Three Dont Tango 15

I am struggling with drawings. We have no money so I must do everything myself. We can't afford builders. We can't afford an architect. Everything has to be DIY. I draw out sizes of rooms on the lawn, and hedge them round with sticks, then I sit on chairs inside these structures, and walk from one to the other. Of course it is all rather silly because without walls stopping the view it is difficult to come to grips with the supposed size of a room.
However, eventually I am satisfied that my ideal home is now represented by the bricks and sticks spread across the lawn, and I draw up the final plans on special paper and have dyelines made and sent to the planning department of the local council.
I have given up my job at the nursery. I now work on someone else's garden three days a week for a better wage, so I now have four days a week I can spend doing the building.
So here I am standing in my garden. I start by measuring out the site, and squaring the corners. Then I dig a trench three quarters of a metre deep, and half a metre wide for the foundations. I spend two days working non-stop hacking at the clay with my spade. The clay is mixed with stone and my wrists begin to crack up with the constant chopping action with the spade. My fingers are blistered, and my palms are salmon red.
At the end of two days there are great wads of bandages round my hands, and my wrists are bandaged too to give them support, and I have grown a strange lump at the base of my left thumb.
A man from the council comes out and looks at the trench, measures its depth, and goes away again. I ring the quarry. They bring something they call 'dust'. It is crushed stones, dug out of the mendips, and sieved through a sixteenth of an inch grating. This stuff is used locally instead of sand. I ring the quarry and order concrete blocks, and ash breeze blocks. I ring another quarry and order reconstructed Bath stone bonded to a concrete block base.
The sloping garden has been altered. I dig the top soil off and pile it to one side. I dig down layer through layer of thick stone-filled clay. I am terracing the garden. I return the top soil. The excess clay I put in my barrow which I wheel  across the garden, along the front of the house, and up the bank at the side of the house, through the wood, and tip it into the shafts of the ruins of the old ironworks.
Ten barrow loads I take up every morning. I then get on with another job, but return to do five barrow-loads in the afternoon, and a further three in the evening.
My hands are dropping to pieces. I wear soft woollen gloves, but they are not enough. I wrap cloth around the handles of the barrow. That isn't enough either. My hands are still raw and red. I put leather gloves over the wool. My body is pulled, my arms stretched, and I get terribly thin. Inside my head a demon drives me to rush the hill with as full a barrow as possible. I must finish shifting earth. I must get it all done. I must be able to sit in my finished garden and relax, and bathe my hands in cool, cool water. Instead I push and dig like one demented.
Mel and Emma Jane come to visit. They sit about and talk. They are soft and white and flabby, and lazy and indolent, and useless. But I have my quota to finish, and more the next day, and the demon in my head drives me on and on. My head begins to ache, and a tough resentment grows inside me. I go indoors and am surly and shout because I am sweating myself to death while they sit drinking tea in front of the fire.
"What's the matter with him?"
"He's in a bad mood."
"He's always in a bad mood."
"He works too hard."
"Well, why doesn't he stop for a bit and come and sit down?"
Sit down. Yes, I could sit down, but there's all that bloody earth to shift, and I've got to get it done so I can have the footings in before the winter comes, otherwise it will mean I shall have to work all summer, and I don't want to work all summer.
I am out the door again having drunk a hurried cup of tea, and it is the resentment and the pains in my head that drive the next four barrowloads up the soggy track. I heave and grunt and push like some stupid pig-headed idiot. I slip on the muddy path. I fall, and catch my lip against the back of the barrow. It bleeds copiously. There are tears just behind my eyes. I keep muttering to myself: nearly there, nearly there. And my hands hurt so much I concentrate on my hurting feet instead.
I buy bags of cement and put them in the back of the car. I go to the library to learn how to mix cement, and how to lay bricks, and then I buy a spirit level and a trowel.
Two rows of concrete blocks two high; a roll of damp proof course on top, and the walls are up to ground level, which means the man from the planning department can come round for another look. I am beginning to get pleased. The building is growing. It is actually there for all to see. We can stand in one of the spaces and say 'This is the drawing room'.
I go back to work for a couple of days, enough to earn some money to buy more cement. I build my first corner which consists of about a square metre of blocks faced by the reconstructed Bath stone. Annabel takes a photograph of it. Our house is growing.
The woodland is also beginning to take shape. My barrow-loads of earth are at last filling up the old factory buildings. The stone walls, and the garage walls have all been taken up the track and tipped down the holes into the underground rooms of the old factory. The place no longer looks anything remotely like an iron foundry. No-one would have dreamed that here, in this very garden a hundred years ago, in fact seventy years ago, there were men busy making scythes, bill-hooks, spears, and various metal implements for the farmer, and all kinds of weapons for our soldiers overseas.
At the back of the house is a large solid structure which had been the kiln. I take the pick to it, and gradually ease out the bricks which are set four deep all round the sides. There are nuggets of metal dried into them where the molten ore has trickled down. The circular shape of the inside becomes apparent as we dig down. The bed of the boiler however is too thick for me to shift. I throw the pick away. "Annabel. that's it, I've had enough."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"That," I point at it, "is my rockery."
"Ummm. But you've made a rockery at the edge of the lawn."
"We can look at the rock plants from the new kitchen window."
Annabel smiled.
It wasn't exactly the Annabel smile that made everything worth while. There was an obsession which needed to be satisfied. I had never realised I was full of such foolishness. Until I moved to this hamlet in the depths of Somerset I had been a lackadaisical lad with no rampant obsessions at all. I had uncovered a demon which rose and drove me from some depths I couldn't reach. I had allowed this demon to take control.
Now and again I would stop, look at my hands, and feel my aching back, and lift my feet from the thick mud. I should stop. I should go in and sit by the fire. I should go and cuddle Annabel.
The demon scowled. My face set. I didn't think twice. I redoubled my efforts. I strained, and my will power forced me on relentlessly with a form of madness. I was a man possessed. I would show my body I was in control, and that it took orders from my will, and that I did not stop just because the body complained and started falling apart. I would go on till the job was finished. I even had to do things twice as fast the more tired I got.
I came in dirty, my head aching with the struggle. I sat gingerly on the settee. My back ached, my legs were sore. My feet were so painful that Annabel had to gently coax off my boots. My hands were so sore I could hardly hold a knife and fork so I had to wear gloves while eating to protect my raw flesh. I fell into bed. In short I started destroying myself.
I had chosen a way of life. I despised it, but I would prove I could win through. I was building our dream home where we would live happily ever after. The ground would be terraced, and the flowers would grow in abundance. The white garden would shine like starched paper in the summer moonlight. The night scented stocks would waft their fragrance through our open bedroom windows, and the pink roses would climb their way up the wall, and wave on long fronds above the sills so we could reach out and smell their gorgeous scent. The wistaria would trail out across the pergola, and the long lavender-coloured racemes would dangle down towards us as we sat in the spring sunshine eating our breakfast, as the bees hummed and buzzed in and out of the wall, and I would be able to retire by the age of thirty, and I would then be able to live in idle luxury doing all the things I wanted to do. I wouldn't have to sweat my guts to pieces ever again, and I was going to do it. Yes, I was bloody well going to do it! And I grunted and sweated my way towards that absurd finality.
I went to sleep. I got up again. I went to work. I got my pay. I went to the builders merchants. I bought materials. I went to bed. I got up. I started laying blocks. I balanced windows on the blocks. I built round them. The walls reached up. They actually began to block in space. I could see the building start to take shape. I was winning. My obsession was forcing my dream to come true.

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