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Fourteen years after his death, my father’s workshop remains a meticulously organized treasure chest of tools, bolts, screws, gadgets and machines. Soon, when I return home for the holidays, my mother will send me there to pick up some gadget he has created in the service of home decoration, meal preparation or home maintenance. I will complete the journey by spending minutes scanning neatly stacked shelves, reading their handwritten labels on old tin tobacco boxes filled with washers, willing their memory to surface.
My father was devoted to my mother and me, passionate about sailing and delighted in the company of friends. But he was most alive when he was tinkering, whether hidden in that drafty outbuilding designing some new appliance, or half-inside a kitchen cabinet adjusting it, applying his intelligence and manual dexterity to practical household problems.
We English may be a nation of gardeners, but we are also a tribe of tinkerers who delight in a certain kind of nest improvement: those idiosyncratic, personalized and functional adaptations we create to make domestic life easier, prettier or more satisfying.
Tinkering is the job of the opportunist and the magpie. My father once saw a golf cart collecting dust in the back of his twin brother’s garage. For the next 20 years, my mother drove the adapted cart (on a new wooden base and secured with bungee cords), neatly stacked with buckets of feed for her horses, its wide, flat wheels perfectly designed to plow the flooded fields.
This winter, at age 80, he will trudge through those fields on the coldest mornings to the watering holes, carrying a shovel he made from chicken wire and a miniature hammer he bought at a local farm sale. With the hammer he will break the surface of the ice before removing the fragments, thus saving his fingers from the cold.
During the pandemic, lockdowns and abundant free time caused millions of people to give in to their tinkering impulses, marking the latest chapter in a long-standing national fascination with the craft.
William Heath Robinson’s Victorian-era cartoons so fascinated the English that his surname entered the language to describe ingenious but overly complicated mechanisms for simple household tasks like peeling potatoes. The animated clay figures of Wallace and Gromit, a middle-aged bachelor and his enormous beagle, whose main activity is creating unlikely inventions on a bench and vise in a dimly lit home workshop, rival James Bond for the affection of the nation (Wallace wears a tie and a tank top to play, exactly as my father did when I was a child).
His creations exhibit a brave meticulousness that is at the heart of retouching. For my father, a child during World War II, activity was based on the frugality of rationing and government exhortations to “make do and make do.” For him, it combined the satisfaction of work with the tranquility of home; his only pressure was the desire to satisfy himself or his loved ones.
In their own way, his inventions are beautiful: tightly wound strips of wire, perfectly aligned, to re-attach a worn leather handle; the smooth, unvarnished surface of a wooden cutout supporting a sunken shelf. They may lack the elegance of a sleek design. inside, but these were the creative expressions of a practical mind. Playing was the closest he came to a vocation.
I did not inherit my father’s practical intelligence or his manual dexterity, and each year my visits to that draft workshop are tinged with the regret of never having shared his favorite pastime.
But often I find there some creation or some half-finished gadget that is new to me and, turning it over in my hand to guess its use, it comes to mind: working hard in the cold, cracked fingers clutching a file in a hand, an adapted metal utensil in the other, arms resting at his sides to direct his effort, dirty jeans pressed against the work table for support, truly satisfied.
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