Travaux par aspiration was the slogan on the lorry. Doing building work with a vacuum cleaner. The noise was colossal and the trench long as this vast machine sucked up rocks, slabs of concrete the size of a diner plate, along with all the sand and gravel under the pavement. It left a clean trench, a metre deep for some 30 metres under our kitchen window, done and dusted in the morning of the last working day in July and with only three people on site.
My first paid employment meant digging in the stone and clay of a Chiltern valley. The flints refused to give way under my pickaxe. The knack of swinging it so the point fell with the fullest force possible just where I intended, took several days of training by the lads from Connemara.
You could tell them a mile off by the cut of their hair, their tweed jackets and steady pace of bodies whose assigned function in the economy of the time was to dig into the earth, whether it was the peat of their homeland or the hoggin of the Thames Basin. Between themselves the talk was in a soft, lilting language that switched to English when instructing me in how to make, or rather craft their tea.
