ILLUSTRATIONS BY CLARA NICOLL
In September 1960, before going to university, I got three weeks of work experience as a (so-called) carpenter’s mate through one of the players in my father’s cricket club, who worked as amanager on the job. The site was exceptional—Marlborough House in St James’s, where the Queen Mother had lived until her death in 1953. It was being renovated in preparation for a lease to the Commonwealth Secretariat, as is still the arrangement today.
The carpenters who worked on the house were of two types. The older, tradeunion craftsmen did delicate work, slowly, steadily and skilfully repairing the sash windows in the grand reception rooms. They were conscious of hard-won rights and requirements—long apprenticeships, tea breaks, lunch breaks, pay rates that recognised seniority. They moaned as steadily as they worked, in drab London accents, much of it sotto voce. The other group were young men from Barbados, animated, energetic, patois-speaking. Predictably, the trade unionists had little time for them, contemptuous of their having, they intoned, recently arrived off a boat “untrained, with a hammer and a saw in a paper bag”. The Bajans were given minor, routine jobs. I remember standing around “helping” them put up a false ceiling in a side-room; they swarmed over the ceiling, animatedly talking in what was to me an incomprehensible accent. They were fun. Both sets of carpenters were in their own ways kind to, or at least tolerant of, me.
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