Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
My Round on the Wrong Days
A scaffolder's inspection sheets come back dated for days the site itself records as closed, and the signatures are all in his hand.
- dated: "the storm weeks"
- narrator: "Reg Anstey, scaffolder"
MONDAY. Gales in the night and the site closed by eight, all cards stopped at the gate, notice on the hoarding. I walked my scaffolds anyway because the sheets want signing and I can no more leave a tower unchecked in that wind than leave a door open. Downwind side of the office block had chord ties strung up like washing. I retied what I could reach and got home by noon.
TUESDAY. Site still shut. The clerk in the site hut rang me to ask why I was on the sheets for Monday. I said I was on the site Monday. He said the gate log said the site was shut to all hands, every card, full stop, and there I was signing inspections, twice, once at seven and once at one. I told him to come and look at my book. My book said Monday, seven and one, my hand, my numbers, the wind speed, the chord ties. He went quiet and said he would copy the gate log for the file and no more about it.
THURSDAY. Site opened again at ten. First thing the general said to me, in front of the painters, was try not to walk on closed days, Reg, we can't pay you for shadows. Nobody laughed. I paid for my own tea to settle it. On the long scaffold at the north face the afternoon tags were out — every board tag dated for TOMORROW, Friday, in my hand again, which is a strange thing to write in your own book before you have walked a bay. I re-tagged the lot for today and did not write to the clerk about it, because what could he write back.
FRIDAY. This is the one I want down plain, and then I will leave the diary alone a bit, because writing it twice makes it stick. Wind dropped completely. Still air, close and warm, like a room. I walked all five towers and not one of them carried anything of mine from the week — no retie of Monday's, no correction of Thursday's, and the Monday sheet in the site office, the one the clerk wanted to file, has gone. Not filed. Gone, he says, and the gate log with it, and the hole in the week logged clean through as SHUT TO ALL — no exceptions, no signature.
SUNDAY. Thinking about the point of it. A scaffold on a shut site, signed, checked, kept sound, five towers, in a wind — for nobody, because there was nobody there to come to harm and no work there to fall. Either I was alone up there checking nothing for no one, or there was a somebody the site has no log of, and somebody's cards were pulled before I ever went up, and the week is being tidied at both ends so there is no door to that day anywhere but me. I am keeping my own book wrapped in plastic in the van.
They can take the gate log, the office sheet, the tags, the week entire. They cannot take my arithmetic, which comes to this: the scaffolds were standing on closed days, and something had to be standing on them, and I can prove nothing bigger than that. Monday morning I will sign for today, and next week for whatever days the gate says I was not there, and if the wind gets up again I will go up in it, because the sheets want signing, that is all I know for certain, and I am as tired as the next man of deciding whether I was ever there at all.