The Career Ladder

It was quite a tall ladder, unused silver rungs propped against a signpost in the DIY shop car park, label flapping in the breeze.  Leaning one hand against it, Bill waited for me to park the car, protected from the early spring chill by green overalls and a tweed cap.  8.30 am, and we await the other half of Lindsay & Son Electricians, who rolls up a couple of minutes later, and the ladder is roped to the roof rack, tools transferred and off they go – this customer needs a security light, the next wants several new sockets and there’s an estimate to be assembled for a possible house rewire in Perth.

Bill has become a serial retiree.  After two attempts to leave it all behind and put his feet up, he’s back at work again, this time returning to his first love, electrical work.  When we met, forty four years ago, he had not long emerged from the chrysalis of his apprenticeship, and was testing out his new professional wings with increasing confidence.  I remember listening with the fascination of young love as he described his days working in the Ship Model Experimental Tank in Dumbarton, careering from end to end of the long narrow strip of water, atop a complicated electrical contraption.  Or his first job in the shipyards, where, as a naive 15 year old, he traversed in terror those bouncing planks, jutting precariously between the high red rust walls in cavernous empty hulls of half built ships.  I even bought a copy of ‘Teach Yourself Electronics’ in an attempt to understand what he was talking about, but I didn’t get past page two.  After all, the mystique of a world I knew nothing about was more alluring and romantic.  Better to keep it that way.  As our courtship (do they have courtships now?  Probably not – a pity.  It was a gentler start to a relationship) – as our courtship developed, Bill moved to work for British Steel, and gave me vivid mental pictures of the huge furnaces, the white hot molten steel, the red dust everywhere, the heaps of railway lines stacked for testing by mysterious electronic devices whose function I could only vaguely grasp.

Then came University, a career in teaching, the first retirement, ten years in running our shops, more retirement, and now Lindsay and Son Electricians.  Why?  Well, that’s where the ‘Son’ comes in.  And he’s now high atop that new silver ladder, green overall-clad, tools slung around his hips, manipulating some mysterious wire into some minute aperture.

For - like father, like son – Donald has also had a career change.  A Scots musician, he played in London’s Barbican and in grey Scottish castles; in lofty St. Paul’s and tiny Muthill Church cradled in the green Perthshire hills; at funerals, weddings, Hogmanay parties; from Italy to the Dominican Republic; from Catalonia to Crieff - music that makes the heart pound with excitement, yearn at the pathos, or tingle with anticipation.  The green overalls make a change from the kilt and bagpipes, as, now retrained, he’s following in dad’s footsteps.

Hannah and I deliver coffee and bacon rolls, and squint anxiously up the ladder.  Bill comments on progress, offers suggestions, combines decades of electrical and teaching knowledge and fond fatherhood with a smidgeon of humour, and trips over a concrete flower tub. 

And then, suddenly, the light flashes on, and we all cheer.  It works.  It all works together.  It works.