The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work Read online

8.

  A week later, I received notice that the senior management of United Biscuits had approved my request to visit the factory where the Moments were manufactured, at a site in eastern Belgium, in hilly farming country between Verviers and the German border.

  I chose to spend a few days driving there and so took a ferry to Ostend, then meandered along minor roads, stopping off at the occasional zoo or heraldic museum, afraid that I might otherwise leave Belgium sooner than I had planned. However, when it came to meals, I ran scared of the forced intimacy that provincial family restaurants so often involve and chose instead to eat in the anonymity of motorway service stations. At one of these, on the E40, I met a Turk who was driving a consignment of dates from Izmir to Copenhagen. We started chatting after I parked my car next to his articulated lorry, beside which he was shaving with a high-end Braun machine that cast a haunting green light across his face. Because I admired his chrome-plated cherry-coloured juggernaut, he invited me to have a look inside its cab, which had a small bunk-room at the rear fitted out with brightly coloured kilims, carved teak panelling and a window that looked out onto an incongruously flat northern European landscape on which a herd of Friesian cows was grazing.

  In Liège, I booked in to the Holiday Inn, a concrete block which hovered on the outskirts of the town, seemingly fearful of entering its medieval centre and keenly nostalgic for the architecture of Detroit or Atlanta. In the evening, I ordered a breaded chicken escalope from room service, and ate it whilst sitting on my bed, reading a book on the history of art in the Low Countries. Some time past midnight, I began watching a television programme made up of a rolling succession of illustrated personal ads submitted by members of the public, including a baker from Charleroi who was on the look out for ‘l’amour et un peu plus’, a programme which continued for several hours deep into an insomniac night and revealed levels of longing that I had not until then suspected from my brief exchanges in this small and fractured nation.

  The next morning, I woke up, still tired, to the sounds of a vacuum cleaner outside. Dressed in a towel, I opened the door and saw a trolley and an abandoned room-service tray on which sat the strangely appetising remnants of a hamburger and fries. The door opposite was ajar and I glimpsed two cleaners inside laughing animatedly while they worked. Seeing them strip the bed, I remembered the book I had read the previous night, which had detailed the way in which the seventeenth-century artists of the region had sought to celebrate the skills involved in domestic service, honouring in particular the scrubbing of kitchens and courtyards, privileging such activities over more conventionally prestigious biblical subjects.

  By the time I was ready to go down to breakfast, the neighbouring room had been transformed. It had been turned into an immaculate history-less space awaiting its next occupant, motionless except for particles of dust whirling on the back of invisible eddies of air in a shaft of morning sunlight.

  As often happens before an important appointment, I arrived far too early at the biscuit factory in the village of Lambermont – and so drove to a nearby archaeological museum, where I learnt about flint and axe manufacture in Neolithic Belgium. There were records of nasty disagreements and, in one display cabinet, the remains of a man whose head had been broken open with an axe, and who had been found by archaeologists curled up in a defensive position, hugging himself from the blows of his opponent. The agony of death long ago became so vivid that the importance and solidity of the present were for a time thrown into doubt.

  Because my appointment to tour the factory had been scheduled to start at the ambiguous hour of twelve-thirty, I had earlier that morning given thought to whether I might be offered lunch or should eat beforehand, eventually deciding to make some cheese sandwiches at the breakfast buffet, a snack I now ate in the car while listening to a radio interview with the Belgian finance minister.

  When I pulled up at the gates of the plant, Michel Pottier, the manager, was waiting for me in person, carrying with him a spare white gown, a pair of rubber shoes and a hairnet, an outfit forced upon all visitors which, by giving one a sense of adhering to an extreme millenarian movement, was apt to lend a peculiar tone to conversations.

  A warm-hearted and garrulous figure, Pottier had prepared a second lunch for me in a corner of his office, and expected a hearty appetite, so I consumed three additional sandwiches and several Moments which had come off the line only that morning. As we ate, Pottier took me through some of the challenges attendant on the making of biscuits, placing special emphasis on the need to cool the dough rapidly enough to prevent it from melting the chocolate with which it would subsequently be coated. Years of working around noisy machinery had left my host mildly deaf in one ear and given him a concomitant habit of leaning in uncomfortably close during discussions, so close that I began to dread his enunciation of a word with a p or a g in it. Pottier’s disquisitions on topics such as the plant’s annual biscuit tonnage and the ideal viscosity of chocolate did not always accurately gauge the levels of interest of his interlocutor, but they communicated clearly enough a surprisingly intense pride in the plant and its workers.

  Alongside the Moment, the factory also supplied a number of leading brands for the European market, including Delichoc, Gateau and Teatime. Pottier informed me that this last, a chocolate-covered digit, had recently been marketed in a limited-edition tin bearing an image of two minor members of the Belgian royal family cradling their newborn baby.

  When we entered the main production hall, I was reminded of the peculiar feeling I had experienced in other factories upon seeing modestly sized domestic objects emerge from the jaws of colossal machines housed in hangars large enough for airships. Biscuits which I had until then seen only in packets of nine were here rolling down the conveyor belt at a rate of eleven hundred a minute. A polydimensional sprinkler was enrobing the Moments in chocolate whilst another porcupined them with small shards of nuts. The technology behind this machinery had been borrowed from applications as disparate as the machine gun, the stapler, the space shuttle’s robotic arm and the loom. A mixer was kneading six thousand tonnes of dough as an adjacent contraption assembled thirty-five thousand brightly coloured biscuit cartons per hour.

  This mechanisation had been introduced not so much because human beings were unable to perform the tasks in hand, but because labour had grown prohibitively expensive. Economics dictated the superior logic of hiring a few engineers to develop three-armed hydraulic machines, then firing two-thirds of the staff and paying them unemployment benefits so that they could stay at home watching television, subsidised by revenues from corporation taxes paid by the likes of United Biscuits.

  One felt in the presence of so much that consumers who slit open their packets of Moments would be unlikely to imagine. For example, the windowless hall, filled with a gentle aroma of sugar and chocolate, where two middle-aged women in hairnets sat facing each other over a moving rubber carpet, looking out for the smallest fault in the texture of dough, and occasionally reaching over to pick out an offending biscuit, their concentrated stares suggesting that they were engaged in a tense game of drafts. Their work nevertheless left them with enough energy for conversation: one was telling the other that her son was, in spite of his family’s advice to the contrary, still going out with a slut obsessed by clothes and the tanning salon (she didn’t sound uninteresting), as serried ranks of biscuits passed by, to unsung fates in boardrooms in Dundee or nursing homes in Poole.

  Then there was Hassan, whose job it was to keep watch on a mixer as high as a house, adding vegetable fat to flour as necessary, and who had arrived in Belgium from a village in western Algeria three months before. There was also the forlorn bus stop outside the factory, from where workers departed to neighbouring villages and towns, and the remarkable presence of nature all around the factory, with a horse in an adjoining field gazing lazily up to the corporate flag of United Biscuits, which flapped like a flannel in an icy breeze.

  The factory was an economic entity,
no doubt, but it was also a product of architecture, psychology and ethnography. One wondered whether its owners at the Blackstone Group were aware of the full implications of owning a tract of the earth and the largest share of the lives of two hundred people in eastern Belgium, and whether an imaginative recognition of these facts ever crossed their minds when they glanced at the profit-and-loss figures in their offices in Manhattan and whether they might even, at the close of their careers, derive a particular pleasure and a sense of responsibility from their investment unconnected to any financial considerations.

  Most of Pottier’s efforts focused on keeping the factory line rolling at all times. The previous summer, when temperatures had reached forty degrees centigrade indoors, he had had to borrow a row of air-conditioning units from the Belgian air force to protect his chocolate. Stray hairs were a constant concern and necessitated weekly lectures to staff on the correct use of their cotton hats. Nevertheless, there had been three expensive interruptions to the line in the run-up to Christmas, caused by false alarms when black hair-like bristles fixed to the ends of certain machines had come loose, incidents which had prompted Pottier to install a set of new brushes, finished in a vivid orange colour seldom seen on the human head.

  The care and skill which Pottier brought to his occupation reinforced the point made in the book I had been reading the previous evening, with its analysis of two contrasting approaches to work found in the histories of Protestant and Catholic thought. In Catholic dogma, the definition of noble work had mostly been limited to that done by priests in the service of God, with practical and commercial labour relegated to an entirely base category unconnected to the display of any specifically Christian virtues. By contrast, the Protestant worldview as it had developed over the sixteenth century attempted to redeem the value of everyday tasks, proposing that many apparently unimportant activities could in fact enable those who undertook them to convey the qualities of their souls. In this schema, humility, wisdom, respect and kindness could be practised in a shop no less sincerely than in a monastery. Salvation could be worked out at the level of ordinary existence, not only in the grand, sacramental moments which Catholicism had privileged. Sweeping the yard and arranging the laundry cupboard were intimately related to the most significant themes of existence.

  Pottier animated the Protestant ideal. His manner drew attention away from what he was doing in favour of how he was doing it. His approach suggested that there might be a continuity, rather than an insurmountable barrier, between work at the top and bottom of the ladder of meaning – and that many of the talents exercised in the most exalted tasks were no less likely to be found inside a steel hangar reverberating with the sound of dough-mixers and chocolate-coating machines.

  9.

  Partially undermining the manufacturer’s ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?

  Yet before ridiculing the Branding Director of Savoury Biscuits, or for that matter the Special Events Manager who had signed off on the tinned assortment featuring Prince Philippe and Princess Mathilde of Belgium on its lid, it was wise to remember that at the heart of biscuit salesmanship lay an imperative which was undoubtedly both urgent and simple enough to qualify as meaningful – namely, survival. Workers were occupied with the ancient task of trying to stay alive, which simply happened to require, in a consumer economy overwhelmingly based on the satisfaction of peripheral desires, a series of activities all too easily confused with clownishness.

  Despite a few years of healthy profits, United Biscuits’ balance sheet was perennially vulnerable. Following the closures of all local steel, textile and coal industries, the area around the factory had some of the worst unemployment figures in the European Union, and accompanyingly high rates of crime and suicide. Any miscalculation in branding or manufacturing techniques, or a sudden increase in the price of wheat, or an irregularity in the supply of cocoa, could at a stroke wipe out a section of the workforce, who would be unlikely ever to find adequate labour locally again. Pottier knew what responsibility he shouldered for his people. He expressed particular concern at the predatory behaviour of his main competitor, the misleadingly cosy-sounding LU brand, owned by the gigantic French Danone Group. The two enterprises regularly locked horns like stags fighting to the death over a limited habitat, in this case, the ten or so metres of the typical biscuit-aisle in the supermarkets of Northern Europe. Their respective sales teams waged sly campaigns to steal each other’s market share. Every product which United Biscuits made in Belgium was imitated by LU: its Delichoc, a butter biscuit coated in chocolate, faced off against LU’s Le Petit Écolier; its plain butter biscuit Gateau went head to head with LU’s Le Petit Beurre; and its chocolate-and-orange Colombine was countered by LU’s Pim’s Orange, even as its Domino, a wafer cookie with a chocolate cream filling, contended for its existence with LU’s Le Fondant.

  The manufacture and promotion of all of these was no game, but rather an attempt to subsist which was no less grave, and therefore no less worthy of respect and dignity, than a boar hunt on whose successful conclusion the fate of an entire primitive community might once have hung. For if a new wrapping machine did not operate as efficiently as anticipated, or if a slogan failed to capture the imagination of shoppers, there would be no escape from shuttered houses and despair in the suburbs of nearby Verviers. The biscuits carried lives on their backs.

  Modern commercial endeavours may not be of the kind that we have been taught to associate with heroism. They involve battles fought with the most bathetic of instruments, with two-for-the-price-of-one specials and sticker-based bribes, but they are battles nonetheless, comparable in their intensity and demands to the tracking of furtive animals through the deadly forests of prehistoric Belgium.

  10.

  I travelled back to England along the route used weekly by a fleet of articulated lorries transporting shipments of Moments from their plant to the United Biscuits distribution centre at Ashby de la Zouch. Near Ostend, I stopped off at a service station whose forecourt was lined with trucks heading for the cross-Channel ferries.

  I lapsed into thoughts of factories across the continent involved in making breadsticks and candles, rubber bands and butter, lasagne and batteries, pillow cases and toy boats – and in turn, I imagined trucks that would at that moment be crossing Europe, travelling north with fondue sets, west with hi-fi parts, underneath the Alps with cellophane and around the Bay of Biscay with puff cereal.

  At the end of a field opposite the service station ran the high-speed Thalys rail line, on which bullet trains sped at 250 kilo metres an hour between the Netherlands and France, each machine costing some 28 million euros. Inside, passengers might have been reading papers and having a drink (maybe a Pepsi Light, a Tropicana Mixed Fruit Vitalité, a Fanta Lemon or a Schweppes Dry Orange), while outside, the shadows of trees flickered in the dusk like the projected images of early films. What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation.

  It was in the eighteenth century that economists and political theorists first became aware of the paradoxes and triumphs of commercial societies, which place trade, luxury and private fortunes at their centre whilst paying only lip service to the pursuit of higher goals. From the beginning, observers of these societies have been tr
ansfixed by two of their most prominent features: their wealth and their spiritual decadence. Venice in her heyday was one such society, Holland another, eighteenth-century Britain a third. Most of the world now follows their example.

  Their self-indulgence has consistently appalled a share of their most high-minded and morally ambitious members, who have railed against consumerism and instead honoured beauty and nature, art and fellowship. But the premises of a biscuit company are a fruitful place to recall that there has always been an insurmountable problem facing those countries that ignore the efficient production of chocolate biscuits and sternly dissuade their ablest citizens from spending their lives on the development of innovative marketing promotions: they have been poor, so poor as to be unable to guarantee political stability or take care of their most vulnerable citizens, whom they have lost to famines and epidemics. It is the high-minded countries that have let their members starve, whereas the self-centred and the childish ones have, off the back of their doughnuts and six thousand varieties of ice cream, had the resources to invest in maternity wards and cranial scanning machines.

  Amsterdam was founded on the sale of raisins and flowers. The palaces of Venice were assembled from the profits of the carpet and spice trades. Sugar built Bristol. And yet despite their frequently amoral policies, their neglect of ideals and their selfish liberalism, commercial societies have been graced with well-laden shops and treasuries swollen enough to provide for the construction of temples and foundling hospitals.

  At my window seat in the motorway service station outside Ostend, observing the departure of a lorry carrying toilet rolls to Denmark, I opened a box of Moments that Pottier had presented to me as a farewell gift and thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to our sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends, and where we are hence prone to fall into crises of meaning at our computer terminals and our warehouses, contemplating with low-level despair the banality of our labour while at the same time honouring the material fecundity that flows from it – knowing that what may look like a childish game is in fact never far from a struggle for our very survival. All of these ideas seemed embedded in an unexpectedly comforting set of glutinous, chocolate-coated Moments.