Memoirs of London - 2

The next Monday I started working for Emilio’s Pizza Factory. The factory was set in Farringdon, East London, somewhere in Smithfield Rd, if I’m not wrong. We made packaged pizzas for big markets, Sainsbury, Tesco, things like that, if you know what I mean. The staff was all made by a small group of Egyptian Copts, a bunch of Italian guys, an old Portuguese named Pinto (who was often kidding the Egyptians in a mixed of Portuguese and   English but  spoken  with marked Iberian pronunciation ) and a retired old Easter Londoner, who was able to mark with  three or four fucking  a speech of five or six words. It was him that I first started with my job that Monday of August 1977. Our duty was to cut the cheddar cheese (which took the place of Italian soft mozzarella in packaged pizzas, and not only, as I quickly learned in London) and send it upstairs, through the lift.

-“ Fuck you, and fucking shut, ‘you know, the fucking door!” he used to shout from

underground space, in order to call the elevator and send the cheese up.

The cheese was kept in a large fridge, down there. Old Jim (that was his name) didn’t allow me to get in the fridge. He did, all the time. It was stocked in big packages of fifty pounds. We were busy on cutting them, by means of wooden handles sharp iron,  on strict, long  slices to be shred in the electric grater before to be sent upstairs on big plastic hampers.

Upstairs there was the production chain.

In a large electric mixer they put flour, yeast, salt and water. After an hour and a half the kneading was ready. Then it had to be pressed to obtain a plain leaf from which they made a circles of five inches diameter. With a trolley they had taken and put in the oven for about ten, fifteen minutes. With the same trolleys, after the baking,  a boy took them

on the assembly chain where the round pizza was flavored with tomatoes juice, cheese and some spices ( besides the plain pizza, we made mushroom and yellow or red pepper’s). In the end we put a brown preservative powder (the only ingredient we avoid when, at lunch time, we made our own pizzas). Finally they were wrapped in cellophane with the seller’s mark, and good appetite.

We went on that way from height  a.m. till 4 p.m..

At that time I had a thick beard and I talked to none, a part those few words with Jim, needed for unroll the work.

When later, I made friendship with the Italian colleagues, they  confess had thought I was a sort of fugitive man, hiding himself to escape from someone or something.

As a matter of fact I was just escaping from myself, and  I was too shy and insecure to make friendship easily.

After a couple of months I asked the boss to go upstairs and he wanted to please me.

2.     To be continued…

Memoirs of London - 1

1.

The first time I went to London it was in 1977. A long time ago. I still remember the day I landed at Heathrow airport. It was the day Elvis Presley died. I remember from my bus, in the endless one which was to lead me to Victoria Station (according to my ticket bus), the supporter’s march in honor of the great song singer from Memphis. They held in their hands signs of their idol: “Elvis will never die” or “Elvis forever”, “You still live in our hearts” and things like that.

I was a young man full of hope and sorrow, at that time. I was going to London to forget an unrequited  love; or maybe I was just searching for something I had not found yet.

I had at present left my university’s studies, with no money, no job, no love at all. Lonely as a stone can be.

I had not been really very fond of Elvis; surely much more of Jimy Hendrix; Elvis was a too controversial myth at my eyes; a great singer of course, I wouldn’t say he was not; but sometimes I felt like he had been exploited by the American industry of success; that kind of business able to create (and also destroy, if they wanted) any kind of myth, any kind of star; ‘you know? That sort of star’s system victim like Marylin Monroe or James Dean. I was quite a critic of capitalism at that time.

But indeed I had already too many problems by my own to be a critic of anything.

I only had an address on my pocket, of a friend of mines who had previous gone to London and I was in contact with. Through this friend I was introduced in an Italian Grocery, in King’s Cross Road. I’ve recently there. Where the shop was there’s now only an insignia, covered by dust, left. I found good help in there. A friend of the owner, a good marchigian guy who sold Italian hams, cheese and other special Italian food, found me a job in a pizza’s factory, somewhere in Farringdon Rd. And George himself, I mean the marchigian shopper, found me a place to sleep in: a room in Keystone Crescent, just around the corner his shop, where I was charged with 5 pound fee per week while in the factory my first wage was a good 40 weekly wage’s pounds .

Not too bad for a beginner.

1.     To be continued…