We were lucky to be there at that place and time. I sometimes have dreams about being back there and even thoughts about what we did can bring me out in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. It was a dangerous game - but in a way we did feel it was a game, as Skipvitesse says, we were paid tourists.
Even in Britain at that time it was different. A couple of years ago, I took a transit van load of LEDs from a local manufacturer to London. A chum of mine, who has the Harrow APC depot said he had a pallet for Northampton, so I took it. On delivery, the trouble started at the gate. ‘Why aren’t you wearing a hi vis jacket’… they lent me one. I pulled up near a loading bay with the shutter up. There was no one around, so I climbed up and went wandering around the warehouse. When I found someone, she was apoplectic. ‘How did you get in? You must leave immediately!’ FFS. I was given a number and told to wait to be called. Eventually I got rid of the pallet. It was like visiting a prison.
In the Seventies you backed onto the bay and at Burtons biscuits if you helped unload they gave you a big bag of biscuits. Same at crisp factories. And anywhere you went you could wander about the factory at will, following the process… Wilkie and Paul in Edinburgh manufactured tins for biscuits- nobody asked what you were doing, or treated you as a potential terrorist!
The job was just more, well, fun!
John.