My grandfather’s at the far end of the garden, black painted, backing onto the lane, and tall from a four-year-old perspective. Remembering, I hear an echo of fond and undiluted Yorkshire, see dusty string-tied wooden-handled tools as he extricates bleached-canvas, finger-trapping, wooden framed and notched deckchairs.
Later, at eight or thereabouts, my father using one of a nail-hung bunting line of saws, to create piles of warmly golden sawdust which I yearned to somehow find a way to keep forever, to bottle or preserve the friendly smell, perhaps in one of the several ‘Four Square’ tobacco tins piled on the scarred ad paint-stained bench.
A boyfriend’s, built of railway sleepers, which contained a family heirloom glass-domed clock and where I heard tales of a pig escaping and rampaging from the field behind. Boyfriend became husband, and for a while our first house-shed housed his pride and joy: a brand new, bright blue, Royal Star motorbike. Then children, and for a while boring domestic, garden tools and lawnmowers, plastic chairs and children’s bikes.
‘Til they left home and he retired, since when bikes have multiplied from nought to ten and sheds increased in size and number to accommodate the more-than-overflow from the garage. No more sawdust and all the tools leave grease-stains on one’s fingers, hence the over-flowing bag of ex-T shirts, now rags.
Odd isn't it.... whenever I think shed I get 'greenhouse'. But that was my dad for you. Always a gardener - never really a DIY kind of guy.
ReplyDeleteI have no shed memories.
Multiple sheds! I am so jealous. I enjoyed that, I like the idea of one made from railway sleepers.
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