Dad's Workshop of Doom
From the outside it looked sweet and unassuming. Inside, potential death and injury lurked in every corner.
My parents were part of a very frugal generation. They were depression babies born at the beginning of the 1930’s, who then grew up with rationing during the Second World War. They learned to eat everything on their plates, save every oily rag or scrap of paper, and keep wearing clothing until it was so threadbare it became transparent. My mother, to this day proudly brings out a Hawaiian muumuu dress every summer, that she has had since the 1970’s. It's actually so old it’s hip again.
My Dad, though, was in another league altogether when it came to saving money. He was a world-class skinflint who never bought anything new if he could help it. Christmas and birthday gifts were hand-me-downs or came from an auction. Even my dog was a sad, but welcome freebee puppy from some auction in a distant logging town.
This obsession with thrift turned my parents into amateur hoarders. Our house became stuffed with reused bread bags, endless empty ice cream buckets, and paper. Reused wrapping paper. Paper saved for phone messages, saved newspapers to light fireplaces, which in winter we did, to avoid switching on the ‘money wasting’ electric furnace. We never threw anything away and when something broke, Dad would fix it.
My Dad could repair anything. From the washers in a dripping tap, to a cracked or smashed window in our house, or a loose bicycle chain. If it was broken and potentially costing money, Dad was on it. He once found an old book at an auction on guitar making by some famous luthier, and set to work replacing the back of my mother’s eighteenth-century Spanish travel guitar that she had inherited from her great uncle Horatio, the sea captain. It never occurred to my Dad that he was potentially devaluing the instrument by working on it with modern tools and materials, but hey! The guitar was in need of repair, he would do it himself and save money!
The one thing he had to spend money on therefore, was tools. Lots of them. Screw drivers, chisels, planes, drills, carpenter’s hammers, ball-peen hammers, sledge hammers, hand saws, table saws, radial-arm saws, circular saws, band saws. He even had a set of inherited Victorian hand tools; and they all had one thing in common. They were sharp, and if used inattentively, lethal. I remember Dad once being off work for a week after attempting to shape a log with an adze and catching the blade on his ankle instead of the wood.
His workshop, next to our house, had once been my grandfather’s butcher shop and the ceiling was still studded with rusted, cobwebby, pulleys and meat hooks. Metal buckets and old cigarette tins, overflowing with saved screws and nails randomly decorated the work bench, the centrepiece of which was a sizeable wood vice of unknown origin and age. The curious thing was that no matter how chaotic, disorganised, or dirty the workshop became, my father could always find whatever tool he needed, when he needed it.
My brother and I were by default his incompetent workshop minions. He would shout for a tool and we would scramble about like cartoon characters trying to locate it. At which point he would lose patience with us, stride over to some pile of wrenches, and extract the tool he needed. He never showed us how to use any of the tools, and we were forbidden to touch them. Watching him work however, did teach us a lot about woodworking.
Dad came to the ghastly realisation (too late) how expensive children are to keep. He and my mother may only have been financially responsible for the two of us, but Mum gave birth to us within the space of a year and a half, and that meant she had to scale back her hours as a Registered Nurse considerably. Worse than that, the expenses children rack up continue to grow until the magic age of eighteen, when legally they are no longer your financial responsibility. But it wouldn’t stop there. What about college? Or a car? Marriage? Grandchildren?! I think that’s why, subconsciously at least, my father realised that if he could kill us off in a tragic domestic accident in the Workshop of Doom, then money could be saved and no blame attached.
As we aged and became more expensive, Dad added a sprinkling of metal working tools to his Aladdin’s Cave of potential injury and death. I think I was fifteen when the Oxyacetylene welder appeared. This was an alarming device that had to be lit and shut off in just the right order, or the flame could ‘flash back’ and blow up the metal, bomb-shaped compressed oxygen and acetylene bottles. Less dangerous, at least at first glance, was the arc welder. Its fearsome electric arc could only blind you or give you an electric shock that would stop your heart or send you flying across the room, if you were dumb enough to touch the anode and the diode at the same time without protection.
Dad soon realised though, that if he wanted to succeed with his subconscious infanticide, he was going to have to up his game. He began suspending heavy objects, like engine blocks and boat hulls, from the ageing hooks and pulleys attached to the ceiling in hopes that they might give out, and drop a Ford 351 Windsor engine on us. He would appear at the backdoor, in his oil and dirt impregnated coveralls, and call one of us into the butcher shop to help him ‘hold something still’ while he changed the brakes on the car. This inevitably meant steadying the back end of the vehicle, which would be precariously suspended on an ancient hyperextended jack. Dad would then repeatedly strike the jammed brake pad with a massive sledge hammer in hopes (in my mind at least) that the car would topple upon me. A tragic accident where no one was to blame, and monthly outgoings could be reduced by one child.
As the Seventies drew to a close and his back-hoe business became more prosperous, Dad’s opportunities to kill us in the Workshop of Doom dwindled. My brother and I got busy being teens and weren’t home as much, and he began making enough money to lose interest in the project. When Dad passed away a few years ago, my brother ended up with most of the tools from the butcher shop, and he still makes lots of things with them. Fortunately though, my brother’s kids had already moved away from home by the time he got them, so those tools never got the chance to terrorise another generation with the prospect of a grisly, but money-saving, death.