Have Trowel Will Travel – Neal Bridger

You should see what happens after me and Mitch have had a couple of beers. Me at Leighton in Perth on a plank. Back to the advert in the Horse and Hounds pub that Shawn the Prawn had given me. The Advert: Surf Instructor wanted St Ouens Beach Experience necessary Contact Anna at the Surf Shak This couldn’t be real I thought, a job on the beach teaching surfing.

My mindset was that unless it was manual work, nose to grindstone, well, there was no other option for earning money. Was there? I got on my bike and rode to the Surf Shak the next morning. It was, as the name suggests, a shack. It was a small brown wooden shed with a small shop on one side that sold out-of-date surf clothes, wetsuits and wax. The other half of the shed stored the boards and wetsuits.

The Shak was right on the beach at St Ouen on the west coast of Jersey. Next to the Shak was a very large pub which at night became a night club. This area was to become my Nirvana for the next two summers. I applied in person for the surf instructor job to the owner Anna who was one of the original beach babes from the 50s/60s.

She was, and still is, one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. I think I got the job straight away on first appearances because I looked the part; long hair, Aussie accent and I could surf ok. Anna explained my job description to me. You start work at approximately 10 am and finish at approximately 3 pm, it’s up to you.

You can go for a surf whenever you want except when you have a class on. (I had one class a day which ran for about an hour and a half) You will be teaching 16-19-year-old Swedish students. What the fuck! It was all true, that was my job for the next two years.

The Swedish students were part of a summer exchange program called STS. A couple of thousand of them would come over to the island every summer and get boarded out to different homes around the island.

I was brought up in a household with still the old mentality of you’re either clever or you’re thick. If you were deemed clever or studious then praise was honoured upon you and your pathway was university. However, I was classed unfortunately not in the latter, so my pathway was to be as a tradesman. I wasn’t actually thick in school; I think I was more bored than thick. Messing around and being the class clown was definitely more entertaining than listening to a boring teacher waffle on about something I had no interest in.

Some teachers were great and some not so much. Any teacher who I thought wanted to abuse their position of power, by being an over authoritarian to me or other students, was usually in for some extra attention. I had an English teacher who was just mean and boring. His class was such a drag and I dreaded going to it as I felt it was just sucking the life out of me. On one occasion just to make his class more interesting I put a fake dog turd just inside the entrance of the classroom on the carpet.

I sprinkled a little water around it and released a small amount of fake fart gas into the air. I was the first one in the classroom that day and I sat back and watched the carnage unfold. This act of classroom terrorism was only unleashed on him after he tried to make me pick up a squashed apple core that had been ground into the carpet. I refused to pick it up as it was disgusting and he sent me to the deputy head, where I got five days scab duty (picking up rubbish in the school grounds).

It was worth it to me, I stood my ground against the authoritarian bully and eventually got pay back with the fake turd. I enjoyed getting a laugh in the classroom, but I was never vindictive. I realised that outside of school hours the teachers also had normal lives and families and half of them probably hated being there as much as I did. My parents’ involvement in my schooling was quite minimal and I preferred it that way.

They never asked too many questions and if my report cards were mostly Bs they were ok with that and so was I. My first real taste of a sort of school environment was when I was about three years old in South Africa. My parents and my special needs sister Nats had moved to Pietermaritzburg in South Africa in 1970.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 857d00b0f0aea30f
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 15,012,978 bytes (14.317 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 167
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 280.16 minutes
• Total Words: 56,032
• Total Characters: 287,831
• Average Words per Page: 335.52
• Average Characters per Page: 1723.54

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