“Oi, Ginger. Ginger Vernall. Over here, you silly beggar.”
It was Billy Mabbutt, who Ern knew from different pubs in Kennington and Lambeth and who’d landed him this opportunity to earn a bit of money, like a good ’un. His complexion florid to the point of looking lately cooked, Bill Mabbutt was a heartening sight with his remaining sandy hair a half-mast curtain draped behind his ears around the rear of that bald cherry pate, the braces of his trousers stretched across a button-collared shirt with sleeves rolled boldly back to show his ham-hock forearms. These were pumping energetically beside him like the pistons of a locomotive as he barrelled towards Ern, weaving between the other labourers who drifted back and forth through rustling, echoing acoustics on their disparate errands. Smiling at the pleasure that he always felt on meeting Billy mingled with relief that this much-needed job had not turned out to be a false alarm, Ernest began to walk in the direction of his old acquaintance, meeting him halfway. The high lilt of Bill’s voice always surprised Ern, coming as it did from those boiled bacon features, lined with sixty years and two campaigns — in Burma and Crimea — with this last being the place the two had met. The older man, who’d been a quartermaster, had adopted what appeared to be the shot-and-shell repellent Ernie as his red-haired lucky charm.
“Gor, blow me, Ginger, you’re a sight for sore eyes. I was upstairs in the Whispering Gallery just now, looking at all the work there is to do and getting in a right commotion ’cause I swore blind as you’d not show up, but now you’ve come and made me out a liar.”
“Hello, Bill. I’ve not got ’ere too late, then?”
Mabbutt shook his head and gestured in between the hulking piers to where a gang of men were struggling as they adjusted the immense contraption there at the cathedral’s heart, dependent from its dome.
“No, you’re all right, boy. It’s the mobile gantry what’s been messing us about. All over everywhere, she was, so if you’d got ’ere sooner you’d have only been sat on your ’ands. I reckon as we’ve got ’er settled now, though, by the looks of things, so if you want to come across we’ll get you started.”
One fat and the other thin, one with a pale complexion and red hair, the other with its opposite, the two men sauntered down the nave, over the resonant and gleaming tiles, and passed between its final columns to where all the work was going on. As they drew nearer to the dangling monster that Bill had referred to as the mobile gantry, Ern revised with each fresh pace his estimate regarding the thing’s size. Close to, that twenty floors of scaffolding was more like thirty, from which he inferred that he’d be at his job two or three hundred feet above the ground, a disconcerting prospect even given Ernest’s celebrated head for heights.
Two labourers, one of whom Ernest knew was brawling Albert Pickles from up Centaur Street, were stripped down to their singlets as they pushed the cog-like mill wheel in the middle round a final notch or two, rotating the whole feat of engineering on its axis while they trudged their orbit-path round the mosaic sun at the dead centre of the transept, its rays flaring to the cardinal directions. With their efforts, the men brought about the groaning framework on the spindle’s right until it was aligned exactly with one of the eight great orange-segment sections into which the overarching bowl had been divided up. As the huge scaffold moved, so too did its enormous sandbag counterweight off to the left side of the axial pole, suspended from the crossbeam far above. Four or five navvies stood about it, walking round beside the hanging sackcloth boulder, steadying it as it wobbled with a foot or two of clearance over the church floor.
Ern noticed that the bag had sprung a leak, a small hole in the fabric of its underside with an apprentice of fourteen or so scuffing about there on his knees beside the sack, sweating and swearing as he tried to darn the rend with thread and needle. The boy was disfigured by what people called a strawberry mark staining his skin across one eye from cheek to forehead in a mongrel puppy patch, whether from birth or from a scald Ern couldn’t say. The milky, stormcloud-filtered radiance dropped down upon the youth from overhead like in Greek dramas as he grovelled at his mending, with the hourglass grains spilling across his darting fingers, falling in a thin stream on the lustrous slabs below. As Ern gazed idly on this scene, thinking inevitably of the sands of time, the picture’s lighting jumped and lurched, followed not several seconds later by a cannon fusillade of thunder. The squall’s eye was evidently drawing nearer.
Billy Mabbutt led Ern past where men were fastening the gantry’s trailing guy-ropes down to anchor it now it had been positioned properly, over to a trestle that had been set up between the statues of Lord Nelson and the late Viceroy of Ireland Lord Cornwallis, who’d surrendered in the Yankee independence war to General Washington if Ern remembered all his history right. Lord knows why they should want to give him such a grand memorial. The kit that Ern would need to make his restorations was set out upon the makeshift table where another young apprentice, this one slightly older, was already separating eggs by pouring them from one cracked china teacup to another. Workmen stood about the trestle waiting to begin their tasks and Billy loudly introduced Ern as the pair rolled up to join the crew.
“It’s all right, chaps, the decorator’s come. This ’ere is me old ’oppo Ginger Vernall. A right Rembrandt on the quiet, is Ginger.”
Ern shook hands with all the men and hoped they didn’t grudge the fact that he was the skilled labour on this job and would be getting more than they did. Probably they understood that he might not have any work like this again for months, while brawny labourers were always needed, and at any rate the money was so poor that neither party had a cause for envy. Him and Billy Mabbutt conferred briefly on the ins and outs of what he was to do, and then Ern went about transferring his required materials and tools from off the tabletop onto the quarter-cheese shaped wooden flooring slung inside the framework of the moveable arrangement.
He selected an array of squirrel brushes from the tin-full that the St. Paul’s clergy had provided and, as well, the cardboard lid off an old shoebox serving as a tray for all the cleaned-out varnish tubs containing the cathedral’s range of powder-paints. Of these, the purple and the emerald green had caught the damp and clotted into crumbly gems, but Ern didn’t expect that he would need these colours and the other pigments seemed to have been kept in a much better state. The surly youngster who’d been put in charge of separating out the eggs was finishing the last of half a dozen when Ern asked if he could have his yolks. These were unbroken in one basin while another pot held the unwanted whites, a viscous slop that looked obscenely like collected drool which would no doubt be put to other use and not go wasted. Carefully transporting his receptacle with the six yellow globs sliding around each other at its bottom, Ern set it upon the pulley-mounted platform with the brushes and the colours then fetched mixing bowls, a two-pound sack of gypsum and half-gallon cider flagon washed and filled with water. Adding glass paper and three or four clean cloths, Ern climbed onto the swaying wedge of deck beside the trappings of his craft and with a tight grip on one of its corner-ropes, he gave the signal for Bill Mabbutt’s men to winch him up.