SHEDS
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It’s 1958.
He’s 20.
It's the year he gets married, when they
move in with his wife’s widowed grandmother in an inner suburb and rent two
rooms from her. It’s an old stone place at the rear of a main street shop, and
the backyard’s only big enough for a clothesline and an apricot tree.
There’s a geriatric lean-to against the end
fence but inside it’s fingertip to fingertip wide and about twice as long.
There’s no windows and the roof touches his head. It’s half full of firewood,
rotted bags of decayed almonds, musty stuff from the past. In no known universe
would he consider this a Shed. Whether it’s a farmyard three-sider with walls
of stacked mallee roots and a brush roof, or a full brick double with an
electric roller door in pastel shades, a Shed is a state of mind, the place
where a man can go to make what he can make, and fix what he can fix. And,
perchance, to dream.
His dreams are of one day building a car,
of playing with engine parts, creating life. But he’s still an evolving human
being, caught somewhere between Homo habilis (man the toolmaker), and Homo
sapiens (man the thinker), but he doesn’t really know that yet. Evolution
takes time.
He has a clutch of hand tools – saw, claw
hammer, screwdriver, chisel – that were bestowed on him when he was fourteen,
when his stepfather buggered off and his elder brother remained steadfastly
invisible, and to his dismay he was designated “The Man Of The House”, and it
was in this way that Fate made him a Home Handyman, as those tools were for
fixing cupboard doors, hanging pictures, lining unfinished sleepouts.
But he has some other tools, from when he
went off to be an Engineer, tools he made in the first year of his
apprenticeship, amid the gritty grotty clunk and clamour of the railways, in
the last days of steam. These are robust tools, for the crafting and machining
of metals – hacksaw, square, scribing block, G-clamps, drill clamps, inside and
outside callipers. He also has tools added by choice – tinsnips, files, pliers,
a breast drill, and an assortment of spanners. He quickly found that it was the
spanners he liked best, the feel of them in his hands.
But after eighteen months in their rented
rooms he still has nowhere at hand to forge his dreams, so he borrows his
mate’s shed, makes his son a push-along 1932 V8 roadster hot-rod, from scraps
of masonite and bits of packing crate, solders up flattened-out fruit cans for
the engine, uses Sellotape containers for the air filters and a pair of
aluminium cake tins for the rocker covers. The only things he buys are a couple
of pieces of steel to fabricate the steering, and the four wheels. It has no
inner life, but it’s a car, of sorts. With no shed he can call his own this is
as far as his dreams will stretch.
But he improvises.
He strips the head off the family car, does
it out in the street, and even though it probably doesn’t need it, he gives it
a meticulous decoke and valve grind, on the kitchen table. He imagines the car
runs better, but this is really only for his hands, his restless hands, so
they’ll feel a degree of purpose. While he waits.
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It’s 1962.
He’s 24.
They’re in their Housing Trust maisonette
in a crap suburb, but it has a big backyard. He buys a basic steel garage kit
and puts it up at the end of the driveway, makes a workbench from an old door.
He buys a substantial vice. With a great
deal of satisfaction he bolts it to his makeshift workbench. He will have this
vice for the rest of his days, as a bench vice above all things, is the
ultimate symbol of making and fixing. He scabs a couple of packing crates, fits
shelves, starts collecting stuff. There is a sense of arrival, and as his first
bold move, he buys an arc welder, and a Black & Decker quarter inch
electric drill, the cheapest on the market. The drill will never live up to
what he asks of it.
He converts his son’s street rod from
push-along to pedal power. He still believes that any son of his will
undoubtably be as fired by internal combustion and dreams of wheels as he is.
He has a long journey ahead towards Wisdom.
At night, at the kitchen table, he designs
a two door sports coupe, tube frame, sleek fibreglass body that looks a touch
Italian. It will never get off the sheet of paper.
But he inherits the wreck of a 1952 Singer
SM 1500cc sports car. It’s resplendent with potential. He cuts, he welds, he
truncates, he drills, he fashions, his hands shaping another dream in his head,
and eventually it becomes a pale representation of a 1926 T-model ‘bucket’
street rod. Sort of.
He drives it around a few times, enters it
in a club meet once or twice, races it against the clock, where parts of
seconds are a measure of tuning cause-and-effect, feels the engineering,
especially in its ability to corner like a roller skate, and for a while he
revels in the brief joy of a thing that he’s created.
He tells himself he feels a pang of loss
when he does the grownup thing and sells it to add to their home deposit fund,
but it will be many years before he evolves enough to realise it was simply a thing
of a time, and also that it’s actually the making his hands need, and not the
using.
© T. R. E. 2024
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