The Tall Girl from Somerset 35

Bob returns.  In the morning a leak in the kitchen and a film in the evening.

It is surprising that Bob entered Anne’s story at all, but he managed to, by chance, one sunny Saturday morning when a pipe was leaking, and there was an inch of water on the floor in Anne’s kitchen.  

Bob’s world happened to converge with Anne’s when Anne walked into her kitchen just before 8 o'clock that Saturday morning.  Anne phoned the number of some builders that Quentin had given her when he had had his wall rebuilt, and in response Bob was sent  with Dave, the plumber, to sort things out.  Anne explained to Bob what the problem was while Dave was getting his tools from the van. Two worlds met. 
Bob showed Anne a life of immediate needs, needs which were easy to see and which could be resolved by hard work.  She had forgotten that life could be like that.  She lived a life of demands from herself, demands which her mind made on her from the moment she woke up.  When you have no difficulty in paying the mortgage and the gas, the electricity and the telephone, then other demands arise.  Bob was busy with the first, while Anne was battling with the second. As always, her demands, made by herself on herself, were by far the harder to satisfy.

Bob’s world was one of the many worlds that rub shoulders in any city.  We inhabit our own, we have our routes and we meet those that share these routes for a time, but we have little idea of the usual routes of our neighbour.  Bob’s was a world of scaffold poles, off-cuts of timber, stacks of bricks and piles of concrete blocks.  It was a world of sawing, drilling and banging set against the background music of the concrete mixer.  It was a world of swearing and of jokes.  It was an out-of-doors world where the weather mattered.  It was a world of sweat and strength and stamina; the world of a new building rising clean and clear out of the mud and mess of the building site.  It was a world of hard work and skill, of good humour and a few beers in the evening.

Anne felt a weight descend on her shoulders as she entered her chambers, but Bob felt better as he strolled, whistling, on to the building site in the clear light of early morning. He felt better when he went on site and saw the confusion, the mess, the puddles of water, the piles of bricks, the torn cement bags, the heaps of sand, the mud, and, among it all, the clean lines of the walls and windows of a new building, of something that would last.   Among the good humour, the rain, the noise, the sun, the sweat, the swearing and the mud, the building rose towards the sky. 

Bob's Day 

Let’s take a day at random from the time when Bob was working on an old farmhouse to the south of Nailsea. near Bristol  It was a rainy spring.

6.30 am.  The alarm goes off. ‘I will never, never, never go to the pub mid-week again.’

Breakfast: four rashers of bacon and two fried eggs.

‘I can’t face it!’  

His mother makes him eat it. 

“You can’t be on the buildings all day on an empty stomach.”    

He swallows the bacon and starts on the eggs.

7.59 Arrives on site. Just made it.  Just.  Leave home five minutes earlier tomorrow.  Traffic is getting worse.

8.00 Picks up his tools in the hut, walks along the planks laid over the mud, up ladders, over concrete floors to the wall of face brickwork. It is strange how different the job looks in the morning. Late last night laying the last course of bricks was hard, a real effort. Today, first thing in the morning, after a night's sleep and a breakfast, the job looks nothing at all.  Now he’s ready to go. He takes out the trowel, takes out the line, slices into the pile of fresh mortar on the board and fills his trowel.  When he has laid the first brick, the rest is easy.

            8.30        A lorry-load of bricks arrives.  Eight at a time are thrown in a line.

8.35       “Catch them and stack them, catch them and stack them, never mind your aching back. Catch and stack. Hold them together or they’ll all fall.  If the driver can pick them up and throw them to me, I can catch them. Never mind the pain.  Who’s going to ask for a breather first? Him or me? Catch and stack! Catch and stack!”

                          11.00 Two lorries of cement bags arrive together.  This always seems to happen.  It's like the buses in London . You wait for half an hour and then two come together. It’s a relief to have the stuff as we were nearly out of it, but why two loads? Bob is called over to help.  He joins the line of men humping bags of cement from the lorry across the planks over the mud to the shed.  The driver stands on the lorry, grabs a bag and balances it upright on the edge of the lorry floor.   The sides have been let down so the lorry is open.  Walk to the lorry, turn, brace yourself and the bag falls on to your shoulder. Brace your arm by putting your hand on your hip.  Trudge over the site, through the mud to the shed where the cement is stored.  Why couldn’t the lorry get nearer the cement store?  It never can!  It never can!  Bob never forget the first cement lorry he helped to unload when he was straight from school.  He was 15 years old.  The first bag of cement nearly broke his back.  He lined up with the other men. When he reached the lorry and his turn came he doubled under the weight.  Red face.  General laughter.  Some comments.  (It had happened to all of them their first time.)  It didn’t happen again.  Next time he was ready for it.

11.15                   Back to laying bricks.  Course after course. The wall went up.

           1.00 pm           Six sandwiches (3 raspberry jam, 3 lemon curd) and an enormous slice of fruit  Lunch. cake, sitting on the cement bags.                                    

       3.30    Rained off.  They would work through drizzle, but this was too much.  It was heavy rain. Nice to stop, but then it’s always hard to get going again.  You wish you had never stopped at all.The back hurts more.

     5.00 Just another hour. The back’s beginning to ache more, and the bricks feel heavier, the zest has gone but the rhythm is there.  Course after course, the wall’s going up well.  Yes, today’s gone all right. 

   5.45    Lay the last brick of the afternoon.  Throw a few old bricks with some water into the mixer to clean it out.  The clanking of the bricks is the happy noise of the end of each day.  Empty the mixer.  Clean the tools.

6      6.00  The firm’s van collects the rest of the men. Bob locks up the shed, gets in his car and drives back home. Tea. The dining room feels warm after the windy building site, and his mother is fussing over him again.  Huge plateful of bangers and mash.

Then out to The Rising Sun.  Darts. Back home around 10.30.  Another day tomorrow.  He will be up at 6.30.  Breakfast.  On site at 5 to 8.  At 8 o’clock the music of the concrete mixer will break the quiet of another day. 

But it was Saturday.  Anne’s morning began with a flooded kitchen at 8 o’clock and ended at 1.00 with a new pipe, new tiles, a dry floor and an invitation to go out that evening.  When it was all finished, and the pipe repaired and the wall and the floor made good, and the water was turned back on, Anne gave Bob and Dave a coffee, and they all talked. Then Dave had to rush to another emergency. (This ‘emergency’ had had to wait for him to finish his coffee.  The Armada, after all, had had to wait for Drake to finish his game of bowls).  Bob managed to say what had been on his mind since he had first seen Anne at 8.30 that morning.  Why not?  She can’t eat me.  She can only say no.

“Would you like to see City play at Ashton Gate this afternoon?”

“Well, thanks, that’s kind though I don’t know the first thing about football, but” (Why “but”?  But what?)  “but there’s a film I’d like to see this evening”.

“Why not?” thought Anne. “Why not?”

They saw the film.  When they came out of the cinema Anne asked Bob what he thought of it.  He had clear ideas on the story and he commented on details that had not occurred to Anne. He asked her why the suitcases in films were always empty.  He knew what it was to lift blocks and bricks.  When she had asked Quentin about a film they had seen, he had summarised the review in the Times and had never thought of giving his own opinion. 
Anne and Bob became one of those couples, if you could call them a couple, that see each other from time to time because they do each other good.  Anne needed someone from the real world, and Bob felt that the mud of Monday to Friday was on another planet as he showed Anne to a table in a restaurant in Clifton he’d never normally have dreamed of going into.

To Anne, Bob seemed to know something about everything: plumbing, wiring, wallpapering, painting, decorating.  He could turn his hand to anything that needed doing in the house. Anne was amazed.

‘How did you learn about all this?

Had Bob known about Bazac's Vautrin, he would have answered ‘Je m’y connais!’  But he hadn’t so he didn’t.

‘Well you just pick it up.’

He assumed that everyone must know how to mend a fuse or unblock a sink, things which were a mystery to her.

So Bob helped her with these little jobs, and she helped him in other ways.  For example she wrote a letter to his insurance company when he had been involved in a claim for damage to his car and they were tardy in paying. They had delayed payment for weeks but when they received Anne's letter and then her phone call, they paid.

Like Jack Sprat and his wife, they complemented each other well.

And what did Anne learn about bricklaying?  She learnt much.

1.  Pace yourself.  You’re bending, lifting, measuring, mixing, carrying bricks, blocks, mortar, concrete, rubble 10 hours a day.  Take it calmly.  Pace yourself.

2.  Meet the challenge.  That pile of bricks, taller than you, has got to be laid today.  You can do it.  You can do it.  You can do it.

3.  It matters.  This house, this wall, this gable end will be here in a hundred years.  It’s your work.  It matters.

4.  How to keep warm at eight o’clock on a December morning, when the water in the tap has frozen, and there’s sleet in the wind that feels as though it had come from Siberia, and it probably had.

Anne gradually found out all this bit by bit as they chatted, and she began to understand, though she could not feel, the satisfaction of feeling warm from the rhythm of work, of seeing something done at the end of the day, of achieving more than you thought you could, and of going home with something built.

They went out for three months, and then they stopped.  The medicine had taken effect, the course of treatment was over and that was it.  Yet they parted happily, and each was grateful to the other for those hours in another world, out of all the many worlds that rub along in a single city.