The Trench

How many different types of rain can there be in one week? After heavy driving rain, swirling windy rain and stair rod showers with the merest glimpse of the sun in the rare intervals, today has seen a mist like haze where the air itself soaks you. It all makes restoration work in this little corner of France very difficult. Even Tom the cat seems to have disappeared, perhaps finding a cosier spot than under my caravan which has turned in just a couple of weeks from a nice bit of shelter against the sun to a chilly damp wind tunnel. After a warm week digging a trench across the courtyard to bring in new services to the base of the old kitchen wall, the ground has gone from dry and hard to sludgy mud, the trench filling with rainwater making progress impossible. Earlier, whilst looking out through the rivulets of water streaming down the large window at the end of the caravan where I eat most of my meals, I was working up the enthusiasm to go and lay a couple of planks across the trench, as continued leaping across was tempting fate, when I was reminded of an incident some years ago concerning a much bigger, more malevolent trench. I had taken on the plastering and flooring contract at a big old pub on the Staffordshire, Derbyshire border. The first job was concreting the whole floor and I had a new recruit, Phil. Phil was a friend who had lost his job in an office restructuring and asked if I could help him for a short while until he found a new job. Although slight, and with no practical experience I took him on, as a friend would. And so it was that we pulled up in the pouring rain in the pub car park at eight in the morning and a concrete lorry and crew waiting for us. I had never apologised to a labourer before but I found myself looking at his thin frame and saying how sorry I was that he had got to work in this weather on the wheelbarrow all day but he shrugged it off saying he was quite looking forward to building his muscles up, working with these tough looking lads who were lined up with their barrows next to the concrete lorry. As I got out and hurried across to the foreman, I noticed the lads sniggering and looked across to see Phil lighting up his pipe. Although my dad used to smoke one, it was quite unusual to see a younger man smoke a pipe and I wondered if perhaps Phil was under estimating the endeavour he was about to begin on. The rain falling heavy now, and with an impatient lorry driver pulling the leaver to start the flow of concrete into the men’s barrows, I noticed the further impediment to a smooth first day for Phil. After having their barrows filled to the brim, they had to move forward in the mud and over a bridge of three planks across a wide and deep trench. Worried I took Phil aside and told him that it did not matter if he didn’t want to do it. That it was asking too much of a chap who had never done anything like this before. But puffing on his pipe with a determination I had never seen before he said he was ready and took his place behind Gary, the big apprentice bricklayer. I watched with half closed eyes as his wheelbarrow was filled and he moved forward to the planks, wobbling as he took the strain. "You sure your man is up to it," said the foreman, but all I could do was give a weak nod. I held my breath as he mounted the planks, but the combination of weight and mud was too much for him and I moved forward shouting to just let go of it Phil. Too my utter disbelief and horror, Phil, sensing the barrows unstoppable lurch to the edge of the plank, thought that he could wrestle it back and held on as it went over, whipping him down with it as it went. For a split second I felt the shocked gaze of four or five of the men shoot towards me as though I had sent a new recruit on a lone suicide mission to the front, but running to the edge and peering over I felt first a huge sense of relief which then turned to laughter followed by the others who slid to a halt beside me. Phil climbed to his feet, covered in mud and concrete, the whites of his eyes glaring up out of the gloom but with his pipe still held firmly between his teeth. He gained the men’s respect that day. Brushing off my offer to drive him home, he went to wash his hands and face and then returned to take his place with his barrow, the concrete man showing a rare touch of pity and not filling it up right to the top as before.

The weather report gives a better week or so ahead, but perhaps I shall wait until the mud has dried up a little before I get my wheelbarrow out again.

Martyn Walker is the author of Stopcock.

Available on Amazon

Fish, Beef and Rabbit

I have a confession to make. Yesterday I bought a couple of tins of cat food. This may not appear to be a particularly revealing confession, or even one that can have the merest modicum of interest to anyone. But to anyone who by chance may be reading this who knows me, it will come as a surprise. After many years of skilful evasion by which I managed to rebuff any request for a pet by my children with a sometimes sympathetic wife, I ventured into my local Leclerc supermarket and purchased the two above mentioned tins. I bought two because, astonished by the array of flavours and musing if cats actually had a preference for one or the other, decided to play it safe and go for a tin of both fish and beef. The reason for all this of course is Tom. Since rescuing him, I have felt like one of those chaps in a film who saves a strangers life and as a consequence the stranger stays close to him forming a bond, a little like Morgan Freeman in Robin hoods prince of thieves from a few years back. He’s fussy though. In the last few weeks he slowly approaches the food I leave for him near the caravan door, nervously sniffs it before taking increasingly smaller bites before hardly touching it now. Cathy might not be surprised, knowing the limitations of my cooking, but feeling sort of responsible for him now, and to be honest, enjoying his albeit limited company, I found my way into the pet aisle of the supermarket with its array of all things pet friendly and a faint whiff of Zoo. I decided to go with the fish, and crikey, did it make the caravan smell like a North Sea trawler. As usual, I put the bowl out before it gets dark, which now is disarmingly around half past eight, and sat down in my spot near the window to see if he likes what I imagine must be his first taste of tinned food. My Grandmother often used to say that you have made ‘a rod for your own back’ when you have done something that will cost you time or money, and I could almost hear her say it as Tom tucked the food away, licking his lips as he finished the bowl for the first time. Oh well, I am not exactly snowed under with friends at the moment, so I will pop off to the supermarket tomorrow and try the rabbit.

Rats

Not many people's favourite animal are rats, and so it seems to Tom. After slinking away unseen the other night, I have just found a small dead rat near to the step of the caravan. I presume it was he who left it and although it appears to have no marks on it I don't think it had a cardiac arrest as it was passing the caravan. I like to think that he brought it to me as  a gift for helping him out, and although not a particularly nice one for humans, I suppose his gift range is a little limited. I expect it was more likely though that he dropped it as he caught sight of me as he was making good his escape. He will probably return for it when it gets dark.  Rats hold a singular place in my affections. When I was but a young chap with only the acquisition of girlfriends, money and a decent left foot on the pitch to stretch my mind, I was working on the construction of a new brewery maltings. Like most young  men, I probably had an over inflated opinion of my own abilities and one day after saying that I could work quite easily on my own, I found myself in a labyrinth of concrete lined dark tunnels with flickering lights every ten meters or so which felt like I was on one of those scary video games. Near every light there was a steel joist that held up the concrete slabbed roof.

"Just wrap the stainless steel mesh around each one, tie angle beads on the edges and render them with three coats," said my dad with a smile that knew my ego would not let me utter any grievance about being given this god forsaken job. He knew as well as I, that it meant carrying trestles and planks, as well as barrowing the sand and cement and wire etc, underground along long, cold corridors, with my footsteps the only sound to accompany me. After a couple of days with no daylight, I was beginning to feel like Jack Nicholson stalking those corridors in The Shining, when pushing the wheelbarrow along to where my trestles were set up, I heard a funny kind of rustling, scratching noise that seemed to be getting closer. Picking up my speed a little that had lapsed into a plod, I gripped the handles tighter and broke into a trot, which isn't easy when your barrow is full to the hilt. With the noise getting closer and more sinister I stopped and turned and shouted out that whoever was there to stop mucking about, or words to that effect. But in the dimness I still couldn't see anything until in the glow of the last light behind me I saw a mass of rats running my way with god knows what aim in mind. Leaving the barrow where it was, I took off, reaching my top speed in a time that I had rarely achieved on the football pitch, but even so was surprised when I approached the trestles and leapt onto the planks before the rats reached me. Feeling like a builder's version of Indiana Jones, and I do believe he was a carpenter once, I looked back to see fat rats, bloated on Barley, run under the trestles and off into the darkness with barely a squeak in my direction. Where they were going and in such a hurry  I never found out. In the three months it took me to do what seemed like endless beams, the rats came again on three more occasions, but by then I was almost used to it.  It's getting dark now and I am beginning to wish I had moved the rat further away, but if it is there in the morning I suppose it means that it was meant for me.

Martyn Walker is the author of Stopcock, available on Amazon

Tom

Still on my own, and with the villages and towns full of smiling tourists, it all feels a little hollow to me. Maybe that's why I started this blog, but does anybody actually read them anyway? I have been thinking about not bothering to write anymore when I met Tom. When I say met, I mean I heard a faint gurgling meow kind of noise in the old lime tree that grows over the roof of the caravan. To be honest I am not even sure he's male, but when I looked in the dense foliage about an hour ago, I finally spotted what looked like the Cheshire cat grinning down at me. He seemed to be just happily sitting there, his ginger and white fur  a good camouflage amongst the shadowy leaves, but after a couple of minutes and me opening a carton of milk and pouring him some out into a bowl, I felt something was wrong. Fetching my ladder, thinking he had bitten off more than he could chew, I leaned it on the branch he was on and tried to coax him down. Still he did not move. So slowly climbing the rungs, I decided to attempt a rescue. Halfway up, I noticed some grubby floral fabric near his head which on closer inspection I found was a long makeshift collar that he had entangled in the branch until it held his neck tight to it. His Cheshire cat grin was of slow suffocation. He didn't move, I expect through exhaustion at the struggle to free himself, as I tried to release him, but the fabric was strong so I went back down to fetch my Stanley knife. Gently sawing at the fabric and with soothing words I cut through it and was surprised when he still sat there. Backing down the ladder, I pulled up my plastic chair and watched as he opened his mouth a few times and moved down the branch a little. Nudging the bowl of milk a little closer to the base of the tree, I was glad for the first time since being here that I was on my own, as the sight of me crouched down talking in a high pitched voice, tool belt dragging on the floor must have looked a picture. Eventually he made his way down on to the roof of the caravan before tentatively dropping down and under the caravan. He is still there now, still shy of venturing out, but it has given time to think abut what idiot what make a collar for a cat with a piece of fabric over a meter long and knotted round his neck. Surely not Jean Pierre? He seems so common sense like, but there is no one else here for over half a mile! Oh well, we will see what happens, and hopefully he will still be about when the kids get here as they have always wanted a dog or cat. That's if I can coax him out from under the caravan.

Martyn Walker is the author or Stopcock, available on Amazon