Common People

by Kit de Waal

  ‘Errr… I dunno… probably not… Do I have to?’

  Sharker shook his head in a mix of disbelief and pity, sucking sharply through the roll-up that never left his lips.

  ‘Ain’t your dad taught you summat as simple as the fanny test? What the fuck sorta bricklayer you gonna be, boy?’

  I might have known nothing about sex, but growing up where I lived, I knew plenty about standing my ground. Knew a reasonable amount about reciprocal swearing too.

  ‘A fucking sight better one than you, Sharker Harlock! You want this fucking muck or wot?’

  ‘Oooh, easy with that cursing, boy,’ Sharker laughed. ‘I’ll be telling Hazel and you’ll be getting your spotty arse tanned.’

  Hazel was my mum. And yes, if she knew I had used the F-word, I would indeed get a well-deserved hiding. She had crept up behind me once, over the playing field one summer’s evening as I had been merrily shouting and swearing my six-year-old head off at some of the posh kids (that is to say, they lived in privately owned houses and as such were our mortal enemies) from over the field. Pulled my trousers and pants down in one quick move and slapped my arse so hard it echoed around the houses on the perimeter like a gunshot. Took me a coupla days for my bum to stop stinging and considerably longer (years, in fact) to stop feeling the burn of shame from that one.

  And whilst Dad’s mates were always loud, abrasive and heavy on the swears, he himself was a quiet man who rarely swore in front of me and my sisters.

  Sharker sighed the sigh of an incredibly patient man, and I knew instantly that in an act of unimaginable generosity he was going to stop giving me grief, and instead revert to charitably bestowing a nugget of his impressive and hard-earned wisdom upon me.

  ‘Muck’s gotta be just right, innit, boy. Not too dry, not too wet, an’ nice ’n’ buttery to boot. Definitely not sloppy; you can’t lay brick and block with soup. So, first thing, flatten the fucker out.’

  He used the heel and bottom flat of his brick trowel to smooth over the shiny grey mixture in the barrow.

  ‘Now, draw a fanny on it…’

  This time it was the tip of the trowel, used like a scalpel to draw an upright, lemon-shaped outline, then a sharp flourish, to slice a vertical line straight down the middle from point to point, perfectly bisecting it.

  ‘And now, if it’s juuuuuuust right…’

  He slid the trowel point first into the muck just below the pictogram, then eased it forward so it was running about an inch deep and parallel to the surface underneath it, until the point of the trowel was buried in its centre. Then, gently levering the heel of the trowel down and the tip up from underneath, the middle vertical slash opened upwards and outwards, looking disturbingly like the puckering lips of someone who had a mouth that ran from top to bottom instead of from side to side.

  Sharker grunted his satisfaction. ‘And there it is, all nice and ready for you to slip your old boy in. Or, in this case, lay two hundred of London Brick Company’s finest commons with. That’s a good mix, young Allen. And make the most of seeing that fanny; that’s about as close to one as a fucking useless string of piss like you will ever get.’

  Naïve and unworldly I was, stupid I wasn’t. My fledgling sexual education took a giant leap forward as my scrambling mind tied in Sharker’s impromptu vulvas-for-dummies lesson with the stuff the Scottish fella in Living and Growing (the grainy black-and-white sex-education film shown in school) had been banging on about. In truth, I stared at it in fascinated horror. All I could think was, ‘Christ… is that what one looks like?

  As it turned out, Sharker was right, and it was some years later before I got to see a real one. And aesthetically, to be fair to him again, he wasn’t a million miles out on the basic workings of the thing. I did initially think, ‘Ooh… I dunno, that don’t look quite right, perhaps I should tell her to get that checked out or summat,’ but luckily for me that sixth sense I’ve always had to warn me about stuff sometimes told me that:

  A. A real one was bound to be a lot more realistic than a sand-and-cement-based one in a wheelbarrow; and

  B. That sorta talk beforehand both spoils the moment and, more importantly, would result in an immediate cessation of proceedings.

  So I kept schtum.

  Dad, Sharker and his other building mates had worked together for years, been in the army before that together, and been friends as kids even before that.

  They were a motley crew: Sharker Harlock, Whippet Edwards, Old Wongy, Young Wongy, Bull Stimpson and Pug Jones. Even today, I have no idea what their real names were. The only one who didn’t have a nickname was Dad, though everyone called him by his second name, Roy. Sharker was the ladies’ man, forever ‘sharking’ around the girls when they hit the pubs after work. Whippet was leaner than a blade of grass, all muscle and sinew, so I got that. Bull was thickset and solid – again, made sense. Pug was the ugliest man you could ever meet; there it is, ipso facto. But Young Wongy and Old Wongy? Gawd knows. On-site they were a law unto themselves, though they got away with it because, to a man, they all worked their arses off. And did they ever give each other grief.

  ‘Bull, I stuck up for you in the pub last night… Sharker said, “Bull Stimpson ain’t fit to live with pigs!” I said, “He fucking is.”’

  ‘Buggeration, Pug. If ugliness were bricks, you’d be the Great Wall of China.’

  ‘Sharker, you’ll find life a lot easier if you grease that brick trowel of yours up, ’cos if you leave it on my mortarboard again, I’m gonna shove it up your fucking arse!’

  ‘Christ, Whippet, you’re short… What’s it like to be the last one to realise it’s raining… AND have your hair smell of feet?’

  ‘I see on the telly the other night we all spring from apes, Young Wongy. Shame your poor fucking mum didn’t spring far enough.’

  ‘Old Wongy, you fat fucker, I was shagging your missus last night and she told me being fucked by you was like having a big wardrobe fall on her with the key sticking out…’

  They never let up or eased off each other, though I knew they all loved each other like brothers, which is kinda what they were. They had been kicking and punching as a unit for survival their whole lives, and humour is undoubtedly one of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. And though I didn’t realise it at the time, Dad knew I would learn basic and important life lessons from being part of this unity and camaraderie.

  He himself gave me advice sparingly. I mean like, hardly ever. I’m fairly certain his way of thinking was this: ‘Gotta let Paul make his own mistakes and then, when he’s picked himself up, he’ll probably do it again, pick himself up again, then do it a few more times till he has had the shit completely knocked out of him, then one more time, then finally learn from it and perhaps not do it any more. Perhaps.’

  Sometimes what little advice he gave was cryptic, at least to my ears. In my mid-twenties I was married and working all the hours God sent to pay the mortgage off before we tried for a baby. My then wife went to see a pregnant friend of hers and when she came back it was: ‘I want a baby.’

  ‘You want a WHAT!?’

  ‘You heard me. I WANT A BABY!!!’

  Cue a big row and me schlepping my sorry self around to Dad’s house, where sympathy and advice would hopefully be found. What was I thinking? As soon as I walked in, Dad saw I had a face like a smacked arse.

  ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘Dad, I just don’t understand women…’

  Dad shook his head in exasperation and mild anger.

  ‘Fer Christ’s sake, what?! Do you understand colour telly?’

  My turn to shake my head, though in my case from confusion.

  ‘Errrm… no?’

  ‘Well then, what’s your problem? Now put the bloody kettle on…’

  And there it was. My wife got pregnant, Dad got his cup of tea, and I got years of scratching my head, thinking, ‘What the hell did that mean?’

  Constructive criticism wasn’t his forte eithe
r. I went through a stage, as a lanky, growing, beanpole kid, of falling over a lot. Dad’s answer to that?

  ‘Your problem is your feet are growing too big for your brain. You just gotta wait till it catches up. If it ever does.’ Yup, not big on being all about the helpfulness. He had, however, given me some good advice that first day he started taking me out on-site with him. It went like this: ‘Right, this is all you gotta remember. Building is just four things, and that’s it.

  1. Level.

  2. Plumb.

  3. Digging bastard holes.

  4. Filling the buggers up again.’

  And you know what? It is. You dig bastard holes (footings). You fill the buggers up again with concrete (foundations). You build (level and plumb). That’s pretty much my whole working life described in full.

  But there was actually a fifth element, something he hadn’t told me, something essential to the soul and infrastructure of every building site I ever worked on. Something Sharker Harlock had given me a glimpse of right at the start of it all.

  Sex.

  I don’t mean the physical act of it. In truth, I mean the exact opposite! What I actually mean is everything else to do with it but the physical act of it.

  Talking about it. Endlessly.

  Joking about it.

  Teasing about it.

  Moaning about the lack of it.

  Relating every job we ever did in some way to it (if I had a quid for every time some twat said, ‘Shame there ain’t hair around it, you’d soon find your way in,’ when I was struggling to locate something in a hole).

  Declaring any mistake anyone ever made on-site to be proof of their undoubted uselessness in the bedroom department.

  The list is endless. Hardly a day would pass without it rearing its head (ho ho), whether in acrimony, hilarity or just plain old general discussion.

  I guess back in the day it was just one of the fundamental ways working-class men who had a very physical job to do, day in day out, dealt with keeping their nose to the grindstone and bringing home money for rent (these were the years before Maggie told us if we grafted we could buy our house instead of renting it off the council) and food. And in truth, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Life on-site was actually bloody good fun most of the time, back then.

  Obviously, health and safety was pretty poor, and every now and then someone would get hurt badly or even die (I’ve witnessed three deaths on-site in my time, and been standing next to a bloke who got electrocuted so badly he wished he had died), but, according to Dad’s mates, there was always a bright side.

  ‘Poor old Ernie fell off the top lift of the scaffold on plot three. He’s proper fucked. Still, give it a few weeks an’ his missus is bound to be “hungry”; face like a bag of spanners but decent tits an’ that…’

  Every cloud, huh?

  The only extremely vague mention Dad ever made about sex to me was when I was fifteen and he took me out of school (‘CSEs ain’t gonna do him any good, Hazel, he’s gotta start paying his way’) to go full time with him on the trowel.

  ‘You know what a working girl is, right? They been plying their trade as long as we have. You’ll always find builders got a certain respect for them. We got more in common than you might think. We call ourselves “self-employed”, but we’re not really, we’re all somebody’s whores and all dance to the tune of the man paying the wages. Brickies and working girls got summat else in common too. The common rule we live and work by, regardless of everything else that happens around us: “No lay, no pay”.’

  Whether it’s scorching hot, freezing cold, whether you’re ill, hung-over, or just plain dog-tired, you got to be on-site at seven every morning, that mixer’s got to be fired up and loaded and you got to be putting bricks down by half past. You stop twice a day for dokky (farmers in our region used to dock workers’ money when they stopped for food, hence that widespread local term for a break), but you don’t stop long; you get back on the string line and you keep getting bricks down till fifteen minutes before the site shuts. Have the crack with your mates by all means, but keep that trowel working.

  ‘No lay, no pay. It’s that simple.’

  All these years on, I remember that, word for word.

  And sometimes, when I’m on the trowel, just for the fuck of it I’ll draw Sharker’s crude vulva into the muck, open it up and smile as I see his stupid, leering mush grinning and peering through it at me across the sands of time.

  He’s been dead, along with my dad, for many years now. Hard labour and building wore them both out, along with the drink and fags. But to me, he will always be immortalised, albeit in a barrow-load of mortar.

  *

  ‘Every encounter is a moment of another’s becoming.’

  — Dr Tim Gibson – friend, mentor

  and one of the most human of human beings I ever met.

  Any Relation?

  Louise Doughty

  In 2004, one cold spring afternoon, my father told me a secret. We were in his car at the time, driving back to the small East Midlands town where I had grown up and where he still lived with my mother. We had spent the day in Peterborough, the city where he had been raised, visiting elderly relatives.

  It had been a long day of tea and stories, and we both fell silent on the drive home. It was early spring and the light began to slant across the fields. As dusk gathered, my father, still looking straight ahead as he drove, spoke a single sentence. ‘If I tell you something, will you promise never to tell anyone else?’

  My little writer’s heart, dark as pickled walnut, began to constrict in my chest. What was my father about to say? ‘You are not my daughter…’ or, ‘I have another family,’ or, ‘I once killed a man.’ I was too excited to make the promise, but he continued anyway.

  ‘I left school when I was thirteen.’

  My disappointment was profound. I sort of knew that already. He had often talked of how he had won a place at grammar school but that when his mother saw the price of the blazer she had said, ‘We can’t afford that. You’re not going.’ He had gone to the rough school instead where, in the playground one day, a teacher had given him a backhander so hard it threw him against a wall. He had left early and worked as an apprentice – his own father was a painter and decorator.

  For some reason, though, he had a bee in his bonnet about education. ‘He was always the posh one, our Ken!’ my Great-Aunt Lenda had remarked to me once, raucously, pushing at his shoulder while my father laughed. He did his lower and higher certificates at night school and, eventually, studied for an external degree in engineering at Nottingham University, while doing a full-time job to support his wife and three children. ‘Your father was no help when you were all small,’ my mother once said, in an uncharacteristic moment of disloyalty. ‘He studied every evening and every weekend.’ When I was twelve and he was well into his fifties, he finally got a PhD, the highest academic qualification anyone could get. Ever since, he had called himself ‘Doctor Doughty’. He took great pride in explaining his PhD thesis in engineering to anyone who mistook him for a medical doctor.

  My mother had left school at fifteen and gone to work as a secretary in the firm where she met my father. No night school or studying for her when we were small. She had the ironing to do.

  ‘Don’t you think, Dad,’ I said quietly, as we drove, ‘that actually, that’s something to be proud of?’ I was thinking how hard my father had worked: a full-time job, studying at night, he and our mother both giving everything to provide us with advantages they had never had. All three of us had gone on to higher education and it meant the world to him. The photos that took pride of place on the walls of the bungalow we were heading back to that day comprised a row of me and my brother and sister in our graduation gowns. ‘You had none of those opportunities and yet we all went to university because of what you did for us.’

  My father was not prone to talking things through quietly – he was a man who liked an argument – but on this occasion he said, tho
ughtfully, ‘I suppose so, yes, OK, maybe you’re right.’

  I think of this conversation whenever I brag about my parents’ humble origins. Like many a middle-class child of working-class parents, it’s something I’m prone to doing when I feel embarrassed about how privileged my life is now (i.e. quite often). I thought about it in 2013, when I received a letter inviting me to prepare my entry for Who’s Who. My father’s own ancestors had been Romany Travellers on his mother’s side; his grandfather on his father’s side had grown up in a workhouse where he went by the name of Pauper 57. Back then, our family was not so much working class as underclass.

  When I received that letter, my father had been dead for eighteen months. Knowing how much social status had meant to him, I got a little moist and sentimental. ‘Look, Dad,’ I whispered to myself, ‘from Pauper 57 to Who’s Who in three generations.’

  The lynchpin of this Dickensian-sounding elevation was my father and his determination that his children would, above all else, be educated. Education was the key to everything.

  After leaving school and his apprenticeship, my father had moved away from Peterborough, to work in the engineering firm in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, where he met our mother. He was a townie, she was more rural working class – her father worked in Dickinson & Morris bakery making Melton Mowbray pork pies. We ate D & M pork pies quite regularly and it was a family tradition to have one for breakfast on Christmas morning. As a result, I am a terrific pork pie snob and can bore for England on how to tell if a pie has been properly hand-raised and how the meat must always be grey, not pink, and peppery. The choices for girls like my mother were few: shop girl, nurse or secretary – and even then, only until you got married, when you gave up work and looked after your husband and your home.

  Despite his achievements with night school and external studying, my father felt his lack of formal education acutely. He had taken elocution lessons in his youth, ‘To learn how to talk proper,’ as he joked. With neighbours and teachers at school, he affected an accent more upper crust than middle class – he would pronounce ‘theatre’ as ‘the-ay-tre’, although he lapsed into Fen dialect peppered with Romany when he was talking to one of our aunts or uncles. He had read the Complete Works of Shakespeare from cover to cover, because he thought that was what educated people did. ‘I always say, King Lear is Shakespeare’s greatest comedy!’ As children, the swiftest way to earn a rebuke was if we did anything common. This included wanting to wear blue jeans, saying ‘caff’ when we meant ‘café’ and watching ITV. At my graduation ceremony at Leeds, he mortified me by saying loftily to one of my English Literature professors, ‘Of course, George Eliot wasn’t the only woman novelist to adopt a male pseudonym, George Sands was a woman as well, don’t you know?’