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I write to draw attention to those men taken too much for granted., working underground, in risky and filthy conditions. I include a short story based upon one occasion when I really thought I might drown.

Under Ground Going up pipes, down manholes, through tunnels, into dark dank corners, beneath the sea, beneath roads and ground, deep or shallow, in compressed air or in sludge and sewage, is the lot of the inspection engineer, and those who worked there. I was paranoid of being faced by a cat-sized mother rat protecting her brood, but there was no alternative. Once I had to find out for myself whether an old pipe was still viable after ten years. Holes were opened to air the pipe, a trolley made so I could push my way up it. Off I set, tied to a safety line, in total darkness illuminated by a hand-torch, anticipating the red eyes of Mama Rat like the headlights of a car. There was no rat, I hadn’t really expected there would be, it didn’t make sense, there was no food. A Bricklayer I worked with was badly burned by steam in a sewer when the steam exhaust, from a reciprocating steam engine, was leaked by mistake into the sewer.

The Short Story. I, a bricklayer, have been instructed to examine the main drainage culvert beneath our sleeping city. All afternoon men have been erecting a temporary sluice gate, a stank, to hold back the waters of the whole city which will be collecting as I work. We work at night when the flows are generally low. The heavy timbers are in place, I put on my thigh boots and walk over to the others standing at the gaping manhole in the bright circle of the arc lights. A man steps aside to allow a late traveller to pass quietly by. The black round curves of the car reflecting the gentle activity, before being swallowed up in the mist. Natt steps forward with the lifeline, harness and lamp, and tells me that the sewer has been tested for gas, methane, the killer. Previously a man had passed out at the bottom of a manhole and his colleague, going down to rescue him had died with him. We were now being extra careful. The tightness of the harness gives me confidence, a warm comforting arm around my waist. With my hammer, chisel and lamp I descend the old, dirty and rusty, wrought-iron ladder to the bottom of the shaft. I know the tarry smell of sewers but I have never become accustomed to the loneliness and severance from those above. I stand on the concrete shelf and shine my torch at the almost still grey waters at my feet. A bubble of gas rises to the surface in the light of my lamp to form a grey sinister bulging eye in the viscous liquid and, after surveying sightlessly the round red brick tube garlanded at every projection with the bunting of refuse, bursts silently. I wade through the sticky silt towards the sluice that is holding in check tons of water, slowly rising, behind the timbers, like the shadow of evil. It must not rain!

I have been here some time. I’m tired through the effort of lifting my legs in the sludge of years. I stop and listen to the steady trickle of water through the joints in the temporary barrage. Has the noise increased? No! There are two noises. It must be a small pipe discharging as well. I stop and watch the level of water against the culvert wall with the bricks acting as a gauge, it is not rising. On I go again, tapping to see if the joints are sound, the steel beams are still strong, and trying to guess how long it will all last. Lifting each heavy leg from the clinging slime, easing my bent and aching back, surveying as I go, all the time keeping an ear attuned to the trickling water. I think I hear a creak. My pulse is beating. I must control my imagination. Is the gushing louder?. Before I can reassess the sound, a thunder clap reverberates along the tunnel like a charge along the barrel of a gun and as I stand dumbfounded, for a brief second I hear the torrential rushing of the angry waters freed from their imprisonment. The timbers have cracked. The sluice can no longer hold all the water in check. I turn and drop my tools in frantic flight. I tug the rope, all signals forgotten and feel the tension taken from above. I cannot run, I can barely walk. I can but flounder.. In my haste I splash but I care little if I mouth the water which is rising round my knees. I must take off my boots, but how? Is there time? Now in my haste I have fallen, my torch is lost. Dragged by the rope through the stinking blackness I lose my breath. I struggle once more but now the rushing waters carry me on as the rope never could and tiredness and exhaustion have seeped my will to fight. All is going black. Thank God!

I assume there are as many characters today as there were in the 40’s, but the streets seem more crowded and they don’t stand out like they used to. There was a man with a military style to him, I used to see in front of the Belfast City Hall. Smartly dressed, wearing a trilby and carrying a walking stick, he would suddenly raise his stick like a sword, holler ‘Charge!’ and then obey his own instruction by careering down the pavement , brandishing the sword. As quickly as he started, he would resume his walk as an ordinary passer by. He was a shell-shock victim twenty or so years on. The older trams in Belfast were fitted with bench seats running the full length of the tram, downstairs. Many a night, late on, I was entertained by a small, vigorous 60 – 70 year old who would get on close to Town, and leave near Belfast Castle. When the tram started on the straight stretch, and he would be secure on his feet, he would rise, start singing and then dance up and down the aisle. The trams were almost empty, the passengers were content, so the conductors left him to his routine.

MAC In an office I was in, he was a character of the ‘Old School’ who was very clever but had lost his way some years earlier and now sought solace from a bottle. His natural politeness insisted that whatever he was taking, he could do no less than offer share. When he laced his mid-morning cup of tea he invariably offered a snifter to anyone standing near him when he opened his drawer for the miniature of Irish. This pick-me-up was to tide him over until mid-day when he would go for a serious tipple in the bar nearby. Later in the morning, the temporary shot having run its course, he would hold out a handful of phenol-barbitone, offered like a child would, with dolly-mixtures, for me to take one, yet I never saw him incapable or affected in any way, and he could always be relied upon for the mot juste or a quotation from the classics.

FREDDIE Mac had a friend who also worked with us who was an even greater character, if that were possible. Freddie was also a single man, as many of the Council staff seemed to be, which I put down to the low wages they were paid when they were of marrying age, that and the fun they were having at the time, so, by the time they were financially capable of supporting a family the choice was probably very limited and perhaps they were also more circumspect. Freddie lived with his mother who I suspect still thought of him as a boy, because she would lock him out if he were late home. He was between forty and fifty at this time. He owned a greyhound he referred to in the local vernacular as The Groo. On one occasion he returned home, found himself locked out, so for the night he shared the kennel in the yard with The Groo. On another, he came home the worse for wear, he was partial to Guinness. He looked for something to cure his hangover and when nothing seemed to be to hand he used Bob Martin’s Dog Powders, which apparently did the trick – if he was to be believed. Freddie worked beside a window overlooking Donegal Square. In summer, at lunch time, office workers would come to sit on the grass and sunbathe. Freddie had a mate called Sam and the two of them were talent watchers. One day I joined them. When I saw the age of their choice I couldn’t resist mildly pointing out that my daughter was about that age and there was no way she would look at two old reprobates like them. They aged on the spot. I was unfair, it was a harmless bit of reflection on their part, but life is unfair.

The Odd Day Out. In the early days, skint but happy, our holidays consisted of several rides on Public Transport, to and from some local beach, with a swim and picnic between On one occasion a relative, Jim, accompanied us. He was a tall, ascetic, aesthetic, high church vicar, with an academic view of life in general. His lofty, six foot four inch viewpoint, may have been physical, but it was also part of his psyche, his unconscious conviction that he was part of a breed which should be cherished by all with whom he came in contact – he was definitely odd. It was the twelfth of July, a public holiday when everyone who was not watching the Orange Lodges parading was rushing for the seaside and as the weather was extraordinarily Mediterranean, the beaches were crowded. It was time to go home after a wonderful day. Everyone in Helen’s Bay seemed, to have come to the same conclusion. The station platform was stacked to the wall and a very diminutive Station Master strutted back and forth in front of Jim shouting ‘Keep back from the rails’. Jim was not fond of children generally and certainly not en masse, as we were now experiencing. It was all more than he could bear and he took his frustration out on the poor official. After about a dozen exhortations to ‘Keep back’ Jim lost his cool, looked down upon the bumptious little man from his great height and said in a thin crisp tone, which carried quite some distance. ‘Cease, Pimple!’ Surprisingly, Pimple did, I think he was dumbfounded, he had never experienced anyone before like our Jim, nor any one so rude.

The words ‘Hoke, hoker or hoaker’ do not appear in Chambers Dictionary, but are common in Ulster for the act of or the person acting, in digging with the fingers, hands or a tool in small areas ranging from a rotten tooth to the Town Tip. In ‘Digging For Coal’ the construction of the berms of the airfield extension has been described. When a test hole on one of the berms was dug, it was discovered that there was everything from oil drums, rotting fruit to large slabs of brick and concrete. Further testing using a rock borer, a tool similar to a road drill, to penetrate the berm as a probe, elucidated that all the berms were the same and unsuitable as a foundation for the runway extension. They would have to be excavated totally to 8 to 12 feet deep (2.5-3.5m) and replaced with stone. In those days excavators were less flexible than today, and were based on a single design with different jib and bucket attachments. The one most often chosen to excavate the berms was a ‘Face Shovel’ which dug upwards from the ground with a gouging action along the base of the excavation, thus creating a sort of cliff ahead of itself. This in turn produced overhangs which the operator knocked down, or which fell down unpredictably.

The berm contained waste from the Shipyard, machine and electrical works of every type which meant that the excavated material had a high metal content, including copper, all of which in ’51 was attracting a high scrap value. Hokers, mainly men, arrived, up to ten at a time, to scrabble through the loosened material for the metal, using a home-made raking device and they did their raking as soon as the Digger bucket was just off the ground and swinging to fill a lorry standing near. To anyone responsible, this was heart-stoppingly serious – an imminent accident. No amount of shouting, pleading or swearing had any effect, and the work had to proceed. One of the men on the site was a professional boxer of some local renown. He was approached and it was suggested he should ‘chin. a couple of the hokers to make a point that might have less consequences than the accident about to happen. While he liked the idea, he refused, explaining that his fists were legally categorised as Lethal Weapons, and if used outside the Ring, would more than likely put him in jail. We were then faced with the expense and inconvenience of temporary fencing.

A few weeks later, though, men from the site were playing a scratch, lunch-break football match with the Hanger-men from the airfield when the boxer took exception to one of the opposition, chinned him, and broke his jaw. He lost his job because, although it was on his own time, it was also on the site. I never heard the police were involved, but, clearly, his weapons were lethal.

George Best, Belfast City Airport in 1951,was merely Sydenham Airport, occupied by the Royal Naval Fleet Air Arm, and Short Bros & Harlands as a landing place for planes needing repairs and also testing new aircraft. During WW2 it was the test-bed and the home of the Sunderland Sea Recognisance Plane. It was about 1950 the ill-fated De Havilland Comet, the then new commercial aircraft, was being promoted, and the 05-23 runway at Sydenham selected for strengthening and lengthening to permit it to land. The work had strange and sometimes ridiculous anomalies, such as the Coal Diggers, and The Hokers and The Lethal Weapons,

The Coal Diggers Belfast, along the River Lagan and down the margins of Belfast Lough, is built on alluvial silt from the River, a soft mud known locally as Sleech. For decades, the Harbour Authority, by necessity, dredged the river along the quays and used the dredged material, pumped ashore, to fill areas encased by berms or dykes, which had tide controlled drainage through sluices to the sea. The original airfield was built in this way, and beyond it on the south shoreline, more dykes were built during and especially after the war with tipped material from factories, the Shipyard, some fly-tipping and the remains of the brick and reinforced concrete air raid shelters, which had been built on the corners of some Belfast streets and were removed in the post war years.

In particular, then, coal for the Belfast area was shipped in coasters, up the Lagan to the Coal Quay, beside The Queen’s Bridge ,and there unloaded with clam-shell excavators to the stock-piles. Speed in turn-round being the governing factor, much coal fell between ship and wharf from the clam-buckets, as they swung away from the ship, the coal to be dredged later. In the dyke areas were long lengths of very large steel piping through which the dredged material, in liquid form, was pumped to the dykes, filling the areas during the dredging periods. When the pumps were sending the sleech ashore, one could hear the rattle of the coal in the pipes as it too was being pumped. So, the filled area was rich in coal of a size suitable for the grate. I have always regretted not having a camera on those dark, winter evenings, with the sun setting and dark clouds looming, when the Dykes were like a Dickensian scene. Men, women, and children, were standing knee-deep in the slime, black to the elbows, rummaging for coal, filling sacks and wheeling their booty away in decrepit prams.

I often refer to myself as an idiot, because I have been one on many occasions, and because I have that sort of sense of humour. But eating wine glasses? I was a mature student, and so found some of the practices of the other students a little eccentric. We had an extrovert in our rowing club who, for a substantial bet, subscribed to generally, would actually chew wine tumblers in our local bar. No matter how closely I looked, I couldn’t see how he avoided getting cut. I was convinced he palmed the glass and munched something noisy like nutty brittle – if he did, the guys betting him were the nutty ones!

The Battle Of The Officers In 1950, post war, men had returned to jobs, others who should have retired were still in office, the slow deliberate attitudes of the thirties were being stretched, so there was change in the air and the archaic mores were being challenged by circumstance. An amusing confrontation demonstrated this metamorphosis. Barnes, unqualified, held a lowly position in a Design Office. During the war, he had been promoted to acting Lieutenant Colonel on the battlefield, later confirmed; at the other end of the age range was a veteran of the First World War, Masterson, demobbed in 1918 with the rank of Captain. Masterson was a blimp-like character, senior member of staff, the scourge of us all, and hid his inadequacies behind his regimental tie Barnes, was a lig, a character, a comedian, one who took life as he found it and would rise no higher. Masterson paraded round the office maintaining discipline, ostensibly checking work, although I don’t recall him ever being asked for his opinion, a sort of policeman. When he approached, those near Barnes would say ‘Colonel, the Captain’s coming,’ and there would then be, soto voce, derisory chuckles. The whole thing came to a head when another lig, the office was full of them, put a notice to the effect that Colonel Barnes was to go to see Captain Masterson True in detail, as Masterson was indeed looking for Barnes, but unwise in execution. Masterson in one of his circulatory perambulations saw the sign, he could hardly not have, it was the size of a tea tray and intended that none should miss it. The joker, though, had stretched what little humour Masterson had beyond its limit and the Colonel bore the brunt from then on.
Battle Enjoined I have since wondered if the ventilating system made people act the way they did in that office, it was as if some controlled substance was permeating the atmosphere which engendered practical jokes. The ventilating system was admirably designed for such a ploy, we had proof of it by the very nature of the secondary smoking we enjoyed daily. The behaviour of the staff was certainly unique. Perhaps it was because work was so boring, anything was a relief. to the tedium. We had a Greek engineer who grew his own tobacco and smoked it all day long. It was foul smelling and there were varied suggestions as to the additional ingredients including – the least obnoxious suggestion – shredded tram-drivers gloves. As the day progressed a fug, a dense cloud of smoke, no more than two foot deep, of a grey blue colour, eddied and swirled gently down the office from the top corner, where the Greek was stoking the embers, and at average face level so no one was exempt. This atmospheric coincided with some very strange behaviour. The ‘confrontation’ is a typical example.

The ‘confrontation’ started in a high class, ladies’ outfitters, at the scarf counter. Lunch time on a hot day, Matt, a lig, walking past the shop spied our tracer, a beautiful young woman who stood no nonsense from the men. She was standing examining scarves. Matt burst into the shop, strode over to the girl and said in a voice everyone could hear, ‘You spent all the housekeeping last week and the week before, and I suppose you are doing the same this week. Buy the damn thing and come on home.’ He then strode out of the shop. The girl was so taken aback she bought the first thing which came to hand and fled. Would you believe the man had been trying to ingratiate himself into the girl’s favour for some time? A few days later, Matt had left the office for a moment and his jacket was draped over the back of his chair. The tracer picked his pocket, removing his wallet, his season ticket on the train and his loose change. She knew he walked to the station and would not be aware of his predicament until he went to show his ticket at the barrier. It took him some time to find someone at the station from whom to borrow the fare home.

When I worked in Belfast for the council and English travellers came to the little room where we interviewed them, whoever went to the window, returned and said to me, ‘you talk to them, you speak their language’. Just a joke with an edge – in other words, one might be with the Irish, but, with friends and relations excepted, no matter how long one has lived here, one is with the Irish, but not of them.

After the war, my brother-in-law and I decided we would walk from Ballycastle to Coleraine by every inch of the Coast, instead of sticking to the roads. In those days we would hike in the Mournes, and the Antrim Coast at weekends, and with rationing still a serious consideration, our pack weighed about forty pounds because we had to take nearly everything with us. It was our habit to eat a prodigious breakfast and a colossal evening meal and only an orange or grapefruit and a bar of black chocolate for lunch – after all his mother owned a sweet shop, so sweet rationing was not a worry. We stayed in YHA hostels which varied tremendously in quality and facilities, from the luxury of the new one at Dunluce Castle near the Giant’s Causeway to the hovel at White Park Bay. We were sitting above White Park Bay, that beautiful stretch of sand, which is now so popular, but then was hardly known except to walkers and locals. The hostel was as primitive as they come, especially the men’s dormitory which was little more than a cottage with a packed earth floor. It was towards evening and we were anticipating the great fry we would soon be sitting down to, probably consisting of eggs, ham or bacon, tinned beans, a steak and the usual potato bread and soda bread, an Irish fry would never be without. The problem was the eggs. It was my turn to scavenge and I set off up the hill to a small farm. I knocked the back door and politely asked the woman who came if I could buy some eggs. She looked at me very suspiciously and then said she had none. As the place was surrounded by hens I was convinced she was being economical with the truth, but that was that.. I duly reported back to HQ and Ted laughed. “They think you’re the Ministry man checking up,” he said, adding, “It’s your accent.” To prove the point he then went up and came back with a hat full of eggs.

The Irish Conception Of The English An accentless, or near accentless speech was, in my experience generally the trigger for suspicion. This was best illustrated during a political discussion, which had broken out in my office among the younger elements. I generally stayed clear of politics but on that occasion, because I felt things might get a bit heated, I put my oar in. One of the young men, a more vociferous, belligerent and forthright participant, and one who had only just joined us and did not know me very well, listened to what I had to say for a few seconds and then interrupted. ‘What do you know about the Irish situation, you’re English.’ For a moment there was what is called, in novels, a pregnant silence, the others, like me, were taken aback with the virulence of the attack. “How old would you say you were when you became politically aware?’ I asked. He thought for a second and then said twelve was about right. I was sceptical, but any figure would have done. ‘Right,’ I said, ‘That means you have been politically aware for twelve years, but you reckon you have a good grasp of Irish politics.’ I did not wait for his reply but ploughed on. I did notice a gleam of amusement in some of the eyes of the others present, they could see where I was leading. I continued, ‘I have lived here as an adult for thirty-four years.’ I had made my point and although it was seen to be reasonable to some of those present, I am equally sure there were others, including the young man, front and centre, who instinctively believed that Irish politics came down through the generations, in their genes.