by Tony Hawks
It wasn’t until several days later that the soreness and last vestiges of the swelling disappeared completely. My body was back to normal. Not a temple maybe, but akin to a small church, at least in so far as it had a fully functioning organ.
Amen to that.
4
Harnessing Skills
One morning, when I popped round to Ken’s to ask for his help with something, I eased into the question slowly and began by telling him about my problems with the slugs.
‘Our son Andrew entered a snail in a snail race once,’ he said, going off on a rather surprising tangent, ‘and he had the idea of removing its shell to lighten its load.’
Ken then waited, his eyes imploring me to enquire further.
‘And how did it perform?’ I asked.
‘It was sluggish.’
Ken beamed broadly, pleased at having had the occasion to work this joke into a conversation. The opportunity probably didn’t come up that often.
‘I walked into that,’ I conceded. ‘Very good.’
Ken beamed all the more. I had a go at changing his cheerful demeanour.
‘I don’t suppose you could help me shift my grand piano?’ I asked.
‘Where to?’
‘Just from one room to another. Should be fairly straightforward, although we may have to remove the legs.’
Instead of this question puncturing his high spirits, Ken responded as jovially as ever.
‘No problem. Shall I pop over this afternoon?’
‘Yes, please.’
Well done, Ken. So far, he was following instructions to the letter from the text book How To Be the Perfect Neighbour.
To be fair, the job was no more complicated than I’d made out. Having changed my mind about which room I preferred to play the piano in, I now wanted it moved into our living room from the ‘adjacent studio/office’ (as it had been described in the estate agent’s particulars). I’d allowed one hour to complete the job before I would need to leave for a meeting with a local councillor about buses. I’d noticed that the ones that came in and out of our village were nearly always empty, and I wondered why. Later that afternoon I would have some answers.
I was well prepared for the job. I’d watched my piano being moved several times before by teams of two men, and I was pretty sure I could remember the procedure. Admittedly, Ken and I didn’t have a special grand piano removal trolley, but I had a plan to overcome that. The wooden floor was shiny and flat between the two rooms, so I figured we could drag the piano between them on cushions and sheets. All we needed to do was remove the three legs.
Ken arrived, beaming with enthusiasm, and we set about our task. Disappointingly, we went off-script almost immediately. Instead of engaging in piano removal, we found ourselves scratching our heads, Stan Laurel-style. We just couldn’t fathom how to remove the legs without the help of a third person. In the end, Ken went back to his house to fetch a car jack – but unfortunately for me, he didn’t do this until we’d already tipped up the piano and removed one of the legs. This meant that I had to take the weight of one corner of the piano until Ken made it back.
‘How are you getting on, darling?’ said Fran, as she popped her head in.
‘Oh, not so bad,’ I said. ‘Just waiting on Ken, who’s fetching something.’
‘Great. I’m just nipping out to yoga. See you later. Good luck.’
It seemed an awfully long time before Ken re-entered carrying the new equipment, but it may have been only a few minutes. As I looked at Ken readying the jack, I couldn’t see a place on the piano where it was going to have any real effect. Then it dawned on me.
‘I remember now,’ I said. ‘We lower this corner, where we’ve removed the leg, down onto the cushions. Then we tip the piano to remove the other two legs.’
‘So we don’t need the jack?’
‘I don’t think so.’
It was galling to think that I had supported the piano for all that time without any sensible reason. Ken, who had now supplied the room with gear more normally seen alongside beaten-up cars in greasy garage forecourts than around pianos in Parisian conservatoires, lined up the cushions and then joined me on the corner of the piano, and we began to lower it down. The further down we got, the greater the weight. As we neared the floor, it became apparent the cushions weren’t aligned properly.
‘I’ve got the weight,’ said Ken. ‘Quickly, move the cushions into place.’
I jumped into action, whilst my retired neighbour held a fair proportion of the entire weight of this 800-pound piano – roughly the equivalent of me, four and a half times. As I observed the strain on his entire body, a horrible thought struck me. What if he had a coronary? Being responsible for the death of the man next door wouldn’t be the best way to establish myself in the locality. I would also have a piano stuck at this dreadful angle and it would be very difficult to play. Worse still, every time I played it, I’d be reminded of my dead neighbour.
Fortunately I was able to slide the cushions quickly into the correct position and Ken and I were able to complete the lowering without incident. The end of the piano keyboard was now resting on the cushions, with one leg successfully removed.
‘There!’ I declared.
The problem was that this had taken us twenty-five minutes instead of two, and we’d need to speed up this process if I was going to make my appointment.
‘Now what?’ asked Ken.
We both continued to look at the piano – no longer a musical instrument, but instead a giant puzzle. Bewilderment reigned. Utterly. Dictatorially. It had all seemed so straightforward when I’d watched other people doing it.
‘I think I know,’ offered Ken, his tone of voice suggesting that he’d had a brainwave. ‘From this position I think we need to lay the cushions in a line and then hoist the piano so it’s lying along them on its side. Then we’ll be able to remove the other two legs.’
‘That’s it!’ I said, with great relief. ‘Let’s do it!’
This is where we learned that not having the correct equipment was indeed a huge disadvantage. Normally, at this stage the piano would rest on its side on a specially designed piano trolley, not cushions just lifted off a sofa. Unfortunately for us, these cushions slipped and moved on the smooth and shiny wooden floor, and we soon had an 800-pound piano resting half on and half off them. The piano didn’t balance as it would have done on a flat trolley either, so I had to hold it in position whilst Ken circled it, assessing whether it would get damaged if we dragged it through from room to room as it was.
‘Before we remove the other legs,’ he finally declared, ‘I think we need to get more cushions under it.’
‘How do we do that?’
‘I think we can get the jack under it enough to wedge a few more cushions in.’
And so, a further fifteen minutes were lost making use of the car jack and getting the piano in the best position for dragging it along the floor. The first leg came off easily enough. The second one started to prove a problem. Ken twisted hard. Nothing. Something may have gone wrong with the thread. He tried again. Still nothing. He took a deep breath and exerted the kind of pressure that a builder exerts when the whole job depends on it. He started to turn blue. Panicky thoughts about coronaries returned. Ken let out a huge gasp of breath.
‘Bugger!’
The leg hadn’t shifted. We both looked at it.
Stalemate.
I let a reasonable amount of time pass,1 before asking the obvious question.
‘What are we going to do?’
Ken repeated the Stan Laurel head-scratch.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe I could shift it using an oil filter band.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s a tool I use for removing oil filters on tractors.’
Oh my. In our novel approach to piano removal we’d now moved from cars to tractors. We were getting further and further away from the Paris conservatoire.
Bereft of any ideas of my own, I had
no option but to declare that this was a good one, regardless of nagging doubts to the contrary.
‘Good idea, Ken. I’ll hold the piano here. How long do you think you’ll be?’
‘Well, I’ve got to find the tool, but I shouldn’t be longer than ten minutes.’
Twenty minutes later I was still supporting my grand piano. I’d had ample time to assess what we’d achieved. In just under an hour we had put the piano on its side, removed two of its legs and established that we couldn’t remove the third. Ken was currently lost in some shed or another searching for tractor tools. I now realised that I had absolutely no chance of making my appointment with the councillor to discuss buses. Momentarily supporting the weight of the piano with my back, I fished in my pocket for my mobile phone and called the town councillor. With only one bar of signal on the phone, I knew that the line wouldn’t be a good one.
‘Hello, it’s Tony Hawks here,’ I began, sounding strained as a result of the weight on my back. ‘You know we’re supposed to be meeting at four? Yes, well I have a slight problem . . . I’m currently supporting a piano that has a leg on it that won’t come off . . .’
‘You’re where?’ I heard from the other end of the line.
The situation wasn’t helped by a poor signal on the phone.
‘I’m waiting on my neighbour, who’s fetching this tool we need. I can’t move from the piano till he gets back.’
‘You’re at your neighbour’s, playing the piano?’
‘No, I—’
The line went dead. Curses. The one bar of signal had buggered off. Where does it go when that happens, I wondered? And why does it come back again? Does it drift off in the wind? Whatever the reason, the councillor was now left thinking that me playing the piano to my neighbour was more important than honouring our appointment. I stood there, disappointed, a piano at my shoulder. Alone. Trapped. Once again I had been undone by my own misplaced confidence. I’d thought I knew how two men could move a piano, and I’d thought it would be easy. How wrong I’d been.
Finally Ken returned brandishing an odd-looking tool unlike any I had seen before. It somehow resembled a cross between a screwdriver and a scythe.
‘Sorry, Tony,’ he said, as he let himself in, ‘it was a bit trickier to find than I was hoping.’
What followed was crunch time. If Ken, with this new and unfamiliar tool, failed to remove the leg, there would be nothing for it but to give up and call in the professionals.
Ken strained as he pulled on the tool. He went blue again – for the third time in one afternoon. This time, though, his final gasp was exultant.
‘Gah! Dunnit!’
Heroically, Ken had loosened the leg, and now it could be unscrewed.
I’m not going to begin to say that the rest of the procedure went smoothly. We dragged the piano between rooms easily enough, but lifting the piano to get the legs back on tested us once again and we were unable to manage without recourse to the car jack. I’ve since looked at YouTube clips of pianos being dismantled and moved with relative ease and without a car jack in sight, but for some reason Ken and I couldn’t have managed without it.
So much for it taking less than an hour. We were still toiling away when Fran made it back from yoga.
‘Why are you both purple?’ she asked.
I dodged the answer and suggested, not without a sense of urgency, that she make us both some tea.
A little later, poor Ken went home exhausted.
I left a nice bottle of wine on his doorstep that night.
***
The summer continued to be the kind that made the front pages of the newspapers.
PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER!
This sort of headline had always puzzled me. The weather was not news. Whilst a correspondent might be required to bring us the latest on missing planes or the latest conflict in the Middle East, we didn’t need the newspapers to tell us what was happening bang outside our front doors. Was it hot yesterday? I hadn’t noticed. Thank goodness for that alert newspaper reporter.
Whenever it’s hot, I want to swim. Devon’s beaches were only forty minutes away, but we’d discovered that they weren’t Britain’s best-kept secret. August brought hordes of holidaymakers, who selfishly got into cars and formed themselves into traffic jams, doubling the journey time for us. They made the beach experience uncomfortable and sometimes disagreeable. I’ve always much preferred being on a beach in a foreign country, where the conversations of the families on adjacent towels remain a mysterious burble of exotic sounds. Raised Italian voices, or instructions called to a child in French or Spanish, were a positive part of the experience, mainly because they had no meaning. On a beach in my own country I am drawn into the family conflict, however hard I try to shut it out.
‘DARREN! GIVE THE BUCKET BACK TO YOUR SISTER!’ shouts an irate dad.
I immediately check on Darren’s location, observe the tears of the sister, and wonder how the situation will become resolved.
‘NO, YOU CAN’T HAVE A BLOODY ICE CREAM! YOU HAD FOUR YESTERDAY!’ shouts a despairing mum.
‘Yes,’ I inwardly concur, ‘four does seem an awful lot. The mother seems to have a point.’
Thus my beach experience is ruined.
Which is why I came up with my idea.
‘Fran doesn’t think it will work,’ I said to Ken, as we chatted over the fence.
‘Well, I don’t see why it shouldn’t,’ he said, supportively.
‘I’m tempted to give it a try.’
‘I’ll help you, if you need a hand.’
‘Thanks, Ken.’
‘I’ve got a good name for it.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You can call it the Hawks Harness.’
‘Excellent idea.’
I’m no inventor, but I felt I was onto something with this. The trouble with small swimming pools is that if you want to do any meaningful swimming – the kind that keeps you fit and healthy – then you reach the end of the pool after only a few strokes. It can end up feeling like you’re doing more turning than swimming. What better idea than a harness that ties around your waist and attaches by rope to a pole at the rear of the pool? Essentially a swimming machine, in the same way that you have a running machine. You simply swim on the spot. If Ken thought it could work, then it couldn’t be crazy. This man was rebuilding a tractor. He’d built the house he was living in. He knew what tool would remove a stubborn leg of a piano and, better still, what that tool was called. Ken knew what was possible and what wasn’t.
‘Trust me,’ I said to Fran, as I made the online payment for the plastic pool. ‘This will work.’
***
The pool arrived a week later, a few days after some of Fran’s family had come to stay: Ted, her dad, and her half-brother Oli and sister Monica, who were ten and thirteen respectively. And her nan. Nan was in her mid- to late eighties (there was some familial dispute as to her definite age, no doubt caused by her own bogus claims to be younger than she actually was), but she was in good physical health. Mentally, she hadn’t fared so well in the last couple of years. Her memory was definitely on the wane, and she regularly told you the same thing over and over again. On her previous visit to see us in London, before we’d moved, she’d informed me about fifty times that she loved travel. The exact words she uttered on each occasion, never with any variation, are indelibly stamped on my brain.
‘I love travel, me. Ed, my husband, he used to come home sometimes and say to me “Do you want to go for a spin in the car?” and do you know? he didn’t need to ask twice. I love travel, me.’
She’d also told me forty times how she’d felt about moving.
‘I never wanted to move to Eastbourne.’
And thirty-five times how she managed her children financially.
‘I always took good care to treat my children equally. If I gave to one, then I always gave to the other.’
Some days I just couldn’t stop myself from being mischievous.
‘Nan, I’ve been wondering lately how you feel about travel?’
‘Oh, I love travel, me. Ed, my husband, he used to come home sometimes and say to me “Do you want to go for a spin in the car?” and do you know? he didn’t need to ask twice. I love travel, me.’
‘How about your children? Did you give more to one than the others?’
‘No. I always took good care to treat my children equally. If I gave to one, then I always gave to the other.’
I’d usually be belted by Fran before I could ask her how she felt about the move to Eastbourne.
As I unpacked the pool and spread it out in the garden, Nan went momentarily off-script.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going to inflate this pool, fill it with water, and then try out the Hawks Harness.’
‘I see.’
Poor Nan. She spent most of her day pretending to ‘see’ what she clearly didn’t ‘see’, and had no way of differentiating between what was straightforward information, and what was downright confusing. However, on this occasion, given that no one in the family had grasped the concept of the Hawks Harness (only Ken and I had so far shown the intellectual capacity), then she could hardly be expected to ‘see’. She claimed that she did though, which made her unique in the house.
If ‘seeing’ meant ‘watching’, then she was excelling. She had great fun observing me as I stretched out the blue plastic onto the lawn, attached the hosepipe, and began filling the pool. I had not gone top of the range. I’d spent about £90 on a circular kids’ pool, twelve feet in diameter. It would be enough to establish whether my idea would work. As Nan and I watched the pool filling with water, I could see sceptical faces inside the house, observing from the kitchen window.
Swimming pools, even tiny ones, take a long time to fill. By the time the water had reached the required level, I was so magnificently aware that Nan liked to travel, that she treated her children equally, and that she hadn’t wanted to move to Eastbourne, that only a combination of family loyalty and a lack of suitable implements had prevented me from hoisting her in to see if she floated.
