Audio excerpt transcribed:

My name is Hay Martens, born and raised in Reuver. We lived opposite the factory where my father worked. The Greswaren factory.

 

When I went to school I took a technical course and when I finished that I started in the forge. Go and try a week or a few weeks at the forge, see if they are of any use to you there, and then we will talk about the wages. That's how it was in those days.

 

My first job was to crawl through a hole that I could just fit through and I had to get these really big iron balls from a grinder. They were sitting outside with two adults saying, hey, hurry up. I had sweat on my forehead, but I was the smallest and could fit through it  hole of the chamotte mill where the pipes were ground again. Sometimes it was said that you did well, but usually it was about continuing to work and learning.

 

We also sometimes got into trouble  out! In the forge you had a large hood hanging over the fire, and we would throw bullets onto that hood from a distance. Under the hood the blacksmith stood working on the blacksmith's fire, the hood was to catch the smoke, there was always dust and other junk on it, and so it all fell into the blacksmith's neck, haa haa, then we had to make sure we got away quickly because then we almost had the hammer that the blacksmith had in his hands thrown at us.