Newham Writers Workshop Anthology 1998

		George Fuller For me the "conversation" of British society doesn't ring true because it lacks the voice from the building site. Many people, from different walks of life must have their own ideas about what is lacking from the "conversation". But as my contribution I am trying to complete this personal account of working and living as a bricklayer in Berlin in 1994. It is part of a diary, based on tape recordings made at the time. German speakers, please excuse my German - it's Englander builders' pidgin. I have been attending Newham Writers' Workshop for a number of years now and it has helped me a lot. Prisoners Of War First thing I heard as I changed into my working clothes was Brendan, a few feet away, talking to Olaf in the foreman's hut, "My wife she is very proud. Very proud woman." Every chance Brendan got he was in Olaf's office, talking loudly because Olaf didn't understand English. "She is very houseproud; the house is spotless." I looked at Mick who was pulling on his working boots; Mick shook his head, "I wish some of these idiots would take the trouble to try and learn some German." "Soon it's our wedding anniversary . . . anniversary?" Olaf said, "Ya! Nein! Ya!" He didn't sound pissed off with Brendan bashing his eardrums. "Eighteen years happily married." Why didn't Olaf sock Brendan in the jaw and tell him to `fuck off'out of his office. "Four lovely children." Every chance Brendan got he was crawling up Olaf's arse. Seemed manic: got a screw loose. What a fuck'n man! The German workers looked at me and Mick over their tabloids, bemused at Englander antics. Later as Mick and me worked, filling the holes in the block of flats we were joined by Brendan. He'd finished working with his saw, now he had a big shiny steel float. As he smoothed compo into any holes with his steel float, Brendan said, "If this job was on piece work we'd be on a œ1000 a week." I said, "But we've only just started on the job. We don't know the language. Don't you think we're safer plodding along on at œ12 an hour?" Brendan shook his head, anxious eyes on me. "No. We should be on a œ1000!" I thought Brendan was a bloke who'd sat in his local in The West Country, listening to all the talk of `œ1000 a week in Germany' and assumed it was his due; like some people think: "Everybody rich in America!" Just then Mick gestured us to us to keep quiet. He spoke from the corner of his mouth, "There's a woman through that window naked!" "Naked?" "Yea. She hasn't got a stitch on, doing her ironing!" She must have taken off her clothes because of the heat. One of the Germans in the mess room had said it was the hottest summer in Berlin for a hundred years. After that, as we worked, we looked hopefully through the windows. It reminded me of a job I worked on near Edgeware Road tube station in London. Every morning at about 9.30, as a gang of us laid bricks along one side of a building, a young woman, almost naked, blonde hair down her back, would draw back the curtains of her flat, which our scaffold overlooked. Someone would whisper: "Hey up. Here she is!" She'd spend about twenty minutes making her bed, bending, tucking in the covers and stretching over; almost a ballet. Occasionally she'd glance at us. Soon, every morning, half the site's workers gathered on the scaffold. The site was so inactive and quiet the general foreman discovered what was going on: "Oy! What's the ruddy game you perverts!" At midday I borrowed a pen from one of the tenants to take notes, as we took it in turns to phone the labour agency to check up on our wages. I asked for Sandy, who I'd spoken to before, but got Ingrid. They all had the same soothing voice and telephone manner. Even if your wages were short it was hard to curse them - a `business' technique to lighten your wage packet. The labour agencies' set-up in the Dutch border town of Nijmegen was a bit of a puzzle. The money faxes were sent from across the border in Germany; maybe something to do with currency exchange-rates - and part of the agencies' regulation `bending' operation. A bricklayer I'd worked with in England told me he had visited an agency's office in Nijmegen. He said, "The different agencies advertise in the British papers - the Sun, Daily Star and Mirror - you think they're completely different companies, but they're are all housed in the same office, with desks alongside each other; everyone chatting. When I went there one of the agents was marrying another agent's daughter: the whole crowd are intermarried. And Nijmegen railway station is like a cattle market full of British bricklayers. When they're paying out wages the labour agents' runners have `minders' and pistols for protection." I could believe that; I wouldn't want to be a Dutchman paying out wages to Englanders after hearing all the threats to "kick the Dutch bastard's head in," from blokes who thought they were being ripped off. A plumber told me a friend of his had got into a fight with a `heavy'. "He knocked out the heavy. The agent immediately promoted him to take the heavy's place." I'd once made an agreement over the phone from London, that I failed to keep, to meet an agency's runner outside Nijmegen railway station. The woman's voice on the phone said, "You must stand exactly where I tell you to stand outside the station. On no account get into a car unless its registration tallies with the number I'm going to give you." "What is the pay?" "You will be paid œ1000 per week." "I find that hard to believe." "What! You have no confidence as a man and a bricklayer." "Well, what are the hours then?" "You can work as many hours as you wish." "Oh, OK then." Ingrid said, "Your money is already at the Zoo station fax office, George". The sum she quoted seemed correct. I went back to the site to give the tenant his pen back. He was a big, grey-haired man wearing just shorts and flip-flop sandles. He stood by kitchen door, the smell of coffee wafted out. He came out onto the balcony and I handed him his pen. "Is it OK here?" I pointed at his kitchen and waved my hand at the surrounding area, "Ist Gute?" He smiled, and nodded his head, "Ya, ya. Sehr gute, wunderbar." (Yes, yes. Very good, wonderful). He indicated the tops of the pine trees abreast his window, his view over the fields and woods and the nearby shops. I nodded approvingly. Lately all I'd heard in England was of people wanting to get out of council housing and buy their own house: `a step up the ladder.' I didn't get it. I'd been brought up in a council house and it had seemed fine to me. But I'd never lived on a huge estates; but a small one not far from the town centre or the countryside. He got me a coffee. I asked him, "Was arbiet Sie." (What his job had been before he retired). He moved his hands around and said something I didn't understand. Then he said that during the war he'd been a soldier in France. "In Krieg Soldat in Frankriech." 18 years old, wearing a steel helmet, holding a rifle - not flip-flops but jack boots; marching like a robot under the Arc De Triumph. He still looked fit, like he'd have made a `good' soldier; could have been a Hitler worshipper chanting: "Eine Riech! Eine Volk! Eine Fuhrer!" But the Nazis were never a majority party in Berlin, and could he have avoided being carried along on the Nazi wave of `true patriotism' and being drafted into the army? He folded the underwear that was airing on a balcony linen-line and put it into a basket then he leaned on the balcony rail. "Mein Bruder prisoner of war in England. Sehr gute, Sehr gute!" He grinned broadly, giving the thumbs up sign with both thumbs. "Sehr gute fur mein Bruder." (Very good for my brother). He was the second German I'd met who was an enthusiast for British prisoner of war camps. In `93, when I first started working on a job, building a Citroen car showroom just outside Brandenburg, East Germany, I'd walked into town on a Saturday afternoon. I hadn't realised it was early closing; the place was completely deserted. The buildings were in a bad state of repair, here and there roofs had caved in. There were no cafes or bars open, so I sat down on a doorstep reading a paperback book. I read for about twenty minutes, but the completely deserted main street began to feel eerie, distracting me. Then I saw a figure about half a mile away. As he got close I saw he was poorly dressed and had a small dog with him. He kept putting a pipe into his mouth then taking it out and shaking it. As he drew level he said something to me indicating the pipe. I held out my empty hands, "I don't understand: Ich bin Englander." His face lit up. "I prisoner of war in England." He held up his thumb: "Gute, gute ." Shaking me by the hand, his dog sniffing my knees. He stood in the street several minutes talking to me, smiling, me nodding, though I could hardly understand a word. Then he put up his thumb again and we exchanged Auf Wiedersehens and he walked off still trying to suck air through his pipe. I scraped the remaining compo from my bucket and trowelled it into a hole in the wall. Then I dropped the bucket over the side of the scaffold, climbed down the ladder, refilled the bucket from the wheelbarrow, then hoisted it up on the jenny-wheel and called up to Brendan or Mick to take it off its hook. When I returned to the balcony with my bucket, the tenant Willie, the ex German soldier, had poured two more coffees. I swallowed a mouthful, "Danke," (Thanks). I tried to explain to him that my uncle Jack had been a German prisoner of war. I raised my hand in surrender, "Mien uncle Englander Soldat, artillary. Tobruk, blitzkrieg kaput, Nord Afrika, 1941. Soldat jail, lager, im Italy." (My uncle was a British soldier, in the artillery. He was captured in Tobruk, North Africa, when it was blitzkreiged by the Germans in 1941. He was held in a POW camp in Italy.) The old tenant nodded, looking serious. I carried on working, filling the holes in the wall, smoothing the compo with my trowel. The sun beat down. A piece of red cloth hung down from the back of my safety helmet protecting the back of my neck and shoulders. I remembered my mother saying, that her brother being in the prisoner of war camp, had killed her father, my grandfather. She worked in a munitions factory, her mother kept house. My grandfather was a blacksmith on the railway - working long hours - but he hardly slept; worrying through all the years his son was a prisoner. But at least when he was in the camp they could exchange letters via the Red Cross. The worst part came when Italy surrendered and all the prisoners escaped - and Germany invaded Italy. For months they had no word, then somehow a message written on a cigarette paper got through: "I am fit and well. Love Jack." When the bucket was empty I dropped it over the edge of the scaffold and climbed down to refill it from the wheel barrow. My uncle had lived in a cave with dozens of other escaped POWs, a lot of them Russians. I only remembered one story about that time. One night, after curfew, dressed as peasants, with another escapee, he went to a nearby village to pick up food as arranged. Coming back through the cobbled village street, wearing hob-nailed boots, with a heavy sacks of chestnuts on their backs, one of them slipped and chestnuts had spewed across the street. At the same moment a German patrol came round a corner. The Germans switched on their flashlights and helped pick up the chestnuts. Then they wished each other, "Buono notte" (good night) and went their separate ways. I filled the bucket then hoisted it on the rope, calling to Brendan or Mick, who were working on scaffold platforms beneath mine, "Take it off the hook." My grandfather died of pneumonia soon after his son came home. It couldn't have been much better for Willie's parents waiting for their son to come home. At 5.30 pm we packed up our tools and Mick gave me a lift in his car to the Zoo station fax office. Mick, his hands on the wheel, said, "This is what I don't like about working in Germany, all the stress around getting paid." I wound the window down to let in the cooling air. "Yeah, out here, most of us not knowing the language, working for these agencies - outside the law: we're sitting ducks." Mick said nothing, but sat stiff-backed, his eyes on the road, then he said, "How do you make that out: `outside the law'", as if I was talking bullshit. As the car moved through the Berlin traffic I sat in my seat trying to work out how to make a reply without sounding a `know all', and maybe provoking Mick into giving me the cold-shoulder again. It wasn't easy to explain `outside the law' to Mick because understanding the concept of `bogus self-employment' was the key. But this was the only employment status Mick knew. The big building contractors and the British government itself - to further their `flexible labour market' policies - encouraged bogus self-employment, even though it broke regulations on employment, tax, and national insurance contributions. This took place even - or especially - on the government's own projects like hospitals and motorways. They got cheap casualised labour outside any union agreements. To hell with legality: the more regulations torn up, the more profits for the shareholders! But the Thatcherites did not run Germany - yet! I glanced at Mick, then looked at the road ahead, "We're rightless because "self employment" isn't legal on German sites. We're duty-free goods - contraband - smuggled by the labour agencies. Our labour sold on the black market to the contractors. We get paid money - `in the hand' - while the legal German building workers pay almost half their wages in taxes and national insurance. We're relatively cheap and expendable. We're not really self-employed, running our own businesses are we? We're just moved around to throw the labour police off the trail. If you look at the small print of the E101 it says "self-employment is illegal on German building sites". Just then when we saw three scruffy figures: Tom McClowen and the two Lancashire chippies on the crowded pavement flagging us down. Tom's unshaven face came to the window, "There's no wages in the fax office, we've just been there. The chippies are having a meeting with Delban's, (the agency), runner, in the Europa Irish bar at 10 o'clock." Mick clasped his head in his hands then rested his forehead on the steering wheel, stunned; his plans to build the bungalow in Jamaica with his brother, redeem his prestige with his family back in Wolverhampton, had hit the rocks. I'd only got about œ40; instead of the pay day blow-out on food and beer I was skint! But that wasn't unusual. I got out of the car which was becoming as hot as an oven. "I'll check at the fax office just in case ours is there. If I'm not in the bar tonight I'll see you at work in the morning."