by Ronald Smith
******
When the High Street flat was completed, several months later, we went back to Fife to begin work on the Mill. It was now June, and we bought a packet of seeds, intending to start by digging a vegetable garden. Vile came with us. He had this very annoying habit of coming up to me when I was working at something and saying "That's no how ya do it", pushing me aside and. grabbing the tool out of my hand, bashing away to show me the right way.
I soon saw that if I didn't protest and just hung about, saying "Oh, is that how you do it?" he would do all the work.
As soon as I stuck the spade in the ground, Vile started: "That’s no how ya dig; here, this is how ya do it."
"Oh, yeah, I see, very good," I said appreciatively, stepping back and folding my arms.
After a while, when he had dug a couple of square yards, he asked me the time. I lied, telling him only a few minutes had passed. It was one of those long, clear June days which never ends. As the afternoon wore on and Vile continued to dig, I lied about the time again and again.
Around nine p.m., when he thought it was only four, he dropped the shovel and gasped, "Oh Man, I'm beat!" and lurched off to lie down.
The next day he was ill from exhaustion from too much digging. But that summer we had a superb crop of vegetables.
By autumn we had made the farmhouse habitable, and Mairi and I moved in. We invited an architect friend to come and stay with us while he drew up plans. It took us about a month to measure every room, every wall and window in all the buildings, and about five months later we were ready to begin construction - except that we had absolutely no money. I had paid the architect with a number of my best paintings. I had a blind faith that we would find enough money somehow, and went to the local authority to apply for all the grants we could conceivably be eligible for.
Then a brown paper envelope came through the letter box, addressed to Mairi, from a legal firm; my intuition told me even as I lifted it that my prayers had been answered. Inside was a letter informing Mairi that she had inherited £25,000 from an uncle she scarcely knew.
The biggest problem now was that I didn't know how to do anything. I had been the worst pupil at school in woodwork, and my father had never shown me even how to use a saw; I didn't see myself as a practical chap getting things done; my intention was to do deals to pay for others to do the work. I asked everybody I met, as if the whole world was my brain.
Next door to us was a quarry office; the quarry itself was in the bowels of the hill behind our property. I began my campaign to exploit its resources by going over and having tea with the Manager, Mr. Nibblet.
I liked his name because he sort of nibbled at the hill. Nibblet was a collapsed fat man, a ghastly bag of skin and bones, originally from South Africa, who had run the Quarry with a rule of iron for the last thirty years. When he had first taken over, the Quarry had been a hotbed of agitation, indiscipline and thieving. He quickly noted that the most popular as well as the most honest worker there, was twenty-one year old Sandy, whose wife was expecting a baby.
Nibblet invited Sandy into his office. "I'm making you supervisor in charge of all the men."
Sandy was horrified. "I won't do it; these are my mates."
"Well, if you don't take the job, you're sacked."
So Sandy became Nibblet's right hand man. He drove out the Unions, stopped the thieving, prevented men with silicosis from the rock dust from claiming compen sation, and became the biggest bastard up there.
For some reason, the dour and taciturn Sandy liked my mischievous ways; I would borrow tools from their workshop and he would just stand there, saying nothing except, "It's that fuckin Sangster again." I'd wink and carry on, and gradually I got free run of the quarry, taking loads of gravel for the courtyard, even borrowing their JCB digger for a fiver instead of the going rate.
Adjoining the Mill itself was a slightly smaller, square building I dubbed 'The Hall', It had a balcony around its inside walls, like an Elizabethan theatre. The previous tenant had kept pigs in it and he had constructed a warren of extremely well-built pig stys; thick concrete walls reinforced with granite chips and steel rods.
These had to come out, I decided, I hired several men from the village and some compressed-air jack hammers. But when we began drilling in the confined space, the noise was unbearable, echoing and reverberating from the concrete. To make it worse, trying to hold the heavy road drills at an angle was utterly exhausting.
I couldn't stand the noise, so I went up to the quarry and asked their demolition expert if he would blow up the pig stys. He drilled some holes, laid his charges, set the fuses, and we retreated across the yard to watch.
WHOOM! The detonation shook the massive building, a dense cloud of dust billowed out, and all the pantiles on the roof rose vertically on end and flapped down again. With sinking heart, I realised the entire roof would now have to be retiled.
But at least it was now easy to break up the fractured stys with pickaxes. The result was 120 tons of rubble, piled in pyramids outside the Mill, far too much for me to dispose of on my own.
Brazenly, I approached Mr. Nibblet and told him I needed a couple of lorries. To my surprise he acquiesced, and Sandy merely stood by as we dumped the heaps of concrete fragments in a corner of the vast pit made by the quarry operations.
"It's that fuckin Sangster again," was all he said.
The Farmhouse kitchen was too small, divided from another room by a ridiculous wall which was my next target.
Driving back from Edinburgh in the rain one afternoon, I had a puncture which I had to repair; wet to the skin, I was steaming with annoyance when I returned. My attention hit on the unwanted partition, like one of the Furies in a Greek myth,
"Right, get everything out of the kitchen, because I'm going to start on this bloody wall NOW," I ordered Mairi.
She hadn't even finished shifting the pots when I stormed back in with the pickaxe and swung it furiously at the wall. Immediately, to my horror water gushed from the hole. It was hot; I'd punctured the hot water tank.
"It's too small anyway," I told Mairi as a hasty improvisation; "We'll need a lot of hot water,"
But despite my energy and confidence, I was becoming more and more awed by the enormity of my task and the profundity of my ignorance of even the simplest practical jobs. I had been relying on Harry's experience and connections to renovate the cluster of derelict buildings cheaply and quickly; now I began to have nightmares of unending labour amid vast, ruinous halls from which there was no escape.
I was desperate for help. In my extremity, I went back to Edinburgh to see Harry's sometime partner. Drew, His appearance should not have inspired my trust; gaps between his broken teeth, one missing eye, and
unkempt, straw-like hair which gave his chiselled face a distinctly criminal expression.
The devious underworld of building, where men lived by a different code, where cash in the form of backhanders is the language, was as yet unknown to me. I was walking in like a lamb to the slaughter.
Back in the heady days just before we had bought the Mill, Drew had assured me he could restore the cottages in a mere two months. But now he was about to go to India for a prolonged holiday on the profits he had gleaned from the sale of two decrepit flats he had done up at break- neck speed, which would put him conveniently out of reach when the new owners discovered what lay behind the whitewash.
"I need someone who can stay at the Mill and lead a team of builders," I told him, "guys who know what they're doing, I don't want a bunch of ignorant locals,"
"Jamie Bothwell is just the man," Drew told me, "I can send him up to you this week,"
I clutched at the straw, "Fine, thanks a lot, Drew,"
And so Jamie came to the Mill. Full of fun and childlike abandon, he had a waggish doglike charm, eager to please and flatter.
"Fuckin magic, this place," he gushed as I showed him around. "An I've got just the guys for a crew; they'll really be intae it, ken. We'll dae a profe
ssional job for ya, get the materials real cheap, only cost ya £9000."
I liked Jamie's conspiratorial sincerity, and the price was music to my ears. I took him on without much further thought.
Jamie, Andy, Dancer and Wilson moved into the farmhouse with us. The work started off well enough and I was pleased with its progress, but our private life became unbearable as these four took over our kitchen. They drank beer, went off to the pub in the village, came back drunk and then threw up in the sink, roared with coarse laughter at dirty jokes, and stayed awake all night having press-up competitions.
Mairi had a deep natural goodness; she made everybody feel welcome, sitting and chatting warmly, trying to please them, making them tea and treating them like members of the family, but becoming a domestic martyr to the rude and objectionable crew. I reflected ruefully on a proverb:
There are two tragedies: one is not getting what you want; the other is
getting it.
Then I found Jamie and the rest were hijacking timber from the building merchant. Jamie had an arrangement to pay the yardmen £300 and they would permit him to drive in with a truck and load up £1000 worth of wood. The truck was hired in my name. I confronted him: "What's the idea?" I demanded.
"Look, we're daein this oor way. If we want to rip off materials, that's oor business; that's us gettin them cheap for ya, and we're making a wee bit extra as well," he returned sharply; too sharply for my liking.
"Well, I'm not happy about you hiring motors in my name and stealing. I want this to stop. The next lot of wood you get, I want you to buy it straight. I'll give you the money."
"Aye, OK, Will, it'll no happen again."
But one night several weeks later, a lorry laden with wood roared headlong into the drive and slid to a halt in the gravel yard; in a state of total panic Jamie and his crew scrambled out of the cabin and ran for the house. Breathlessly, Jamie related how they had broken into the timberyard and filled the truck with £5000 worth of stolen planks; then several security guards had pounced on them. They fought their way free, kicking guards off the cab as they crashed recklessly through the gates while other guards tried to lock them in.
I was furious but also frightened because now I was unwillingly implicated in their crime.
“Let's get the wood out of here right now. You take the lorry and follow my car," I ordered. We drove off into the night with the stolen wood, leaving parts of it with people I knew here and there; then I abandoned the lorry and drove Jamie back to the Mill, to await the police and look as innocent as we could.
Astonishingly, they never came. The only likely explanation I could come up with was that the management of the timberyard were also stealing and were afraid of being found out if there were an investigation.
