Free Last Days of the Bus Club by Chris Stewart

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 andhandling 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