working ..class heroes

This phorograph by Steffan HiU, from the April 24 issue of London's Independent Magazine, is part of a series documenting the work of Britain's 1,600-member Casualties' Union. The union,farmed in 1940, supplies trained volunteers ro act as
victims during first-aid drills, including the annual National Power First Aid Competition, shown above. In this exercise,
a contestant performs first aid on a union member who is simulating the result of a domestic power-rool accident. The man
sitting on the desk is a competition judge.
internationally for ten years. In December of her
junior year, she dislocated both elbows in practice and could no longer compete. This mixed
blessing allowed her to apply for a scholarship
that would pay for a summer activity of choice.
She decided to spend five weeks in Hungary
helping to build an orphanage, serve in a soup
kitchen, and work in a homeless shelter. She
helped start a peer-counseling program at a local
runaway shelter, and loves tutoring and counseling programs. She will be attending Harvard
University in the fall.
Shine May Hung, BeUingham, Washington
Shine May believes that the most precious
gift in life is the opporrunity to seek one's individuality and to express it in a manner that is true
and unique to oneself, and that the truest form
of self-discovery can be attained through the
avid pursuit of knowledge. Garnering her inspiration from the natural world and the noble attempts of humans to parallel nature's greatness,
she has unceasingly strived to understand the
world around her and within herself. Shine May
anticipates a meaningful existence in which she
will never abandon her ideals, while seeking
truth and balance in all things.
[Memoir]
WORKING ..CLASS
HEROES
From "The Brass Bar," a memoir by Louis de
Bernieres, in the Spring Granta, a special issue on the
"Best of Young British Novelists." De Berrueres
is the author of Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord,
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman,
and The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts.
In
the late Seventies, 1 was desperately attempting to avoid having a career by doing what
I supposed were "real" jobs. It was a depressing
time. Utopia was failing to emerge from the revolutions of the Sixties, and those natural dropouts
who remained found themselves with nothing to
drop out into and nowhere to go. I had been
keeping my life together by gardening in the
daytime and teaching philosophy classes in the
evenings. My idea of hell was, and still is, to
have to put on a tie and go to an office,and I believed that I was a part of a new world where everybody would wear faded jeans and work would
be less important than "finding yourself" and
READINGS
29
seeking nirvana in the arms of gentle long-haired
girls. I had also swallowed heavy drafts of the
kind of left-wing thinking that implies that only working-class people are worthwhile. Being
impeccably middle-class myself, I threw aside all
my advantages and privileges and took only those
kinds of occupations that "real" people take.
At university I came to believe that the working classes were in the forefront of progressive
thought, which caused me to be 'ever more
stunned by the slow discovery that the opposite
is true. In workingmen's clubs I was amazed and
disillusioned by the opinions 'that passed unchallenged around the tables laden with watery
beer, whiskey chasers, and barley wine. No
Colonel Blimp could have been more national-
[Poll]
TEN ..SPEED TERROR
From "Have You Ever Hit aPed? ." a poll of bicycle messengers in San Francisco in the August-December 1992 issue of Mercury Rising, published by
the San Francisco Bike Messenger Association,
Cathy
I hit some old guy crossing the street. He got halfwayacross,saw the light tum red, and decided he'd
go back. I had chosen my line to go behind him
but I hit him, and we both went down. He was all
tangled up in my bike but nobody was hurt. I felt
badly because he was nice and my handlebars
were screwed. Only ped I hit in five years.
Mark
I hit a Chinese lady on Market Street. She was
crossingwhen she sawme coming toward her. She
,took a step forward, then a step back, and then
she froze. If she had held her course, I never
would have hit her. People like that put themselves in jeopardy by trying to second-guess us. I
think I'm better off if they don't see me at all.
Michael
I ran over a wino going up Market to the Flood
Building. I was cutting around peds when suddenly an arm plops out on the ground in front of
me. I tried to bunny hop it but I ran right over
it. The guy was so fucked up, he didn't move. I
felt bad because I thought I heard something
pop. Later I saw him wandering around muttering, "Fuck this, fuck that." But he wasn't holding
his arm or anything.
30
HARPER'S MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 1993
istic, more money-fixated, more hang-tern-andflog-tern, more unreasoningly racist.
At this time I was working at a garage in the
East End of London. My boss, who was a cockney
Italian, once refusedto call an ambulance for a little black boy who had been run over outside. He
backed off when he saw that I was about to abandon my ideal of .non-violence, but afterward I
avoided the sack only because of the intervention
of the foreman, Vic, who told him that I was the
only one of the mechanics who understood how
an engine worked. This was actually true.
The garage was a tiny establishment in a back
street. It had a pit but no real equipment, so we had
to work under unpropped jacks with metric spanners, regardless of whether cars were fitted with
American or imperial bolts. It was like doing the
most strenuous yoga all day every day, and my
pursuit of nirvana in the arms of long-haired girls
was reduced to falling asleep as soon as I went to
bed, too embarrassedto touch them in any case on
account of the ineradicable grime on my hands.
Everythingabout the garagewasdishonest. They
soldsecondhand engines as "reconditioned" (we labeled old enginesaseither "OK"or "P' for"fucked");
using technical language, they charged for elaborate work that had not been done and did work that
was unnecessary. The very first job my boss had
me do wasto change brake shoesthat wereperfectly
serviceable. When I pointed this out to him he
looked at me as though I were utterly mad.
We did have a black welder for a little while,
but he was obsessed with the smartness of his
white clothes. He eventually stopped turning
up, because he preferred unemployment to getting muck on his garments and his gold chains
kept getting caught up in suspensions and exhaust clips. The boss said, "I'm never employing
a fucking wog again." Having been in that company for a while, "fucking" became the only adjective that I ever used, and it took me many
years to get out of the habit. It was the kind of
place where the answer to a question like,
"What's fucking wrong with the tucker?" would
be, "The fucking fucker's fucking fucked, fuck it."
I was later to learn at university that workingclass speech was as rich and varied as Standard
English. The research was done in
New York, however.
T
\
ic, the foreman, was in fact a carpenter who
was technically unemployed. He earned a very
large wage at the garage, claimed social security,
and also creamed off the takings when he delivered them to the boss at the end of the day. We
used to call him "Wic" for reasons that shall be explained, and he only had one sentence in his
repertoire. He would look at something he had just
finished and say,"That is so fucking pukka I could
fucking spunk myself." His eyes would go wide
with pleasure, and I would say that he was the
only one there who found genuine joy in his work.
He was called "Wic"because we had a Turk
there named Tommy. Tommy the Turk could
not say his "V's," and he always called Vic "Wic."
This caught on, and by extension I became
"Wouis," Trevor became "Revver," and he himself became "Wommy."
Wommy's favorite tool was a large hammer.
He used it upon even the most delicate tasks, frequently with startling success. His ambition was
to spend his life playing "wolleyball," and he had
married an English girl just so he could stay in England and play it. He was alwaysdeeply depressed
about his marriage because he couldn't stand having to sleep with a wife whom he had not even
liked in the first place. His life was a long reverie
about finding true love and playing wolleyball.
Trevor, or Revver, was already a supposed lunatic when he arrived. I thought that his illness
was that he was too natural and too kind. He was
bald except for black wisps at the side of his head
that stuck out horizontally,he had perpetually surprised brown eyes, and he was very thin. He
loved his girlfriend deeply, was crazy about sex,
and quickly realized that the appearance of work
was more important than its actual accomplishment. He used to do a delightfully gross impression of cunnilingus by touching the tips of his
forefingerstogether and the tips of his thumbs and
waggling his tongue through the resultant impression of a vulva. He referred to oral sex as
"plating" and would come into work with his
eyes gleaming. I would say,"All right, Rev?" and
he would reply, "Fucking plated me girlfriend
for breakfast. Fucking lovely."
Because Trevor was so joyful he was referred
to a psychiatrist by his doctor. Trevor himself
was convinced that he was mad, because he believed that the fumes of welding always caused
welders to become demented. When the psychiatrist questioned Trevor about his sex life,
Trevor told him to "fucking mind your own fucking business," whereupon the psychiatrist was
also persuaded of Trevor's madness. Not wishing
to disappoint anyone, Trevor himself began to act
up to the label, mainly in his work.
I used to help him under the cars by holding
the metal plates in position, and at first he was
very conscientious; his welding was as careful as
needlework. But when fate conspired to declare
that he was crazy,he became disillusioned. Metal sheet was replaced by newspaper, body filler,
and heavy coats of underseal. His craftsmanship
in this novel form of laminate was immaculate,
though his perfect mock-ups of welding actually took twice as long to execute as the real thing.
However, Nemesis inevitably arrived one day
when a customer got into his car and the whole
of the new floor fell out beneath him, revealing
32
HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 1993
itself to be made of the Sun and wrappers from
the kebab shop that we raided every lunchtime.
Trevor got the sack the same day he was allocated a place in the mental home. He came out
of the boss's office looking depressed for the first.
time and gave me a brass bar. It was his favorite
tool. "This is fucking high-class metal," he told
me. "Everybodyworker would give his fucking life
for a bar like this. It won't never break nor wear
fucking out, and I want you to have it."
It was the bar that he used to knock metal
straight when it was in awkward corners. It was
exactly the right hardness to do the job without
damaging the target metal and without itself
bending or fracturing. "My dad passed it on to
me," he said. "He was a welder 'n' all."
"Did he go potty?" I asked, and Trevor replied,
"Always fucking was."
After poor Trevor had left for the last time I
showed the brass bar to Wic, and he exclaimed,
"Fucking pukka. You should fucking
spunk yourself, having that."
I
left to do teacher training. At the polytechnic the middle-class students, who flattened
their vowels and said "fucking" a lot, granted
me tremendous street cred for having had such
authentic working-class jobs, at exactly the time
when I was beginning to understand what a fraud
that street cred was.
At teacher-training college I sometimes repaired
the tutors' cars, and I still use Trevor's indestructible brass bar when I do the bodywork on the
same Morris Minor I had then. The more I use it,
the more I realizehow much Trevor was giving up
when he gave it to me, and the more I understand
that for him it wasa farewellto happiness, purpose,
and his natural self,and ro rhe trade that had made
him what he was. Where I come from you can be
madder than Trevor and simply be a "character,"
without being shunted off to a mental home. You
know not to tell psychiatrists to mind their own
business, you know not to celebrate oral sex in
public (I remember his shining eyes as he slopped
his tongue around in lasciviousimitation of oral sex,
his thick stubble glistening with tiny drops of saliva), and you don't do the kind of jobs where the
terror of white heat and the jagged edges of steel
make you prefer to do botch-ups. I cannot help but
hope that his girlfriend had the sense to take him
out of the hospital, and I wish I could find him and
thank him for the gift of the brass bar.
Every other metal-working bar that I have had
since then has bent, peeled back from the point,
or splintered. Only Trevor's has survived, pristine.
It lies gleaming in my toolbox, heavy, solid, and
waiting imperturbably for the club-hammer blows
that will never defeat it. Trevor's best possession
is now one of mine, a fucking pukka brass bar
that makes you want to spunk yourself.
_