The Beginning Leeds, Yorkshire, 1998
There are a million ways to torment your kids, but from beyond the grave Bernard Gradley had found a new one.
Technically, of course, he was within his rights. Every legal aspect had been considered, the document drafted and redrafted under Gradley’s dictatorial eye. Augustus Earle had resisted every change. He knew the difference between right and wrong, and he fought to preserve the family’s disintegrating rights. But Gradley was unforgiving. He demanded a document ‘watertight as a Scotsman’s wallet’ and wouldn’t rest until he had it. And once he did, he signed it, then put it away from him for ever, a document hard and mean as the dead man’s heart.
Earle pitied the family. The mother, who had for so long defended her kids from their father’s severity, had done nothing to merit this. And if the kids weren’t perfect, their punishment would far outweigh their faults.
They would come in hope. Their father had built a mighty fortune, and isn’t wealth supposed to pass down the generations more reliably than genes? Well, hope might bring them, but other emotions would send them away. Grief, sorrow, anger, rage.
The clock readied itself to strike twelve noon. The family would be here any minute. With tension mounting in the pit of his stomach, Earle patted the documents nervously into line, beneath his desk lamp: the will and the letter, heavy as a curse and more certain.
You don’t find too many saints on a construction site, but Bernard Gradley was in a class of his own. It wasn’t just the night of the accident that he’d ‘borrowed’ one of the site’s dumper trucks for a private job, it had been pretty much every night for the past eight months, cash in hand every time. Plus it turned out that Gradley had three pieces of heavy equipment as well as numerous cement mixers and the like ‘on lease’ to local building firms. Given how hard he worked by day and the extent of his extra-curricular activities at night, it was hardly surprising that he dozed off once when he shouldn’t. He was found in the morning, badly concussed, wandering the site. The dumper truck, wheels still spinning, was lying upside down on the remains of the site engineer’s cabin. With his foreman’s insults boiling in his ears, Gradley left the site for ever, saved from prosecution only by the company’s embarrassment at its own negligence.
Gradley was seventeen years of age. His father was dead, his mother alcoholic, his numerous brothers and sisters all of school age, his job prospects all but annihilated by the accident and its aftermath. It was, as he told his children later, the morning when his career took flight.
Before even returning to his lodgings to bathe his head, he walked to the centre of town to make some purchases: a suit and tie, white shirt and decent shoes, a briefcase, some stationery, and, costing as much as everything else together, a pair of binoculars with lenses hand-ground in East Germany.
His routine was quick to develop. On the first day he would get up, put on his dust-stained working clothes and set out on foot to do the round of construction sites in the area. His first move was to find himself a vantage point from which he could watch the activity on site. He took no notes and drew no pictures, but his eyes, glued to the binoculars, never left the scene. He spent several hours in that way, sometimes a whole day if the site was large. Finally, and only when he had seen enough, did he make his way to the nearest working man’s café or pub.
There he ordered food and drink and unfolded a copy of the Racing Post on the table in front of him. As he always took care to arrive at peak hours, however, there was no chance of him being left alone for long, and with an air of reluctance he’d put away his paper and begin to engage in the talk swirling all around him.
Posing as an unemployed labourer seeking work, he probed for the information he needed. What equipment did they use? What worked well, what didn’t? What were the foremen like? The site engineer? The construction manager? How many people were on the site altogether? Were they ahead of schedule or behind? He took care never to look inquisitive. He avoided direct questions, cracked a lot of jokes, slagged off bosses in general, told tall stories about bits of equipment he’d worked with in the past, encouraged even shy men to open up about their jobs, to complain about the idiocies they were forced to endure. He bought oceans of tea, laughed inordinately, and forgot nothing.
The next morning he returned to the site unrecognisable. This time he wore his suit and tie, his hair shone with Brylcreem and his shoes looked as if their owner had never heard of builders’ dust. He sought out the construction manager whom he already knew by description and usually also by sight. His pitch was simple. From his briefcase he took out a sheet of paper entitled ‘Site Costings: Current’. On it he had written carefully in pencil a complete list of the workforce and equipment employed on the site. By each item on the list were three columns showing the number of units, the cost per unit, and the total cost. He spent some time explaining rather elaborately that of course such an analysis was only illustrative and no doubt the manager had his site much better arranged than ‘the chaos typical around here’. The manager would look away, agree that the site was better managed than that, but encourage Gradley to continue ‘just supposing that things were that bad, but only for the sake of argument, mind’. At that point, Gradley knew he was home and dry, but still he took his time.
He talked about different construction routines, analysed them with equipment and without, and costed them out to show how the labour saving more than paid for the extra cost of the equipment. Every time he started, he hesitated, saying “Course, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, it’s obviously second nature to someone like yourself.’ Each time, however, he could be coaxed back into his patter, knowing that every routine he analysed was used on site and in most cases was even more inefficient than those he described. Eventually, and only after protestations, he pulled out a second sheet of paper from his case. This one was entitled ‘Site Costings: Potential’. There was the same list, and the same three columns. But this time the workforce was dramatically smaller, the need for construction equipment much bigger, and the total site costs a full third lower than they had been. Beneath the total was a number neatly written in pencil and underlined twice, labelled ‘Percentage Saving’.
The closer he came to landing his fish, the slower he wound the reel. ‘I feel like a complete bloody fool teaching my grandmother to suck eggs,’ he’d say, ‘I should be getting you to teach me my business instead.’ He got the site manager to walk with him around the site, making sure the manager watched every activity with new eyes whilst not appearing to see a single thing himself. Instead, he told stories about mythical site managers fired for incompetence when their bosses saw how ineptly things were being run, and others who had been promoted and given company cars for finishing impossible projects under budget and ahead of schedule. He larded his talk with things he had heard in the café the day before: the things the workers complained about, the ridicule they directed at their bosses, the petty cheating which goes on everywhere.
As the time for leaving drew near, Gradley almost seemed to forget that he had introduced himself as a construction equipment rental agent. He needed the site manager to bring his attention back to the equipment available, the pieces of machinery needed to bring the site’s costs from the first list to the second. Once they did get stuck in though, it was amazing how quickly the site’s equipment needs grew. No point in having just one bulldozer when a second could be used to clear the rubble. No purpose in using just one mechanical hoist when there were workers enough to be busy with two. Whenever the manager suggested another piece