Don’t Forget Your Shovel (If you want to go to work)

Don’t Forget Your Shovel

I painted this acrylic on paper as an imagined scene of Brentford in the early 1960s, when the landscape of West London was being torn open and remade by the rising spans of the M4 motorway. The whole district is a building site: earth cut open, girders emerging, the future hovering above the mud. It’s another painting that grew organically – I added and removed bits as they came to mind or were dismissed.

At the edge of a freshly dug pit stands my father — a scholarly Belfast man, dapperly dressed, composed amid the dust and machinery. The hole is being dug by Irish navvies, labourers whose voices carry the cadences of men from Connacht, Mumhan and Uladh. Hearing their Irish, my father cannot resist. Delighted, he greets them in the same language, meeting countrymen in a far-off place.

They pause in their work and stand in a line, almost like soldiers, looking up at him. Perhaps they are puzzled by this well-dressed stranger addressing them in their own tongue. Perhaps they are amused. The moment sits somewhere between curiosity and recognition. In truth, when this section of the M4 was under construction, I’m pretty sure dad was still working as a railway clerk to bring in money and couldn’t have afforded to dress so elegantly.

At home in London, my father tried — with limited success — to pass that language on to us. He attempted to teach my brothers, my sister and me the Irish he loved so much, gathering us around words and phrases that belonged to another landscape and another time. We never truly learned it, but his longing for the old Ireland of memory and imagination lingered in the house like an echo.

That romantic vision of Ireland, carried with him from Belfast and cherished in exile, has left its mark on my own life. This painting is partly a memory of my father and partly a memory of the place where I grew up — an imagined fragment of a vanished London, and a quiet ode to my London-Irish inheritance.

These things have become deeply meaningful to me.

Here’s a little humorous song for you, written by the late Christie Hennessy  and sung by Christy Moore: