Ten Tales Tall and True Read Free Page B

and speed of the result. Together these amazements stopped him feeling very happy or very angry. But he liked Joe so the unfairness puzzled him.
    â€œAre you sure he doesnae ever want ye back Joe? I never heard him say so.”
    â€œThen you need your ears washed.”
    â€œBut that cannae be right, Joe! I’ve got more muscle than you but I havenae the head yet – the skill. That’s why Mick keeps pairing us. If I’m working just by myself I won’t do so much because I’ll need to keep stopping to think.” “Too true!” said Joe, “Stoddart is stupider than he knows, but he’s a boss so nobody can put him right. In a week or two when he sees you arenae doing as well as you did today he’ll think you’vestarted slacking so give you the heave and get in someone else. Or maybe no! If ye arrive ten minutes early every day, and work your guts out till he tells ye to stop, and if you take a five minutes tea-break or none at all when the housekeeper forgets ye – well, if ye sweat enough at showing you’re a boss’s man he’ll maybe keep ye.”
    Joe climbed over the fence and went up the embankment by a path slanting through willow herb and the young navvy followed, his confused feelings tinged by distress. Joe led him across three sets of railway lines to a gap in a fence of upright railway sleepers. They were now in a broad, unpeopled street between old warehouses. “What should I do Joe?” asked the youngest navvy. He was not answered, so said it again. After a long silence Joe suddenly said, “Get out of this into civil engineering, son. No bastard can own you in civil engineering because ye travel all over. Highland power stations, motorways in the Midlands, reservoirs in Wales – if ye tire of one job ye just collect your jotters and wages, clear out the same day and go to another. Naebody minds. No questions asked. And the money, the overtime is phenomenal. Once at Loch Sloy I worked a forty-eight hour stint – forty-eight hours with the usual breaks of course, but I was on the job the whole time without one wink of sleep. Someone bet me I couldnae but I could and I did. Civil engineering is the life, son, for folk like you andme. Of course most of the money goes on booze and betting, there’s nothing much else to do with it. Some keep a wife and weans on the money but why bother? Ye only get to see them one week in six maybe. Family life is a con, a bloody imposition. Not that I’m advocating prostitutes! Keep clear of all women, son, is my advice to you: if they don’t give you weans they’ll give you some other disease. Chuck Stoddart and go into civil engineering. It’s the only life for a man while he has his strength. That’s what I did and I’ve never regretted it.”
    Joe seldom said more than one sentence at a time so the young navvy brooded over this speech. Booze, betting and prostitutes did not attract him. He wanted to hurl himself through the air toward any target he chose, going faster than a mile a minute with maybe a girl clinging on a pillion behind. But a good bike cost nearly £400. After paying his people two thirds of his weekly earnings in return for the home and services he had enjoyed since infancy, about £4 remained which (despite his intentions of saving £3 a week) seemed always to get eaten up by tram, café, cinema, dancehall, football, haircut and clothes expenses – he had begun to like dressing well on his few nights out. But if he worked on a big civil engineering job in the Highlands, and did all the twelve or sixteen hour shifts his strength allowed, and slept and ate cheaply in a workers’ hostel, andpaid his people a few shillings a week till he felt like returning, he might earn enough to buy a good bike in less than a year. Then the neglected Honda in the boss’s tool-shed came to mind, and Stoddart’s words A neglected tool is a