“Oh, I used to go round. I didn’t go on my own, because it’s not, I mean they’re all men there, and it’s not fair. It wasn’t the safest of places for a woman to walk on her own, I don’t mean from a men’s point of view I mean from the machinery. You could easily go into the shed, and the big presses, pressing the bricks there, you’d only got to trip over something and you could have been damaged, you know. But if any new machinery came in, or, if my chief said to me ‘Oh we’ve got a new piece of plant down at the knot hole’ – the pit – I’d say ‘Can I come and see it’, so next time he was going down he’d say, ‘Come on, I’ll take you down and show you the machinery’. Because I wanted to know what I was writing about. So I went all over the place, but erm. Lunchtimes, if I wanted a walk, I could walk from the office, along what we called the knot hole road to the pit, ‘cos they called the pit as you know the knot hole, and you’d walk along there, it’d take me about quarter of an hour each way, which would give me half an hours walk in the lunchtime. You see you’d go through the press sheds, with all the presses, hear the presses thump-thumping away. And go along the road and see the lorries loading up, and er. ‘Cos don’t forget you’ve got the kilns, where the chambers, where the bricks are stored in to dry and then to burn, and you’d see them drawing, what they call drawing the bricks out of the chambers, putting them onto lorries ready for dispatch."
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