Men of Steel

The thunderous crash, a singular momentary avalanche unnerving sound and movement shook the whole fabric of the cavernous building. Dust and particles of metal glistened as they danced, almost suspended in the rays of day light that shone through peeled back and broken down cladding, The light soaked up by the blackness of the hellish dark crucible that was the cast house floor of the blast furnace. The barrage not an overture of exploding ordnance but bi hourly landslide of semi molten coke ore and limestone settling in the huge vessel.

Eric Stephens never got used to the ephemeral shock, a resounding attack on the senses it was too much a reminder of a time in South Korea. He and his comrades had been held to account by enemy artillery fire for three days. They had been left to die by the officer class, destined to be black type on a telegram, a name carved in a stone epitaph. In what he could only describe as a miracle he survived a direct enemy hit on his placement. The sole survivor, amongst his dead comrades, strong men , men of principal born from the furnaces of the River Tees. Men of honour his friends, brothers in arms. They were all gone, mutilated, the visions of there ripped and shredded blood sodden torsos, vacant faces, men reduced to piles of torn flesh, would pierce his dreams and haunt the rest of his life.

He could never forgive the incompetent , dishonourable men who ordered his station to remain and hold position until reinforcements came. Weak men of questionable ego spewed rhetoric of past glories, shallow words, vacant promises, but nobody came. Those of courage left to perish on that green hillside. Amongst a countryside so alive with nature they had been left to die, not mankind at his best. With superficial injuries Eric had manged to escape the smouldering crater of death. He kissed the bloodied face of Sergeant Jackie Warren, his protector. But as Eric’s muddied fingers stroked down the lids of Jackie’s deep brown lifeless eyes he knew his friend was gone. He leaned forwards, his tears flowed, streaked channels in the opaque muck on his face, a face that no longer shone with the once innocence of youth, of hope, but carried now the burden of 12 months fighting an unknown enemy in a war he did not understand. Reddened with tears, grit and the stinging waft of stale cordite his bright blue eyes shone no more. His moist lips touched the forehead of his friend, he could taste the dirt, a total absence of life. He stepped back and with his grubby forefinger he gently and carefully parted the sergeant’s hair, like a mother worships a sleeping child. A whoosh of a shell overhead jerked him from his trancelike state, The round exploded approximately fifty feet away and he was thrust back by an assault of superheated supersonic air. Then a rain storm of earth and torn foliage temporarily pinned him to the ground. The barrage quickened and fight or flight commanded Eric’s instincts, he had to leave his friends or at least their remains. He mustered up his depleted strength and countered his emotional distress by vowing to hate the men who had put him and his comrades in peril. The young soldier dragged his wounded body on his belly through the soft green undergrowth, the lush greenery was dressed with a smattering of dust and freshly disturbed soil. Would it be but it be enough to keep him covered and protected from enemy small arms fire ? he hoped so but doubted it. Then there was another boom and he found himself rolling uncontrollably down the hill. A blue flash turned into a bright white light, a precursor to a burning pain in his right leg then blackness

Chapter 2

Eric raised his hefty left hand over his brow, a shield from bright rays of light, flare like that irradiated the rusty stairway coiled up way up the side of the great steel leviathan. He felt roughness against his tender forehead, fingers toughened with hard skin, confirmation of years of unprotected combat with the grime and heat of old and broken equipment.

The light subdued and before retracting his hands the veteran steelman of forty years took a second out. He halted on the worn steel platform, the paint had long gone and morphed into rust polished by years of work boots carrying steelman about their daily routine.

He paused and brought his right hand to within four inches of his face. He extended he digits and rotated the human enactors of his trade first clockwise than counter. The large fingers embossed with dirt . The insidious reminder of working up to his elbows in grease and dirty lubricants as he maintained the threadbare machinery. This was a sunset industry ,investment non-existent a Government hell bent on seeing the destruction of what was once the pride of the Nation , World beating. innovation It was now a case of mend and make do to ensure budgets were thin enough to allow plant viability for another quarter, a meagre reprieve before good men would be discarded onto the glum jobless streets. A slow painful decline as Far Eastern competition seized what was a growing lucrative market.

His hands would tell a story and the scars and callouses engraved on tough leathery flesh would remain with him for the remainder of his mortal days. Physical representations that would co-exist with the mental scars and traumas of a hard working life. He had done his time, played out servitude to Mother Steel lived a life, the heat of the furnace quenched with comraderies and flat beer at the workingman’s club. His thoughts wandered to those heroes of years ago , good men, his friends who perished that day on the hillside in South Korea. Outlines of smiling laughing faces he would never forget. Their ragged toasted flesh and ripped limbs blood covered brows would haunt his sleep and every waking hour. The anger of their betrayal could never be tempered they had perished for the vanity of a ruling and officer class who boasted a better existence. In aberrated self-righteousness they had sent good honest men not boys to an early grave. He closed to eyes, his jaw tightened and the he transferred his wrath through his iron grip, hand clenched to the handrail like a vice. Through gritted teeth he forced his thoughts to happier times.

How he lamented his younger days, two generations in the rear-view mirror of advancing time. Days when men of steel had no cares, with the prospect of a job for life like generations before them . Their steel mother would provide, never betray them, the giant furnaces would roar and radiate an eternity of fortune for those who served them.

Back in those days, a young Eric like many others was destined to a linear existence, school, National Service, back home to the steel works, work hard drink hard and one day find a girl.

Eric Stephens had held a close track to the chart of life in all but one area, he never found the girl, he never followed the migratory transition from free easy single man to engaged man to husband like so many of his friends. There had been one fleeting romance but it could never have lasted, a cultural and geographical divide an unwritten warrant that this would never flourish. The first to go was Stan Willis, Eric’s best friend throughout school. They both played in the local football team left school on the same day at fifteen years of age, served apprenticeships together. Eric got his papers to serve Queen and country and was shipped off to some distant quarter of the world to stem the tide of evil communism. When he returned Stan had married Pauline Wilkinson and was working every extra shift to pay the HP instalments on a fridge and a settee for the rented house.

As the next years panned out they all followed Stan into married bliss, Davie G, Big Steve, Dessy H, Barry, and to everyone’s surprise Tommy Webb.

Tommy was the archetypal jack the lad, always had a big noisy Triumph motorcycle. Dressed in the ubiquitous uniform of the sixties Rocker, Tommy would be unthinkingly and constantly wielding a comb from the pocket in his leather jacket and patting back his equally coal black hair. To the displeasure of all sat in his court around one of the chipped and worn melamine tables that furnished the club, Tommy would flick hair cream off his comb which would normally pollute at least one pint of the Federation’s best ale. He would then resume a prone position arms on his knees and explain in broad words how he was going to leave the River, get out of the dead end world of generation on generation kneeling to the steel master.

‘Just watch this space’ he would declare as he stubbed out a half-lit cigarette, squinting as the final whiffs of smoke made an uneasy communion with his eyes. The unsteady wooden chair would rock as he recoiled back, followed by another hair calming performance and flying Brylcreem.

‘Yes watch Tommy get up and go and make his way in the world’

This lightweight rebel, continued to spout his ersatz rhetoric, and bolstered a pseudo recalcitrant regime of noisy motorcycles, the latest rock albums and excessive consumption of beer. Then he met Cynthia Roddam, the fresh faced daughter of the newly arrived distribution manager of the large fresh fruit and veg warehouse in the local town.

Overnight the would be James Dean of the South Tees district transformed . He was a rabbit in the headlights, mesmerised by the trainee school teacher . Within two months the motorcycle was sold, he was attending night school and was driving what he once termed the “devil’s transport” an MG sports car. Over the years, he grew up into a middle-class middle management clone, and worked all of his life as a draughtsman prompted to director at the local engineering company. One of the few that survived. He never left the Tees, except for the annual pilgrimage to the beaches of the Costa Blanca and the natural progression to Tenerife.

Eric would often go and visit Tommy and Cynthia in their square box on the local estate . To them they had achieved utopia, Tommy had stopped the beer and cigarettes as the trade for Cynthia’s attention all those years ago.

The advancing years would also guarantee a succession of meetings at the local crematorium as past friends, and fellow combatants in drinking sessions only past and not of recent times, passed away.

‘Not many of us left’ ‘aye and sad job’, ’one of use next’ uttered by the dwindling band of brothers as they stepped out into the garden of remembrance on what always seemed to be sunny but cold days. Shuffled into position where the rays of the sun would not be blocked by the tall poplars. In the background the looming presence of the Blast Furnace. An irony, man of fire worked with fire committed to the eternity by a non eternal flame.

An what a band of brothers they had been, they had ben released from the monotony and poverty of school gates and tempted through the gates of the steel plant. More monotony but at least there was compensation, good pay, pay that bought comforts to offset the daily toil. At sixteen Eric and the gang all bought motorbikes and embarked on what they thought were legendary camping weekends at Scarborough. These were happening times the fifties, rock and roll was spreading fuelling a professed but in actuality a frail rebellion. Yes the teens had access to HP , motorbikes, music, fashion but in reality, it was just an elevated illusion as these boys were all still servants to the steel master. Like elsewhere in the UK work was abundant and the coal mines, steel plants and ship yards paid good wages to attract the youth of the day. Eric smiled and released his grip on the rusty steel handrail.

Fond memories temporarily pushed back Eric’s deep disillusionment and festering resentment. He was unsure on where to lay his poison , in fact it was bordering on venom. Embryonic dendrites of hatred that had been assembling for years in to a homogeneous odium a loathing forged from strands of revulsion into a honed weapon of abomination. A weapon tipped with a venom that was being distilled daily with increasing toxicity. It stemmed from the wrath that had descended and plagued him when his friends had died on that hill in South Korea. He blamed the class system initially the chinless wonders of the officer class who believed that their way was the right way, they had to be right, why ? for their fathers had built and run an Empire. How could such a pedigree fail? He would not forgive a system that allowed good men to die without an atom’ s thickness of remorse. And they had left him to die, in fact given him up for dead. He survived often wishing he had not. The flashbacks crippled him with sleepless nights, and where was the help? there was no help. He was brought into a world where men did not show emotional weakness, they had to labour through life with a duality of physical and mental strength. In a split second his young friends, fit healthy smiling, laughing joking caring young men had been shredded into piles of smouldering flesh. Limbs torn from torso in a heat that almost made their blood evaporate. And the smell of incinerated flesh the rancid taste of cordite and the dark smoke the thick grey nectar of death.

The seeds of bitterness propagated as he witnessed the decay of a once power house of industrial strength and the associated division of tight knit communities. Again to Eric it was the officer class, a complacent clueless management that oversaw the demise in fact destruction of world leading companies built on the shoulders of hard grafting obedient disciples. Third generation offspring frittered away profits to bankroll hedonistic pursuits and the paid by the hour hangers on. Lazy Investment in fine French wines and Italian cars and not German plant and machinery rapidly put the UK base on a backfoot against the competition. Then came nationalisation and a programme of slow closures. The final nail in the coffin would be privatisation and the need to satisfy shareholders. To Eric this quarterly reporting was as cancerous as the incompetence of the flaky offspring of great founders. It was all about the dollar. Suits in London who lived by their own short horizon of rapid financial gain gambled with the livelihoods of men and communities alike.

He had seen enough, he had toiled for years fought for his country and what did he have to show, not even love.

He had elected this as his way out , the end, it would coincide with the final shift at the plant. A fitting encore. What remained on Teesside for him ?, The seeds of doubt had blossomed into a poison flower. He could take no more, his job , friends, National spirit and respect, all gone. Never to return.

He was alone, and had been for many years, he had decided his fate, he had to slice away the torture in his mind.

Chapter 3

His eyelids felt immovable ,the soft skin bonded by an amalgam of dust blood and tears that provided push back on Eric’s attempt to assimilate with the surroundings, Frustration quickly evolved into panic as he felt a light but significant pressure over his cloaked eyeballs. He wrestled uneasily, he was laid flat on some kind of basic ,mattress, Then a waft of cooking and unfamiliar smell of equally unfamiliar food. He tried to move but his right arm was restrained and he could register no sensation in his lower body. Unaware of his predicament and reasoning his with his mortal state he dug deep into his mind held breath and willed for the weak muscles in his eyelids to liberate him into the conscious world. He managed to open his eyes but a vista of darkness sent torrents of fear through his confused and frightened soul. He forcefully wriggled his head from side to side but the attempt was fruitless his sight still captive to third party bondage. He had to remove whatever was impeding acuity ,so lifted his right hand off the flat surface, as he did his nails dragged against the poor quality linen. Tired threads , well-worn but not dirty he concluded. His attempt to liberate his sight was halted, he felt the contact with flesh. A slender hand, it felt warm a gentle touch, not hostile. The human contact appeased his fears momentarily, he still had no recollection on what had happened, no clue to his condition, no understanding of his circumstance, but he sensed that this was a hand of goodness, humanity, caring. Then he felt it. It was like a hot hammer was attacking his right leg, eyes open wide to a reception of the course cotton wool bandages he tried to sit up but was restrained by a creased dark green woollen clad arm.

Then talking, Eric did not comprehend the language. Then a fear shot through him ice cold, unsettling . A fear cold enough to dampen the agony radiating form his leg. “My god I have been taken prisoner’ he muttered. He closed his eyes in dread, his mouth was so dry he feared that his caked lips may never part again.

The pain and the restraint eclipsed any comfort he had sensed ,was it just an act of blistered hope, from the caring touch. Physical reality the champion over a confused mental state. An attempt to sit up right was met with resistance yet again, and the initial concern of hostility was calmed by another warming contact a strangely familiar reassuring caress from the mysterious hand. The tender touch, the most basic of communication of good intentions, but could he trust the source of the rapid fire almost barking like talk in the background.

Could he allow himself to be safe, would it be ok to show vulnerability? He reasoned that he had no option.

Over chatter he heard the clinking of metallic objects, and then that heavenly hand on his forehead a precursor to the sharp steel that pierced his left thigh.

“what is that he mumbled’ The he felt the warmth replace the pain and then sleep.

When he came to his eyes flickered open to the yellowish hue of a solitary naked light bulb in the ceiling of the room. This time he was sat up and he felt comfortable, no longer threatened. As he opened his lips they were greeted with the cold wet metal of an heavily scratched grey aluminium cup, half filled with water. With his left hand he reached out for the refreshment and it is that when he was reunited with and remembered the caring warming flesh of that slender hand. He gently turned his head to one side and his heart was brightened at the sight of large soft brown eyes and a wide grin. Long jet black hair flowed down the side of the smooth face of a young Korean woman.

This was the first time he cast his eyes on Mai Gwan. She was the daughter of a Jae-jinn Gwan a local peasant farmer.

Mai and her brother Kai Lak had been out foraging for food when then came across the injured and unconscious English soldier.

The two young South Koreans carried Eric back to their modest farm house where he had laid comatose for many days.

Mai had remained by the side of the badly wounded Eric for seven days and nights, cooling his brow, and changing the dressings on his eyes . Hour after hour she bathed his burned eyelids and selflessly and skilfully dabbed cotton wool to remove grit and fine metal dust from his blood red eyes. Before the outbreak of war Mai had been training to be a nurse at the local hospital. When hostilities started she fled back to the county as she had heard the nightmarish accounts of what the so called soldiers of the North had done to captured nurses and doctors.

She had escaped just before the town fell, and ensured that she was not empty handed. She plundered vials of morphine that helped her manage the pain of Eric’s badly injured legs.

For many months Eric was nursed by Mai and fed by her younger brother, in the Gwan family smallholding, 7 Km behind enemy lines. For hours , days and weeks they risked their own lives to care for the young man from the North East of England and nurse him back to health.

Over that time they both became familiar with each other languages and mentored by Kai who had been studying to be an engineer and already fairly fluent in English.

He became very fond of Mai and that spark he had experienced on that first touch and first glance grew into a warming gentle flame of pure admiration and deep love. A love however that could not prosper, the flame could only flicker, behind the encasement two very different culture. A love but a melancholy Eric would carry in his heart for the rest of his life. The lost opportunity of a loving relationship, the hard reality that he and Mai could never be one would leave vacuum in his soul for the days and years that followed.

A ceasefire between North and South ended the hostilities, and the fateful day came when he had to leave these loving caring wonderful human beings, ordinary people whose kindness had transcended the greed and tyranny of war. Tears in his eyes he hugged his saviours tightly, then embraced Mai stepping back slightly and ran his hands down her shining black hair. They gazed into each other eyes, this was goodbye, or was it as Eric closed his eyes to kiss Mai on the cheek he made a vow that one day he would be reunited with this angel.

He never saw her again , but over the years they would write, and exchange photographs. Eric would never lose his love for Mai, who also never married. Kai would achieve greatness, he graduated as an engineer and the post war South Korea was hungry for technical talent.

He too became a man of steel and would rise to the heady heights of Vice President of one of South Korea’s largest industrial conglomerates. Success and wealth allowed him to provide a new home for Mai. Eric and Kai would regularly correspond, they had a common interest , steel making. They exchanged stories on the fortunes of their mother industries. Kai proud of his companies advances bolstered in a country with a positive attitude to industrial leadership. A huge contrast with Eric’s, reports of the continuing decline of a one great industrial base. Apathy turned to anger in his accounts of the demise of steel and the breaking up of surrounding communities. A commentary peppered with wrath about a government hell bent of destroying hope in the industrial heartlands. As time moved on and Eric entered his fifties , Kai could sense his friend’s dissent towards the UK. Slaughtered friends in a useless war, tough men who worked all of their lives only to be to put on the scrap heap alongside the ruins of a once great fire breathing steel plants. Eric had seen enough and become a loveless man, he had lost those close to him, part of a lost generation.

Chapter 4

Eric had pondered this day for a great deal of time, hours, days weeks and perhaps even years had converged turmoil and his demons into a deliberate plan, the final act. Rebounding the agony in his head, a tsunami of emotion, and tumbling scrutiny of his life, the outcomes were always the same. He could suffer no more, he needed peace a warming beacon of light not a bottomless cold darkness. No more reflection of past days, no morose thoughts of how his old friends were no longer by his side, the nightmares of war. the screams of his comrades as they melted away, evaporating treasured mortality. They had only one life, he would surmise, one chance to make the best of time on God’s Earth, be a friend, son , father, lover. These men had been swindled of priceless years, cheated and robbed by an uncaring class. By a generation of men of fanciful arrogance and callous narrow minds who remotely dealt in death without fear of their own existence being in jeopardy. It was always the ordinary man, the good son, the hard worker, obedient servant who would be slaughtered at the altar of those who sought glory through the bloodshed. The bloodshed of the innocent. Eric’s nights became longer, sleepless surrender to the suffering of the victims to a fallacious cause. When he did sleep, it was only to be awoken to the agony of loss, the deeps wounds of irreversible bereavement.

He had borne witness to the demise of human beings, a great nation and the beating heart of the Industrial North, slaughtered by acts of vanity the blood ran warm through the fingers of incompetent men. And endless the suffering as the victors of short-term gain revelled in pyrrhic victory.

He had decided that this would be the day, his last shift, he would walk onto the worn and broken space, that once a fiery Goliath that beat the drum of pride across Empire. Like Eric mother steel was feeling her own mortality as years of under investment did not remedy a now terminal decline.

It would be quick as the taps of the furnace were opened to unleash the superheated molten iron that would flood the floor and evaporate flesh and bone within seconds. There would be no trace no evidence of mans transition from life to permeant oblivion. He had planned the operation for weeks, he was after all in charge of maintenance on the floor and had the power of life and death over the machinery that brewed the best steel in the world.

He walked across the cast hose floor, the dust made it difficult to make out the other side. As he proceeded to a foreman’s cabin on the far side he nodded at three men in silver heat protecting suits who were preparing to make the next pour. He stepped into the discoloured office, dark red ore and grey dust caked over a structure that once gleamed whiter on leaving the factory.

He stared at the clock on the wall it displayed 0915 “ the perfect time’ he muttered.

Grabbing the red telephone placed on wooden lectern, he paused and closed his eyes. The heat and noise on the furnace diverted his thoughts to the war and the heat and noise of that last battle. And the devastation, to his friends their families and the assassination of his once rational mind. A flashback to Mai the love lost, one that could never be replaced, a tragedy with no convalescence. He had touched real caring, honesty, selflessness and ethereal beauty. He opened his eyes and looked through the dirt smeared window and onto the crucible of former greatness, the birthplace of magnificent ships, great bridges peerless acts of engineering. A tortured mind was seeking peace, closure, an ageing body was no longer able to cope with the rigours and routine of tough physical work. But he was too old to retrain he was of no use the evolving digital world or the banality of retail. He was on his own in a soon to be ghost town.

He collected the red receiver from the dirt ingrained phone set and dialled 0, he was now an automan, he had set in play a routine a countdown the ending. Unable to be stopped, a man no longer willing to yield to what would be ongoing pain.

‘Cast house control , Eric here we have a system break on the drills, and the clay guns are out pf action’ ‘We must evacuate Now !’

A series of sirens sounded. As men downed tools and headed for the emergency exits, Eric shuffled out of site across to a control panel set in the shadows of the far end of the building.

Chapter 5

It had been a miracle that only one worker had perished . What had ensued had been a catastrophic failure on the largest blast furnace in the Western World. The plant lay in ruins and the mortal remains of maintenance fitter Eric Stephens remained missing. The man of forty years dedicated service to mother steel had perished at her un forgiving hand. Ironically , the board of directors had just approved a large refurbishment programme for the works , one that would have protected 1200 jobs and advanced a lead over a main competitor in special steels based in South Korea. The resulting devastation rendered that useless and the site would be re developed., and men would be laid waste. Communities would crumble.

There was no one to lament the passing of Eric Stephens, he left no widow, of family, a few old friends turned up for the wake, and there was a mention of his service in the Korean War.

To the surprise of the solicitor handling the estate, Eric had amassed savings of several hundred thousand pounds, and curiously for a man with no direst descendants had several life policies in place. Along with life insurance and compensatory payments made by his employer Eric had a fairly substantial estate to hand over. In his will he expressly wished that all of his estate be left to a Mai Gwan care of a solicitor’s office in Seoul North Korea.

The substantial sum that Mai received was on top of that which had Eric had held in a unnumbered Swiss account. This account had been credited with substantial sums over the last ten years. Payments made to Eric by an unnamed organisation, at the instruction of a senior Korean Industrialist. Only Eric and Kai Gwan would know the reason for the transactions.

Over the years a disillusioned and disenfranchised Eric Stephens had been selling steel making secrets to the son of the man that had saved his life. Not only had he obtained documents on special process controls and blends of steels, but for ten years he had been aiding the demise of the overworked plant and equipment. A man trusted with the maintenance had ensured that the gearboxes were short of oils, and bearings ran out of tolerance. A process that culminated in the premature death of the plant one that would block an investment that would have guaranteed another 25 years of service. The plant perished and the South Koreans were gifted market share in the production of the specialist steels that had been developed in the laboratory and furnaces of Teesside Steel.

At a private airfield near Geneva Switzerland, a grey-haired Englishman, dressed in a hand made blue suit, stood on the apron as the power steps of the small jet unfolded and touched the tarmac. The afternoon sun peered from behind the white fuselage and the man placed an oil grained hand, over his forehead to block the blinding excess light.

Then then at the top of the stairs she appeared, his angel, Eric Stephens could not hold back the tears as he cast his eyes on Mai for the first time in forty years.

At last they were reunited, this time never to be parted ever again. They now had great wealth , and he would never bend his knee ever again to any master. Not even mother steel.