In the 1970’s and early 80’s I worked as a building site labourer. I dug holes, shovelled sand and cement and bolted steel reinforcing posts into place. My friend Burt had a Triumph Tiger motorbike that leaked oil. I was his pillion passenger and shared the cost of petrol to sites across the country. The last big job we worked on was the St John’s Shopping Centre at Leeds. We were there from when it was a hole in the ground until we installed the rubber ribbed mats that shoppers wiped their feet on as they entered off Dortmund Square on the day it opened. Burt and I mostly worked as a team alongside a young Irish lad called Sean. We ate breakfast in a makeshift canteen, grafted all morning, then supped ale at dinnertime in an old Tetley pub called The Guildford, then grafted some more.

Most of our workmates were older Irish labourers who had come to England seeking work after the war when everything needed rebuilding. They were in their fifties and sixties by then, with beer bellies as well as muscles. They still worked in old suits and waistcoats that had once been Sunday best and never thrown away. There was Eddie from County Mayo who carried a bucket and trowel everywhere he went. He once told me ‘You can’t go wrong with a bucket and a trowel, that way you’ll always look busy when the big fella comes round.’ Another, was known to everybody simply as ‘The Delaney.’ Every morning he came to the canteen and ordered three fried eggs on toast and then sat on his own picking out horses from the racing pages. If you said ‘good morning’ to him or asked him how he was, you always got the same reply ‘The craic is good in Cricklewood.’ I loved that twenty minutes in the canteen before we started work, just listening to stories, old folk wisdom and the occasional song. Seamus from Sligo knew all the Margaret Barry songs off by heart and did lusty takes on ‘She moved Through the Fair’ and ‘The Galway Shawl.’

Back then Leeds was at the beginning of its redevelopment, as it moved to become a destination city for shopping. Yet the old city remained if you cared to look and listen. The old pubs still spilled characters out of their back doors, traders shouted the price of a pound of apples at the market and an old man in a flat cap stood on the corner selling the Evening Post by calling ‘Eeeeeeenin Po,’ in a voice like a corncrake. Occasionally a saxophonist called Xero Slingsby who played a spiky mix of free jazz and punk came to busk in the square. Burt and I used to sit on a scaffold board high up enjoying that sound.

I remained friends with Burt, though neither of us did much shovelling after the job at Leeds was finished. Burt died quite young. I miss him. I went to his funeral and said a few words. I spoke about our time riding through belting down rain to building sites, about how much Burt loved old tap rooms in pubs and about the time we went to see Van Morrison at Nostell Priory Festival. As we came out of the crematorium the sound of Maria Callas singing ‘Un Bel di Vedromo’ came through the speakers. Burt never mentioned a liking for Madame Butterfly when we were having the craic on those building sites.

(Image Credit Allan Wilkinson)