[soundtrack : Muddy Waters - ‘Mannish Boy’]
After attending furniture-making school for two years it was time for me to find an apprenticeship. Then, as now, there were too few places to go around. I was scheduled with an interview at one of the hospitals in town. Many of the larger, public institutions that had an amount of real estate still kept kept an in-house workshop as part of their technical / maintenance department.
Being punctual and finding the right building I was shown up a flight of stairs and told to go straight through. Knock-knock. Behind the door I found a surprising number of paunchy men seated around a long table — the numerous heads of a multitude of departments busying themselves with the maintenance of the sprawling hospital complex's many buildings, I surmised.
- Walter ? Welcome. Please, have a seat.
- Thank you.
- Sooo ... you've been to University, have you ?
- I can’t deny.
- Aaand why do you want to become a woodworker ?
- Well ... I don't want to become an office worker, and I've always
- !Some people would find you scary.
- Eh?! ... I ... I ... don't think I've frightened anyone yet who didn't deserve it.
I notice one of the old gits grinning and nodding, the others are stonily unamused.
- Well, yes ... I think that is all we need to hear for now. Thank you for your time, you'll hear from us.
I left bewildered as to what had actually happened.
Later it dawned on me that the meeting had just been a box-ticking exercise and that the congregation I'd just informed of the undesirability of being an office worker had probably spent most of their working lives struggling to advance from lowly shop-floor craftsman up through the ranks to better-remunerated management and head of office. Reading the room was never my strong suit.
I no longer remember how it came about, a sympathetic soul maybe wispered in someone's ear that “he's a good boy, and a crafty woodworker” ... anyhow I started working at 'Gustav Gjelstads Eftf. Snekkerverksted' (translated: 'Gustav Gjelstad's Successor Woodshop'). And so I never completed my formal education and never got my Guild Diploma. Instead I was paid full wages and got to work with some of the best boys in the trade.
Oh, and my classmate Svein got the apprenticeship at the hospital. He said the most woodworking he did at that place was hanging some shelves occasionally, but that the nurses were friendly.
And after 30 years I’m the one standing by my bench, insisting on doing the work no one any longer remembers how to do.
'Gjelstad' was one of the oldest shops in town, and well reputed. It was originally housed just east of the river, in Nedre gate 3, in a wooden building that burned down.
When told about this I asked if it was the ubiquitous wood-burning stove they used to heat the shop and the glue-pot that had started the fire. It had always seemed insanely risky to me to have an iron stove amidst all the sawdust and shavings.
- Weren't you afraid that an ember would crackle and jump out of the fire and set the whole shop on fire ?
- Naaaw ... we'd just throw some more sawdust over it. Sawdust doesn't really burn that well, you see.
I was always very dubious about this, but was told that when the fire-inspector and the shop foreman were walking through the smoking ruins of the burned-down shop the inspector says something like
- Well, I guess it was the heap of sawdust you lot always sweep up to the stove that set this off, don't you reckon?
- No way, Inspector! Look here!
says the foreman and kicks open the blackened heap in front of the oven to reveal fresh sawdust under a charred layer. The only thing that had not burned down in that conflagration was the heap of sawdust by the stove. They got their insurance money. Or at least that's what they told me.
When I worked there they had long since moved across the river (but only just across the river :-) to Maridalsveien 3, to a modern concrete building that had been part of a large soft-drinks factory (NORA Fabrikker). The new workshop was housed in what had been the old bottle crate workshop. We did all manner of work; furniture (new and restauration), windows, doors and street gates, shop fronts and interiors, remodelling offices.
Still, the business was running out of steam and just coasting along on a good reputation. The boss / owner was a jovial old boy from one of those mountain provinces where they speak a quaint dialect that clients tend to find endearing. That was his shtick; being the honest, likable country lad — and customers lapped it up. I know for a fact that he used to be an efficient and good woodworker, but a businessman and leader of men he was not. No investment in new tools or machines, no pay rise for the boys year after year, the workshop slowly atrophying ... no driving will behind the enterprise. Dissolution.
The guys left one after one, having no problem finding work in other shops. In the end it was only me and old Arne on the floor and the boss and his second-in-command (a very capable man who did his best to keep the ship afloat) in the office. So; two men working for four and getting the smallest wages for their troubles. It was time to find greener pastures.
A great read.
The "scary" conversation is brilliant. "I've never scared anyone who didn't deserve it".
Fantastic.