Play For Today: Slab Boys (1979)

 

The Slab Boys Trilogy by John Byrne (Faber and Faber 2003)

The Slab Boys (1978)

Scene

The Slab Room is a small paint-spattered room adjacent to the Design Studio at A. F. Stobo & Co., Carpet Manufacturers. It is here that the powder colour used by the designers in the preparation of the paper patter is ground and dished. The colour is kept in large cardboard drums. It is heaped onto marble slabs by the Slab Boys (apprentice designers), water and gum arabic is added, and it is ground with large palette knives till deemed fit to be dished. A window overlooks the factory sheds from where the distant hum of looms drifts up. Beneath the window is a sink. Beside the sink are stacks of small pottery dishes (some of them very dirty). There is a broom cupboard in one comer of the room. Rolls of drafting paper, rug samples, paint rags etc. litter the shelves and floor. A large poster of James Dean (unidentified) hangs on the wall. The action takes place during the morning and afternoon of a Friday in the winter of 1957.

Act One

The Slab Room. Enter George ‘Spanky’ Farrell in dust-coat, drainpipe trousers, Tony Curtis hair-do, crepe-soled shoes. He crosses to his slab and starts working. Enter Hector McKenzie, similarly attired in dustcoat. He is shorter and weedier than Spanky. He wears spectacles and carries a portable radio.

Spanky Hey, where’d you get the wireless, Heck? Never seen you with that this morning ...

Hector Had it planked down the bog . .. didn’t want ‘you-know-who ’ to see it.

Spanky Does it work? Give’s a shot... (Grabs radio.) Where’s Luxembourg?

Hector Watch it, Spanky ... you'll break it! You can’t get Luxembourg... it’s not dark enough.

Spanky Aw ... d’you need a dark wireless? I never knew that. Mebbe if we pull the aerial out a bit... (He does so. It comes away in his hand.)

Hector You swine, look what you’ve done!

Spanky Ach, that’s easy fixed ...

Hector Give us it. (Twiddles knobs. Gets Terry Dene singing ‘A White Sport Coat’.)

Spanky Good God, could you not’ve brung in a more modern wireless? That’s donkey’s out of date.

Hector I like it.

Spanky That’s ’cos you’re a tube, Hector:

Enter Phil McCann in street clothes and carrying portfolio under his arm. He sets folio down behind the door.

Morning, Phil. You’re early the day... (Consults wristwatch painted on wrist.) 'S only half-eleven.

Phil Anybody been looking for us?

Spanky Willie Curry was in ten minutes ago looking that lemon-yellow you promised, but I told him you diarrhoea and you’d take a big dish of it down to him later on.

Phil (changing into dustcoat) Who belongs to the jukebox?

Hector ’S mines...

Enter Willie Curry.

My Favorite Year (1982)

Happiland by William Bedford (William Heinemann 1990)

When his work was finished, Harry went down to the promenade and sat at one of the window tables in Brown's cafe. From the window, he could see the pier and the deserted shores, and the slipway where the inshore fishing boats would come when the tide began to ebb. Great banks of cloud were gathering at the estuary, and as he ordered a mug of scalding hot tea and a bacon buttie with onions, the wind howled and gusted along the promenade, whistling underneath the cafe door. He fed some sixpences into the juke box, selecting Rosemary Clooney and Tennessee Ernie Ford, Frankie Laine and Teresa Brewer, and then sat down to wait for his food. He had spent all day baiting the fishing lines with frozen bait, and now he was waiting for George Bainbridge to get back from his trip to see what fresh lugworms were required tomorrow. During the winter months, when the fairgrounds were closed, Harry's only money came from the casual bait digging he did for the inshore fishermen. In the summer, he worked on the fairgrounds.

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (Longman Caribbean Writers 1956)

'The trouble with you,' Galahad say, 'is that you want a holiday. Why you don't take a trip to Berlin or Moscow? Listen, I hear the Party giving free trips to the boys to go to different cities on the continent, with no strings attached, you don't have to join up or anything.'
'Who tell you so?'
'I get a wire. I hear two students went, and they say they had a sharp time, over there not like London at all, the people greeting you with open arms. Why you don't contact the Party?'

New York in the 50s (2000)

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe (Plume/Penguin 1959)

Sitting in what has come to be called my study, a room in the first-floor flat of a ramshackle Majorcan house, my eyes move over racks of books around me. Row after row of coloured backs and dusty tops, they give an air of distinction not only to the room but to the whole flat, and one can sense the thoughts of occasional visitors who stoop down discreetly during drinks to read their titles:
"A Greek Lexicon, Homer in the original. He knows Greek! (Wrong, those books belong to my brother-in-law.) Shakespeare, The Golden Bough, a Holy Bible bookmarked with tapes and paper. He even reads it! Euripides and the rest, and a dozen mouldering Baedekers. What a funny idea to collect them! Proust, all twelve volumes! I never could wade through that lot. (Neither did I.) Doestoevsky. My god, is he still going strong?"
And so on and so on, items that have become part of me, foliage that is grown to conceal the bare stem of my real personality, what I was like before I ever saw these books, or any book at all, come to that.

[From The Decline And Fall Of Frankie Buller]