A Tale of Brawn and Sweet Revenge.

I don’t remember whether I told this story before, but if I did it was a long time ago and those who were reading my efforts then have long since moved onto better things.

Time runs apace.

Time’s a blockhead.

~ somewhere in the Works of Shakespeare.

Right then…

When I was seventeen and waiting to go to Dartmouth I got a temporary job as a labourer on a building site. I was told to start on Monday.

Monday duly arrived and so did the Monday lunchtime break at around 12 o’clock. I went to the canteen armed with my British working man’s salt-of-the-earth-style haversack, which my mother had dutifully filled with my luncheon requirements, and joined the big, brawny builder types in the tea queue.

All hands clasped a big earthenware mug, apart from those who had a tin one. I held out a small teacup fashioned in translucent bone China and sporting a most attractive floral design.

Mother, why are you doing this to me?

We all sat down and the countless brawny hands of the assembled brawny builder types produced sandwiches which would have competed favourably with the doorsteps of Old England. Mine were thin, white and cut with embarrassing accuracy into quarters. I chose not to look at the big, brawny builder types since I feared what I might read in their eyes in return.

After lunch I was called to the site office and told they couldn’t keep me on. They’d just looked at my cards, they said, and discovered that I was only seventeen, and since the company operated a closed shop and union membership was restricted to those aged eighteen and over, my employment had to be terminated.

I went to a phone box and rang my mother.

‘I’ve been fired,’ I told her.

‘Fired?’

‘Yup.’

‘Why?’

‘I had an argument with the foreman and pushed him off the scaffold. He’s been taken to hospital.’

‘OMG!!!’ (Or whatever passed for OMG!!! in pre-internet days.)

And then, of course, I confessed the joke. But at least I’d had my revenge for the teacup and sandwiches. I’d also learned how to push a heavy wheelbarrow over a narrow plank (it’s just matter of confidence, like swimming and arranging dates) and how to throw two bricks at a time to a pair of brawny hands attached to a brawny bricklayer up on the scaffolding. Neither skill has ever served me since, sad to say, but I’m not dead yet so who knows?