Sewing Shirts Only those white clouds are free to soar beyond the factory window; inside, grey dust scales the cutter hacking out shirts, flinging dismembered parts, inanimate as dead dreams, into open boxes. Here, life is taped, ruled "At the double!": double seams yoking body to arm; the double load of outside job and housework, the double talk of a radio playing "Workers' Playtime" while women sweat for a minimum wage. Their hands cling to a Singer straining like a small, frantic beast towards five o'clock and freedom of a sort; life buttoned down from eight to five, for fifty weeks a year the stop-and-start embrace of these whose limp arms hold only the bone and flesh of a five-day week plus compulsory overtime. Their eternal home is this dead end where St. Mary is a supervisor with hennaed hair, steel eyeglasses and a tongue whipping them forward and God is a scissors-wielding boss slashing seams and wages. Neither the singer nor the song these women are only the necessary insert between the dole and the rent due Friday next, and the young girls marry arm to body, try to pin life down by the tail, and dream of collaring a husband, rattling out short and long stitches: hopeful SOS to that future Prince faceless now as these headless ones who will take them away from all this, into a fairy world of wifedom where life will be a seamless wonder and the inside will be as perfect as the outside… And the older women, wiser, turn away, knowing that in a woman's world, all hope hangs only by a thread and they fold the shirts and entomb them tight in plastic, seeing in these pale look-alikes an image of themselves hoxed -in, straight-jacketed, branded in cut-rate, throw-away packages. Jancis M Andrews **When I was sixteen I worked full time in a shirt factory, sewing the sleeves to the shirt body. Recently, I saw a documentary on the garment industry and was depressed to see how little had changed.
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