22/8/01: character-clip: T.H., Bricklayer.(Literature)(Critical Essay)

WE HAVE HAD "Old Tom" back to cement-render the outside walls of the dining room. Massive, white haired, square-jawed, and the long face of a druid, he still hefts his barrowloads of cement, shovels, sand and lime into the mixer, lifts cement bags, for all that he must be over seventy.

When he arrived a couple of years ago to build my workshop, I went out at 7 a.m. and offered him coffee. He could have simply accepted. Instead, in his marvellous Welsh tones he pronounced, "Alan, you have fired an arrow and hit me in the very heart of my sentiments!" He twinkles with rascality and eloquence. Of D our builder, a genial fellow but close in money matters, I observed to Tom flippantly one day as D kicked stones on the site, inspecting it, "Did you know, Tom, that D has offered to do the job for nothing?" At this information the Welshman's face grew very long, and he responded gravely. "Alan, the man is a phil-an-throp-ist," and the entire muscular structure of his visage was co-opted for the expressive power the word philanthropist apparently needed for its meaning to be felt. Then, like a stylised television comic, he slapped his knee and grinned broadly.

"Old Tom's a one for the books," D the builder will acknowledge respectfully.

Tom watches the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire television show, and today at morning tea was much put out by a woman contestant in a recent show who having already won a tidy sum, insisted on answering a question for which she did not know the answer. "Stupid woman," Tom's Easter Island face worked around this loss of opportunity. Then turning on me fiercely, he exclaimed as though her loss had been his own, "She should have taken the money and run like a thief in the night," and in case I had not grasped the point, he repeated, "... like a thief in the night!"

I learned his father was killed at Dunkirk, and, one of five children, he was brought up by his mother. He has a daughter in America, where he has worked. I have not met his short Filipina wife, though D in his equally musical Somerset accent gleefully recounts how she is ...