In a sad sign of the relentless upwards presure on house prices skips are becoming a common sight in the village these days as the middle classes move in to what used to be houses for the workers.
They always employ builders to carry out the necessary repairs, renovations & improvements & have no use for the old stuff themselves, even as scrap.
Until recently hard working young couples would, with the help of friends & family, work hard at evenings & weekends to do the houses up, making a useful capital gain to put towards the eventual move to a larger house with a proper garden for the children. Somebody would always know of somebody who could find a use for the scrap; I have even known of cases where the youngsters benefited from fancy kitchen or bathroom fittings salvaged from the house of a richer person on which one of them was working
I was reminded of James Fenton’s poem, The Skip, by hearing it again on Poetry Please the other week.
Fenton himself said in an interview that it is just a flight of fancy.
from The Skip
I took my life and threw it on the skip,
Reckoning the next-door neighbours wouldn’t mind
If my life hitched a lift to the council tip
With their dry rot and rubble. What you find
With skips is – the whole community joins in.
Old mattresses appear, doors kind of drift
Along with all that won’t fit in the bin
And what the bin-men can’t be fished to shift.
* * *
Well, I got back that night the worse for wear,
But still just capable of single vision;
Looked in the skip; my life – it wasn’t there!
Some bugger’d nicked it – without my permission.
* * *
Some bastard saw my life and thought it nicer
Than what he had. Yet what he’d had seemed fine.
He’d never caught his fingers in the slicer
The way I’d managed in that life of mine.
His life lay glistening in the rain, neglected,
Yet still a decent, an authentic life.
Some people I can think of, I reflected,
Would take that thing as soon as you’d say Knife.
It seemed a shame to miss a chance like that.
I brought the life in, dried it by the stove.
It looked so fetching, stretched out on the mat.
I tried it on. It fitted, like a glove.
And now, when some local bat drops off the twig
And new folk take the house, and pull up floors
And knock down walls and hire some kind of big
Container (say, a skip) for their old doors,
I’ll watch it like a hawk, and every day
I’ll make at least – oh – half a dozen trips.
I’ve furnished an existence in that way.
You’d not believe the things you find on skips.
