Cement and Sympathy
For years the front garden of No3 Forsham Cottage looked like a builders yards . We had turned an idyllic little bit of Sutton Valence into an obstacle course, red sand stained the lane as the lump was eroded by the rain and washed into the road..
Stacks of bricks and blocks, which no matter how many times I re-stacked them still fell over ( ground slopped towards the road at twenty degrees) . What with the look of the place and the accompanying dust and noise, our neighbours ( Mrs B & Mrs T) had every right to complain, but bless them they were always so tolerant and so supportive. I think they felt sorry for us. ( we did milk the sympathy vote)
Number 3 FC had a really ugly flat roof extension ‘plonked’ on the side of it. To add insult it was painted battle ship grey, so blend in, it didn’t. From the very out set we were determined …. it had to go. We were endeavouring to transform the HMS ARK ROYAL into something a bit more cottagey and more in keeping with the original dwelling . The master plan was to convert the integral garage into a dinning room. We were building a new porch and building a new garage next to the detached garage belonging to Mrs T . Top of the list was to replace the flat felted roof with a proper pitched roof using old Kent clays tiles. I should also add that between us we had amassed approximately NIL experience of the building trade .
Once committed we were spending every spare hour working on our house and spending every last penny not on ‘nice to have’ stuff like an Indian takeaway or a posh frock but on ‘must have’ stuff like cement dust, joists and replacing numerous tools I had either lost or broke. However with the aid of the Reader Digest DIY manual (wedding present) Stan and Reggie ( Cindy’s and my dads ). Hundreds of hours of swearing, our extension conversion slowly emerged from the mire. Things happened along the way like an eight foot long concrete lintel falling from the top story. She was just being dramatic, it missed Cindy by several foot, but it did harpooned the patio, which I never did repair. The dog caught a half brick I threw down off the roof onto the rubble pile. That must of hurt, but he still did it again!. He also diligently picked up the clay I was throwing out of one trench and unbeknown to be was re-filling the trench behind me!. To cocky to be told , I f****d my back repeatedly carrying over full buckets of wet cement up a ladder onto the roof. The legacy of which thirty years later I still endure.
The bloke from the electricity company that came to move the meter got into fluster because he was running late. Rather than go to get his drill, he borrowed mine. There was a slight problem , the trigger switch was bust ( no dosh for a new one) so I had rewired it bypassing the switch, which meant it literally spun into action as soon as it was switched on at the wall, which to the uninitiated could be a bit startling. It was not a good idea to plug it in holding on the ‘spiny bit’ or as some would call it ‘the chuck’, which he did. Ok, I should have warned him …..but he cotton on quite quickly and dropped it, where upon it jerked and thrashed about on the floor like a demented critter on a leash having a fit, until I put it out of its misery by switching off its life support system !
Then my startled sparky mate used my stepladder, which had the second to bottom step missing, ((concrete block fell on it ). Now in my defence he must have known it was missing because he had climbed up it, so to forget a few minutes latter when coming down, was in my opinion carelessness on his part. He was not a happy chappy laying there on the floor gasping for air ( just a bit winded). SEEBOARD man was not having a good day, as was proven several weeks latter when an inspector came out to ‘ eyeball’ and sign off the work. He found that our accident prone sparky had wired the meter up back to front so it had been unwinding for the best part of a month. Obviously his mind was elsewhere!
Cindy at nine months and two weeks pregnant spent her days pointing block work, in appreciation of her condition I did mix up the cement. She woke me about midnight saying something about waters breaking, which given we were always having problems with the plumping and the back half of the roof was a PVC lorry sheet, I at first assumed she meant we had another leak.
I called the number ( like my list told me to) and explained to a very nice lady, who in my opinion was far too calm, that something called the waters breaking had occurred. She asked if I was sure. “ If Cindy says somethings broke, then it’s broke !” I told her. The blue lights turned up and two confused ambulance men stood in lane, in the dark, in the rain, shinning torches around the place trying to work out which of plastic sheet covered holes in the wall was the door and then what was their best line of approach. I gave them a lead, particularly drawing to their attention the two foot wide, three foot deep trench that ‘moated’ the building and the piles of now wet clay that had been exhumed from around and under the house ( I was under pinning the footings). Having negotiated the obstacles two slightly bemused blokes stood in our front room with a stretcher and with clay up their other wise very neat trousers. Procedure dictated that the patient was to be stretchered to the ambulance, which was not going to be easy. They thought of making an arm cradle and manual carrying her out to the road, but gave up on that. What actual happened was that Cindy, who she was not overly fetching dressed in her night attire and wellington boots clambered over the trench and sand piles, followed by the blokes in black carrying the stretcher. Once we had gotten onto flattish ground they put Cindy on the stretcher and carried her the remaining twenty five foot to the ambulance. Dill the dog always liked a trip out and had to be persuaded that this was not an occasion for him to ‘get in the back’, so as a memento of their visit, Dill dropped a half brick on the ambulance step and left his mark up the side. ( class act that dog) .
It was snowing a week later when having convinced the midwife we had a warm nursery and that Cindy had help at home, she wangled the OK to take the ‘kidlet’ home. I consulted the list again .“ When collecting us bring the bag on the table” it said. I presented Cindy with the bag of nappies, Zinc & Caster ointment jars and pins. She wanted the ‘bringing baby home clothes’ bag. “It didn’t say which bag” I offered as a pathetic defence. So it was that our Kidlet came home in ill matching and ill fitting clothes lent to us by the nurses, who had rummaged and borrowed them from around the ward. ( they felt sorry for us)
Not the most auspicious of starts for our Tracey, but Dill gave her a bit of brick, so she WAS welcomed home ……..
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