EVOLUTION
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(4)
The End Of Days
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It’s 2019.
He’s 80.
It’s Darby & Joan Time, as they gave up serious travelling a couple of years back, because – well, because after thirty years of it, there was nothing left on their list. They’ve loved what they discovered, but came to detest flying and crowds and airports and digitised transiting. The world out there had changed too much.
Some would say, this is when their true retirement began.
With the house and garden long ago set up to their liking, his shed is now a potterer’s place, a place where small things are mended, small alterations made, small tinkering done. And it has evolved, morphed over the years.
It’s his ninth shed, and while this one has the spirit of all of his previous sheds, it’s now trimmed down, abbreviated, to suit his abbreviated life. But it’s also neater, cleaner, like it’s a reflection of their modest affluence, and his home-y style. He’s even developed the habit of hanging a cloth over the vice when he's not working there, the way English publicans hang a bar towel over the taps at closing time.
And there’s a place for everything, and everything is in its place, even if, to the female eye, a touch of anarchy is at work. But he can lay hands on any item and at any time, and if needs be, do it in the dark. This place is an extension of himself, his own work of art. As it should be.
There’s a two-tier rack of 32 small drawers up on top of the back shelf, made from plywood and chipboard offcuts and painted white, and on each a plastic name plate, cut from surplus louvre blind slats. On these are pencilled such names as – “240 volt switches”, “Gang Nails”, “Taps & Dies”, “Locks”, “Hinges”, “Gate & Fence”, “Knobs & Handles” – pencilled so they can be changed at will. Which they never are.
The top of the rear cupboard is now for smallish stuff – a tray of scrap offcuts, some ends of chipboard panels, a milk crate full of short lengths of just about everything that may come in handy, an assortment of metal rods in a container made from a bit of PVC pipe. There’s also a set of six plastic drawers meant for A4 paper but here contain such things as motors and gears from recycled computers and printers, watch and glasses repairs bits, shoe-fix materials, and oddly enough, a collection of lights and reflectors that have flown off the badly maintained steeds of lycra-clad Tour de France wannabees.
Also on the back wall is a shadow-board. He has always wanted a shadow board, for his everyday tools — his 1956 apprenticeship hacksaw and square, his shifting spanner, multigrips, big screwdriver, big pliers, small pliers, pincers, side cutters, his new tenon and rip saws, and the builder’s spirit level across the top. The whole thing looks balanced, makes the right statement.
But, like any decent shed-man’s shed, this place is more than the sum of its parts, more than just somewhere to make and fix and store. It’s a mass of artefacts, each carrying its own story.
There’s a large “NO LEFT TURN” street sign (found in the loft on day one, and fixed to the wall just inside the roller door, as if setting the tone for things to come), a very Pommie “Keep calm and carry on” sign (a Christmas pressie), a battered and faded blue aluminium “KANANGRA” sign (the original name plate from their much loved cottage by the sea), a pressed metal “ISLE OF MAN TT RACE 1934” plague with an AJS making serious time on Sulby Straight (bought in a touristy shop in Ireland), the “PHIL HUGHES [1988-2014] 63 NOT OUT” poster (from ‘The Advertiser’ on a dark day for Aussie cricket), a shared bike/walk pathway notice (scabbed from a demolished road sign waiting for the rubbish people), and a rusty and tyre-less pram wheel with one bent spoke (from the bitsa he made on the farm in 1952 for his car-mad cousin and good mate Brent).
Then there’s his shed radio.
Every self-respecting shed has a version of this.
The guts of it was once a 1980s tape-deck boom-box with deep emotional connections, now preserved in a ‘cabinet’ made from bits of polished timber (origin forgotten), some white aluminium strips (left over from when they did their atrium’s window conversion to French Provincial), a bit of metal mesh (gutter guard offcuts), two stray knobs (from the “Knobs & Handles” drawer), and an aerial sticking up the back like the tail of an excited lemur. It looks appropriately Arts’n’Crafts. He could’ve simply used the boom-box as it was of course, but that’s not the point, is it? Nup, never is.
And then, like touches of whimsy, there’s his bottle top collection, and his scab board.
One is on a 3ft x 2ft white-board, probably used for shed notes by the past owner, but now displays about 500 crown seals, harvested from the neighbourhood and from the far corners of the earth, stuck on with Blu-Tack, and no two the same. In an ice-cream tub on the bench there’s half as many again, waiting for the bigger board (standing by below) to go up, as the old one is absolutely chockers.
The scab board is high above the workbench, carrying an assortment of cultural fossils picked up in their daily wanderings, metal and plastic bits that were once part of urban life - small toys, car badges, coins from exotic places, touristy clap-trap, and brooches that may, or may not, be diamond-encrusted. They never fail to be surprised at the things people lose. It’s like the history of the human race is continually falling from the sky.
But, bit by bit over the last ten years, his garage has slipped, not really into disuse, but has become ... secondary. Secondary to that other shed where he goes to be alone and make things, the one stocked with images snatched from life, collections of words, scraps of ideas, and the many manifestations of his restless spirit. When all else is done with, this will be his final shed, and he’ll take it with him when he goes.
It has a large window that looks out into the atrium, making the room bright, and under it a set of four filing cabinet drawers, 2 high by 2 wide, that he had to custom build, to fit. In these are their business lives, and fifty years of family history research.
Covering one entire wall is a set of book shelves, also custom built from 16mm white Melamine, to take the wide sweep of their tastes, novels filling the top two rows, the rest near-overflowing with reference books, from 1927 car tours of England and Ireland, through to the life and works of Monet.
Stuck onto the end is a poster, mocked up from that classic Kelly Gang one, offering £8,000 REWARD, but for “Robbery & Affray” (MURDER seemed a touch too much), with him and his two sons featured, from back when they each had full beards, with the paper suitably edge-stressed and doctored with a spent tea bag for sepia effect. He loves this poster.
On one wall is a large mounted print of a B. G. Price painting, of two Spitfires in an English sky, on another a framed set of four photos, of parents and grandparents from two World Wars. With the exception of the old fella who lied about his age, they all look so young. And naïve.
Here his workbench is still the oak desk, that now looks even more well-travelled, carries what can only be described as the wear-and-tear of a lifetime’s use. Maybe several lifetimes. It looks – apt.
Against the wall, behind his swivel chair, a louvre cupboard holds an array of wine cartons that are titled “Computer”, “Stationary”, “Disc Blanks”, “Keepsakes”, and folder upon folder of writing works-in-progress. Beside that is a set of cheap drawers, full of maps and notepads, with a printer on top.
On the desk is his Hewlett-Packard PC tower, LG flat-screen, keyboard, mouse, phone, the ever-humming broadband wi-fi box, and a 5-drawer A4 paper tidy carrying a flatbed scanner. As unlikely as it once may have been, his computer and its peripherals have become his favourite power tools.
The room looks comfortable, and well used, and here he pays the bills, tracks their superannuation, does emails, and balances the books once a month, as his accounting orderliness has never left him. It’s also where he has researched and written all of the stories of their ancestors, crafted three more novels, and about 50 short stories. He loves being in this place, surrounded by his words and his books, and the ghost that lives in the machine, helping him grasp at a little immortality. It’s what sheds are about.
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It’s now 2025.
He’s 86.
Today he stands at the shed workbench, mood – pensive.
He takes down his tinsnips, picks up a beetroot can salvaged from the recycler bin, cuts a piece out of its side. From this piece he clips a narrow slice, about 2 inches long. He’s making a tool to help him fit those awkward spring-loaded pins that anchor in each half of a watch band. They’re fiddly little sods and he’s never yet managed to crack a formula for doing this that doesn’t involve swear-words.
He drags his ‘anvil’ towards him, gently hammers the strip of tin on it, back and forth, making it flatter. He stops, contemplates this block of iron from his early childhood, realises it’s the oldest of his tools, the head of his stepfather’s 14 pound sledgehammer he used to swing, up in the hills, driving in steel wedges to split redgum logs for the fire. It was just another piece of what the man left behind.
This makes him consider his other tools, on the shadow board, consider their age and pedigree. From his mother’s well-meaning starter pack there is now only the claw hammer and his small pliers, and in a drawer the plane, the wood-scriber, and the gut-buster drill, everything else worn out, broken, or lost. He resented the implication at the time, but now thinks of the dent its purchase must’ve made to her meagre income from cleaning offices at night, and feels a little shame.
This makes him think about what he has of his Dad’s. There’s just the big blue tinsnips he took as a talisman, before he put everything else of the old man’s workshop to the clearance sale. But then he remembers the spanner toolbox his Dad gave him when he was sixteen, when he towed his first car over there to be silently judged, and if possible, resuscitated. He gave the toolbox to him empty, like he was saying – You need to fill this – pointing him in a new direction. But there’s nothing else of his Dad’s.
But then he smiles, realises - his Dad gave him his first novel, which gave him a fleeting moment of acclaim. Hard to beat that.
He goes back to making his watch-band fixer, but stops again, and now looks at the backs of his hands, splotchy, vein-y, smaller than they were once, and softer. He puts down the hammer, turns them palm-up, stretches out the fingers, and begins to write, in his head, like always, trying the image out on the page.
“Once they were young-man’s hands...”, he writes, “...hands that have made cars and music, pleasure and pain, stories. Stories that bellowed, stories that whispered, stories that laughed and stories that cried. Stories that spoke to God.”
He smiles again, nods, writes –
“Hands that made me a fully paid up member of the human race. Hands that made me a better person.”
He goes back to his hammer and anvil, listens for the sound it makes – donk donk donk – no, it’s dhunk dhunk dhunk - and he writes that down too, for later.
© T. R. Edmonds 2025
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