DAY TWENTY ONE

When I was nine my two sisters and I spent a considerable amount of time in factories. Not so much in the child slave labour sense where we might be paid $4.16 an hour to clean the cages of battery hens but more as a form of entertainment. Of course, now that I look back on it, I realise this wasn't the usual choice. Other children wouldn't have taken rusting heavy machinery and an increased chance of tetanus over a comfortable evening of popcorn and Pierce Brosnan. But in a sleepy post-industrial town the options were somewhat limited. You either risked flocks of cranky, disease-ridden pigeons as playmates or chose to be hypnotised by the jiggly arms of Elsie Toothern shaking your deep-fried chips of their oil. After a brief discussion and three artery-clogging meals at Toothie's Takeaway my sisters and I agreed. We opted for bird-flu.

Madeleine, the eldest, always angled for us to play in the old biscuit factory. It was a cavernous building whose lingering smell was a reminder of its previous life. As romantic as that might sound, it was not. The trapped air baked under the day-long sun as if the building was holding its breath until we arrived. Being the strongest Maddy would force back the rusted, once rolling, metal door and from its hot, sour mouth the factory would finally exhale. It was reminiscent of an old man's yawn, had he eaten a packet of Milk Arrowroots just half an hour prior. 

I matched Maddy's eagerness to play amongst the slackened conveyor belts and five-person ovens. Unlike other forgotten warehouses its eroding insides harboured a second life. Echoing empty extruders now played host to a young family of rats, silver pathways along which our imaginary Ginger Snaps travelled had been bombed by the birds above, and the matted piles of half-rotten hair protectors provided excellent insulation for the nests of both. On a good day you might not even notice the smell. Just fifteen minutes of acclimatisation and you could be forgiven for wondering if Mum might bake a batch of Jam Drops for dessert that night.

However our younger sister Anna didn't share our sentiments. She just didn't appreciate all the old biscuit factory offered. Her eyes only saw the residual licks of black smoke along the exhaust fan edging or the mould-lined cutting moulds. When she complained that the floury cloud perpetually hanging in the air made her throat dry I dismissed it, telling her to think of it as an exotic micro-climate. Her enchantment with the factory was as lacklustre as the redundant machines it housed. For her the biscuit factory equated to a lot of 'make' but to me it was a lot of 'believe'.