These events took place during the summer vacation at the end of my second year of university. The previous summer I'd taken a job with a local agricultural contractor -- I'd been at school with his son -- driving tractors towing trailer loads of silage, hay and grain. It'd been easy work, but long hours and often seven days a week; so I'd earned good money and had little opportunity to spend it.
I'd planned on doing similar this summer, but my parents put the kibosh on that by voicing a resounding 'No!'. Despite being almost twenty years old I couldn't fight their decision as those lost earnings wouldn't come close to matching the amount of money that my parents were pumping into my college education. Besides which, I'd only got myself to blame:
My first year at Uni had gone well, with year-end exam results placing me close to the top of every class. As a result I'd gone into my second year not only overconfident, but with a bank account full of beer money too. Having partied hard and cruised through my course work, this year's exam results told a very different story; I'd barely scraped through in a couple of subjects.
Even I could accept that a second, or perhaps even third rate degree was not going cut the mustard. So, no job of any sort this summer; I was to stay home, revisit my shortcomings in last year's work and get myself well prepared for my third and final one. I wouldn't have as much money for socialising, but with the time and effort I'd need to put in this year, I probably wouldn't need much.
For the most part I was studying in my dad's home-office, away from the distractions available in my own room and handy for my my mother to regularly (too often!) stick her head through the door, to ensure that I wasn't skiving-off. I could see that my parents were right, but it was still a ball-ache, not helped by the sound of Harry's tractors often rolling along the road past our house.
It was mid-July and my nose had been hard against the grindstone for three weeks. I'd started at 08:30 that morning and it was now nearly midday; lunch -- courtesy of my mother - would be another hour, but I wandered through to the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee. My mother would have gladly made that too, but I needed a break from my books and the computer screen.
Getting through the kitchen door proved a problem, the door handle didn't seem to work. It was abruptly wrenched free from the other side by my mother, accompanied by a snarl of "That bloody door again! It's forever sticking; I've been chasing your father to fix it for months."
"What's dad going to do about it? I doubt he'd even know where to find a screwdriver."
"Don't I know it! But you know what I mean; get a joiner or handyman organised to come and sort it out."
"Around here?" I raised my eyebrows and grinned as I spoke; the look of exasperation on my mother's face confirmed that she understood and agreed with my sentiments:
We live in a rural area, where there are relatively few skilled tradesmen around and those that there are concentrate their efforts on larger and better paying projects rather than the fixing of dodgy door-knobs. The clowns and cowboys who might take a look at it were incompetent and/or dishonest, most especially when it came to dealing with 'in-comers' like ourselves.
We'd been living here for fifteen years, but you're not counted as being a 'local' until at least the third generation. One regularly heard tales of extortionate invoices being presented for second rate work and there had been a few burglaries where suspicion -- though never any proof -- had been laid at the door of local odd-job men.
"Tell you what mum, you make me a coffee, while I get some tools from the garage and I'll have a look at it."
"You haven't time for fixing doors Paul, you need to be studying."
"Don't be daft, it'll probably not take me more than half an hour and I need a break from my books; my brain's boiling." I headed out of the door before mum could object further.
I perhaps spent forty minutes on the problem and though I couldn't fix it -- the latch itself was knackered; to be fair, it was probably a hundred years old -- but that time included my calling the builders merchant in town to order a suitable replacement and phoning dad to arrange for him to pick that up on his way home from work.
By then it was lunch time; where after it was back into the office for another afternoon poring over my books. Dad brought the new latch back that evening, which I installed in a further twenty minutes when I stopped for a coffee-break the following morning. Though hardly rocket-science, the completion of that task drew a round of applause from my attentive audience:
Besides my mother, there were a couple of her friends who had called in for coffee, so all three had sat watching. Once all three women had opened and closed the door a few times and voiced their approval, my mother reached for her handbag, pulled out her purse and said "There you go, a job well done." as she handed me £40.
"What? You don't need to pay me and especially not this much; it only took half an hour."
"We both know that it would've cost me at least twice as much for one of those local cowboys, if and when he ever bothered to turn up. Besides, it'll give you a bit of extra spending money for next year."
I couldn't and didn't argue with that. I thanked mum for her generosity, stuffed the notes into my pocket and bid the ladies a good morning as I picked up my coffee mug and headed back to my studies. I was half-way through the now working door when I heard "Can you fix shelves too Paul? The brackets on two of mine have come loose from the wall"
Turning back around, I saw it was Mrs Turner who'd spoken; she lived about five minutes walk down the lane. My mother had interjected before I could reply: "No, he can't. Paul's got to study, not spend his summer working as the village maintenance man."
