THE PRACTICAL MAN
We visit my father-in-law in a village a hundred kilometres from London. It’s the house where he was born and raised, the one he fled at seventeen to join the war, only to return in ’45 with a stump where his right arm used to be.
“Michael’s not here! He’s gone for firewood!” laments Aunt Jean, his wife. “They’re tearing down the village hall next door—gave the timber away for free!”
Father-in-law’s nearly eighty, but he’s still a sturdy bloke. Not like men these days.
“How far’s the village?” we ask Aunt Jean.
“Oh, not far!” She waves a hand. “Five kilometres or so.”
My wife and I exchange puzzled glances.
Before long, he “arrives.” His transport? An old pram from the seventies, its basket long gone, tilting under the weight of salvaged planks. He shrugs off the straps crisscrossed over his chest, rigged to drag the load behind him.
“Look at this!” he boasts, as if the wood had fallen from the sky. “A few more trips, and we’ll be set for winter!”
“How will you cut it, Michael?” I help stack the planks.
“Got my sawbench!”
He points to a clumsily cobbled worktable fitted with contraptions for one-handed sawing. On top rests an old, rusted handsaw with a metal handle—just like my father’s. The very one I’d learned on.
My chest tightens. I want to help—drive him there in my Land Rover, maybe hire a lorry with workers.
“Need a hand, Michael?”
But he isn’t listening. His single arm waves me off as he slings the straps back over his head.
“Lorries just get in the way! Speed past so close to the kerb, nearly knock you over!”
And there *are* lorries—huge, roaring things, barrelling through the tiny village on the transit route to Edinburgh.
“Jean! Off again!” he calls to his wife. She steps out to see him off, watching as he trudges past the gate, then tells us proudly:
“Provider!”
It clicks then. He doesn’t *want* help.
He lives for this—for feeling like a *man*, not just a bloke but a proper, old-school *man*, though he spent his life as dean of an economics college.
I squint down the road and see him: an old man, alone, dragging that battered pram with its frayed belts and knotted clotheslines strapped across his chest. Once, it carried my wife as a babe. Now he looks like a barge-hauler, but instead of riverbanks, lorries thunder past, spewing fumes and soot.
I can’t just stand there. My son and I drive to the hardware shop.
Later, we leave a brand-new Swedish bow saw, hardened teeth gleaming in its leather case, on his workbench.
Five years on, we bring him to live with us. In comfort, he lasts barely six months.
After the funeral, at the wake, I find the saw untouched in its case atop the sideboard. The villagers murmur:
“He treasured it. Practical man, he was.”
“Aye,” I nod. “A *real* man. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”
