The Resourceful Bloke.
We’re visiting the wife’s dad in a village about sixty miles outside the city—the same cottage where he was born and raised. The place he ran away from at seventeen to join the war, only to come back in ’45 with a stump where his right arm used to be…
“Michael’s not here! Gone to fetch firewood!” Aunt Jean, his wife, tells us, disappointed. “They’re tearing down the village hall in the next hamlet over—letting folks take the wood!”
The old man’s pushing eighty, but he’s still a tough bloke. Not like the lot you see today.
“How far’s the village?” we ask Aunt Jean.
“Oh, not far!” She waves a hand. “Three miles or so.”
My wife and I exchange a glance.
Before long, he “arrives”—if you can call it that. His transport? An old pram from the seventies, missing its basket, leaning under the weight of scrap wood.
He shrugs off the straps crisscrossed over his chest, rigged up to drag the load behind him.
“Here we are!” He beams at his windfall, like it’s treasure. “Just a couple more trips, and we’ll have enough for winter!”
“How’re you planning to cut it, Michael?” I ask, helping him stack the planks.
“Got me sawbench!”
He points to a makeshift worktable in the yard, cobbled together with all sorts of contraptions for cutting wood. Only one arm, mind you. On top sits an old, rusted handsaw with a metal handle—just like the one my dad had. The same saw I learned to cut my first planks with.
My chest tightens. I want to help—I could drive him to fetch more wood in my Land Rover, even hire a van and some lads.
“Anything I can do, Michael?”
But he’s not listening. That one hand waves me off as he slings the straps back over his shoulder.
“Lorries just get in the way! They hug the kerb so tight, could knock you over without a second glance,” he grumbles.
And he’s right. The road’s packed with them—huge, speeding things, roaring past this tiny hamlet. The main route to London, busy as ever…
“Jean! I’m off again!” he shouts. She comes out to see him off, and once he’s trundled down the lane, she says proudly, “Provider!”
It clicks then. He doesn’t *want* help.
He lives for this—the feeling of being a proper bloke, not just a man. Never mind that he spent his life as a dean at a university.
I watch him disappear down the road—just an old chap dragging a battered pram, straps and washing lines lashed across his chest like some modern-day barge hauler. Only instead of riverbanks and boats, it’s lorries thundering past, covering him in soot and fumes.
I can’t help myself. That evening, my lad and I nip to the hardware shop.
By the time we leave, his workbench has a brand-new Swedish saw, hardened teeth gleaming in its case.
Five years later, we moved him in with us. He lasted six months in comfort before he was gone.
After the funeral, at the wake, I found that saw—still untouched in its case, tucked on top of the sideboard. The villagers nodded, murmuring about Michael:
“Look after it, he did. Practical bloke.”
“Yeah,” I agreed quietly. “A proper bloke. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”
