2006 Reading


One day driving through London my dad said, “your grandfather built the public conveniences at Shepherds Bush.” At fourteen this was all I knew about my grandfather who died the year I was born.

Intrigued I descended the concrete steps from the street into a damp, echoing netherworld rank with the smells and sounds of bodily functions.

I pointed percy at the porcelain and looked around. Men lurked in the shadows. This was not a place to linger even to admire grandfather’s handiwork. Just get the job done and relieve yourself, get out of there as quickly as I can without soiling myself. Breathe through your mouth to avoid the miasma leaking from under the wooden door of each stall. Then, bound up the stairs out to the fresh carbon monoxide of Shepherds Bush roundabout.

I had failed the eleven-plus examination. In England, that meant I went on to a secondary modern school instead of a grammar school; that meant I stayed with the working class kids rather than with the middle class children; that meant I would get a job working with my hands rather than at a desk. My parents being good working class had wanted me to go to the secondary modern even if I had passed the eleven-plus. So I went to Abbotsfield Secondary Modern, Hillingdon, Middlesex.

Abbotsfield had a vocational bias, and at age thirteen I took the building course – with classes in building construction, technical drawing, brickwork, carpentry and plumbing. At fourteen I specialized in my best subject, that was plumbing.

Each day I would go to learn the rudiments of plumbing with diminutive form-master “Mini” Martin. In a drafty workshop replete with tools arrayed on the wall and black metal cylinders reeking of noxious gases, I learnt the intricacies of fashioning wooden pegs, filling a length of copper pipe with sand and plugging each end with the wooden pegs, heating the pipe and then bending it. The sand under pressure prevented the pipe from buckling. In the real world of plumbing, copper pipes are bent with a special flexible steel wire snake that fits inside the pipe to prevent buckling of the soft copper.
I learnt the subtleties of shaping sheets of malleable lead into flashings using special wooden tools to beat the lead into shape without ever cutting. It was great fun but not much use in the real world of plumbing in the 1960’s. But I wanted to be a plumber – “have a trade” as my parents said. I was good at it.

But I got in with a bad lot who encouraged me to go on to Nottingham University. I became the first from my school and from my family to go to university and I left plumbing behind.

Ten years ago my dad died and left me an untidy pile of old black and white photographs and some crumpled certificates: birth, marriage, death. Curious I sorted through. I found the marriage certificate of my grandfather Arthur Charles – whose occupation was listed as a jobbing plumber. It also cited his father - David Henry - and listed his occupation as Master Plumber. I pulled the 1901 census record for David Henry and found all the males in the household - David Henry, my great grandfather, David Edgar, my great uncle, and Arthur Charles my grandfather - were listed as plumbers of one sort or the other. I came from a family of plumbers.

Three years ago I moved to San Francisco and started to manage a 1929 Spanish revival style apartment building. I do repairs in the apartments, I change washers, fix toilets, fix kitchen sinks. I do plumbing, the family profession.

But lately I came to the realization I just don’t have the patience nor the skill to be a plumber. Perhaps that is why my dad never went into plumbing. I am a writer who tells stories – part memoir, part fiction.

© 2006 Keith David Cooley