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It's October 1944, time to leave school and get a job to earn my keep, so I've been told. No hanging around street corners, there's a war on. So I embarked on my first experience of work in a munitions factory.
My mother worked in the same factory upstairs on some kind of detonators or something like that, I didn't really have a clue and didn't really care.
I'm a man now, I'm 14 years old, wrote Allan Huntingdon.
I was put to work in the paint shop where hundreds of steel girders had to be painted with khaki, anti-rust paint. The girders were for the army to build bridges, which were called 'Bailley Bridges'.
What a job that was! Boiler suits which, after a few days, would stand up themselves with the amount of paint on them. We used long handled paint brushes with a round head of bristles. (They seem to have become popular again as they are now being sold in the shops.).
There were about four or five of us at about the same age so, as you can imagine, we used to get up to some pranks. Unfortunately, my uncle happened to be the foreman on the paint section and after one prank, which I don't really remember, he really told me off.
I turned on him and told him to 'x?@= off.' He promptly snatched the paint brush from my hand and hit me round the head with it. It wouldn't have been so bad, but I had just dipped it into the paint so my hair and face were covered in the mucky stuff.
It took days to get it all off. When I told my mother, she chased me round the house and gave me a few clouts for being cheeky.
In the corridor leading to the paint shop they used to store 16lb shells next to the old print rollers which were previously used for wallpaper before the war. Some of the bigger lads used these shells for weight lifting.
I thought this was easy, so, during the morning break, I decided to have a go. No sooner had I lifted two of these shells, than I overbalanced backward and my hand was trapped on the print roller with the weight of the shell on top.
The next six weeks were spent making regular trips to Blackburn Royal Infirmary. I lost interest in weight lifting after that.
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