Peter Woods

Not London of the early 80’s, but hard graft is the same everywhere

The back cover blurb – for once – gets it perfectly:

When McBride, a young Irishman, leaves Co. Monaghan for the building sites of London, and then Germany, he is confronted by a harsh new world and the volatile men who have mastered and mythologised it.

Many, many thousands went to London in the 1970’s and 80’s and stood out on Cricklewood Broadway for a start. Peter Woods has lived through it and documented it faithfully. From the first mention of subbies, the Redcap, subs before breakfast, dead men and hop-ups, I knew this would be the real thing. Woods is not writing like a journalist holding the reader’s hand for a shocking tour of something-should-be-done-about-it. He writes as though he were still among these characters, still meeting up with them of a Friday night, though perhaps now with a more cushy job as a barman.

“Riveting, at times frightening” is how Colm Toibin describes the novel. I would go as far as “terrifying” in places. Isolated men, far from the community they were born into, with nothing in their lives but work, no-one to tell them who they are or what they should do with their life, nothing to stop them plummetting straight to alcohol, crime, and self-forgetfulness. It’s a man’s world, sealed-off, even in the case of well-balanced family men. And there are men here who have been rejected by their families, those suffering mental illness, those with a great burden of shame — all end up at some time or another looking for a day’s work on the sites.

I shared with three others, who they were varied, sometimes by the week

says the narrator of his lodgings. It’s hard – and unfaithful to reality – to forge a coherent narrative out of a concatenation of varying workplaces and flats. The reader quickly realises it’s not essential to remember all the names and details. The story involves you more and more deeply, even though – like life – it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Woods shares the love of mythologizing that these men have, their legends and stories of big money to be made.

This book is like a wormhole to a world from which by rights no such report should have returned.