The case of the disappearing wheelbarrow.
Once settled in Mallorca we found it was not possible to renovate our old farmhouse without some help. I was still a young man, and years as a technical manager in a UK factory had made me soft. However, a few months clearing rocks, shifting concrete blocks and wheelbarrows of cement had hardened me so I could do a good days work.
In the 1980s, cement came in 50Kg sacks, not those 25Kg girly things they have now. At the builder’s merchants and the worksite, you had to load and unload them yourself. Once I was over the aches and pains from muscles, I never knew I had. I really enjoyed the hard work in the fresh Mediterranean air and sunshine and the visible results from the effort. Building walls is an empowering and meditative experience, you find yourself completely engrossed in finding and shaping stones and looking for their rightful place in a wall. It’s more liberating than dealing with technical problems or worse the political and relationship issues of workers. The truth is, I enjoyed the simplicity and achievement of producing something meaningful and lasting after a day’s work using my hands. The problem was, I had much to learn, there were a lot of materials and techniques to produce traditional Mallorcan finishes that I had no experience of.
That’s where our friends, Lynn and Dave who had two young girls and were also renovating a house in the area, helped out by introducing us to Skip. With his tight curly hair and beard, Skip looked like a blond, white, blue-eyed version of a young Amiri Baraka, the black American writer and poet.
As I recall, Skip sailed from New York across the Atlantic in the late mid-1970s, during the last years of the Vietnam War. He landed in England and then moved on to Germany, where he met his long-time partner and wife, Barbara. After some tangle with the German authorities, he moved south to Mallorca, making a living renovating old farmhouses. He was younger than me, but there was not much he didn’t know about Mallorcan building methods. He put a small team together to do the heavy work renovating our farmhouse. When all the heavy work was done, Skip and I worked on alone with Sandy’s help as required. We teamed up for a while to work together on paid jobs with me as his builder’s mate. It was a happy time, and I was the fittest I have ever been. We had fun, I enjoyed the work and picking up my wages at the end of the week with no responsibility other than providing labour. I learned a lot from Skip, which served me well in other ventures on the island.
By 1989 the main house had been renovated, and we had turned the old donkey stable into a two bedroomed apartment with a bathroom, kitchen, two bedrooms and a living-dining room. We built a 6 x 12-metre swimming pool with a jacuzzi. With this work done, we were now in the holiday rental business.
It was at this time I came across a 2×0.9 metre wire mesh bed frame and decided that with a little innovation, it would make a lovely outside table for our guests. I figured, if I laid the frame on a polythene sheet on a flat surface, and shuttered it with 7.5 cm slats of wood, I could fill the whole thing with concrete to make an elegant slab for a tabletop. At the same time, I could fit right-angled reinforcing bars in the mesh that would act as a single central plug that would fit into a single support column. The whole structure would be an elegant design like a single stalked rectangular mushroom. It would be installed by the pool and finished off with a beautiful slab of polished granite on top. I set to work enthusiastically. We were going into the rainy season, so I set up the mould under the roofed terrace outside our kitchen door.
I mixed the concrete, it took two wheelbarrows to fill the mould, once it was full, I smoothed and squared off the surface and left it to cure. After a week when the concrete was thoroughly dry, I knocked off the shuttering. It looked good, nice and smooth with rounded corners where I had placed strips of thin bent plywood. Four 400mm long 12 mm diameter reinforcing bars projected from the slab’s geometric centre. These bars would be cemented into the 40x40mm reinforced hollow column that would act as the tables single support. It was a beautifully engineered piece of concrete furniture, and it was time to move it into position.
It was at this point I discovered that, in my enthusiasm to build it, I had overlook one major consideration. The volume of concrete in the tabletop was 0.14 cubic metres, with the density of concrete being 2.4 Tonnes per cubic metre this gave my tabletop a weight of about 340Kg. With a small crane and a few strong men, this would not have been a problem, but I had neither of these, there was just Sandy and me. The thing sat there, a permanent monolithic slab, by our back door. When friends came around, and I asked for help, they suddenly had bad backs. I couldn’t blame them, if they didn’t have one before they probably would have one after they tried to move the slab. The tabletop sat for weeks, a dangerous obstacle on our rear terrace.
I have always had great respect for the ancient Egyptians and what they achieved with the pyramids. I figured, if they could move those enormous blocks, then I should be able to devise a method of moving this relatively small concrete slab. It became an obsession. I was an engineer, I had to move it, and I had to do it alone. My plan was, by using a crowbar, I could gradually inch by inch raise each end of the slab and prop it up on bricks until it was high enough to slide a wheelbarrow beneath it at its exact centre axis. I could then, incrementally using the crowbar, remove the top bricks until the slab rested on the wheelbarrow. I could then wheel the barrow, with its carefully balanced load the twelve metres to where I needed it. This was a method of wedges and rollers that any Egyptian would have been proud of. Everything worked to plan until the full weight of the slab was on the wheelbarrow. Its tyre was so flat under the weight that I would not have been able to push it. The problem had diverged somewhat from Egyptian technology. It had now become a problem of pneumatics, and so I used my foot pump and simply increase the pressure in the wheelbarrow’s tyre. I pumped up the tyre, increasing the pressure until it was perfectly round, it was as hard as a rock and rolled easily. Very carefully, like a tight-rope-walker keeping his balance, I manoeuvred the wheelbarrow and its horizontal load to the swimming pool area. Using the handles for leverage, with a great effort, I raised the rear of the barrow as high as I could and just let the concrete slab slide off under its own weight.
Exhausted from the stress and effort, I left everything and made my way back around the corner to the kitchen to get a cup of tea. Halfway to the kitchen, there was a tremendous BANG, and a shock wave hit me. It was so loud that I thought one of those bloody hunters had come into my garden and discharged a shotgun really close by. I was angry, and I went back around the corner to find the idiot and get him out of my garden, but there was no one there. Puzzled, I walked back towards the kitchen, then I stopped, there was something wrong. I walked back, the slab was where it had fallen, but something was missing. Where was the wheelbarrow? I searched the garden, but it was nowhere to be seen. It was as if Aliens had abducted my wheelbarrow to conduct some sinister experiment on it. However, I’m not a believer in Aliens, and so I continued searching. Finally, I peered over the wall of the old pig stye at the bottom of the garden.
There, upside down in the weeds was the wheelbarrow where it had fallen from the sky after its tyre, now completely shredded, had exploded from the excess internal pressure I had pumped into it.
I walked away, glad in the knowledge that I had not been closer when that had happened.