THE RESOURCEFUL OLD CHAP
We’re visiting the father-in-law in his countryside cottage, a good sixty miles from the city. This is the house where he was born and raised—the same one he escaped from at seventeen to join the war, only to return in ’45 with a stump where his right arm used to be.
“Michael’s not here! Gone for firewood!” Aunt Jean, his wife, informs us with a sigh. “They’re tearing down the village hall next door. Let him take the wood if he can haul it!”
The old man’s pushing eighty, but he’s still tougher than most blokes half his age these days.
“How far’s the village?” we ask Aunt Jean.
“Oh, not far!” She waves a hand. “Three miles, give or take.”
My wife and I exchange baffled glances.
Soon enough, he “arrives”—his chosen transport being a battered old pram from the seventies, missing its basket, listing dangerously under a heap of weathered planks. He shrugs off the crisscrossed straps slung over his shoulders, the makeshift harness he uses to drag his haul.
“There we go!” he crows, proud of his windfall. “Another trip or two, and we’ll be set for winter!”
“How’ll you cut it all, Michael?” I ask, helping stack the wood.
“Got me sawbench!” He jerks his chin toward a rickety worktable cobbled together with clamps and wedges for one-handed sawing. On top lies an ancient, rusted handsaw with that unmistakable metal handle—just like the one my father had. The very saw I’d learned on as a boy.
My chest tightens. I want to help—could fetch the wood in my Land Rover, hire a proper crew, anything. “Let me give you a hand, Michael?”
But he’s not having it. His lone arm cuts me off as he resettles the straps over his head. “Blasted lorries are bad enough! Hug the kerb so close, they’ll flatten a man one of these days!”
And he’s not wrong. The road’s heaving with them—great roaring beasts tearing through the sleepy hamlet, bound for London or god knows where.
“Jean! Off again!” he hollers. His wife steps out to see him off, then announces proudly, “Our provider!”
It finally clicks. He doesn’t want help. This is how he lives—not just as a man, mind you, but as a proper old-school *bloke*. Never mind that he spent his life as a dean at a posh economics college.
I watch him trudge down the lane, that empty pram rattling behind him on its knotted ropes and washing lines, rigged up like a barge hauler’s harness. Only instead of riverbanks and barges, there’s just the stink of diesel and the thunder of eighteen-wheelers.
I can’t help myself. That evening, my lad and I nip down to the hardware shop. Later, we leave a shiny new Swedish saw—hardened teeth, leather sheath, the works—on his workbench.
Five years on, we moved him in with us. Comfort didn’t suit him. He was gone in six months.
After the funeral, at the wake, I found that saw untouched in its case, dusted on top of the sideboard. The villagers murmured, “Look at that—kept it nice. Practical old sod, wasn’t he?”
“Aye,” I nod. “Proper old chap. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”
