That food factory ……. the River ……. and a conversation

Just when I spent my dinner times gazing out over the River talking about music, the chance of over time and pretty much everything is lost.

I think it will be the summer of 1970 and the location was Glenville’s the food factory down by the Blackwall Tunnel.

It could have been the year before or the year after.

Glenville’s made a variety of things from custard powder, and sachets of flavoured water you left in the freezer, to their specialty which was turning powdered milk into granules.

Of all the jobs this was the most unpleasant given that I was tasked with filling large bags of the milk granules as they shot out of a pipe.

It didn’t help that the regulating tap didn’t work very well so you used your hand to stem the flow just long enough to get a bag underneath, and that it came out very hot from being blown through a set of stainless-steel tubes.

Added to which the sweet-smelling stuff stuck to your overalls and worse still your face which on very hot days was prone to mix with your perspiration to form rivulets of milky sweat.

Nor was that all because while we were paid a basic wage there was a bonus for the amount that was produced, and there was the flaw, because on wet and damp days the granulated milk clogged the tubes and production ceased.

At other times I worked in the dispatch area on the ground floor at the end of a long conveyor belt which disappeared into the roof and on to another few floors.

Loading the boxes of assorted “stuff” was never the problem only that they came down at a ferocious pace, and if not unloaded quickly enough would cause a long jam, which the pressure of more from on high meant that sometimes the boxes burst open showering us in clouds of custard or blancmange powder.

All of which meant that breaks and dinner times took on a special place in the day.

And it will have been on one of those that I met up with a South African.

He was the first South African I had met, and I was fascinated by him.  He was a few years older than me, and he had already traveled thousands of miles across two continents, while I had just got the bus from Eltham.

Over half a century later I can’t remember what we talked about other than that song America by Simon and Garfunkel, which chronicles the journey across the US by two young lovers.

We shared the magic of their journey and each of us in our different ways conjured the trip from Saginaw, in Michigan via Pittsburgh to New Jersey.

And now all those years later I have no idea what he looked like or our other companions, and our dinner time conversations are lost.

But listening to America brings back my time in Glenville’s from the smell of the various products being made, along with that of the River to that carefree and optimistic take on life which at 20 I shared with Kathy and her lover.

I still have that optimistic take but long ago lost Glenville's, and despite frequent visits to the area its exact location remains elusive.

So I await a photo, an address or a memory from someone who like me passed a batch of his early 20s at the food factory by the River.

Location; Glenville’s, Greenwich

Pictures; by the River, 1970s, from the collection of Andrew Simpson