Pickled onions

After I finished my degree I did a variety of jobs, then I worked for a year as a civil servant then I worked for a brilliant year at Manchester Airport. I then returned to college to train to be a teacher and took various jobs to help fund me.

I worked in a pickle onion factory. It was a small concern, in an old probably Victorian red brick building. There was a yard where the delivery vans would come then the a series of small buildings, one of which was where the vegetables were prepared. There was a very old Heath-Robinson looking machine to take the skins off the onions. There was a big hopper which would be filled from sacks of mainly Dutch shallots, and it would feed down into a small tray. The operator, me, would take each onion and put it on a wheel with spurs – it resembled a cog-wheel,, the onions would move up, two blades would swish down and cut off either end and a third blade would slice length ways to open the skin. I wind machine then blew the skins off and they would tumble out the other end onto a conveyor belt where other workers would pick through to make sure the onions were all skinned.

I had to work the machine with a foot treadle, and every so often give the hopper a shove with my shoulder if the shallots got wedged in the feed chute. Because I am just about ambidextrous I could place onions on the wheel with both hands, and work quite quickly. Sometimes the other workers had to stop me because I was getting too many through. If you worked on the belt you had a short-bladed very sharp knife to peel off the remaining skins; the shallots were then tossed into a big brine tub on wheels which when full, was wheeled though into another room. In here other people would be putting prepared vegetables into brine tubs for other pickles, piccalilli  gherkins, beetroot,  silverskins etc. or transferring salted vegetables into vinegar.

For the first hour in the factory you would weep continually from the onions, but then you’d get used to it. After lunch there would be a shorter period of weeping before your eyes got used to it. At night, when I got home, every item of clothing including underwear had top be washed as it reeked of onions and vinegar. I had a shower and washed my hair every night, and even then I still could smell onion and vinegar.

The other mainly women working there were not especially friendly to me, the student. However, I did have one friend, Prem, an Indian woman who was working to save a dowry for her daughter’s wedding. Prem was really beautiful and always used kohl round her eyes – by nine o’clock, an hour after we started, she looked like a panda!

I once found a knife in the onions that came down the chute, it had a short black well-worn handle, and a short, sharp blade. Obviously a Dutch worker had lost it when packing the onions… I wish I had kept it as a souvenir of working in the pickle factory.

Pickle Belt
by Theodore Roethke

The fruit rolled by all day.
They prayed the cogs would creep;
They thought about Saturday pay,
And Sunday sleep.

Whatever he smelled was good:
The fruit and flesh smells mixed.
There beside him she stood,--
And he, perplexed;

He, in his shrunken britches,
Eyes rimmed with pickle dust,
Prickling with all the itches
Of sixteen-year-old lust.