M
maugein96
Guest
Whilst looking for Irish accordion music I came across this classic wee Irish ditty about Paddy not being at work.
It rang very true with me as I was one of many kids who had to leave school at 15 in 60s Scotland when their fathers were made redundant, and go to work as labourers on building (construction) sites. Incidentally the practice is illegal now, but when it was legal we would probably have been better off as prisoners sentenced to hard labour.
We were basically just thrown into heavy manual labour without any instruction or safety briefings and were expected to do any arduous tasks they threw at us. On the first day on site I suffered two stupid injuries due to ignorance. First one was when I pulled a three piece 60 foot wooden ladder off a roof, taking care not to damage the aluminium facing on the house. The ladder bounced off the ground, caught me under the chin, and lifted me a few feet into the air. I fractured some bone or other in my chin/jaw, but not badly enough to go home sick. Later that same day I was told to carry a propane gas cylinder down another 60 foot ladder from a roof to the ground. The cylinder weighed 120 lbs so I put it on my shoulder, not realising that the frost on it was going to lift the skin off my neck.
My mother was very sympathetic when she saw the state I was in, but I had to go to work again the next day as we needed the money. When I heard this song it brought it home to me that Paddy could well have been me, and in fact it was me. If only I could have saved enough money to buy my sister a Lego doll for her Christmas!
Sometimes we got easier numbers like two 15 year olds manhandling cast iron baths weighing 280lbs up four flights of stairs at a time. If all the carrying got too much for us we were just told to steal the dumper trucks from our fellow adult labourers and use them to carry the heavy gear. Most of us could drive just about any construction site vehicle on the roads at 15 with no licence, insurance, or anything else. Please dont reach for the paper hankies as our mothers gave us 8 slices of bread and cheese, and two bars of chocolate every day. We needed it for the amount of graft we had to do. One guy used to complain about getting 8 cheese sandwiches every day, so we told him to tell his mother to vary it a bit. He said he couldnt do that as his mother was dead, and he had to make the sandwiches himself!
It rang very true with me as I was one of many kids who had to leave school at 15 in 60s Scotland when their fathers were made redundant, and go to work as labourers on building (construction) sites. Incidentally the practice is illegal now, but when it was legal we would probably have been better off as prisoners sentenced to hard labour.
We were basically just thrown into heavy manual labour without any instruction or safety briefings and were expected to do any arduous tasks they threw at us. On the first day on site I suffered two stupid injuries due to ignorance. First one was when I pulled a three piece 60 foot wooden ladder off a roof, taking care not to damage the aluminium facing on the house. The ladder bounced off the ground, caught me under the chin, and lifted me a few feet into the air. I fractured some bone or other in my chin/jaw, but not badly enough to go home sick. Later that same day I was told to carry a propane gas cylinder down another 60 foot ladder from a roof to the ground. The cylinder weighed 120 lbs so I put it on my shoulder, not realising that the frost on it was going to lift the skin off my neck.
My mother was very sympathetic when she saw the state I was in, but I had to go to work again the next day as we needed the money. When I heard this song it brought it home to me that Paddy could well have been me, and in fact it was me. If only I could have saved enough money to buy my sister a Lego doll for her Christmas!
Sometimes we got easier numbers like two 15 year olds manhandling cast iron baths weighing 280lbs up four flights of stairs at a time. If all the carrying got too much for us we were just told to steal the dumper trucks from our fellow adult labourers and use them to carry the heavy gear. Most of us could drive just about any construction site vehicle on the roads at 15 with no licence, insurance, or anything else. Please dont reach for the paper hankies as our mothers gave us 8 slices of bread and cheese, and two bars of chocolate every day. We needed it for the amount of graft we had to do. One guy used to complain about getting 8 cheese sandwiches every day, so we told him to tell his mother to vary it a bit. He said he couldnt do that as his mother was dead, and he had to make the sandwiches himself!
