April 1913

While the matron certainly understood the issues of a seventeen year old finding work when most places didn't actually take anyone under the age of eighteen, she still didn't smile upon idleness. The trouble was, Kenny was far past the age where he could pass himself off as a prepubescent and shine shoes on a street corner for thruppence a crack.

There came a point when one had to find real work, that point usually being marked by a breaking of the voice and a growth spurt. People didn't really trust teenage ruffians, and of course the more middle class people were probably in school.

He didn't really want to incur the wrath of the matron, though. The trouble was that he was also getting to the sort of age where he was on the prime kick-out list for whenever a fresh bed was needed.

At the very least, if he could get a bit of money in and be less of a drain on the orphanage owner's coffers then he might at least survive a few kick outs before being forced out himself, and he didn't particularly want to lose Karen, after all.

So when it came down to the choice between getting kicked out onto the streets and running the risk of getting done for vagrancy and lying about his age to get work, there wasn't really that great a choice.

Hence he'd gone browsing to find out which of the many production lines that Hackney had to offer had the lowest risk to pay ratio. That was his main objective, anyway - not getting his limbs sliced off by dangerous machinery and half decent pay were paramount. After that came reasonable and flexible hours, but he was willing to write that one off first. The day he got a job that couldn't be construed as some manner of slavery was going to be the day he had sunshine and rainbows coming out of his arse.

He'd pinged around a few places but most of the foremen he'd spoken to had either outright not talked to him further than telling him to piss off, and the ones that had been any measure of polite had told him that there wasn't any room on their assembly lines right now and to check back in a few weeks. In other words: piss off.

So on Kenny trundled through the streets. If he found nothing today then there would always be tomorrow, of course, it wasn't as if there was a permanent uncontrollable influx of orphan children looking to swipe his bed out from beneath him, but he figured that the sooner he could get a nice steady-ish job the better.

He passed his next target, and the fact there was someone standing outside the doors putting up vacancy posters gave him a bit of a boost. Apparently they were desperate or efficient. Kenny walked up to the man, who paused his adornment of the walls.

"Afternoon," he greeted the man. "Do you represent this place?"

"Yes. You're not looking work, by any chance?" Kenny nodded once. "That's good. We just had five blokes run off to join the army, it's left us with a bit of a gap in the lines, so to speak."

Kenny nodded again. "What precisely is it this factory produces?" he asked.

The man shrugged and tilted his head back and forth, in that way that meant he wasn't so sure how to answer. Surely it was an easy enough question. "A bit of everything, really. General parts that get bought by other places for their lines."

"Good enough. Work's work," Kenny thought aloud.

The poster man resumed putting up the flyers and adverts. "Go inside, speak to the foreman. He'll give you a yay or nay, and if you get the yay he'll give you your hours and your wage." He turned back to Kenny and glanced him up and down. "To be honest, there shouldn't be any reason to turn you down. You look capable enough and you don't look like a swindler."

Kenny really didn't know how to respond to that. He guessed it was a compliment, but then it also implied that he might have been out swindling, and he couldn't help taking some offence at that implication. "…okay, thanks," he finally opted for. He headed inside.

The foreman, Kenny guessed, was the man walking around making sure everyone was doing their jobs. He didn't look that into it. Bored, even. He noticed Kenny standing around doing nothing and approached him.

"You don't work here, do you?" he asked disinterestedly, in a nice thick Cockney accent that sounded in a very odd way to be somewhere between friendly and outright threatening.

"No," Kenny replied.

"Do you want to?"

"Yes."

"You're eighteen?"

Kenny was on the verge of correcting the man and saying seventeen, but he quickly thought better of it. He managed not to miss a beat in replying "Yes."

"You'd be fine with a low skill job?"

"What's that?"

"You're shown how to do one thing and you do that over and over again ad nauseam."

"Oh." So, exactly what was on the tin then. Kenny didn't need to think about the offer for particularly long - he immediately followed up with a "Yes."

Thus was the extent of the job interview. Kenny walked out of there with instructions to turn up the next day at seven in the morning, where he'd be shown to his station and what to do, and with the warning of any trouble from him and there'd be a horde of unemployed slobs willing to take his place.

At the very least it was nice to know exactly how much the foreman thought (or, more accurately, didn't think) of him.

He walked through the narrow roads, dodging horses, carriages and the occasional car to get back to the orphanage relatively quickly - he had no idea how long it was going to be until curfew and he'd be locked out.

Fortunately the doors were wide open when he got back, and he was about to go straight upstairs and begin a nice session of doing not a whole lot when a harsh voice came from behind him.

"Kenneth McCormick," said the matron. Kenny turned to acknowledge her. "I take it you've still not gotten any useful role in society?"

"Actually," Kenny contradicted, "I have." The matron cocked her head and waited for him to continue. "Tomorrow morning I start a factory job."

"Hmm," she replied. "About bloody time. Well done, I suppose." She continued about her business.

After he was certain that at least two doors had closed between her and him, Kenny muttered "Thanks I suppose," in reply to what was, in fairness, the nicest thing she'd ever deigned to say to him at a time at which he was not bawling his eyes out back when he was small, then ran back up to his dormitory before he could get any confirmation as to whether she'd heard that or not.

The next day, at five to seven, Kenny was waiting outside the factory for someone to unlock the doors. He'd been there for a few minutes, and was thankful that it wasn't raining despite a threatening sky.

The door opened from the inside, and the foreman from the day before was there. "You're the new guy, right?"

"Yes," Kenny confirmed.

"Right," he replied. "In you come, let's get this over with." The tone with which he spoke made Kenny think that maybe he'd done this more than a few times recently.

He led Kenny into the factory. With it empty Kenny looked around a little bit to get a feel for the place. Big windows meant the place was generously lit, but there was some electric lighting as well that all in all made very little difference. Maybe they're for the winter months Kenny thought. There were banks of desks at which manual labour could be carried out, and around the edges of the building were heavier devices, presumably designed for tougher jobs, that all looked a little bit lethal. Kenny prayed he wasn't being put at any of those.

The foreman led him to the middle of the room, then towards the left side from the door. "This is you," he replied. The machine he had was hand operated by the look of it, and had a worryingly large sharp drill bit at the end of it.

"Here's what you do," the foreman explained. "You'll be receiving metal bars, what you do is you unscrew this-" He took hold of the handle on the machine and span it, screwing it out as far as it would go. As it span, the drill looking thing rose considerably. "-and place the bar here on its end." He indicated the main platform, below the huge pointy thing that was still putting Kenny in a slightly fearful mood.

"Then you just screw it back in. It'll be tough the first few times, it's boring a hole in the metal. Making the bar into a tube. But when you get used to it, it shouldn't be that much of a strain. Basically it's just easy to forget how much effort you need to get boring." He glanced up to Kenny. "Easy enough, right?"

"I guess," Kenny acknowledged.

"Any questions?"

Kenny thought for a moment, eyeing the very, very sharp drill thing. "Has anyone died using this machine?"

The foreman considered for a second. "Um. Not this particular one, I believe."

Kenny sighed at the narrowness of the answer. "Brilliant." No information on other similar machines, no information upon injuries. Not even a concrete answer. That was all but a yes.

"Shift starts at half past, amuse yourself however you like until then. Just don't touch anything you shouldn't." The foreman turned and disappeared off somewhere, maybe to smoke or something.

Well, then, Kenny thought. His job consisted of boring holes into metal rods in order to make metal tubes. How dull. Maybe he could entertain himself while on shift by guessing what the tube was for, but a quick think through of all the possibilities only turned up pipes, plumbing and cannons of various sizes, and somehow Kenny didn't really think plumbing was up for mass production.

Still, it kept him in a bed. And it wasn't exactly like he could injure himself unless he deliberately put any of his appendages in the path of the drill. It wasn't like he was going to quit and lose the roof over his head just because it was slightly boring.

How bad could this possibly get?