Dermot - A Memoir

"You understand it Shane. You're a working man. A good worker makes everything on the site run smoothly. And they call it unskilled labour." Old Dermot paced his words, a natural rhythm that swung from sincerity to scorn and back.

"People don't know what hard work is any more. In my day - that was in Manchester - it was fourteen hours a day of digging. Digging digging digging, till there was muscles on top of your muscles. Like a workhorse. Not even a horse. At least the horse can keep his neck straight. The horse will not have pains in his back. And what do you think?"

Shane rested on his shovel and listened. He watched the team handing up scaffold tubes to the upper floors. Hand over hand, passing up the shiny aluminium bars. They were too clean and bright, out of place here where the men were all caked in mud and lime dust.

"Tell me," said Shane.

"Agh," he dismissed the toiling horse. "There was a time I worked seven days a week for a full year. That was on groundworks. I used to think anyone a right lazy fecker if they weren't working from eight till five every day. I'd look down on them. What had I at the end of the day only a few shillings more than anyone else. No matter how much you earn, you spend it anyway." Shane laughed and swung his spade with excess energy at the heavy clay. Soon he was again drawn under the calming influence of Dermot's London-tinged Fermanagh accent.

"Maybe they're right, and hard work is only for donkeys and horses. My son now, he stayed at school to the end. The building sites were not for him. Got his A-levels and everything. He put his name down to join the police and they accepted him in. I said to him, look now, it's your own decision and your own life. I have my own opinion on this, but I'm not going to stop you. You'll be well-paid and fair play to you for getting accepted, you did well there, but if you want to join that shower of bastards then go ahead and don't darken this doorstep again.

"So that's what he is now. A bobby." He said it with heart-scalded resignation, as though the brute world held only two choices for a man: to become a labourer or a policeman.

"Someone has to be one," offered Shane. "But did you really never speak to him again?"

"Arragh," Dermot tilted his head in a precise gesture. You know yourself the way it goes. Don't be asking stupid questions.

"So the superintendent gave me a knock at the door," he continued. "Went out of his way to call out to me in Hornsey. In ordinary clothes, not in uniform. - It's only a social visit, he says. I hear you don't like the idea of your son joining the police force. And I said, it's his decision, but the police have never been on the side of the Irishman, nor any other chap be he dark or white from any foreign country. Look at the Birmingham six, says I, what have you to say about them? - Well with people like your son in the force it will prevent that kind of thing from happening again. That's what he said. So do you think they're innocent, says I. - I do think they are, he says, the law will take its course. I think they'll be freed one day. - I'll have no problem with him joining the force when that happens, says I. Now that's not strictly true. I'll still hate that shower of bastards may God forgive me. But the man was nice and polite to me in my own house, what else could I say?"

"He told you he believed the six are innocent? A superintendent of the British police force said that?"

"He did. But what of it? Sure he'll tell no-one else. He'll keep that a secret. They might all believe they're innocent, and still not a thing will be done about it."

"The super from what station was it?"

"Finsbury."

"You could invite him back, record what he says with a secret microphone. If this got out in public it would cause a scandal."

Dermot tilted his nose at the sky again. Impatiently he hacked at the ragged edge of the trench. The taut orange twine stood out sharply against the crumbling soil. One heavy rain could turn it all to mud, making it useless for the pourers. There'd need to be a lot more hardcore whacked into the base, Shane was thinking. Maybe they could get a few barrowfuls of broken brick from the site on the adjacent sector. The lorries of readymix were due to arrive in four days time. He would see to it that everything was ready. This building site had become his locus of action. It's in your hands now, the foreman had said, and driven out the gates in his mud-splashed BMW.

"When you look around London now, you must have built a fair part of it," said Shane.

"That I have Shane, that I have," Dermot said, "and more of Manchester. And Bristol too. I wouldn't wish on anybody the hard work that I've done. It's little enough I have from it all. And yourself, would you not go back to the schooling? Get in with the civil service or something. It's tough to be at this crack all your life."

"Arrgh," Shane spat away the distasteful thought, dug it into the earth with a flick of the spade. "Maybe some time. What's wrong with this kind of work anyway? You seem to get on with it all right. Would you rather be an accountenant and not have to do the hard graft?"

"There's nobody wants to do the hard graft any more. All these educated people who don't know what hard work is. Earning money for having a degree. They lose touch with all reality. They've no more idea of sweating to earn a shilling than a puppy in a fecking - in a fecking box of wood shavings." Words failed him temporarily. "Farts in the wind is all they are."

"That's right Dermot, that's right." There is a thin line between being respectful and humouring someone. Shane wasn't sure on which side he stood.

"Soon there'll be no more need of hard work in the world, and there'll be no more like us. None like you and young Maurice coming over to dig trenches and carry hods."

"I don't know about that. It seems to me there'll always have to be somebody to do the hard work. Even in a hundred years time, there'll still be hard work."

"You might be right. Even if people are walking around full of computers, there's going to be some poor chap who has to bend and lift from morning to night."

"There are worse things than hard work."

"Many's the worse thing. But better or worse, I'll be carrying on at this crack a while yet. Do you know, after working with Byrnes' for twenty years they said to me, 'Dermot, you're in charge of these ten men now. You're the gangerman.' I didn't ask for the job, nor no notion of asking. They just said there you are, you're the boss now. Sure I could only stick it a few days. I can't tell another man what to do. I can't order them around. Could you?"

Shane straightened his back and looked at the scaffolders bolting on the irons. "No, not directly."

"Well I'm no good at it, telling another man he's late or that he should throw away his cigarette." They gripped their spades and hacked further into the clay, a heavy gritty soil that was nothing like any farmer would plant a crop in. This was city earth, the detritus of centuries tramped down hard under thousands of feet.

"That's an awful man that foreman," breathed Dermot as he put his weight behind the spade. "Puts us here on the site and says he'll be back by next Monday or Tuesday. We could be all sitting in The Crown for all he knows."

"And yet everybody's working on just the same," said Shane.

"True enough. Better off to fuck without him. I never saw a foreman yet that was use for anything except scratching his arse."

Shane looked up and down at the empty concrete shell. The building was a skelton, exposed bones on which to hang a place to live. The scaffolders were finishing off, leaving a space-age structure of silver bars bolted on to one side. When they tapped the irons with their clawless hammers the noise rang hollowly up and down the tubes.

Maurice stood on the exposed third floor. Three concrete walls around him, the fourth open to the sky. Rigged out with goggles, dust-mask, and helmet, he stood rigid, pressing hard behind the machine in his arms. It shrieked and tore into the wall. Shrouds of dust obscured him, growing thick and thicker until it settled in streaking tide marks. Currents of air from the motor swept it into lines. Then laying down the heavy drill, he walked to the edge to catch a breath of air; a white demon dedicated to pulverising concrete.

Now he slammed the flat bit into the Kango. The protruding runs of concrete at the pillar base flew away in shrapnel beneath the chisel head. He was getting good at this. Sweat trickled down his face. His bushy eyebrows were caked in moist grit. Holding one nostril, he blew forcibly to eject a plug of dust and mucous. Tiny scabs of quick-setting concrete clung to his forearm like parasites. His ankles were plastered over from concrete burns where he had jumped in under the gush and steered the pipe to the low points.

Shane tapped him on the back and beat a clenched fist on the air. Maurice spluttered a laugh into his cotton dust mask. He stood up from the work for a moment, and held the Kango, still running, like a weapon.

Shane set to scraping clean the shutter boards, leaving them stacked and ready to use again. He borrowed a drone from the Kango and built a tune around it in his head. Round and round it went. It was a summer of music.

Out on the groundworks Dermot tipped in a barrow of hardcore and levelled off the sides for the pourers. Time for a break. He looked up, but there was no chance of catching the boys' attention.

After regarding it critically for a moment, she crossed the hard ribbed clay with promptness and facility, clasping a handbag under her arm and not looking up again until she reached the patio. There she kicked her shoes smartly but without disgust. Standing lightly on one foot, she undid a strap and shook a stone out. Her arms and face were pale and lightly freckled. Any woman was an exotica on a building site, and Shane and Maurice fairly gaped. She approached them at the water barrel where they were scraping trowels.

"Hello boys," she said familiarly. Her mouth tightened in an odd way, as though she were trying to stop laughing.

"Hello lady," said Shane.

"How are ye," said Maurice.

"Whose site is this?"

"We work for a sub-contractor," answered Shane evasively. It was a habit he'd picked up. Never give your full name nor a straight answer.

"Yes, but which one?"

"We call him Macksers."

She regarded him with her calm blue English eyes. "So you call him Macksers. But does he have a name?"

"Mick"

"You don't give much information, do you? I suppose you don't know anybody called Dermot Feeney?"

"No," said Shane. "Unless you mean . . . There is a worker here called Dermot."

"Dermot! . . . out at the retail unit", said Maurice, puzzled at how he had nothing more to say to identify the man.

"That must be him."

"You want to speak to him?" Shane still hadn't caught on. But she had. She smiled sweetly.

"Tell him someone wants to see him," she said.

"We'll see where he is," they said.

"Bring him back with you."

Shane and Maurice both turned and left her gazing up at their five storeys. "That's one freaky chick," said Mo.

"Did you catch the way she said 'boys'?"

"That means only one thing."

"We all know what that means."

"She had you sussed out in three seconds flat."

Shane acted offended. "Me? What are you talking about? You have to know who you're talking to first. All those questions coming out of her! Who is she? Undercover DSS inspector or what?"

"Man inspector."

"A spy from the foreman."

"Sent to spy on foreskins."

They found Dermot on his hunkers, tapping at a joint with a straight-edged kitchen knife. The damp proof course had been left out in the rush. Now he was cementing in thin strips of black vinyl at the base of the walls, so the inspector would see a protruding black edge and go away happy. A cosmetic operation, Dermot termed it in one of his flights of words. One of the finishing touches to stop the situation from becoming flamboyant.

"Dermot. There's some lady out in the yard to see you."

"A lady?" said Dermot incredulously. Smear, scoop and slap. Again one, two, three. All one movement.

"A woman. She asked for a Dermot."

"Oh aye."

"Would it be your daughter or someone?" asked Shane.

"I'll know when I go out," he muttered, not to be hurried whoever the stranger might be.

Back out in the yard the woman brandished her watch and shook her head. "We can't be late. You know that. You'll just have to go as you are and have a wash at Colum's"

"I will not," said Dermot firmly. "I'll have a shower first. I'll not be two minutes."

The woman snorted impatiently. She seemed strangely familiar to Mo, as though she'd stepped out of some story book. Perhaps it was her accent. She wielded it like a keen weapon. Her accent and her red shoes. The connection between this pale stern English rose and the old labourer seemed remote, incomprehensible to these young workers.

"And if I insisted that you take a shower you'd say 'I'm good enough as I am'. What was it you said the last time? 'It's only Colum, it's not like we're going to see the pope.'" But Dermot was already out of earshot.

The two lads chuckled. She turned her eyes on them again.

"I hope you're not working with asbestos here."

"No, no. There's none of that around here."

"Definitely not," added Maurice with unnecessary emphasis.

"It's dangerous material you know," she said, "And it's been outlawed."

"We use glass fibre slabs. Nothing else."

"Polystyrene too."

"Polystyrene's a totally different thing," said Shane.

She walked to the edge of the concrete and took a few tentative steps towards the building. Their building, block E.

"Who set up that scaffold?" she asked. But they had caught up with her now.

"The scaffolders," they said with one voice, hitting a resonance. She laughed this time.

"Do you always agree with each other?"

"No," said Mo.

"Not at all," said Shane.

"Does Dermot climb up on the scaffold?" she asked, counting off the levels with her eyes.

"Never"

"Not that I've seen."

She appeared to accept this at face value. Shane and Mo exchanged a grin. But she was not finished with them.

"You two should go on some training course. Get a career. You shouldn't spend all your life as labourers."

Out of the blue, came the defeat. By unfair means, but still an utter defeat.

"Yeah, why don't we become stock brokers," said Shane, but his voice slipped into resentment. It emerged from nowhere, surprising even himself.

"We have to get some money together first, and then see what happens," said Mo. It came out like a tired excuse. Yet how could he explain his vision of freedom on a building site?

"There are many opportunities to get on a course. Do you have any Leaving Certificate results? You could get a grant, enroll on a course."

"We're earning good money here," said Maurice.

"I'm sure you are. Every labourer earns good money yet at the end of the day they never seem to have a penny saved up."

"Did you work like on a site yourself or do you just go around giving free advice?" said Shane. It was a sullen attempt at humour. Maurice wished Shane would go away, go somewhere else with his building site heroics, his wild enthusiasm for the work. Pitching in all hands, Red Bull and grapefruit juice, strong black coffee, setting themselves deadlines, working until your muscles glowed. Just for the hell of it; the foreman neither knew nor cared.

"That's their own fault. We're saving up, not drinking it all" said Maurice. "You make it sound like a prison here."

"I never said that," she said. "Why would it be a prison?"

"It's not. I could get a job as a salesman or anything at any time."

Dermot returned, slapping the front of his trousers, his grey wisps swept to one side in a storm wave. His daughter walked ahead of him towards the car. He passed, whispering to them with a nod and a wink. "Don't let that bit of work out the back lying the way it is for all to see. Finish it off well to keep the white hats happy."

Fate, as punishment for his life-long defiance of authority, had taken his son to be a policeman and his daughter to be a teacher.