The Tall Girl from Somerset 21 'Bob. The wall'

Bob

The wall

It was about this time, when Quentin and Anne’s excursion to the Malverns put an end to their walks, that Quentin had some building work done at his home.  He lived alone in a Victorian semi-detached house in Redland.  It was one of those solid, well-built stone houses that stand proudly in Redland and neighbouring parts of Bristol. They demonstrate respectability, and give a sense that they will be there forever, whatever cataclysms might shake the world. 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 these 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 all these values were 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 and the South Pole, Bristol was cold enough. Today, 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 fulfil a passing need, 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, it’s got air in it’, as Basil Fawlty would say. The Eiffel Tower is iconic.  This sort of writing saves the writer thinking.  It saves the reader thinking too, so everyone is happy in a colourless world of repetition and imitation.

But back to the wall.  Most builders hoped for indoor jobs at this time of year, but Bob, as he unloaded his car by the stones where the wall had been, on a bitter Monday morning at 8 o’clock, thought happily about the day ahead. 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 behind something that would last.  The wall would be there and he could show it to 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 father when it is too late.