On the scrap heap…

I guess by now you can recognise me. Here I am with my Grandfather suitably attired for a spot of agricultural engineering in white socks, shorts, hand knitted cardigan, shirt and tie – a man in miniature. I’m not sure what I’m fixing, but it looks like something with blades and spikes and it’s probably covered in dried or drying animal excrement. Just the thing for a small child to be tinkering with, mind you back then children could even climb trees.

How much like my Grandfather I looked even then, our expression and set almost identical. That’s the forge you can see in the background and we are in my Grandfather’s yard. To the left of the forge was the building where my Grandmother kept her chicken feed sacks in galvanised dustbins to keep the rats from stealing it and to the left is where my Grandfather dumped his scrap… his scrap heap, my scrap mountain.

And it really was a mountain, a Matterhorn of scrap, and fourish year old me was fascinated with it. For fourish me the highlight of our twice yearly visits to see my Grandparents wasn’t the wooden crate of fizzy drinks that I’d steal a bottle or two from in the outhouse, or the empty pigsty (the yearly pig not reared since the fifties), or the huge chicken shed (although I liked collecting the eggs from the wood shavings that lined the hen troughs), or the hand pump by the massive black tank of rainwater outside the back door, or the wash-house with it’s white enamel bowl and tub of Swarfega, or my Grandfathers various greenhouses (full of cacti and pots and trays of feeble seedlings) that were dotted about the huge rambling garden, or the belt driven machinery in the anvil strewn forge, or the charcoal fired forge itself (red hot coals glowing, electric bellows blowing) or the wooden seated earth closet up the garden (there was no inside toilet for years), or the huge black safe with the big brass lock hiding inside the upstairs airing cupboard, or the two massive apple trees at the end of the vegetable plot where uncle Mick kept his pheasants, or the wooden farm carts that stood dumped by the side of the forge entrance, iron rimmed wooded wheels propped against their sides. No, it wasn’t any of those things, exciting though they were to that man in miniature fourish boy me - it was the challenge of climbing my mountain of scrap.

At first I climbed alone, but years pass and every Edmund Hillary needs his Sherpa Tenzing. I remember clambering across the rusty daggers of bent and twisted metal spears formed from old farmyard machinery, balancing on horizontal sheets of corrugated zinc as I dragged my sister Caroline over and up the rusty debris as she tearfully followed my each and every step. Screaming for me to ‘STOP!’ as she was forced to climb towards the summit of the red blood dried Everest of rust.

“Nothing to worry about.” I’d say, as I jumped from old car wheel to old car wheel or skipped across a bridge of twenty oil drums. “Come on you can do it. It’s easy”

She didn’t believe me though – and sobbed as she toddled along after me only just managing to stop from falling into the pile of shattered windscreens that lay six feet beneath the old iron lamppost she was gingerly tight-rope walking. I can see us now, her crying with fear as we shinned the last five feet of rusted iron girder and reached down onto the old tractor that was my mountain’s summit. Hardly a scratch – a cut here, a graze and bruise there. She’d survive. We’d made it. I sat at the wheel and stare down at the detail of my wonderful mountain.

Looking down in my mind and remembering my mountain I realise what treasures were buried within – petrol engines, pulleys and flywheels from steam driven farm equipment, huge cogs from old contraptions, tractors, cart wheels, a huge upended iron roller, mangles, bits and pieces from vintage cars - all there piled and balanced on my scrap mountain. I once found the silver Viking mascot from an old Rover, I wish I had it still. Such happy days - I climbed that heap for years, discovering as I went and never tiring of it.

And then one day it was simply gone - sold and taken away by the scrap man, never to grow to mountain size again.