When I arrived in London in 1984, it was to work in the soft business of Architecture and, for a long while, that’s just how it was.But it happened that the tide quickly turned. That work all dried up and, if you wanted me, in March 1991, I was to be found in a back garden in Queensgate Place, digging my very first hole.
I had my pick, my spade and my steel toed boots. I had a big plastic bottle of lemonade and a Mars bar for sustenance. I had my shirt off and the beginnings of a muscle. By noon, I was no longer at surface level but chest deep in the planet.. if I crouched.
You might imagine that when an excavation caves it, it would give some prior warning. Not so. My hole fell in on me without so much as a polite cough. One minute I was in it, the next it was on me.
I decided it was time for a break. I pulled my tee-shirt over my rippling bicep and quit the site. Once outside, I realised I had left the front door key inside. I was unfazed.
“I will get back in” I told myself, “by ingenuity, guile and analytical examination of my situation.”
Here’s what I worked out.
My worksite backed onto a mews house of the kind lately inhabited by unassuming billionaires. If I counted the houses up my street and then counted the mews houses down the next street, I should arrive at the one which backed onto my site. There was a kitchen window which had overlooked my digging, I could use it to climb through.
I counted them out and counted them back and arrived at a royal blue door through which television sounds were seeping. I knocked.
An Arabian gentleman in full Kuwaiti clothing opened the door and gazed evenly at me. I smiled winningly, his moustache twitched.
“I wonder would you mind...,” my little speech was eloquent but obviously in the wrong language.
Using an inept charade I managed to gain access to his small but elegant kitchen. There, above the sink, was his rear window and through it, just as I remembered, sat my collapsed dig.
The sink was stacked with unwashed dishes. Despairing of any understandable explanation, I proceeded straight away to empty them onto the draining-board. The Arabic gentleman stood back and took this re-arrangement of his domestic affairs silently in his stride.
At last the dishes were emptied. Now, finally, I could show him what I was all about. I climbed into his sink, opened his little window and threw myself out of it. I was back inside my own garden!
It took me a moment to get my balance. I turned to smile my thanks at this most tolerant of men and there he was, looking more bemused than ever, standing at his open kitchen door.
Had I taken more time, I might have noticed there was a kitchen door as well as a kitchen window but, to my lasting regret, I had not.
I dug my hole, and it didn’t fall in on me again. And as I packed my things that evening, I could still see the shadowy figure standing quietly in his kitchen recess.
No doubt wondering what the hell I had been playing at in his sink.
