The
woodworker
Spoken by Trevor Conuly
I was introduced to Hawbush Gardens by Stuart. I had befriended Stuarts partner because she and her little girl passed my place up and down to school. I was sat at my window day after day and they started to wave to me and I waved back, it was some weeks before I actually spoke to them outside. Then one day Stuart, Hazel and their daughter were going out somewhere and I was in the bus stop. He asked me why didn’t I come down to the gardens but I’m no gardener, he said it didn’t matter and to come down and have a look, which I did.
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I took on a plot which I worked for a while but it got to much for me. Unfortunately all gardening takes place at ground level and getting back up from there is not very easy for me so I decided to call it a day with the plot. I don’t know what made me think of taking up woodwork. Someone said we could do with some raised beds and I thought well yeah fair enough I could probably do that. I had some power tools from when I was married but when I got divorced I moved into a flat and when you move into a flat you can’t have a boat load of power tools. I brought them down here and that’s how it came about. I was over in the cabin to start with but all the tools got stolen so we applied for a grant and bought this container.
Up until then I was basically in the house, I only ever went out to do the shopping and stuff like that. In the winter I only come two days a week, I don’t like being here on my own in case I have an accident with the machinery. In the summer when the weather is nice I’m down here most days. I could keep myself busy at home but there’s only so much reading and TV you can watch. This gives me a break from all that and keeps me active. It keeps my mind active because I constantly have to think how am I going to do this and what techniques do I have to learn to be able to do what I do. I’ve never done any wood work accept from when I was at school which was 60, 70 years ago. It’s a learning curve for me doing this and I think I’m getting better, I think I’m improving slowly. But it’s been a life changer for me because before I was stuck in the same four walls. Reading, watching television, going to bed, getting up, reading, watching television, that was my life.
I am a trustee but my main role is to perfect the techniques in woodwork which I do everyday so that I can make things which the local community would like to have. Bear in mind the local community is a very deprived area, one of the more deprived areas in the Dudley Borough. So my role is to offer the community things they’d like to have but they don’t have the disposable income for, such as planters. We don’t charge. They’re able to have these things which they wouldn’t normally be able to buy. I’ve tried the gardening bit but that’s not me, this [the wood work] I enjoy doing. That’s my contribution to the wellbeing community.
I don’t have much of a future left, I’m 81 years old but as far as that’s concerned I’d like to become proficient in what I do. I watch TV programmes and YouTube videos of people making these beautiful objects and I think it would be wonderful to emulate those sort of things and that would be what I hope to do in the future. I don’t have any plans to do anything else but I probably don’t have a great deal of time to do anything else, I’m down here during most of the day. Having something in your hand, something that you’re changing from a nothing to something nice, I enjoy that.
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