The Bottle Factory Outing Read Free

said Freda, patting her hair into place. No matter how rushed she was for time she managed to paint the lids of
     her eyes cobalt blue and to coat her lashes with vaseline.
    Everyone shook hands with them when they came into work, all the tired bottling men in their green overalls and trilby hats.
     One by one they took it in turn to step away from the rusted machinery slowly revolving in the centre of the floor. They left
     the steel rods squirting out wine, pumped up from the cellar beneath into the dark rotating bottles, bashfully to hold the
     cool outstretched fingers of the English ladies. Freda found the ritual charming. It established contact with the elusive
     Vittorio, if only fleetingly. ‘
Bongiorno
,’ she trilled, over and over.
    They worked from eleven in the morning till three in the afternoon. They weren’t supposed to have a break for lunch, but most
     days Freda bullied Brenda into going over the road to the public house to share one hot sausage and one vodka and lime. Maria,
     who started at eight andleft at two, could not bring herself to go with them. She brought sandwiches made of salami, the left-overs from her nephew’s
     restaurant, wrapped up in a headscarf. She wore the black dresses she had carried from Italy twenty years before, and after
     midday, when the damp got to her bones, she climbed into a mail bag for warmth. All the same she suffered dreadfully from
     chilblains, and Freda persuaded her to wear mittens. She worshipped Freda, whom she thought bold and dashing and resourceful.
     What style she had – the large English girl with the milk-white skin and eyelids stained the colour of cornflowers. How easily
     she had wrought improvements in their daily labour. Refusing to stoop over the wooden labelling bench, she had complained
     loudly of a pain in her splendid back and found beer crates for them to sit on. She had purchased rubber gloves from the Co-op
     to protect her mauve and shining nails; she had insisted that the Mrs Brenda do the same. She had contrived an Outing into
     the landscape, a day under the sky and the trees. Best of all, she had condoned the wearing of mail bags and advised the use
     of mittens. At the sight of Freda, Maria’s large pale face flushed pink with pleasure; she stamped her feet to ease her chilblains
     and swung her head from side to side. But for the cramp in her knee, she would have risen and genuflected.
    ‘Hey up,’ said Freda, when the round of handshaking was completed. ‘You’re wearing your sexy nylons again.’ She was looking
     at the grey football socks on Maria’s stumpy legs.
    With joy Maria rocked back and forth on her beer crate. ‘Aye, aye,’ she moaned, rolling her eyes and dartingglances at Freda, magnificent in her purple trousers and hand-made Cossack boots. She understood little of the conversation:
     the English girl gabbled her words so fast.
    The ground floor of the factory was open to the street and the loading bay. In summer the stone walls kept the bottling area
     cool, in winter the temperature dropped below freezing. The men stamped their feet, blew on their fingers and pulled their
     trilby hats about their ears. On the stone columns that supported the floor above, the men had glued pictures from magazines
     – a view of Naples, a stout young lady standing in a garden, someone’s son who had studied hard at night, bettered himself
     and passed an examination. Above the cardboard boxes stacked in rows twelve foot high, there was a picture of the Virgin holding
     her baby and a plaque of the Sacred Heart, sore wounded, nailed like a football rosette to the green painted wall. The work-benches
     faced a row of windows overlooking the back wall of the chip-shop and an inch of sky.
    In vain Freda had tried to tell the men how low their wages were by other standards, how severely they were exploited. They
     listened politely but without comprehension. To them Mr Paganotti was a wise father, a
padrone
who had plucked