FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 4 Laying the Foundations

And as they set off for the control centre that the Army had set up by the school, John remembered the methane and started to run.

NOT CROSS • POLIC getting on, the foreman said he had something to show him. The stone that they were using to fill the trenches had been dredged out of the Thames at Battersea, and it was brought to the school directly from the river. And they had found an unexploded shell in amongst all the stone. ‘It’s all right,’ the foreman told him. ‘It’s a dud.’ And John, being new to this kind of thing, took him at his word, and thought no more about it. But when he came back to the school that afternoon, there was a soldier guarding the entrance. ‘We’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ the soldier told him. ‘We’ve got an unexploded bomb on site, and we’re about to explode it. We need you up at Silver Control.’ And as they set off for the control centre that the Army had set up by the school, John remembered the methane and started to run. And as he rushed into the Silver Control Unit, the officer in there told him: ‘You’ve just missed it. We’ve just detonated the bomb.’ But the school was still standing, and no harm was done. So, the Army probably knew what they were doing after all – they certainly knew more about it than John, at any rate. B ack at the office, life was less exciting than at Lanfranc, but every bit as busy. We weren’t taking on many new people, but we were taking on more work, and we were buying new plant

to deal with it. It was clear that we were running out of space in the yard again. We’d moved into Oakfield Road in 1984, and now nearly ten years on, in 1993, we were stuck for space once again. It was worst at Christmas time, when everything was brought back into the yard for the holiday. There was so little room that all the smaller plant had to be loaded into the lorries; and the lorries themselves were squeezed in with no gaps between them. John Tobin recalls what it was like:

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