Chimbley Sweep

by Edward F. Fitzgerald

efitzgerald7@cox.net

The thing is, I never wanted to be no chimbley sweep. 

Yeah, I know.  Someone told me I’m probly spelling that wrong.  So maybe it’s chimbley sweap.  Who cares?

A jockey.  Riding in one them Irish Sweepstakes, that was my goal.  Leaping them hedgerows in front of all of them beautiful ladies in their crazy hats.  Throwing mud back at them plodders riding behind me.  Winking at the cameras as I flash acrost the finish.

Until I found out horses scared the piss out of me. 

Not riding them.  Never tried that.

Just walking up to them ugly snorting monsters.  If that copper at Trafalgar Square hadn’t of been sitting on that swaybacks haunches that day, my sixteenth birthday, that horse of his would’ve et my face. Like to snap my nose off as it was. Then he swung around, gimmie a whack with his rump hard enough to reset my teeth in my gums, and dropped that pile of muck on my shoe.  Just lifted his tail and let go.  Stunk, too.

Cured me of wanting to be a jockey.  Give that up on the spot.

Here I am now a nineteen year old chimbley sweep and I stand five foot two inches on a good day, a inch less when I’m feeling deflated.  I ain’t no midget, but it’s a close call.  Hell, I was a midget, I’da probly got government benefits. Maybe.

I look bigger in that picture, don’t I?  You get chest and arm muscles doing chimbley work for three years.  But that’s me sitting on that roof alright, king of the world.  My black suit and spiffy topper, and my hair growed out in back to give me that rock star look.  Yeah, I know. See the rock star walking under a Shetland pony without he has to bend his knees.  My problem, I stand up, I’m eyeballing your solo plexus, nose level.

See, nothing in that picture gives you a handle on my size.  Put a dog next to me, like if he could balance on that peak which he probably couldn’t, maybe you’d see.  It wouldn’t have to be no big dog neither.

Most chimbley sweeps are small. That tradition maybe got me the job. Goes back to the days when the climbing boys would be pushed into the chimbleys.  Fire would barely be out, hot ashes still blowing ever whichaway, and in they’d go. 

Up or down the pipe like monkeys, some of them only seven or eight years old.  Swinging on a rope that would cut their chests and armpits to ribbons until they toughed up.  Sometimes no rope, pracally naked.  Hammering away, scrubbing the sides with wire brushes and yelling owtch every time another hot ash drifted up and burned their bare feet or legs.

Which we don’t do no more, mostly.  But Catcher Donlan, my boss, told me all about them days.  Big guys like him worked inside at the fireplace.  If the rope broke or the sweeper lost his footing and came plunging down, he was supposed to stick his big tree trunk arms in and catch the kid.  Said you had some notice because they screamed like hell all the way down. 

Said he caught a lot on the first bounce thogh.  Laughing that filthy laugh of his. Listening you couldn’t help picturing a kid smashing into the bricks and hot ashes at the bottom of one them drops and tumbling out.  With Catcher laughing, going oops.

The truth, I been down the chimbley a few times myself on this job, top to bottom with a wire brush and a hammer to bust up the tar and ash.  Sometimes it was even on purpose.  Other times I’d burn all the skin off my hands and forearms and the balls of my feet trying to brake my fall.  That git, Catcher, laughing his ass off after I was up and limping around.  Saying some guys’d pay big money for that ride.

See, I become a chimbley sweep when I was sixteen.  Right after that peeler’s horse snapped at me and did his business on my shoe.

Bigelow and Donlan, Limited.  And I’ll give you that.  We’re limited all right. You’ve probly seen our slogan on our lorrys.  Let us do the cleaning and we’ll haul your ashes for you.  See, its one them double entandrays.

Every time Catcher says that to one them housewives or female flat managers what hires us, he laughs like the yobbo he is and rubs his crotch.  Like they couldn’t wait to lie down and spread eagle for Catcher.  Him in filthy soot covered clothes, his hands like busted shovels and a mustash on that hod face of his that you could clean the loo with.  

Don’t discourage him none. Tips his black topper at the ladies, thinks he’s Bo Brumel.  Got this big gap with two teeth missing in front where Bigelow dropped him on his back one day for making another helper fall off a roof.

A real card, old Catcher.  Mostly he works downstairs on the fireplaces, but sometimes he’ll come up the roof at the start of a new job. Catch, he’ll yell, and throw a broom at you, but just out of your reach.  Them who is dumb enough to grab for it, like as not they’ll lose their balance, go sliding down them slate tiles, grabbing for anything they can hook on to, with probly a two or three story drop just over the edge.  

Most grab something.  Some end up on a fire escape, some bouncing off a awning to the street.  Get a broke leg if their lucky.  Maybe dead if their not.

Which is how I got my job, reason I mention it.  I’d been out of school a year and I was out of work at the time.  No one wants to hire a sixteen year old kid who looks ten. Especially he can barely read and whoze spelling leaves a lot to be desired.  So I was told.  All the time.

Anyways, I’m walking this narrow street one day when this kid cart wheels off a roof, gets slowed up by a flagpole and hits a tree in a pot at the second floor.  Bounces again, lands on his bony back on the canvas roof of a passing lorry.  Lucky bastard.  The lorry was barely out of sight, headed for Wales, I think, when I run up the three flights and applied for what I made a wild guess was a open position.

It was a chance at a real job, one youd get paid every week.  That was like telling a politician theres a big crowd waiting for you in the park.

See, I never could get no help from the council services or nothing.  Soon as they saw me, before I turned sixteen, they had me by the collar and were shoving me back in some school.  Said I’d end up the Nick they caught me running loose again.  And school, I just couldn’t take that crap anymore.  

School was like unfrigginbelievable.   Pisswallopers two grades below me walking by, patting me on the knob, saying ain’t he the cute one thogh.  And me saying would you ever go and take a good shite for yourself.  And then running, but usually not fast enough. 

Learning to make a real tight ball so’s they didn’t hit nothing vital.  Yelling at them later, you didn’t hurt me you pansies.  Hard to say that with your lips all swole and your head tipped back to keep the blood from splashing on your shirt.

Got to fifteen and had some to go to hit my full height, so walking down the halls I was looking up the short skirts of the taller girls whether I wanted to or not.  Course I wanted to, but if a ham-fisted seventeen year old girl ever picked you up by the scruff, smacked you a good one, you’d soon get encouraged to drop that habit.  So anyways I left, and good riddance.

First I was working all kinds of jobs, most of them under the table, not on no books.  I’d finish the job, washing or painting or hauling out trash, and then I’d put the cash in my pocket and look for another one. 

Still living at home then.  My ma thoght I was still in school.  I’d leave the house with the piece of cheese and stale bread she give me every day and she never thoght nothing of the fact I never had no books or homework.  Every night she’d take her bottle of wine and giant bag of chips and go over to watch telly with her gossipy harridan pals.  I called them the mothers at large club.  She never cared when I rolled in, or where I got the change in my pockets.  Never was much for questions.

She come up with a couple one day thogh.  Just before I made sixteen and got my job on the roofs and moved out.  Looked at me that morning and said, hey, don’t you finish this year?  What year you in now? 

I said don’t worry, Ma, I’m in Eton now and I only got a year to go before they send me to Sandhurst with Prince Harry.  Soons I get my lootenants pips I’ll buy you a beer.

My face was red for a week where she smacked me.

I was glad a few weeks later when I got my job as a chimbley sweep and found a rented room.  Left her a note on my cot in the attic.  Thanks for the use of the hall.  The cheese was terrific.

Bet she still hasn’t found that.  Just thinks I’m real real quiet up there.

The thing is, about four weeks ago something happened that turned my whole life around.  When we come to work in the morning, see, everyone gathers on the street outside the office.  Donlan comes out, calls out the jobs for that day and we all pile into the lorrys to go different places. 

The work is lined up weeks in advance.  I mean we got us a real tit here.  Steady pay all year around.  About three months, dead of winter, when we can’t work the roofs, we scrub boilers and big furnaces in them manufacturing places out on the London rim.

Anyways, a month ago we’re all in the lorrys except Donlan and one or two job bosses when the girl who works in the office shows up.  Man, what a looker. Stuns you at ten paces.  Only been with B & D about six months.  For the chimbley sweeps, just watching her walk, it’s like they were homeless guys in the underground and you were handing out hotel passes.

I really hate the way them guys look at her thogh.  Like they lean right out of the lorrys and you can hear the drool hitting the sidewalk.  But they don’t say nothing, no whistles or anything.  She works for us and it would mean their jobs.  I always study the sky so’s I won’t stare at her.  Good manners taught me by a ham-fisted schoolgirl.

Anyways she’s like half a block away that day and all of a sudden I hear Donlan and the bosses yelling like whoa and holy crap, you know?  And they all make an olimpic jump up into the backs of the lorrys where they never ride. 

And now I’m leaning out myself and I see why.  This dog is coming along where they just were, and blimey if it wasn’t the biggest and meanest looking chewed up, scarred over mongrel I ever seen.  And passing the lorrys he lets out like this throaty growl and slop is splashing out of his mouth on to the street and like if I ever puckered in my life I puckered then, and you know where.

But the thing is, see, he’s heading right for the office girl and she is like frozen to the sidewalk with her hands up and her mouth open, and the mutt’s head is dropping lower and he’s growling even louder as he heads for her.  And to this day I don’t know how it happened but all of sudden I’m out of the lorry with a long handled wire brush in my mitt running after the dog.  I’m almost up to him and the hore wheels around and he’s looking at me with these red eyes and all his yellow teeth bared and a good inch of the gums showing.  My knees started rattling and playing the cha cha, I ain’t lying.

I’m holding the pole at the very end, the wire brush sticking right in his mug and I’m trying to circle him to get between him and the office girl, see?  So all of a sudden that vichous mutt snaps and bites a big mouthful of brush.  Man, he gets the surprise of his life when fifty wire needles bite him back. 

Cujo leaps backwards spitting blood, and I follow on shaky pins. I shove that baby right back in his slobbering face. The needles prick him again.  He panics, wheels around and tears off back toward wherever he come from the first place, past the lorrys, giving me big eyes over his shoulder.

I tell myself, don’t faint, don’t faint whatever you do you miserable half pint.  I go to the girl whose standing there bawling, you know?   I take her elbow and lead her to the office door and pass her in to Bigelow’s old lady who runs the office.

Once she is inside I head for my lorry but I am too weak to climb in and a couple of guys have to lean out and haul me up.  It was like throwing a switch.  Complete silence but then everyone cheering, clapping and stomping on the metal floor of the lorrys.  It was bedlam.  Randy Andy back from the Falklands.

About an hour later, someone comes up my roof, tells me Bigelow wants to see me.  Downstairs I find Bigelow waiting on the pavement. He’s a runt too, by the way, only a head taller’n me but a gorilla’s chest.  A chimbley sweep himself once.  He’s like all teary eyed and he’s swallowing like half an apple went down wrong.  All of sudden he grabs me in a bear hug and almost breaks all my ribs in one squeeze. 

“I heard what you done for my daughter,” says he.

Your daughter? I pracally yell.  It really stunned me.

And you didn’t even know, says he, and breaks my ribs some more.

So, yeah, my life is changing.  Patricia Bigelow sitting here beside me while I’m doing this, my night school assignment. 

Night school, which I never even knew existed.  And not a single pisswalloper in this joint to bug me neither.                             

©2008 Edward F. Fitzgerald

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