<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/lloyd-davis/5014074835/" title="I helped build this garage in 1987"><img src="https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4152/5014074835_09fcb79e71.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="I helped build this garage in 1987"></a>
Summer of 1987 and I'd left college. I didn't want to go straight on the dole, I wanted to have some money in my pocket and have something to do with my time. It was sunny, early summer and I don't really know what I was thinking, but there was a job in the job centre as a builder's labourer working with a guy called Steve and I went for it.
I worked on two jobs until I completely wimped out. The first was this garage. It's just up the hill from where I live now and that was a short walk from where I was living then so I was happy. When I arrived, the foundations had been dug and laid and my first job was to bring the bricks down from the roadside where they'd been delivered to the site where they would be laid. On my first day, I also learned how to mix muck (mortar), sand, cement, water, into the cement mixer, shovel it out ready. These were my main tasks, that and making tea. Every now and then it rained and we couldn't work, we went and sat in the kitchen and drank tea.
Turned out the guy who'd hired us had this place for his mistress. He would turn up (we were very scornful of him, rich, tanned, open top sports car, kept woman) every now and then and tell us to hurry up. She worked every day, so she wasn't that kept. Anyway, boys tongues wagged. One day, I went up to the loo and saw through the open bedroom door, chains, handcuffs and a horsewhip on the bed. Each of the guys also went in one at a time, to have a look. Oh how we laughed.
One week Steve was away. I didn't want to not get paid, so I asked him to give me something to do. He said I could dig a pit for the drainage and marked it out for me, told me to go down five feet. On the Monday, I did a lot of digging. It was hot and the ground was hard. Every now and then I had to swap my spade for a pick-axe to break it up a little. But I made some progress.
The next morning, I turned up and found it had all been filled in. I thought someone must be having a laugh, so I just dug it all out again, but on the Wednesday when I came back it was filled in again and a note stuck to a stick saying "Stop digging here, private property". It turned out that the local Scout Group had the land next to it and it wasn't clear where the border was and they believed I was digging up their land. There was nothing I could do without hanging around there waiting for them to come along the next evening, so I went down to the Council to see if there were any plans or anything that I could use as evidence. There didn't seem to be. I didn't want to spend another day digging only to have it filled in again, so I left it and hoped Steve would pay me anyway. He didn't want to, but he gave me a couple of days in the end.
The next week he sent me off to another job on the other side of town. By now, I'd moved house to a bit further out of Guildford (in the opposite direction), so to be at work by 8 o'clock, I now had to be up and out the door to get a lift from Steve at 7.30 to then drive over there. That and the fact that most of the work was digging and wheeling a barrow full of soil up and into a skip (I was a bit shit and fell off the plank several times) meant the shine was taken off the whole thing. I went on a bit of a bender one weekend and didn't show up on the Monday morning. Steve tried to get me to come back (he was in the middle of a job, of course), but I told him I'd got a rotten stomach bug and anyway I didn't want to do it any more.