A Year Ago
All I could think as I lay on the wreckage of the stairs there
was that I was paralysed. I could feel
blood running down my arm and everyone shouting my name. For our first morning
in France it wasn't going well.
It had all started with a phone call. One of my best mates,
and a fellow carpenter, had rung me up about a trip to France to go and do a
job for a week, would I be interested as he couldn't do it. The money was good
and it sounded like a bit of adventure, just what I was in need of as I’d been
working on the same house for 18 months and I was feeling a little stale.
I rung the firm, someone I had worked for 10 years previous,
everything was paid for, hotel, food, etc. All I’d needed was a work mate and
my tools. The job was fairly simple, install some stairs and second fix a
house.
I knew straight away the carpenter I wanted to take with me.
He’s one of the most energetic blokes I've ever met and one of the very few
that I rate to be as good as I am (sounding big headed now but never mind) I
rang him up. “Tom , what are you like at fitting stairs? And do you fancy a
week in France?”
We were all set, they even sent someone to the passport
office for me to pick me up a new passport, and on a Saturday morning we set
out for France in two rental vans. We were accompanied by our drivers Ricky, a
plasterer and jack of all trades, and Paul, who was coming along for the ride.
The journey was eventful, we missed our ferry but they just put us on the next
one.
As we stood looking at the white cliffs and leaving England
behind, Tom said “I've never fitted stairs before…”
We arrived late that night, the owner of the hotel cooked us
a huge BBQ and we went to sleep happy.
The next morning we arrived at the job and started to have a look round.
Straight away we could see problems, The door linings they had brought with
them were the wrong size, and as we unpacked the stairs I could see that they
had been made to measure but with no tolerance what-so-ever to get them in.
We got to work, assembling the bits we could and laying it
all out. It’s important to methodical with a job like fitting stairs, if you do
something in the wrong order then the chances are it won’t go together. The
instructions were as much use as an empty crisp packet so we set about measuring
up and marking the walls where everything was going to go.
The stairs turned a full 180 degrees as they came down but
we could see that all the walls were too tight to get any of it in. Basically
they’d designed it to be airlifted in with the roof off. We knew it wasn’t
going to be easy. We started by putting the top treads and newel posts together
and when we lifted it up we could see straight away that we were going to have
to cut the wall away to get them in.
We wedged them in place, I held the top and Tom started to
mark the underside.
That’s when it happened. The wall broke on the far side of
the stairs. Instinct takes over and I grabbed the top of the newels to try to
prevent the oak stairs from landing on Tom.
They went down anyway, somersaulting me over the top of
them. When I landed, after the 3m fall, I was facing the other way. The lower
half of my back was on the sharp string (the thick bit on the side of the
stairs) and my arm had a nasty cut on it. I just lay there for a few seconds.
Weird things go through your head when something like that happens;
I just thought I wasn't going to be able to walk my daughter down the aisle. I
remember I wiggled my toes before I did anything else, then the adrenalin
kicked in and I got up and lay down on the floor face down. The others said
later that they thought it was like something out of a car crash where the victim
walks around with a broken leg without realising it. I lay for a few minutes,
Tom was unharmed, a small scratch down his leg, but luckily he’s pretty quick
and managed to jump out the way.
The guys wanted to take me to hospital but I was feeling
alright by then. We patched up my arm at the van and I told them that if I
stopped I’d seize up, best to keep working. Within 15 minutes we were back at
it.
It was only later that night, as I lowered myself painfully
into an empty bath and ran the water with me already in it, that I stopped to
think about what had happened. In the
end it was a combination of my good luck and my thick leather belt I always
wear that had saved me. The point of the stairs I had landed on was right on
the belt and it must have spread the pressure and turned it into a nasty bruise
rather than anything more serious. The bottom of my back went black with the
bruise and was still there after I got home a week later.
It’s funny, in the building we always talk about health and safety
gone mad, but when you’re fitting stairs you have to have the safety rail
removed, it simply can’t be done with it still in place. In hindsight we should
have cut a few props and wedged it in place, and I'm sure we will in future,
but then we didn't know they’d slip like that in the first place. I was always
told I was born lucky and this was one of the days when I realise its true!
Then Ricky nearly killed us all on the way back but that’s a
story for another time….
