AN INDEPENDENT REMEMBERS


IT WAS TIME TO LEARN SOME PRACTICAL SKILLS


Welding, Silexine and dreams of expansion... Part 11 of Graham Higson’s shop-floor memories E of


x-bank clerk turned super hardware man? Hmmm, not quite, but you can bet your life I was working


on it. My latent hardware skills were beginning to show signs of awakening, or whatever it is they do when they’ve been as dead as a doorknob with a broken spring. I had plans for expansion, and had sneakily taken it upon myself to ease the way forward to converting the cutting shop, where the boss also parked his car, into a walk- round store.


lustrous white paintwork, long rows


stock-filled


masses of fluorescent lighting, and manufacturers’ reps begging us to take their branded display stands, with me explaining they would only spoil the look of our gleaming new premises. Silly, I know.


The fast lane … to rot and ruin In the 1970s cars weren’t how they are today; they used to rot pretty quickly, especially British ones. The Germans had made a bullet-proof Mercedes, yet we couldn’t even make a car that was rust-proof. The boss’s new-ish Vauxhall was a fast car but only in the speed at which its bodywork was rapidly turning to dust. Its front end had big holes, edged with pastry-like flakes, through which you could see the wheels.


When again I mentioned that the floor space was big enough for a large shop, he seemed to buckle – or so I thought. “Look here,” he said, standing close, with his finger tapping my chest, “I know what you’re wanting to do with this place, and I can see that we might need to go down that road, especially with this damned recession. But there’s my car sitting there with its front wings needing a bit of work, and this is the only place big enough to do it in.” He’d taken it to a garage where they suggested he scrap it, yet it wasn’t all that old. I asked how he was going to fix it. The new wings


could be bolted on, he www.diyweek.net


I had dreams about gondolas,


said. Fair enough, I thought, then looked under the bonnet and wondered what he imagined they could actually be bolted to – because there was nothing there. “You


know that


woman you’re going with,” he said. Hmmm, where was this going? I wondered. I told him that she was more of a girlfriend. He


disagreed


mentioned father was


that


and her


a motor


engineer. “Oh, so you want me to ask if he’ll do the job?” He laughed never a good sign. “No. When you’re as useless as you are, it’s time to acquire some practical skills,” which sounded good to me, “so I want you to learn how to weld and then you can fix it up.”


The very oak joiner’s bench, which I purloined around 30 years ago. It is so heavy I thought it better to build the new shed around it.


A serious vice Upstairs was a large workshop area where there was an oak woodworker’s bench with a massive vice that opened to around 12 inches, so quite a beast. This bench was where the boss made wooden pelmets that were used to cover curtain rails. The pre-formed shaped hardboard


fronts were


meant to represent the folds in the fabric of the posh appointments that they emulated. These were neatly arranged in piles in one of the attic rooms. To my mind they were about as out of date as a tube of opened superglue and I found it hard to believe that people still wanted these in the 1970s, let alone in the early-80s, yet every week we had a steady stream of orders for them. A pair of doors opened out over the street, from which the traditional timber wholesaler would slide the long lengths of redwood timber straight inside from the lorry


bed. The aroma of that stuff was amazing; new timber hasn’t smelled as good as that now for over 30 years – well, maybe it does in the US, where they know how to grow lumber and where seasoning takes far


longer than a weekend. But


that’s another story. UK timber is so damp it’s a good job it isn’t sold by weight or there’d be no end of complaints.


Eat your heart out, Dulux dog This room is where I discovered around 50 cans of paint – all by Silexine, with plain labels, unlike the Magicote and Dulux of the time. There was also a box of crinkled leaflets (the roof leaked), colour charts, and a newspaper printing block – the type of thing (did you see what I did there?) that had fascinated me since I was at school. It included a dot-type photograph that could be viewed only by rubbing the boss’s inkpad over it and printing on some of the old


wrapping paper to reveal a photo of Tessa, the alluring Silexine girl, not necessarily topless but certainly strapless to give the impression that she was. This must be what they thought would get blokes painting away at the weekend – how times have changed. I thought she looked a bit like Linda Thorson from The Avengers TV series (and who, incidentally, my son worked with on Emmerdale around 40 years later).


Back in the ‘60s the boss had used the advert block in the local paper, where they had botched it by leaving in a line of removable text that said, “Your company name goes here”. I rather think that Tessa may have been to blame. Anyhow, the paint hadn’t sold, was pretty old, and so I used it to completely redecorate and brighten the old part of the shop – a means of preparing the public for the changes that were to follow, just so long as I could learn to weld…


14 APRIL 2017 DIY WEEK 19


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