Moon had just started work on some lettering at St Stephen’s, a private school in South London. The school’s reception building had recently been completed and Moon had been commissioned to carve the school name into the front of it. The scaffold platform was about five feet from the ground so it didn’t take us long after we arrived to get everything Moon needed up on that level in order for him to begin work. A few minutes after he started, a small, red-trousered man in a check shirt skipped past and threw a hand towards Moon.
‘Don’t jump! Your wife just called and said she loves you!’
We both laughed as honestly as we could. Me on the ground, Moon five feet up. The man’s enthusiasm made it mildly amusing. We would soon start calling him Mr Red Trousers for reasons that should be obvious.
To the credit of Mr Red Trousers, the comment was slightly more original than the churchyard jokester’s perennial favourite ‘you’ve spelt it wrong’, which we get a lot as letter carvers. That joke always receives a groan-laugh, whereas Mr Red Trousers received a laugh-groan. The former: more groan than laugh; the latter: more laugh than groan. The ‘you’ve spelt it wrong’ joke has never and will never be funny. But one day in the near or distant future, the ostensible comedian might be telling the truth. A word in an inscription might have a C when it should be an S, or an S when it should be a C, or a double-L when one is sufficient, or an ’ible rather than an ’able. We live in fear of that, and yet that’s when it’ll be truly funny: when a comment like ‘you’ve spelt it wrong’ actually means ‘you’ve spelt it wrong’.
The funniest comment I’ve heard while out on a job came later that day. Moon had drawn the lettering out on the stone in eighteen inch high capital letters. It was drawn out to a high standard as far as I could tell, and from a distance and at ground level, ST STEPHEN’S SCHOOL looked well-sized, well-placed and well-spaced. Moon was waiting for the go ahead from the headmaster to start carving when a group of schoolboys walked past, one of whom coughed a rather loud ‘looks shit’ into a closed hand and carried on walking. Moon smiled at the group as they turned a corner, maybe recognising it as something he himself might have done when he was that boy’s age. Moon had been warned that the school had a reputation for attracting unruly rich kids.
‘That boy will go far,’ he said.
‘Money and his cheek will ruin him,’ I replied, looking at the corner the boy had turned into.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mr Red Trousers delivered his line as energetically
as ever. It was lucky number seven.
‘Don’t jump! Your wife just called and said she loves you!’
We both let out a simultaneous laugh-groan to humour him, as robotically as the six other occasions. The line had been a little bit funny to begin with, but now it was starting to lose its edge.
We’d found out the day before that he was the school’s Head of English.
‘It reminds me of that Robertson Davies quote,’ Moon said after he’d gone. ‘The difference between private schools and state-run schools: they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations.’
‘I wonder how many pairs of red trousers he has.’
‘I’m going to stick my neck out and say just the one. I think he probably gets a new pair every Christmas and takes the old pair to the charity shop. It might be a longstanding New Year custom in the Red Trousers Family household, like making resolutions or taking the Christmas tree down.
I was on and off the scaffold. Bringing things down, taking things up. I was only a year into my apprenticeship and I was still a year or two away from being capable and confident enough to carve something this big. My role therefore was that of a general assistant, a ground floor dogsbody, a thrower-upper, a passer-upper, a catcher, a cleaner-upper, a van-unloader and re-loader, and, maybe most importantly, a chisel sharpener. Sharpening a chisel correctly takes a lot of practice and a lot of patience to get right. I wasn’t quite there yet, and Moon knew that, but I appreciated the practice I was getting from it.
The ashlar that Moon was carving into was a very hard yellow sandstone with the occasional orange wave. It was lovely to look at, particularly with the sun on it, but Moon said as soon as he started roughing out the S that it was the hardest sandstone he’d ever cut. The tungsten chisels didn’t take too kindly to it, blunting much more quickly than they would do on the stone and slate we were used to carving. I had to do a rescue job on most of the chisels when he passed them down, often with their edges nicked. I did the best I could with the sharpening stones we had, going through the five grades from very coarse to very fine until they were returned to a state of sharpness and a semblance of usability again.
Moon sent down some advice.
‘Put a bit more pressure on the right side to stop it twisting,’ he said. ‘Check by looking down the chisel once you’ve sharpened it.’
In those early days, I tended to put a twist in the chisels whenever I sharpened them. It was a common mistake among apprentices. This meant I was putting too much pressure on the left-hand side of the chisel tip when I was moving the chisel back and forth on the sharpening stone. You overcompensate by putting more pressure on the right side.
At the end of the fifth day, Moon was taking some of the tools back to the van and I was clearing up on the scaffold. Mr Red Trousers skipped by again, as smiley and as bouncy as ever.
‘Don’t jump! Your wife just called and said she loves you!’
Maybe Friday afternoon had something to do with it, or the fact that I didn’t have a wife, or maybe it was the way he flailed his arms more dramatically when he said it this time. Perhaps some dark magic was at play because it was his thirteenth attempt at telling the joke. Or maybe it was a combination of all those things. My response wasn’t a groan-laugh or even laugh-groan, but the heroic and persistent teacher-comedian got his wish: Mr Red Trousers finally made me laugh-laugh.
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