REMEMBER THE FOUNDATION MEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 364, 14 June 1946, Page 14

REMEMBER THE FOUNDATION MEN

(Written for "The Listener" by

ROBERT

GARVIN

HERE are a great number of us working all over New Zealand. We are unhonoured and unsung, but without us there would be no new houses or schoois or blocks of flats-we are the building labourers, we are the fetch and carry men, we excavate, we shift, we fill, we dig. And this is not the plural we I use but the royal we, for there could never be a building without a foundation, and we are the foundation men. At twenty-five to eight we mount our second-hand bicycles and ride away to a new job. At eight o’clock we stand looking at a virgin patch of grass with only a few pegs dotted about its surface. We listen to the builder and look at the foundation plan, then we carefully stretch our lines between the correct pegs and set to work. The first sod for a new house is turned. It is a start, but it doesn’t look much-in fact it just looks nothing at all. But we go on digging. Then when We warm up and the sun is out we take

off our coat. By twelve o'clock the trench looks like something. BS ne * WE squat in the shed on sacks of cement and eat our lunch and drink cups of hot sweet tea and talk shop with our mates. We discuss bosses and good digging and bad digging, wet ground and the state of the country. We talk about girls and dances, and enjoyably mull over the little building scandals known to us: the contractor who lugs his steel from one job to an-other-to keep it shiny as we say-and always manages to keep one jump ahea of the architect’s overseer or the inspector; the bloke who never bolts his plates down-just lets them float and hopes that the weight of the building will keep them in place; the one who removes so many studs for further use after the building inspector has been and gone. At one o'clock we are on the job again, and by four o'clock there is quite a respectable piece of trenching done. It’s good work, too, with the sides dead

straight and the bottoms good and level. There’s more in it than there seemsthere’s skill and a good eye needed, and there’s a way to use a shovel and spade and pick, and a way not to use a spade and shovel and a pick that isn’t picked

up just by standing around and looking on for a couple of hours. : a % % OUND about four o’clock the builder turns up again with another load of cement. We don’t like cement-it’s dirty

and heavy and it’s hard sweaty work unloading and stacking it. Still-there it is, and into the shed it has to go. So, in it goes. We are ready to get on with the digging again when we ‘notice the boss looking hard at the plan, and also looking at the trench we have dug. Then he comes over and makes a few measurements. We know what this is-we haye experienced it before. We wait. He comes over to us. "Well I’m blowed," he says. "This is in the wrong place. This is the front of the building. We only need a six inch trench here. We're eight feet out with that." He looks a little mournful. So do we. It’s all work, but we like to feel we're getting somewhere. But we’-e used to that sort of thing. That mistake is made

regularly-the oldest hand in the build- | ing game can make it. Well-we get about two sods cut out of the new trench when it’s five o’clock. So away go our tools and lines, and on with our coat and scarf. And off we go. % % * E cycle slowly off home, we feel all right and ready for our dinner. We pass new houses and half-finished ones and we silently criticise them as the rich roll past in their cars. ' But there’s only one thing-we don’t ever seem to get a house built for ourselves. And, although we’ve had our ear close to the ground for some months we don’t seem to be able to rent one either. That’s ‘deh we really want-six months off to get a house ready for ourselves.