close by, linking Sheffield to the major ports and the rest of the country.

At the beginning, water powered industrial hamlets produced small amounts of iron and crucible steel. Many craftsmen specialised in producing the finest cutlery and knife blades in the world. As the demand for steel products grew, so did the city and its blast furnaces and melting shops. By the end of the 1900s, Sheffield had become known as the Steel City.

However, few people would think of Rotherham when asked about iron and steel, and that is a shame. Because if you were to take a journey east from Sheffield along the Don Valley, following the course of the river that gives that valley its name, you would come to a place where once existed the biggest steel producing plant in the world. A steelworks that provided the bulk of the steel for the ammunition used in two world wars. A place that produced millions of tonnes of high quality engineering steels. That place is Templeborough in Rotherham.

I am proud of those facts and I am also proud to call Rotherham my home town. Although, now a shadow of its former self, it still produces steel, albeit with much fewer people and on a much smaller scale. Far fewer people in fact.

During my early years, everyone knew someone who worked in the steelworks in some capacity. In my class at school, well over half of our mothers and fathers where employed by the steel industry, including my own father and his father before him. Steel made the town prosperous and people had money to spend.

Things change though, and nothing changes more than the fickle demands of the economy. Global trade and free markets mean that manufacturing will migrate to the places where production costs are cheapest. Places where people will work for a full week for less than people get for working for one hour in Rotherham. Free trade means that steel products can now be produced, finished and exported to Rotherham from countries thousands of miles away, for far less than it would cost to produce that steel in the town itself, from raw materials dug out of the ground right on the doorstep.

Although steel is still produced in Rotherham, on the other side of the town from Templeborough, the industry employs a fraction of the twenty-five thousand people that it once did. Modern production methods have increased efficiency and it now takes far fewer people to produce a tonne of steel than it did in the 1970s.

Memories of the glory days when Rotherham and Templeborough could proudly boast that they had the biggest electric arc melting shop in the world, and produced more steel than anywhere else, including America, are now long gone. And so are most of the people who worked in Rotherham steel, spending long, hard shifts in the towns melting shops and rolling mills. Often in hot and lethal environments, stoking row upon row of greedy, smoke belching, open hearth furnaces. Men who, quite literally, harnessed the power of a lightening bolt to make millions of tonnes of cold steel scrap MELT!

I am of the first generation that came after the decline. Robert Vincent Johnson, born on the 5th October 1966, in a small nursing home on Clifton Lane in Rotherham. I did not follow my father into the steelworks. I became a time-served printer after leaving school and completing an apprenticeship. Although I have had what you might call a successful career, I have never felt truly proud of what I do. Not like my father and his father before him. Steel flowed through their veins, it was in their blood and so it is in mine. I have a fierce pride when I tell people I am from Rotherham and woe betide anyone who gives the town a bad review, especially if they come from the South!

I have been lucky enough to have lived in and known the town as it was towards the end of its glory years and I think that my loyalty to the place and its heavy industrial heritage did have something to do with the incredible events that I am about to recall. I also hope that you ( if there is a you ) will get some feeling for why I stayed loyal to my town and its history, more than many have. And so, where to begin.

Chapter 1

February 2017

The day that changed my life financially was the 6th February 2016. That was the day that the lottery syndicate at the Montgomery Ward print works won the national lottery. The syndicate was made up of four people, including myself and I had been a member since its inception not long after the national lottery was born back in 1994.

Montgomery Ward was one of Rotherham’s longer established print works and I worked in the print shop on one of the firm’s seven large litho presses. We produced all manner of business stationery from a few business cards to hundreds of thousands of business forms.

The pay was good but the job was tedious. During all the time that I worked there, I never felt as though I was making any significant contribution to society in general. The product was boring and so were the people that I worked with.

I remember thinking the first week that I paid my subs to the syndicate organiser, what a relief it would be to actually win enough money to get out of this place and the print industry altogether.

I had fallen into the trap that so many people do. I had taken the first job that came along, hungry for the money and independence from my parents. My thinking at the time was that it would do for now and that I would find something better once I had earned a few quid. The months became years, and as I was promoted, the money became too good to be ignored.

In the early years life outside of work was good. A succession of fast cars and one or two fast women. As the money, and my maturity, increased, so did the commitment. Soon I found myself with a wife, a house and a large mortgage. The mortgage lasted considerably longer than my marriage and as interest rates soared into double digits in the middle 90’s and the housing market collapsed, it took most of my salary just to keep my head above water. As the economy changed, things became easier. The years passed and by the time the lottery win came along I was financially comfortable.

So that was my situation up until the day that fate intervened and our six numbers came up trumps. One would think that if asked, I would say that the day of the win was the day that changed my life the most. That would have been the case back then, just after we hit the jackpot. But if you were to ask me now, the answer would be very different.

The day that changed everything was a year or so later in April of 2017. By that time I had got used to the sense of freedom that came with being released from the tedium of working in a job that was not fulfilling. That had been the best part of winning the national lottery. That and not having to spend fifty hours a week interacting with people I wouldn’t normally give the time of day to. I was free. Free from the monotony of having to dedicate mental energy towards things that held no interest whatsoever for me. It provided me with the impetus to change my life for the better. Suddenly coming into a large amount of money helped, but please don’t think me crass when I say that money does not necessarily make you happy. Certainly it gives you choices and if you are lucky enough to have more of it than you need, then those choices can become very different.

One of the main things that money brings is the ability to live where you want, not where necessity dictates. The first big decision I made was deciding to move from Rotherham the twenty or so miles west to the other side of Sheffield, and into the hills and moors of the glorious Peak District National Park.

As I sat in my converted stone barn, by my kitchen table on that fateful April morning, looking out over the pine trees and the rolling views of the Upper Derwent Valley, I noticed that the Larch trees were just beginning to awaken from their winter hibernation. A feint green mist seemed to float between the trunks as the multitude of needles were beginning to grow. In another month or so, the view would be very different. Sipping my coffee my thoughts turned to the year that had passed since my big win. It had been a whirl of emotions, evoking responses ranging from wild euphoria to a mild pessimism. It was these mixed feelings that had ultimately caused a chain of events that were to lead to this morning, Wednesday 5th, April 2017.

This day was the start of an almost unbelievable and utterly incredible period of my life. It was the day I visited Eric, my ninety-three year old friend, because he wanted to show me something special as he had put it. And boy, was it something special! But first, let me take you back a year or so, back to the day of the big win.

A frantic phone call from Andy, the syndicate’s organiser and avid lottery fanatic. Coming late at night I’d thought he was trying to wind me up.

We’ve got all six Vinnie, he panted.

All six what?

"All six bloody numbers pal! We’ve won!"

He was actually much more expressive than that and his excited ramblings were peppered with expletives as he told me that nine point eight million pounds split between four of us meant that we would get just under two and a half million pounds each.

The days following that evening passed in a haze of press interviews, and meetings with the lottery people. A week later I handed in my resignation and left my job at Montgomery Ward. The time immediately after that, I spent researching my financial options and investing a large proportion of my money in what I perceived to be solid investments. For me, the idea of never having to do work that I did not want or enjoy was my priority, and to do that I would have to make my money work for me. Not that I didn’t allow myself one or two little indulgences. I sold my small semi-detached house in Wickersley one of Rotherham’s outlying villages, and after a lot of searching, found a beautiful stone barn conversion. The house was set amongst trees on the western slopes of the Upper Derwent Valley in the Derbyshire Peak District, overlooking the monumental wall of the Derwent Dam. I’d always joked that if I ever won the lottery, I would move here. So when that became reality, I did just that. I also traded in my battered little Alfa Romeo, for a shiny new  LandRover Discovery, and a Nitrous Blue Ford Focus RS. Both would keep me mobile when the winter weather descended over the Peaks.

I spent some time travelling in the US, Canada and Australia and made a conscious effort to do and see the things I had often thought about doing. After that I returned to my little retreat in the hills and took stock of my life. I was happy, yes, you could call it a form of happiness. The stresses of having to earn a living were gone, I had seen and experienced sights that I would never have seen without my fortunate win. I had an idyllic place to live and was now financially secure for the rest of my life. There was only myself to worry about. I had one or two good friends but no dependants. Money gave me choices. Life on the whole was good.

As time progressed however, I began to experience feelings of unease, feelings that something was missing, something was not quite right. My life seemed rather unfulfilling, just like it had been whilst I was working at Montgomery Ward. I was finding it hard to understand. Why was I feeling like this still? Why was I feeling like this when all the pressures of work were now gone?

For weeks these thoughts and questions kept returning and for weeks I couldn’t provide myself with an answer. Eventually I decided that I needed to try and get to the bottom of things and find out the real reasoning behind the growing sense of foreboding that I was feeling.

So I made an appointment with my GP and was referred for counselling, or therapy as the politically correct like to call it. You could say that the decision to go ahead with the therapy was a watershed moment. Another one of the critical events in my life that turned me onto the path that led to the incredible account I am about to tell.

Once a week, I travelled into Sheffield for my counselling. I had arrived early at the medical centre, a bleak 1980s prefab building in the grounds of the General Hospital, and was sitting in the drab waiting room. I tried to find something of interest amongst the well thumbed magazines but failed miserably.

My attention drifted to the large flat screen TV monitor that hung on a bracket on the far wall of the room. A continuous loop of information videos and adverts played over and over again and I thought how irritating this must be for the poor girl on the reception desk, hearing it repeating constantly. One of the articles did grab my attention though, albeit on the second time around the loop.

It started with a clip of an old man, sitting in a chair chatting to a much younger woman. He had a broad South Yorkshire accent, and I started to pay attention when I realised he was talking about his working life in the coal mines.

The man became more animated as he told the young woman his story. He had been a coal miner in the days when coal was king in many Northern towns and cities. The clip only ran for a minute or so before the narrator appeared and talked briefly about the Living Memories project, based in Rotherham, and how it desperately needed volunteers to help with talking to older people and getting their memories recorded before they were gone forever.

My interest was piqued and I pulled out my iPhone and recorded the details. During the following appointment with the counsellor my mind kept wandering to the old man in the video clip and his proud reminiscences. Here was something really interesting I had thought. I was pleased when my time was over and I could get back home and have a look at the Living Memories project in more detail on the web. As I settled into the RS’s bucket seat and depressed the engine start button, I thought of the old man I had just seen.

My mind suddenly made a startling connection. What would the old man in the video think to my hi-tech Focus RS with all its sophistication and performance?

How much change had the man lived through, both in human and technological terms. I suddenly realised how vitally important projects like the one advertised in the film were. How imperative it was to record this man, and others like him, before it was too late, talking about everyday life in a time when material possessions were not nearly as important to people as they are today.

My thoughts turned to my own past and that of my father. I felt a sudden surge of nostalgia and pride for Rotherham and its people of the past. Most of them now long gone, I felt a direct connection to them and the sweat and toil they had undergone to make the town the buzzing and successful place it once was.

When I thought about it, I was pretty interested in the local history of the area. I had read most of the books on Rotherham and Sheffield’s industrial past, right back to the times of the early iron makers when, in the 1770s, the Walker family put Rotherham on the map by pioneering new methods of iron production, later casting and machining most of the cannons for Admiral Nelsons navy.

In fact, I sometimes thought that I was born years too late, a man out of my time. I had often asked myself the hypothetical question as I read historical accounts, if I could somehow go back in time to a particular event or period, would I? The answer had always been yes, if I could spend a short time back there, in whatever time and then come back to the present, unharmed and with my memories and experiences of the event still in tact.

I had also been interested in tales of the recent past. As a child I remembered my father telling me stories of things he had done at work in the steelworks and being fascinated by the works themselves on the odd occasions I had been exposed to them. It was not just steel.

My father’s eldest brother was a pit deputy at Dinnington Colliery, one of the many deep mine pits dotted around South Yorkshire, and I had vivid memories of watching the winding gear at the pit head spinning furiously as it lowered men a mile down into the bowels of the earth to extract the black gold. I remembered seeing the miners coming off shift, filthy in their work overalls, as they trouped across the road to the pit baths.

Perhaps this project was the way forward. Perhaps it would provide a sense of purpose to my days. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like something I would like to be involved with. During the session that I had just had with the councillor, she had asked if I had any hobbies or interests that really motivated me. I had had to admit to her that although I had plenty of casual interests, nothing seemed to really excite me.

I remember feeling a sense of relief when it clicked in my head. It was like a light coming on and it happened instantly. Yes! What a great idea, talking to people who had actually been part of Rotherham’s industrial past. Real people who had lived through the glory years. That’s right up my street. I had a basic knowledge of the steelworks and coal mines from the many local history books and articles that I had read over the years and from the tales my father and uncle had told me.

It felt as though a mental weight had been lifted from my mind, and by the time the western suburbs of Sheffield gave way to the hills of the Peak District, I had made my mind up. Thirty minutes after getting home I had made contact with Gina Crossland, the co-ordinator of the Living Memories project. Her response to my email came surprisingly quickly, that afternoon in fact, and I spoke to her as soon as I had read her reply.

She was pleased I wanted to be involved and we talked for nearly half an hour as I told her of my interest in Rotherham’s past and my father and uncle and the small roles they both played in that past. She mentioned that they had a number of people involved who had worked in the steelworks and the local coal mines and she was sure that if I wanted, I would be able to get involved with a retired steelworker or coal miner.

I was more than pleased when she said that I sounded just the sort of person that the project needed. By the time our conversation ended I had a date in my diary and a positive buzz in my head. This was going to be really interesting, and useful, something worthwhile that would leave a real legacy for future researchers and historians. I had a lot of free time on my hands so why not, I thought.

I felt better than I had in a long time and that evening I headed out on one of my circular walks around the valley. The water in the Derwent Reservoir was just beginning to spill over the dam and cascade into the spillway as I walked along the little path at the foot of the monumental masonry wall, and headed north along the track on the eastern shore of the reservoir.

I began to ponder more on the Living Memories project and who I may get to meet and what I might hear about. Gina had said that a couple of the participants were in their nineties and one was a centenarian. Maybe I would get to know more about people’s lives during the war. Maybe I would get to find out about things other than the industrial past.

I was also interested in World War 2 and especially the role of the RAF and the brave men of Bomber Command. I had often thought that those brave men got the shitty end of the stick. Night after night they risked their lives, suffering terrible losses. Then years after the war, Bomber Command and what they did during those years of conflict seemed to become a thing to be ashamed of.

Generations of young people who had never so much as seen hostilities seemed to jump on the politically correct band wagon that so many of their generation seem to embrace, and the bomber boys became decidedly Un PC. It made my blood boil when I thought about it. Perhaps I would find out more about the war years in Sheffield and Rotherham.

Wouldn’t it be fabulous, I thought, if I get a chance to talk to someone who could remember a time when RAF Lancaster Bombers flew low over this very reservoir, filling the valley with the sound of Rolls Royce Aero engines, as they practiced for the bombing of the German dams of the Ruhr.

My fascination with the dam busters and the construction of the dams, reservoirs and the villages that had been lost under the waters of the Upper Derwent Valley, had been a big part of my decision to move out here. I now lived in the very same valley that the RAF had practiced in all those years ago in early 1943.

Back then in the early forties, the Avro Lancaster Bombers of 617 squadron had flown low level target practice over Derwent Reservoir and the dam. Wouldn’t it be something special if maybe I could get to speak with someone who remembered those times.

Later that week, I received a call from Gina. Would I be able to meet her on Friday? She had a potential new participant for the project and would like me to meet with him. He was a retired steelworker.

So he should be just right for you. If you hit it off then I’ll pair you and hopefully, we will get some great recordings.

Gina Crossland was exactly how I had imagined her from our telephone conversations. She was in her early twenties, and in the final year of an M.Sc. at Sheffield Hallam University. She had long hair that was died vivid pink and it seemed to compliment her positive attitude to everything. Her enthusiasm shone through as she talked animatedly about her role and the project.

Let’s see now, she said, looking at her MacBook’s screen through the small tortoiseshell framed glasses that were perched on the end of her nose. She manipulated the laptop’s trackpad.

Here he is. Eric Kingston, he’s ninety-three years old and quite a character. I interviewed him myself. He’s from Rotherham, lived in the town all his life, worked in the steelworks at Templeborough for over fifty years. I think he’s perfect. She paused, and looked at me. So what do you think? Does he sound like the sort of person you would get along with?

He certainly sounds as though he will have some interesting tales to tell.

I’m sure he has, she laughed again.

Ninety-three you say?

Yes, and he’s as sharp as a new pin. We can pay him a visit now if you’ve got time.

Sure, that’d be great. I grinned.

A few minutes later we were in Gina Crossland’s tiny little Toyota, and as we drove, she told me a little bit more about Eric Kingston, the man I was about to meet .

He lives on his own and manages without much help, amazing really.

So, how did you find him?

Ha, he found us. He came into the office and said he’d seen us on FaceTube.

FaceTube, I grinned.

"I know, we nearly died trying to keep a straight face. Apparently he uses his iPad to get on the Interweb as he calls it."

He sounds like a bit of a character, I can’t wait to meet him. I didn’t have long to wait.

Eric lived on his own in a 1950s semi at the Brecks, one of Rotherham’s more leafy eastern suburbs.

We are looking for Sheepcote Road. She glanced down at her notes. Here we go, we want number 58.

About halfway down Sheepcote Road we came across Eric’s house. Number 58 was the right hand house of the pair of semis, and had a well worn look. The garden had obviously been his pride and joy and still retained some of its former glory. It was now mostly given over to lawn. The large bay window on the front of the house protruded from both stories and I noticed that the shingles that separated the front room bay from the upstairs room had been painted recently. Eric may be in his nineties I thought, but he’s still bothered about his house and how it looks.

The street however looked slightly scruffy and many of the houses had had extensions added to them at various times over the years. What once had been a road of neat uniform semi-detached houses, built in the housing boom after the war, was now looking decidedly dishevelled.

He knows we are coming, look he’s already at the back door.  We walked up the driveway at the side of the house. Gina took Eric’s arm.

Hello Eric, don’t stand out here in the cold. We need to get you inside out of this chilly breeze.

Don’t you worry about me love, tough as old boots I am.

This is Vincent, he’s come with me today to see if you like each other, Gina laughed, as she gently helped Eric back into his kitchen.

It’s Vinnie. I reached out and took his hand. Eric looked straight into my eyes with an almost knowing look, and I heard him whisper under his breath.

"Oh I know who you are son, I know, and it’s so good to see you again." It was as though he had been expecting to see me. Looking back on it now, it was the look you would give when greeting a dear friend, not someone you have just met. At the time though, I thought that maybe he had confused me with someone else. He was, after all, well into his nineties. He gestured for us to follow him through to the small room next to the kitchen.

I’ve got some tea mashing in’t pot, would you like a brew?

Gina said that we would, and she disappeared back into the kitchen with him as he prepared our drinks.

As I sat on one of the four chairs that were placed around a small table, I took in the detail of the room. A coal fire was burning in the grate and I noticed the word Baxi indented in the fire bricks at the back of the fire.

Above the fire place was a framed photograph of Eric and his wife on his wedding day, Eric standing proudly behind his beautiful young wife as she sat on a large sofa. The photograph was old and faded and I guessed it must have been taken in a studio at around the end of the war. No doubt, if things went according to plan, I would hear all about the lady in the photograph.

To the right of the fireplace were two narrow wooden framed glass doors which still had their period reeded glass panes. The doors led to the front room with the large bay window that I had noticed when we had arrived. I felt sure that this room was only used on special occasions and that most of Eric’s time was spent in this cosy little back room.

On the opposite wall, a pair of small French doors opened onto the garden and I was struck by the length of the view. I couldn’t see where the garden finished. A network of red brick paths criss-crossed the nearest half of the garden and between these paths were rose beds, neatly planted with bushes. Further away a lawn stretched into the distance and disappeared beneath two huge Sycamore trees. Beyond that were the gardens and houses of East Bawtry Road, much older and larger pre-war properties.

To the right an ornate brick built garage stood in front of a small rusty framed greenhouse at the head of the driveway, and I wondered if Eric still drove a car, and if so, was that car parked in his garage? One thing I was sure of though, was that I would have no shortage of things to discuss with him.

We sat for over an hour as we drank the tea. I complemented him on his lovely garden and we talked briefly about me and my background. He seemed very pleased when I told him that I had also been born in Rotherham and had lived in the town all my life until recently. His face lit up when I told him that I had worked for Montgomery Ward in the old foundry building on Thames Street.

That used to be Yates and Haywood, he beamed. My missus worked there in the drawing office just after the war, that was before I got her the job in the typing pool at Steelo’s.

We talked about how Rotherham had changed over the years and how a once proud steel town was now just a meagre shadow of its former self. Gina sat quietly listening. I could tell she was pleased with the way things were progressing, and the hour or so seemed to pass very quickly.

We must leave you in peace now Eric, Gina interjected.

Aye, okay love. It's been grand seeing you both. I don’t get many visitors these days, will you be coming again?

Oh I think so, don’t you Vinnie?

You just try and stop me! I’d love to.

Grand, Eric beamed. You’re a good lad Vincent and I’m sure we’re going to have a good time, we always did.

I was puzzled at the last bit when he said we always did. Here he was doing it again, talking as if we known each other for a long time. I glanced at Gina. She frowned slightly, and with an almost imperceivable nod of her head, she signalled that she too had noticed Eric’s comment.

I’m sure we are Eric, I can't wait, I told him, as I squeezed his wrinkled hand. That’s some grip you have.

Aye lad, comes from years of fettling open hearth furnaces. I caught the glint in his eyes at the memory of it.

"Now that’s what we want to hear about, Gina interrupted us again. But it’s for another time, you can tell Vinnie all about it when he comes again."

Oh aye, I will, don’t you worry about that lass.

That was my first meeting with Eric Kingston.

Over the weeks that followed our friendship grew into something very special.

Chapter 2

April 6th 2017

I promised Eric that I would not be late and I had kept to my word, turning into Sheepcote Road at two minutes past one. The improvement in the spring weather was really noticeable and the drive from home, through the spring sunshine of the Peak District had been glorious. Eric was outside on his drive as I pulled up.

Now then lad, he shouted as I locked the car. He was seated on the bench which was conveniently placed to the left of the back door of the house so that he could enjoy a cup of tea in the fresh air. He had already made my drink.

Eric. How’s it hanging? I sat next to him on the bench as he handed me a steaming mug of tea. I came straight to the point. So come on then, spill the beans. What’s this secret that you need to show me? I’m really intrigued.

The secret, as he had called it, needed to be shown, rather than talked about. The talking will come after, he had told me.

The day before, Eric had mentioned that he had something really important to show me. He had asked me to look in his garage for some keys. Eventually I had found what we were looking for in the boot of his car.

"There you go," he exclaimed in a triumphant voice when I’d turned to him.

Are these what we’re looking for? The two heavy metal objects were more like handles than keys, each about ten inches long with a tee shaped bar on one end and three small protrusions on the other.

Looks like you made these yourself Eric. I turned one of the keys over in my hand.

Not me Vin, I had a good pal in the machine shop, he did them for me.

Nice work, these are really intricate. I turned the metal keys over in my hands examining the fine detail. Eric seemed to be remembering something unpleasant.

Ray made ‘em for me, poor old lad. I’d known him since we were at school. He was the finest tool grinder in the machine shop at Steelo’s before I persuaded him to join me and my crew on E furnace.

His voice trailed off and he took a long swig of tea.

Go on, what happened to him?

Eric sighed, and he seemed to be struggling to find the right words.

He was killed in 1980 when we had a ladle break out, covered him in slag, he didn’t stand a chance.

Jesus! I whispered, not wanting to interrupt his flow.

I told him to get out of that ladle pit before we started tapping, and I thought he had, so it was my fault. I didn’t check that he had. Only time we ever lost a man on my watch. He trailed off, his eyes now watery with tears.

"Bloody hell! That’s a horrible way to go."

Oh aye, it was a terrible thing. There’s only one winner when it comes to molten steel, and I should know. Here, let me show you summat.

With that he put down his tea and bent to roll up his trouser leg. I gasped at the sight of his massively scarred limb.

It happened when we were in the pit trying to save him, there were lumps of molten slag everywhere. The crane driver got that ladle up and away bloody sharpish, but it was spewing shit everywhere, it was all over the floor. By the time we got him out the bastard stuff had crusted over. You couldn’t see it like. All crusty on top and still molten underneath. What with all the fuss about old Ray I missed a great blob and trod on it, went straight through and well... He glanced down at his withered lower leg. Never known pain like it son. I was off work for eight months.

This was the first time that Eric had talked to me on a private personal level and I felt very honoured that he could trust me enough to tell me about such harrowing things. It also made me think of the dangers that he had faced everyday of his working life. In the few weeks that I had known him, Eric had already told me some fascinating things and we had begun to record his memories using my iPhone.

Amazing, he’d exclaimed when I’d shown him how I could record our voices in high quality using nothing but the phone. "When you think, after they modernised the melting shop in 1963, and we went all electric, they had this computer. It was as big as a whole room. Electric Melting Shop Control, it was called. They built it special like, on the other side of Sheffield Road. I remember that the main computer filled a whole floor, rows and rows of red metal cabinets with Ferranti written all over them. And the control room, Bloody hell! It was like summat from Star Trek," he grinned.

It was all about power management. See, we couldn’t just power up and start meltin’, because if all six furnaces were started up at the same time we’d have blown the national grid, especially if it was advert time during Coronation Street, when everyone put the kettle on for a brew.

Wow, I bet that computer and the control room were really something back in those days.

"Aye, it certainly looked the business. I remember the two ruddy great ammeters on the main panel, the size of dinner plates they were, went all the way up to 400 megawatts. They were regularly up round at the 300 mark Vin. Imagine that. A melting shop using more power than the whole town!"

That’s quite something when you put it like that. Even though that computer that controlled it all was state of the art at that time, I bet it probably had less power than this phone. I picked up my iPhone, turning it in my hands.

Aye, no doubt, Eric grinned.

As he and I became more familiar with each other I started to learn how to coax the flow of our conversations. I think Eric was impressed by my genuine interest in his life and I absorbed the things he told me like a sponge.

Even if I knew the answer I’d ask the right question here and there, and I got to know instinctively when to shut up and listen and when to gently prompt.

Just when I would be thinking that Eric had finished and said enough for that day, he would remember something else and we would be off again. This happened one cold afternoon when we had stopped after an hour or so. We sat by the fire sipping tea and looking out over the grey drizzle as the light began to fade. After a lifetime in the melting shop, Eric had become used to heat and he felt the cold more keenly than most.

"The open hearth furnaces were summat else Vin. When I started work in 1939,