OUR house, being new, had a garden of rubble and weeds, with one mangy thorn tree by the fence. What we didn’t know, until we starting digging, was that a mere 10cm of desert sand covered bedrock.
Excavating holes for trees and shrubs was such hard work that I went through a succession of gardeners, each of whom had resigned by lunchtime on his first day.
I took to offering piece-work rates, but word got around, and each hole cost a week’s wages.
Many of my trees died on that bedrock, but we did finally nurture a silver oak which grew into a magnificent specimen. The last report I had from Orapa was that it was still standing. It will be 40 years old next spring.
Meanwhile, we decided we needed a patio. After a lot of discussion, we came up with a fairly simple design, of which the mine’s township engineer approved and we set about getting it built.
Five days and seven phone calls after the mine’s builders were supposed to start work, a chap turned up at our door with a copy of our plans. Was he at the right house? Yes. Good. And, with that, he went away.
The following Monday morning, three labourers arrived with two shovels.
One sat and picked his nose, while the other two dug out a few weeds. They all disappeared for their morning break and that was the last I saw of them.
On Tuesday, three different labourers arrived, with one shovel. The one with the shovel dug four holes in the wrong places. At half past ten they all retired to the shade of the thorn tree and went to sleep.
On Wednesday afternoon a large truck arrived, and piles of aggregate and sand were dumped in the middle of my front lawn. The driver said he would leave the cement until tomorrow because it looked like rain. He went back and fetched the cement. It rained.
On Thursday I found my lawn covered in soggy cement bags.
Like all foremen the world over, this one arrived at coffee time. I told him that the vertical supports for the pergola were too long, so he took them away to cut them. He brought them back at tea time. They were now all different lengths, so he told his labourers to dig the holes different depths.
Friday was the day of the invasion – seven labourers and a concrete mixer.
They seemed to be trying to make up for their lack of progress, because they had about a third of the concrete laid before I had time to notice that they were not using reinforcing mesh. I asked about expansion joints, but they told me that the foreman had ordered it laid in one slab.
At this point I got in the Land Rover and went in search of the foreman. He wasn’t in his office, but I tracked him down to the electrical workshop next door. I told him what I thought of his workmanship and he told me that it was none of my business. I pointed out that it was my patio, and the electrical foreman, purple with suppressed laughter, almost disappeared under his desk.
I stormed back to the house, making it quite clear to the workmen that I would devise some exquisite form of torture for the foreman if the concrete cracked. This amused them. They were a good bunch, these workmen, but they couldn’t disguise the fact that they weren’t overly fond of their boss!
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