Free David Jason: My Life by David Jason

lured Dougie up to the church’s wooden gallery and used brass nails and buckle clips to tack him to the floor through his overalls. We abandoned him there, stapled to the floor, for a whole day. Cruel? Perhaps it was. But note we had our limits and that a sense of basic human decency prevailed: we didn’t leave him overnight.
    I fear it may also have been Dougie who was the victim of some equally childish and regrettable deviousness involving a bogus mission at the bottom of a lift shaft and a swiftly removed ladder. If you’re building a block of flats, and you’re high up and you need to relieve your bladder, do you climb all the waydown and use the appropriate facility? Not when there’s a convenient and as yet empty lift shaft to hand you don’t. Which makes the bottom of a lift shaft in an incomplete block of flats somewhere to avoid if at all possible – as Dougie would no doubt have eagerly confirmed after spending a dank afternoon up to the rims of his rubber boots in unpleasantness.
    Apprentices were made to work pretty hard in those days, and the jobs we had to do were very varied. For example, we wired a block of flats in Golders Green which, strange as it may seem, still stands today. In that block, we put in underfloor heating and I was told to oversee the pouring of the concrete floor, to make sure the builders didn’t trample over our beautiful handiwork and muck it up. (Underfloor heating in those days was done with copper cables, which were both fragile and really expensive.) So it came to pass that I was alone on the sixth floor of this partly completed building, when an Irish navvy, who appeared to share the dimensions, more or less, of a bungalow, climbed onto the service lift at ground level, along with two wheelbarrows fully laden with cement, and called out, ‘Bring her up.’
    Now, I wasn’t technically speaking the world’s most experienced operator of the service lift, but I had seen it done, and knew what the routine was. Basically, there was a rope and you gave that rope a big old tug and it let the clutch in on the motor below and sent the lift’s platform shuddering upwards. Then, at the appropriate moment, when the lift had risen to the desired level, you gently and gradually relaxed your grip on the rope and brought the platform slowly and smoothly to a halt. This could be done at any floor as the lift was rigged up to pass the semi-finished balconies all the way up the building.
    So I duly pulled on the rope, and the large Irishman and his barrows began their groaning and rickety ascent. I, meanwhile, readied myself with the rope to perform the slightly trickier stopping manoeuvre. As the critical moment neared, and whenthe builder had risen to the point where his knees were level with the floor, I used my skill, judgement and considerable hand–eye coordination to begin to relax my grip on the rope and brake the lift’s upward motion – only to mess up completely and lose control of the rope.
    I watched the navvy’s eyes widen as it dawned on him that the bottom could be about to drop out of his world in the most literal of ways. As the platform abruptly went into reverse below his feet, I saw the Irishman’s face disappear earthwards and I let go of the rope altogether, thus bringing the lift to a shuddering stop. The abruptness of the halt bounced the wheelbarrows and the navvy in unison a couple of times and then tipped the barrows’ contents off the edge of the platform. Only the navvy’s irate head was visible above the floor. Fortunately, a suitably qualified floor-layer was on hand to take over the operating and bring the platform up to the right place. Or perhaps unfortunately: did my large Irish friend tip his head back and laugh with the simple joy one feels when one has narrowly eluded death? No. Boiling with fury, he chased me all over the building, calling me every name I had ever heard and several that I hadn’t, and would have probably lobbed me off the roof