Eric Mashiter

Yes that's right Ian Dad certainly enjoyed building and never lost the enthusiasm to find more opportunities to pick up a cement trowel! … in fact Sue and I learned that Dad could identify a brick at thirty paces. It is a long story so will be as short as possible…… A good ten years ago now dad's little toes had both become curled up and he needed surgery to straighten them; best toe first and then once complete and recovered straight back for the other to be done; six weeks from the start to the finish for the first and similar for the next. The operations were being carried out at the Nuffield in Chester. En-route to the various appointments we passed a new stock-house build site in the throes of completion. He had had his operation for the first toe and he came out with a cast on half-way up his left shin, toes showing with a metal bar sticking out of the centre of his little toe to keep it aligned straight while it healed over the next five weeks, and everything had to stay dry; well during that return journey he enlightened us to the fact that he'd been eyeing the bricks on this new build site and that they are exactly the same as the bricks on our house in Salford and he insisted that we have a little drive around this 99% complete new estate. What we did not know is that dad had spotted a few packs of unopened and unused facing bricks and that he wanted to see if we could off-load them from the contractor so he could show us how to build back at the Salford house, as our house was in real need of a number of proper rear walls to make it more private to maximise the garden. We eventually found the site office and two days after surgery he hobbled into that site office with me and made a deal with the site foreman that he could not refuse - we'd be back tomorrow with a van to collect said bricks at no expense to him! I was instructed to rent as big a vehicle as my license allowed me to drive and the next morning for us to pick dad up in it first thing and we'd all go collect the bricks; well it was a good job we'd put the two barrows from the garage on the trailer of this open-back truck and work gloves too plus a chair for the new site foreman (dad) to sit on with his healing foot up resting! Plus we had one of Sue's ‘just in case lunches' made (salmon sandwiches for dad of course!) as when we got there plan A went straight out the window as the heavy lifting plant from the day before had gone so we had no choice but to barrow the bricks from pack to truck. Dad sat there watching us go back and forth all day "Raymond you should be getting more bricks in each barrow load than that; you are making this hard work" said the man sitting there with his casted foot up and walking stick waving…. Plenty of spiders present of which Sue really enjoyed too!!! …. Finishing off, the pictures below are dad laying those bricks just after he recovered from the second toe straightening operation; dad spent that second recovery period chomping at the bit to get building and so we designed and dimensioned all the walls to be built (I never got my way; Sue and dad had the last say on the final design) and I was left digging and laying the foundations and calculating the amount of cement and sand we needed to order plus if we had managed to collect enough bricks that day for the whole job and all the other logistics too…. I hasten to add that thanks to dad I can now dig a straight foundation trench, fill it appropriately with concrete and lay a brick in a straight line too although not very fast at any of those things! And Sue knows the difference between a good cement mix and a bad cement mix for the brickie.