Digger

My great-grandfather worked on the Black Gang digging tunnels beneath the river; a big man man whose wife regularly bent pokers over his head when they argued - if you can call his enduring silence one side of an argument, that is. He enjoyed nothing more than his peace and quiet, especially of a Saturday evening, when he would sit by the coal fire, his boots off, a clay pipe in his mouth and the evening paper open for inspection. They lived on the second floor of an East End tenement, and the front door was always open and perhaps it was no suprise that one Saturday a drunk, mistaking the tenement for his own, wandered in, sat down in the other armchair and began loudly demanding his supper. The old lady, wielder of pokers and skilled worker with the frying pan, gave him the 'sling yer 'ook' message, but he still demanded some grub. This carried on, and obviously for too long as far as the Ol Man was concerned. He carefully folded the newspaper, knocked his pipe out on the hearth, got
out of the chair and approached the drunk. He looked him up and down for a moment or two, shook his head more in dismay than despair, and, gathering the interloper's lapels in one big fist, lifted him out of the chair, off his feet and out onto the landing. There, he looked him up and down once more; the corners of his mouth turned down slightly as he estimated the worth of the josser who had obviously not spent the whole day underground. One heave, and he was suspended over the stairwell. The Old Man gave him one last look, straight in the eye, and released his grip. Without waiting for the thud of the man hitting the ground two floors below, he returned to his armchair, stuck the pipe back in his mouth, reopened the paper, and waited for his supper.