Shengliver’s Note: A trip back to my home village in the summer made me keenly aware that the village now is not the village then. Most folk I met about the ancestral grounds were either kids whose grandparents I know, or aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles, who were in their sixties, seventies or eighties. Ways of life there are far removed from what I remember of the early 1970s, my salad days. In this blog series, Extinct Trade, the blogger will share with his readers about nine trades which have died out where his roots are.

 

Of all the trades then, carpentry was the most common for in my village alone were several practitioners. Not being full-time, they took up their tools when there was work available. Some made furniture like tables and chairs, cupboards, and wardrobes; some built farmhouses. Some worked from their own family cottages; some went to serve where a hirer lived. A client normally provided wood, which the carpenter turned into what furniture was needed. A fee was charged for it.

My father was one of the carpenters. He had been apprenticed to a master as a teenager. After he learned the trade, Dad became one of the best known in the rural communities for his workmanship. For one thing, Dad could make the best of whatever logs a customer had at their disposal. Not every family had the best raw material for their desired furniture, but Dad was able to turn it magically into the final product. And the tables, beds and cupboards which he crafted were reputed to be sturdy and durable. For another, a lot of his clients could not come up with the fee upon the completion of the furniture. If that happened, Dad would log the debt in his small notebook. Most of his debtors, grateful for his noble deed, promised to pay it at the earliest opportunity. The week before the Spring Festival came every year, Dad would go and collect the fees owed to him. There were cases, however, where it took a family years to pay the amount off. When Dad passed away in 2004, there were still a couple of debts not cleared in the record. Our family had the book burned at the funeral.

Most of the time Father worked at home, where he built a simple workshop out of a shed with his toolkit near at hand. If a family needed to have a table done, they would have to carry the timber to Father’s lodge in the family yard, where Father would saw the wood into planks, plane and polish them, and assemble the table in a matter of a week. All work was manual, with such tools as axes, planes, chisels, nails and glue, no machinery involved at all.

Carpentry was backbreaking labour. The most gruelling part was to saw a log into planks. For the job, Father needed to manipulate the saw with his apprentice’s help for the tool was too unwieldy to handle alone. My brother or I sometimes doubled up as his assistant, should the apprentice be absent, and that was tons of sweat. The arms and back would be aching days after the slog.

No carpenters fulltime, they had to farm the land, too. Some years, in winter when there was little to do on the farm, Father would itinerate together with another furniture maker from the village, travelling for employment around the farming communities for weeks or months. If a carpenter went to work at a hirer’s, the family had to put him up as well as serving three meals a day. The fare was normally reserved for family guests and visitors. That was a great motivation for taking up the trade in times of austerity.

The best thing about being a carpenter, however, was not that his own family had comfy beds to sleep on or the carpenter was well fed, as was popularly believed, but that his family would never run short of good firewood. Whilst our neighbours often had to fuel their cooking with grass, thorns or stalks, my family had at the stove a good stack of bits and ends of lumber left over from Father’s carpentry work. That was the envy of the entire village!