FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

And the Guinness went to Mickey’s feet, and he started to dance in his big hobnailed boots.

And they were wonderful times, in their own way. There is a story about Dad and his gang at one of their first jobs at Marlow Road in Banstead. They were digging some deep soakaways, using plywood platforms as stages for the digging. In the afternoon, the children came out from school, and stood and watched the digging. Well, one of the gang, Mickey Lloyd, had been to the pub and had a few beers. He was from County Mayo and he liked a bit of dancing. And another of the gang was a musician, and he borrowed a fiddle from one of the children, and he tuned it up, and started to play. And the Guinness went to Mickey’s feet, and he started to dance in his big hobnailed boots. And there he was dancing down in the hole on top of one of the ply sheets, when Dad came up and stuck his head into the hole and asked, ‘Am I too late for the show?’ And they answered, ‘No, Frank. It’s all right. Mickey’s the first turn.’ It would never happen like that now. It couldn’t. When Dad disappeared in 1976, things couldn’t have been much worse. The only work we had on the books was a job for Waltham Forest Council that Dad had priced before he left. The job was to construct a subway at Cathall Road. I had been in the company for four years, I had trained as a plant fitter, and I knew as much about constructing subways as I did about cups of tea. But we needed the work; it was all we had. And it was like Angel Hill all over again. The job was simply out of our league. We had to take on local labour, and they – including the foreman – spent most of their time in the pub. We were bleeding money. I remember getting together on a Sunday morning with our accountant, Jack Basch, to go through the numbers.

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