Certain moments live with you for ever. It is December 27th, 1979, at 7 a.m., with the sleeping world wrapped up in such deep frost that the Finglas pavements are treacherous skating rinks, writes Dermot Bolger.
I shiver and keep my balance by gripping on to walls. A car slides down McKee Road, a scared face peering out from the small square of windscreen cleared of ice. I meet no one until I emerge on Jamestown Road where other factory workers are silently walking towards the gates of the Unidare.
I punch in my card at the Oerlikon Welding Rod factory, beside the slugger that I will operate for the next eight hours. Back then the factory ran round the clock in three shifts and so normally as you entered there was clamour and warmth as the previous shift wound down the machines to let us take over.
But that morning we are the first shift back after the short Christmas break. An eerie silence haunts the factory with no hint of dawn lightening the skylights. It's colder in here than outside. A Siberian chill cuts into our bones as we blow on fingers and wait for the hooter.
No doubt half-an-hour later the usual slagging and hubbub of noise had resumed. Men swapped jokes as they deftly lifted trays of welding rods from the conveyor belt and I stood at my slugger singing John Prime songs as I compressed chemicals down into tightly-packed slugs.
But I just recall the silent chill at 7.30 a.m. as we waited for the hooter. I was 19, the youngest worker among older men who tolerated youth but took no prisoners and rightly suffered no fools. There was a work to rule, with a shop steward who belonged to a militant left-wing group and seemed to enjoy fomenting unrest with endless union meetings in the canteen. Then peace broke out and I discovered that - while I'd previously found the work hard - my crew had merely been marking time. Now they started to work against the clock for bonus payments at a pace which left me shattered.
When I had left school 18 months before, determined to be a writer, Unidare's blue railings were already known to me. Walking at night and writing poems in my head, I would often hear the mournful hooter announce the start of the night shift.
But going to work there stripped any childish illusions away. Perhaps I might have learnt more in university than in Oerlikon - but I am not fully convinced because it depends on how you define knowledge. Oerlikon effectively knocked (or frightened) the teenage bullshit from me. It taught me lessons in survival. And, years later, my experiences there turned me into a novelist.
Night Shift was the welding rod's sole contribution to world literature. Some years later, when I had become the worst library assistant in the history of Dublin County Council, my debut novel was written with the generous help of a dodgy doctor who gave me two sick certs for two weeks off work so that I could visit the new Tyrone Guthrie Centre just opened in Co Monaghan. If I could find a friend sober enough to send in the sick certs in the correct order then I would not lose my job, the doctor would not be struck off and, with the memories of factory life still raw in my mind, I might actually find out if I could be a prose writer.
The novel was published and made £256. I left the libraries to live on my wits and thought that if anyone remembered me at all in the Unidare complex it might to burn an effigy of me. Yet ironically, some years later when I wrote a debut play called The Lament for Arthur Cleary, Unidare stepped in when we had no money to bring it to the Edinburgh Festival. Its sponsorship meant that it was seen there, where it won the Samuel Beckett Prize and
several other awards. So that factory complex helped to turn me into a playwright too.
But such notions were just dreams in 1979 when I left my job as a factory worker in Oerlikon. The previous week an older man left and the entire factory gathered in the Fingal House pub to drink his health. It was a wild, brilliant night, the first time I felt fully accepted among those men. While drunk they all agreed to hold another session to honour my departure. On the chosen night I arrived early to hog the largest table. One hour passed, two and then three before I realised none of them would bother coming. No offence was meant, but they were grown men getting on with their lives, who had simply forgotten, whereas I was still just a kid who had worked the slugger.
It was the final, most valuable lesson in growing up.