Chapter 27: The Apprentice

The summer Tom learned to wall he was nineteen and angry about something he could no longer name, some grievance against the world or against himself or against the fact that he had left school at sixteen with nothing and had worked for two years on a building site in Richmond carrying hod and mixing cement and being shouted at by men who did not know his name and did not want to know it, men who called him lad or you or oi, and the anger was in his body, in his arms and his jaw and the set of his shoulders, and Jim Pratt saw it on the first morning and said nothing about it and put a hammer in Tom's hand and said, "Hit that."

That was the word Jim used. Hit. Not strike, not tap, not shape. Hit. And the thing he pointed at was a piece of limestone the size of a loaf of bread, sitting on a flat stone that served as Jim's dressing platform, and Tom hit it, swung the hammer the way he had seen men swing hammers on the building site, a full arc, the weight of the tool doing the work, and the stone shattered, broke into five pieces that flew in different directions, one of them catching Jim on the shin, and Jim looked at the broken stone and looked at his shin and looked at Tom and said, "That's not what I meant."

Tom did not know what Jim meant. He did not know what Jim meant for the first three weeks, and the not-knowing was the education, was the lesson, was the thing that Jim was teaching without saying he was teaching it, because Jim did not teach the way teachers taught, did not explain and demonstrate and test, did not stand at the front of a room and speak about the principles of dry stone walling while the students took notes. Jim taught by doing, by working beside Tom in silence, by letting Tom watch his hands and try to copy what the hands did, and when Tom failed, which was constantly, Jim would take the stone from Tom's hands and turn it and show him the face he had missed, the surface he had not seen, the angle that would have made the stone fit if Tom had been looking with the right eyes, and then Jim would set the stone in the wall and it would sit there, perfect, as though it had been made for that spot, and Tom would think, I will never be able to do that, and Jim would hand him another stone and say, "Again."

The wall they worked on that first summer was in Arkengarthdale, a boundary wall that separated two sheep pastures on the hillside above the road, and the wall had been neglected for years, the farmer too old to repair it and too stubborn to pay someone until the sheep were getting through in three places and the neighbour was threatening to send a bill for the strays, and the farmer had finally asked Jim, who was fifty then and at the height of his powers, and Jim had said he would do it if he could bring a lad, and the farmer had said he did not care who Jim brought as long as the wall was mended by autumn.

Tom's father had arranged it. His father, who had worked at the creamery in Hawes for thirty years and who had never built a wall in his life but who knew the dale and knew the people and knew that Jim Pratt was the best waller in Swaledale and perhaps in Yorkshire, and who had seen in Tom's anger and Tom's restlessness and Tom's strong young body the raw material that the craft required, and his father had gone to Jim's cottage in Gunnerside and sat in Jim's kitchen and asked Jim to take the boy on, and Jim had looked at Tom's father and said, "Can he lift?" and Tom's father had said, "He's been carrying hod for two years," and Jim had said, "That'll do for a start."

The first thing Jim taught Tom was not how to build but how to see.

"Look at the stone," Jim said, on that first morning, after the shattering. He picked up a piece of limestone from the pile beside the wall and held it in front of Tom's face, six inches from his eyes, and Tom looked at it and saw a stone, grey, rough, the size of a brick, and he said, "It's a stone," and Jim said, "No. Look at it."

Tom looked. He looked at the surface, which was not smooth but textured, covered in small ridges and depressions, the grain of the limestone visible in the light, and he saw that one side was flatter than the others, smoother, the surface worn by weather or by the tool of the quarryman who had extracted it, and he saw that the opposite side was rough, broken, the fracture surface where the stone had split from the rock, and Jim watched him looking and said, "Which side faces out?"

"The flat side."

"Why?"

"Because it looks better."

"No. Because it sits better. The flat side against the string line gives you a true face. A rough side gives you a face that wanders. The face is not for looking at. The face is for building against. The string line is the truth and the face has to match it."

Tom did not understand this for weeks. He built faces that wandered, faces that bulged and dipped and leaned in and leaned out, faces that made Jim look at him with the expression of a man watching a dog try to open a door, patient but incredulous, and Jim would take down what Tom had built and rebuild it in half the time and with twice the accuracy, and Tom would watch and try to see what Jim was seeing, try to understand the relationship between the stone and the string, between the face and the line, and slowly, over weeks, the understanding came, not to his mind but to his hands, the hands learning what the eyes could not teach, the hands finding the angle, the pressure, the placement that made the face true.

Jim spoke rarely and when he spoke the words were precise and few and they landed in Tom's mind the way well-placed stones landed in a wall, sitting firm, not moving, each word in its place.

"A wall is not a pile of stones. A pile of stones falls down. A wall stands up. The difference is the arrangement."

"Never put a stone in a wall that you wouldn't want to take out again. If it goes in hard it's wrong."

"Hearting's not filling. Hearting's building. You're building the inside of the wall the same as the outside. You just can't see it."

"The stone knows where it wants to go. Your job is to listen."

Tom did not believe that the stone knew anything. He believed that the stone was an object, inert, dumb, a thing that went where you put it and stayed where it was set, and the idea that the stone had a will, a preference, a destination, seemed to him the kind of mystical nonsense that old men produced when they had been doing the same job for too long and had run out of practical things to say. But he did not say this to Jim, because Jim was the kind of man whose nonsense you listened to respectfully even when you thought it was nonsense, and because Jim's hands produced results that Tom's hands could not produce, and because the gap between Jim's walls and Tom's walls was the gap between music and noise, and Tom understood that the gap existed even if he did not understand how to close it.

The closing happened slowly, over the summer, the gap narrowing the way the batter of a wall narrowed from base to top, gradually, measurably, the improvement visible from week to week if not from day to day. Tom's first course improved. His grading improved. His hearting improved. His eye, which had been the eye of a hod carrier, an eye trained to see weight and distance and the fastest route from one point to another, became the eye of a waller, an eye that could look at a stone and see its place in the wall before it was placed there, the eye that Jim called the "second sight," the sight that was not supernatural but super-professional, the sight that came from having looked at ten thousand stones and having placed ten thousand stones and having learned from each placement what worked and what did not.

Jim's cottage in Gunnerside was small, two rooms downstairs and two rooms up, the stone walls of the cottage the same stone as the walls in the fields, the same limestone, the same builder perhaps, the same hands that had built the boundary walls having built the house, or if not the same hands then hands trained by the same tradition, the same craft, the stone speaking the same language in the house and in the field, the language of gravity and weight and the fit of one surface against another. Tom stayed at the cottage during the week, sleeping in the spare room upstairs, the room that had been Jim's son's room before his son had moved to Middlesbrough and taken a job in a factory and had not come back, and the room was bare, a bed and a chair and a window that looked out over the dale, and at night Tom lay in the bed and listened to the sounds of the village, the sheep in the fields above, the river below, the wind on the roof, and he thought about the day's work, replaying the placement of stones in his mind, seeing the wall grow in the dark behind his eyes, the mental walling that would become a lifelong habit, the building in the mind that preceded the building in the field.

Jim's wife had died five years before Tom came, and Jim lived alone and cooked for himself and for Tom, the meals simple, repetitive, the food of a man who ate to sustain the body rather than to please it: potatoes and meat and vegetables from the garden, the same meal in different arrangements, the meat sometimes beef and sometimes lamb and sometimes sausages from the butcher in Reeth, and the vegetables whatever the garden produced, and the tea that accompanied every meal and every break and every conversation, the tea that was Jim's medium, the liquid in which the words floated, the tea strong and dark and sweet, two sugars, the tea that Jim made in a pot and poured into mugs that were stained brown inside with the accumulated tannin of decades, the mugs that could not be cleaned because the staining had become structural, had become part of the mug the way the lichen had become part of the stone.

In the evenings they sat in Jim's kitchen, the range throwing heat, the room warm and dim, and Jim talked. In the evenings Jim talked, the silence of the working day opening into speech the way a bud opened into flower, the words coming freely, loosely, the formal precision of the daytime instructions replaced by a looser, more discursive style, the talk ranging across the dale and the craft and the years, Jim's memory holding the stories the way the wall held its hearting, packed tight, no voids, every space filled.

He told Tom about his own apprenticeship, fifty years ago, with a waller called Frank Dinsdale who had worked the upper dale from Keld to Muker and who had built, Jim said, more wall than any man in the twentieth century, miles and miles of wall, the fell boundaries and the intake walls and the garden walls and the retaining walls of the roads, Frank's walls everywhere you looked, the dale walled by Frank the way a room was papered by a decorator, comprehensively, the whole surface covered.

"Frank was hard," Jim said. "Harder than me. He'd throw your hammer in the beck if your hearting was loose. He threw mine twice. I had to walk down the hill and fish it out and walk back up and start again. He didn't speak. He grunted. You learned to read the grunts. One grunt meant right. Two grunts meant wrong. Three grunts meant start over."

Tom listened and drank tea and the stories entered him and settled, becoming part of his own story, the lineage of the craft running through him, Frank to Jim to Tom, each man passing the knowledge to the next, the knowledge of the stone and the wall and the hand, the knowledge that could not be written or filmed or digitised but that could only be transmitted through the medium of shared work, through the hands of one man guiding the hands of another, through the proximity of bodies engaged in the same labour, through the sweat and the ache and the repetition, the ten thousand hours that turned the ignorant into the competent and the competent, eventually, into the skilled.

Jim told Tom about the walls he was proudest of and the walls he was most ashamed of and the walls that had fallen and the walls that had stood and the walls that he had built fifty years ago and that were still standing and that he drove past sometimes and looked at and felt the thing he felt, which was not pride exactly but was related to pride, was the satisfaction of the made thing, the enduring thing, the thing that outlasted the man who made it.

"I've built walls that'll stand for two hundred years," Jim said. "And I've built walls that came down in three. The difference is not the stone. The difference is the attention. The attention you give to the hearting. The attention you give to the bits you can't see."

Tom thought about this. He thought about attention and about the visible and the invisible, and he thought about the building site in Richmond where he had carried hod and mixed cement, where the attention had been on the surface, on the render and the paint and the finish, the outside, the face, and the inside had been plasterboard and air and the hollow spaces between the studs where the wiring ran and the mice nested, the building all face and no hearting, all surface and no substance, and he thought that this was the difference between what he had been doing and what he was learning to do, the difference between building with mortar and building without, the difference between a structure that hid its flaws beneath a surface and a structure that had no surface to hide behind, that was what it was, that stood or fell on the quality of its construction, the soundness of its hearting, the care of its arrangement.

By the end of the summer Tom could build a wall. Not a good wall. Not a wall that Jim would approve of without reservation. But a wall that stood, a wall that held, a wall that was recognisably a wall rather than a pile of stones, and Jim stood beside the last section they built together in Arkengarthdale, the boundary wall gapped and repaired, the sheep contained, the neighbour satisfied, and Jim looked at the wall and looked at Tom and said the words that Tom would carry for the rest of his life, the words that were Jim's highest praise, the words that Jim's teacher Frank Dinsdale had used and that Frank's teacher before him had used, the words passed down the chain of wallers like a through-stone passed from hand to hand, the words that meant you had learned enough to begin.

"That'll do."

Not good. Not well done. Not excellent. That'll do. The words that meant the wall was adequate, was sufficient, was acceptable, was the minimum standard below which a wall should not fall and above which a wall should always aspire, and the words were a beginning, not an end, were the foundation course on which everything that followed would be built, and Tom heard them and felt them settle in him the way a foundation stone settled into the ground, solid, permanent, the base of something that would rise.

He thought about Jim now, in March, on the hillside above High Scar Farm, building the wall that was Arthur's wall, and he thought about Jim's hands and Jim's eyes and Jim's grunts and Jim's silences, and he thought about Frank Dinsdale's hands and the hands of the wallers before Frank, the chain of hands stretching back through the centuries, back to the men who built the first walls in this dale, the Bronze Age men or the Iron Age men or whoever they were, the first men who had picked up a stone and set it on another stone and discovered that the two stones together were more than the two stones apart, that the arrangement created something that the raw material did not possess, which was structure, which was purpose, which was a wall.

And he thought about his own hands, the hands that Jim had trained, the hands that were now forty-four years old and that had been building walls for twenty-five years, the hands that were thick and scarred and calloused and strong, the hands that could feel the weight of a stone and know its place, that could read the surface of a limestone piece the way Helen read the surface of a patient's skin, looking for the signs, the indicators, the things that told you what was happening beneath the surface, and he thought that his hands were Jim's hands now, that Jim's knowledge had passed through Jim's hands and into Tom's hands and that the knowledge lived there, in the muscles and the tendons and the calluses, the knowledge that was not memory but was something deeper than memory, was instinct, was the body's own wisdom, the wisdom of ten thousand stones lifted and turned and placed.

He set a stone on the wall and it sat there, fitting, right, the weight settling, the face true against the string line, and he did not think about why it was right, did not analyse the placement, did not calculate the angle or the pressure or the distribution of weight, because the hands did not need the mind for this, the hands knew, the hands had always known, the hands had been taught by Jim's hands and Jim's hands had been taught by Frank's hands and the chain of knowing ran back through the decades and the centuries, through all the hands that had ever lifted a stone and set it in a wall, and the chain was unbroken, and the knowledge lived, and the wall rose.