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Sport 10: Autumn 1993

2

page 94

2

My father bought a concrete mixer. Originally it was hand driven, but he attached a small electric motor to it and a belt drove the large wheel. The concrete mixer was a noisy beast. It clanked when turning empty and when full would go kershuffle slide kershuffle slide kershuffle slide. My father would swing shovel-load after shovel-load of premix into its gaping mouth with an easy rhythm and each shovel-load would thwack drily and clatter. Then he would add a slurping bucket of water and the mix would splash and splodge. As the big wheel was driven it in turn drove the small gear wheel and I would look at the remorselessness of the black greasy cogs and fear for my fingers.

The long black flex snaked away from the motor towards the transformer.

'Be careful,' my father would say. 'There's enough juice in there to knock you into kingdom come!'

Outside, except on the coldest days my father never wore a shirt. Only a white singlet which quickly became grubby. His face would brown and his shoulders would turn brick red, then peel, blotch and freckle. When he washed up and took his singlet off, the white outline of the singlet remained.

Dump trucks backed down the steep drive delivering yards of premix. Their steel trays would be prised up and up and then with a scraping clatter the load would give way to the inevitable and slide out: a perfect mountain of sand and small stones which over the next few weekends would be fed remorselessly into the rotating mouth of the concrete mixer.

My father loved concreting. He had laid down the drive. He had laid down paths. Pads. He liked making the boxing. The angles. Curving corners. Strengthening the pressure points. Pegging. Buttressing. Getting everything perfect with a spirit level, a plumbline and string.

Most of all he loved finishing. Screeding the surfaces. Troweling. Heating. Getting a fine plaster on the surface. Planting a lucky penny. The cement would be delivered by Lofty Trelawney, the carrier. He was a nuggety little man with huge forearms and broad shoulders. He would back down the drive in his huge truck as if it were a Morris Minor. He would pull on the brakes, jump out of the driver's seat, and vault into the back of his truck. Then he would jump from the back of his truck with a bag of page 95 cement under each arm. He would do this five or six times until the cement was delivered. Two hundredweight each time.

My father would lean on his shovel and grin in admiration. Then Lofty would roll a cigarette, take his money, and roar away.

I was pretty impressed myself. All the same I had no doubt my father could jump huge distances with a bag of cement under each arm. He was bigger than Lofty Trelawney, anyway.