A Motley Cast Upon A Stage of Stone

'Just give them the drawing and let them get on with it!'

As General Foreman, Kev O'Neill knew he wasn't affording the most helpful advice to his charge-hand carpenters with that regular remark. However, back in 1988 - the boom years of construction in Britain, often remembered as the "Loadsamoney" era - many a chancer had begun to beleaguer the nation's building sites.

On a daily basis, cocky geezers were turning up as "chippies" in particular: with a hammer, a saw and occasionally the odd chisel. Their target was the major construction projects which for various reasons, sometimes found it better to enlist their hopeless services than to show them the gate. O'Neill merely struck a balance which tended to usher the worst of them towards it.

'Kev, they're bloody useless,' his top charge-hand protested, 'you know that formwork is beyond the grasp of even qualified carpenters unless they've some idea of shuttering - if I try to cast a flight of steps with this lot, you'll have the jackhammers round the next day!'

O'Neill glanced at the four timid but eager young men just out of ear-shot - one of whom he recognised as a city centre taxi driver - as they pretended to comprehend their detailed task in the brief absence of their chargehand, Steve; a shuttering chippy of some thirty years standing. It was a scenario which O'Neill had grown used to along with the dismissive response of their Contract Manager, Seamus McCarthy, who would sometimes say with a simple shrug: "You've just got to move with the times, Kev."

All three of the dedicated Keene Construction workers had certainly moved with the times since starting-out with the firm as apprentice carpenters during the late '50s. Their individual roles within the leading company were no particular reflection upon the respective abilities of each employee after that many decades. Rather, their working status reflected disparate natural levels of job satisfaction and focus upon the pursuit of lucre over the years.

In physical terms, Steve - a stocky, erstwhile mod in forest green overalls - remained as fit 'on the tools' as Seamus had become prone to paunch in his shabby site office. Whereas Kevin kept in respectable shape despite a reputed vow to avoid getting his hands dirty more than once a week! The tall, lean and clean-shaved foreman would have looked as comfortable in a tracksuit, as the jeans and Barbour jacket which he always wore on his rounds of the site.

'There's just not enough bodies here to get this size of a shopping centre back on programme,' O'Neill complained, 'and with the way Seamus is running the show there's nothing I can do about it. Just keep an eye on things and show them how it's done.'

O'Neill's voice would often echo around the cavernous car-park which comprised the third floor area that Steve had somehow reached with several flights of stairs from the basement in three short weeks. However, the foreman's habitual roar was tempered on this occasion by camaraderie and besides; belligerent background noises from man and machine had intensified around O'Neill's menacing presence.

Steve could handle the situation with relative ease; considering Keene Construction's reputation for dogging their shuttering chippies around in an unholy quest for the casting of maximum concrete quantities in any given week.

However, he would still have to think for five men, rather than simply assign each of his team a particular task and muck-in himself. Then there was the chore of procuring materials and the process of setting-out the next flight position with an engineer; a ritual which less active charge-hands tended to seize upon to excuse themselves from undesirable graft.

'Just don't send me that bloody muppet Chris the Scholar ever again - that's all!' Steve warned, as he strutted back to his workbench, satisfied to have at least got the tacit message across that there would be no point hassling him for a pour of concrete before the end of the week.