Down the Docks

When I moved to the Netherlands in the early 1980's I had a vague notion of “doing” Europe, but Amsterdam was the farthest I could get on two weeks broo money..

I got the overnight bus from Montrose to London, dossed about London during the day and took another overnight bus to Amsterdam.

Arriving in Amsterdam at 8 in the morning I went up to the Vreemdelingen Dienst (Aliens Police) and had my passport stamped with a 3 months residence permit.  In the then early days of the EU we had a right to work, but not live in other EU countries.  So at least I didn't need a work permit.

I went to an Uitzendburo (Employment Agency) and made up an address for their records.   This was by now about 11am.  I'd been on the road for about 36 hours by this time.  My first shift was working down the docks at Ijmuiden (on the North Sea coast), starting at 2.00pm that afternoon.

I think I managed to doze a wee bit in the van thoughtfully provided by the buro. Then it was up and at them, loading up a freezer ship with 15,000 tonnes of frozen mackerel for Nigeria. 

I don't know if any of you have ever worked as a docker.  It's hard graft.  in this case it involved filling a hold which was at around -20 centigrade with 25 kilo blocks of frozen mackerel.  You fill a hold by starting from the corners and working in towards the middle.   Pallets of the blocks are swung in by crane.  You and your gang's job is to break down the pallets and stack the blocks individually.  15,000 tonnes at 25 kilos a block.  That's 600,000 blocks.

..exactly..

Four gangs of eight guys.  Roughly 18,000 blocks per man....

Two days at three shifts a day...say 3,000 blocks per man per shift...

Let's say, you didn't have time to get cold...I wasn't QUITE stripped to the waist, but not far off it.  I managed to scrounge a pair of gloves off one of the gangers and that was it.  You wouldn't want one of these blocks to drop on your foot.  Or anything else for that matter. 

A carelessly flung block crushed my right thumb and broke the nail off it, right off.  It was cold enough so that I didn't feel much then, over the next few weeks it was agony.  Fortunately, the nail grew back and I don't appear to have any lasting effects but that was only my good luck and no judgement.

The other guys in the squad were Moroccans and Turks for the most part. Nice blokes and grafters.  You had to be.

The ganger in our squad was a guy from Friesland. I've no recollection of his name or even if I ever knew it.  His job was to drive us.  Like beasts.

Years later, reading Alan Lomax's accounts of Levee bosses in the southern United States I read of a man being described as a “good nigger driver”.  That was this guy.

Anyway, here I am hard at work, hallucinating through lack of sleep, blood filling up the fingers of my glove... and the ganger shouts down to one of the guys alongside me in the hold...

..”heeft je en beetje touw...?”  which means “Have you got a piece of rope?”

..but what I heard was the Scots language cognate phrase...

...”hiv yi a bittie tow...?”...

That's when I knew I was going to be ok in the only other Calvinist country in the world.