Free Last Days of the Bus Club by Chris Stewart Page A

at four forty-five the next morning, prepared enough sandwiches to cram my lunch bag to bursting, chose a book,
Point Counter Point
by Aldous Huxley, for the long morning wait, and set off down the drive in the dark. As soon as I eased into the seat in Jim’s car, I fell fast asleep and didn’t wake up until we arrived at Deer Leap.
    ‘We’re pourin’ today,’ said Jim, unfolding
The Sun
. I wondered what pouring might be. Jim, lost in the paper, didn’t seem inclined to expand upon the subject. He read while I slept again like a young animal.
    ‘Get your shovel, Chris.’
    I gathered up my shovel of the day before. Another tiny frisson of pleasure, my own shovel, and it was a beast of a shovel too: not some half-arsed gardening tool, but a proper Eastman, the type used by the navvies who built the first railways. A man’s tool … and when you’re sixteen this means something. I staggered out of the hut; my bones and muscles still hurt like hell from the cement bags.
    I was to work on the mixer where Belgian Andy was clattering about in readiness for the pouring.
    ‘D’yo ’ave it in las’ nite?’ he shouted down at me.
    ‘I beg your pardon,’ I shouted back. Andy’s accented English was all but impossible to understand. He made an unspeakably lewd gesture.
    Dave, who was leaning on his shovel at the foot of a hill of gravel, translated for my benefit. There were shouts and the rumbling of machinery; the pouring was ready to start. ‘Just shovel,’ said Dave. ‘Shovel till you can shovel no more.’ And we bent our backs to those big old Eastman shovels.
    Beside the mixer was a huge double pair of scales. Our job was to shovel sand into one half of it, until we got to 850 kilos, then spin it round and fill the other half with 1,600 kilos of gravel. When it was full the scales would tip into the mixer, where Andy would add the cement. Once the hopper was empty, we started shovelling again.
    We started with the sand; sand was easy because you can get a huge load on the shovel and if you’re placedright it’s just a deep satisfying thrust into the pile, a twist of the body, a superhuman heave of the arms and that’s twenty kilos down. The gravel was different: you can only get so much on the shovel, much of it falls off, and it’s hard to drive the shovel into the pile. On pouring days Dave and I were the motive power of the whole site. Everybody depended on us for the great loads of concrete to be shifted, poured into the shuttering, and vibrated, and so whenever we flagged, we would be lashed with the most hideous abuse from all sides. In the main this would be good-natured chaffing, but if we got too far behind, tempers would sometimes flare.
    We worked, even on cold days, stripped to the waist, warmed by the sunshine and the herculean labour, which tore at the skin of our hands, leaving fearful blisters which immediately burst and filled with grit and cement and started suppurating. Nobody would think of wearing gloves, though; it wouldn’t have gone down well, wouldn’t have been manly … and, for better or for worse, manly was what it was all about.
    One day, there was an accident. Scott was using his drott to haul out a colossal ten-ton trunk of oak. A drott is a tiny open bulldozer, all engine and a huge powerful toothed grab for a shovel. Anyway, Scott was heaving this tree backwards but it was heavier than the drott, so as he raised the shovel, instead of raising the load, it raised the drott itself in the air, so that it was tiptoeing backwards on the tips of its caterpillar tracks. This seemed to work alright, though, so Scott kept on coming. Then suddenly the drott hit a bump and slammed back down on the ground, whereupon the colossal oak tree rolled down the arms of the shovel and right over Scott. He screamed and managed toduck beneath the bonnet just enough to save himself from having the life crushed out of him. He was badly hurt, and was rushed out in an ambulance to hospital.
    Later