FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

He would come home in the evenings, depressed, and tell Mum that they’d lost everything, and that it was all over with the company.

his arm, with a hacksaw: luckily for everyone, the blade had snapped before he cut into it. When Peter did eventually dig up the cable, with the foreman yelling at him to get on with it, there was a terrific bang, and the lights went out across half of Sutton. Dad was furious. He went down to the pub, where the gang regularly spent their evenings, and sacked the lot of them. He put Jim Manning in charge of the project, and from then on things went forward in a proper manner. But the price he had to pay was enormous, both in terms of money, and in terms of his own health. ngel Hill came close to destroying the company, and it exhausted Dad. He was an emotional man, and he didn’t enjoy pressure; and now the pressure was on big time. He would come home in the evenings, depressed, and tell Mum that they’d lost everything, and that it was all over with the company. By the next morning, he’d be all right again, and the panic would be over. But Angel Hill took the heart out of him, and he started to spend more and more time away, travelling to Ireland to work on the bungalow in Tragumna. And that meant that nobody was keeping an eye on the business. Inevitably, things got worse. When Dad started to disappear, he left everything in a muddle. At the new house in Ravenscroft Road, the rates hadn’t been paid, there was no licence for the TV: nothing had been done. And at work, things were no better. I was on the tools then, I was still a fitter. I remember going on site at a school in Sidcup. One of the machines, the Drott, had broken down, and I was sent out to fix it. When I got there, there was a sign up on the gate, and the name on the sign wasn’t Conway. I knew that the gang A

32