Last Days of the Bus Club (7 page)

Out on the bridge site I was confronted with the
incomprehensible
and arcane paraphernalia of civil engineering: the great bundles of steel rods, drums of unfamiliar oils, machines that smelt of stale diesel and mud, and a monster concrete mixer set amongst its mountainous landscape of sand and gravel. It was hard to make head or tail of it all, so I wandered up the road and into the woods. For half an hour I walked through the dripping woods, delighting in the dappled light on the great limbs of the trees, and all in a green sheen from the canopy of fresh summer leaves above. The beech hangers of the North Downs in Surrey have a special beauty all their own and, on this bright summer morning, it was all mine for the taking. I took it and went back to the hut.

Jim grunted and barely looked up from his paper. A car drew up outside, breaking the silence, and a minute later the door banged and a man burst in, stamping his boots on the wooden floor and sniffing loudly. He was a thin, powerfully built, middle-aged man with a crooked nose, tar-blackened stumps for teeth and a strand of black greasy hair hanging over his forehead. I rose to greet him,
proffering
my hand. ‘How do you do?’ I began.

He stopped dead; his jaw dropped; he considered me for a long, long moment in amazement and distaste. I looked at Jim in the hope that he might break this impasse by introducing us …

‘Oo’s the cunt, Jim?’ said the man.

I just did not know how to react to a thing like this; it was so far from any of my previous experience. I wondered if I ought perhaps to hit him, but it didn’t seem like a good idea at the time, so I didn’t. I just stood rooted to the ground like, well … a cunt.

In a moment, more cars arrived, more banging of doors, the sound of shouted oaths, and with a thunderous
stamping
and laughing and coughing and farting, an unruly mob of big, dirty, foul-mouthed men in cement-spattered clothes crashed through the door. The hut was instantly filled with their enormous and oppressive presence as they lumbered and barged about in the narrow space between the tools and the tea table. I shrank a little into my corner. I was learning fast: I’d have been a fool to go for the formal
introduction
again.

There was big Frank, who drove the lorry; Terry, the toothless foreman carpenter, a past master of the filthy story; incomprehensibly Irish Mervyn, the digger driver; Jim Riley, a sinewy work-worn labourer, all bad temper and
unpleasantness; and Scott, who drove the drott. Then there was Belgian Andy, in charge of the mixer, whose entire conversation revolved around sex; and a particularly fat and foul-mouthed slug of an individual whose name escapes me but who was a comic genius and in charge of the tea. And the man who had called me a cunt was Fred the crane driver, surprisingly likable and amusing. Then, just as everyone was settling themselves in for the start of the job, the door opened and a young man sidled in and unfurled his tattered flares from their bicycle clips. He was Dave the Student, who had dropped out of an engineering course at the local tech and was trying to save enough money for a trip to India. This then was the cast of characters who would fill my life for the next few months.

Jim Brunt was the foreman and thus it fell to him to keep this rabble of brutes under control, and get the broken bridge rebuilt. He was a gentle and amiable man, not a little bumbling, and, though the butt of constant ragging, most of the men seemed to hold him in respect and affection. He was the only one to wear a hard hat, which seemed to confer authority. Things were different then: you wore what you liked on site, no compulsory hard hats, steel-toed boots or hi-vis fluorescent vests. If there was any uniform, it was the blue donkey jacket which I too wore over my jeans and T-shirt and sneakers. I guess I was just lucky: during my time on the building site nothing unpleasant ever fell on my head, nothing penetrated my shoes, and I didn’t get run down and crushed by a drott. I came through more or less unscathed.

The men slung their kit on hooks, gathered tools and lumbered out into the cool sunlit morning, each to fill his allotted task. Jim kept me back until everybody had left the hut. ‘Right Chris, later on this mornin’ there’s a lorryload o’ cement comin’, but till then I want you bottomin’ up behind Mervyn. Fetch yourself a shovel.’

This was the moment I had been waiting for: the work. Of course I hadn’t a clue what ‘bottoming up’ might be, but I took a shovel and followed Jim outside. A surprising degree of order reigned, with the men each having embarked upon his allotted task. Mervyn’s task was to dig a trench for some pipes with the JCB.

‘I want you down in that ’ole wi’ Jim Reilly there, an’ bottom up, nice ’n’ neat like. And mind the back actor now.’

I jumped down into the trench. There was not a lot of room down there, what with Jim Reilly, and Merv’s back actor (the hydraulic arm on the back of a JCB). But Merv was good: they said he could pick up a sixpence with his back actor, or even scratch his balls. It was one thing keeping out of the way of the great mechanical arm; it was another keeping clear of the awful Jim Reilly. Reilly was around sixty, I should have guessed, and lacking in the merest shred of agreeableness; he would never offer anybody a friendly word nor a smile – he just wasn’t made like that. What he did was work with a terrifying ferocity, jabbing and thrusting with pick or shovel, accompanying himself with a constant stream of the vilest invective.

‘Bastards, I’ll show the fuckers, this work’s shit, shitty fuckin’ shit … I’ll rare up on ’em an beat the shit outa ’em … they’re all bastards, every bloody man Jack of ’em!’

This unending and meaningless tirade of abuse was not aimed at anyone in particular, but it seemed to provide
the energy that drove this horrible old man to ever greater feats of shovelling and pickaxing. As he worked, his elbows and arms flailed out in all directions and you had to take care not to catch a nasty blow from the pick or shovel, an occurrence that would have given Jim Reilly immense satisfaction. To my surprise I heard mention that he had a missus and I found myself wondering what sort of a woman could live with such a man. It seemed unlikely that the marriage was a happy one, but love is a strange thing.

Bottoming up, it appeared, was a matter of finishing off neatly the job that Mervyn had done with his back actor, smoothing out the sides and taking off the little hillocks left by the machine. It was hard to get a look in, though, with Reilly there giving it all he had got. I managed a little poke here and there, but I would scarcely say that I had got the measure of bottoming up by the time Jim Brunt peered over the edge of the hole and told me to come on up and get the lorry unloaded.

A big flat-bed truck was waiting by the cement mixer, loaded with sacks of cement. Now, in the normal course of events there would always be a few people hanging around, not really involved in anything specific, and they could be called upon to help with whatever task presented itself; but whenever the cement lorry arrived everybody made
themselves
scarce, busied themselves with jobs that could under no circumstances be interrupted. Thus it fell to me, and to Dave the Student. ‘The Student’ was a pejorative term used with the utmost scorn by the men, and it soon came to apply to me, too.

Dave and I shook hands and grinned a grin of collusion and shared exclusion. ‘It’s the old story,’ he said. ‘Every bugger fucks off soon as the cement has to be unloaded.’
Dave had been at Deer Leap for long enough to have absorbed something of the vernacular.

I looked uneasily at the mountain of cement bags on the lorry and quailed a little. This was an ordeal and a test – and I was very uncertain that I would be up to it.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll just take it easy. Don’t bust a gut.’

If anything was going to bust my gut it was going to be those cement bags. A cement bag weighed, then, one hundredweight, or fifty kilos, the weight of a small adult. You had to come up to the truck and brace yourself while the driver dropped a bag down from the top of the load onto your shoulder; then you would turn round and stagger twenty paces across uneven ground, and there bend and slip it off your shoulder onto a growing pile of cement bags.

At first, when that bag hit your shoulder, the tendency was to buckle at the knees, or the waist or the neck, or any other part of the body with a hinge. It was a colossal weight. And each bag was thickly coated with a layer of fine grey cement, which exploded all over you upon impact, filling your hair with fine grey powder as well as your eyes, your clothes and every pore of your body. The unthinkable weight of the sack ground the stuff into your shoulder, and there it burnt with ten thousand tiny lacerations.

It was hellish, utterly hellish, but I was young and desperately keen to be able to do work, so, in the parlance of the building site, I rared up and tore into it, quickly developing the necessary strategies for coping. I blew a few; I dropped some, and I fell a couple of times, but little by little I began to master the art of carrying sacks of cement. I suppose it was all in the breathing and in the posture and
handling the sack accurately, with just the right amount of weight before and just the right amount behind.

It went on and on and on. It was a ten-ton truck; there would have been about two hundred sacks on it and, with every other bugger making himself scarce, the whole lot went on the shoulders of Dave and me. When we had got it all off and stacked, shortly before lunchtime, I was teetering on my last legs, with a neck as raw and red as steak, and an indignant quivering in every muscle of my body. But I felt suffused with a simple pride: this was work, and I had done it. I hadn’t bottled out.

Jim Brunt ambled over and looked dubiously at our pile of sacks. He lit a match and put it to his pipe.

‘I want you bottomin’ up some more, back down in that ’ole wi’ Jim Reilly now, Chris.’

That evening Jim Brunt was, of course, the last to leave. I slept a deep and exhausted sleep as the old car ambled slowly down the lane through the woods. Back home I could barely eat for the pains in my body, and battled vainly for sleep through stiffness and cramps. Yet the whole experience had been exhilarating. Manual labour, I decided, was for me.

I rose again at four forty-five the next morning, prepared enough sandwiches to cram my lunch bag to bursting, chose a book,
Point Counter Point
by Aldous Huxley, for the long morning wait, and set off down the drive in the dark. As soon as I eased into the seat in Jim’s car, I fell fast asleep and didn’t wake up until we arrived at Deer Leap.

‘We’re pourin’ today,’ said Jim, unfolding
The Sun
. I wondered what pouring might be. Jim, lost in the paper, didn’t seem inclined to expand upon the subject. He read while I slept again like a young animal.

‘Get your shovel, Chris.’

I gathered up my shovel of the day before. Another tiny frisson of pleasure, my own shovel, and it was a beast of a shovel too: not some half-arsed gardening tool, but a proper Eastman, the type used by the navvies who built the first railways. A man’s tool … and when you’re sixteen this means something. I staggered out of the hut; my bones and muscles still hurt like hell from the cement bags.

I was to work on the mixer where Belgian Andy was
clattering
about in readiness for the pouring.

‘D’yo ’ave it in las’ nite?’ he shouted down at me.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I shouted back. Andy’s accented English was all but impossible to understand. He made an unspeakably lewd gesture.

Dave, who was leaning on his shovel at the foot of a hill of gravel, translated for my benefit. There were shouts and the rumbling of machinery; the pouring was ready to start. ‘Just shovel,’ said Dave. ‘Shovel till you can shovel no more.’ And we bent our backs to those big old Eastman shovels.

Beside the mixer was a huge double pair of scales. Our job was to shovel sand into one half of it, until we got to 850 kilos, then spin it round and fill the other half with 1,600 kilos of gravel. When it was full the scales would tip into the mixer, where Andy would add the cement. Once the hopper was empty, we started shovelling again.