The Tall Girl from Somerset 24

The Wall

It was about this time, when Quentin and Anne gave up their walks, that Quentin had some building work done at his home.  He lived alone in a Victorian semidetached house in Redland.  He had bought it carefully, as he did everything, hoping that it would rise in value. It had needed some repairs, especially to the kitchen and bathroom. In spite of the expense, he had both kitchen and bathroom modernized.

‘It’s increasing the value of the house, you see.  It’s increasing the value. It’s a very good investment.’

Everything was completed and Quentin thought he had finished with the builders, when a coal lorry knocked down his garden wall while doing an ambitious three point turn.  The coal company’s insurance would pay. Quentin had established this immediately. He then phoned the builders that had worked on his kitchen, and they sent one of their young bricklayers, Bob Parsons, to rebuild the wall. 

Like two circles that just overlap at one point of their perimeter, Quentin’s world and Bob’s world just touched in their brief dealings with each other.  But Bob’s world was a world of bricks and blocks and cement, of foundations and walls and windows, of mud in February and wind in March. It was hard and healthy world, in which men put up buildings which then stood proudly in towns and villages for years. For Quentin it was as remote as the life of Emperor Penguins at the South Pole.

It was mid January and the temperatures in Bristol struggled to rise above freezing at midday.  Never mind the penguins. Now of course with global warming the worry is that life is not cold enough for the penguins.  In the sixties the expression ‘global warming’ did not exist but bitterly cold winters did.  Along with political correctness, global warming had not been born.  Words appear, and then live an intense life but often a short one.  Pick up any airline magazine today.  Destination X is ‘iconic’ and ‘atmospheric’.  So is destination Y and destination Z, and so are all the other destinations in the magazine.  Everywhere in the world is iconic and atmospheric. "Prague is atmospheric" says the article in the flight magazine.  ‘Well, its’ got air in it’, as Basil Fawlty would say. The Eiffel Tower is iconic.  It saves the writer thinking.  It saves the reader thinking too, so everyone is happy in a colourless world of repetition and imitation.

Most builders hoped for indoor jobs at this time of year, but Bob, as he unloaded his car by the broken wall on a bitter Monday morning at 8 o’clock, looked forward to the day. He was looking forward to doing some stonework as a change from laying blocks and bricks.  He was looking forward to creating something beautiful and leaving  something that would last.  It would be something that he could show his kids one day as they all drove past in the car.

‘I built that, and it was January, and freezing cold, I can tell you!’

And his children would laugh and make a joke and would only realize many years later, when they had children themselves, how important the wall had been and how much it had mattered. We all do this.  We only appreciate our fathers when it is too late.