“Cos them days there was no machinery to, no electronic recorders or anything like that – you’d done everything by your eye, and by a long iron pole, which you put down to test your moisture, and er, and burnt by eye. And it was really interesting. You, personally, was responsible for those bricks in that chamber, and, you felt as though you were the elite of the brickyards. You felt, ‘I’m the one responsible’. And you used to go down, and when the drawers were taking the bricks out of the kiln, by hand, when they put them together they rung, and when the drawers used to say ‘Good lot’, you know, it made you fell proud that you’d done something. Mind you, if you’d overdone one of them and they was hammering ‘em to get them out, they let you know it, you know. But er, you lifted your pot, and you looked at the colour - the colour of the bricks of the fire. And, what you had to do, you had to stop it, at the temperature of about 1000 degrees you had to stop it. To stop the silicon that’s in the material, the silicon, from. You had to let it melt into glass, just enough to bind the brick together. But if you let it go too far, then it would start to crumble and melt, well melt actually, so you had to stop it melting.”
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