Being a manual of maintenance for the instrument repairer's bench at 4 Corporation Yard, set down for whoever holds the post next, by the one who held it last.
You will have been told the post is part-time now. It was never part-time. The band room above the Institute holds forty-one instruments on the strength, of which perhaps eleven are played, and an unplayed instrument decays faster than a played one, though more politely, which the committee will not believe — no, will not afford to believe, which is different, money being what it has been in the ten years since the mill shut — and so the work comes in floods after every Whit Friday and not at all in January. Plan for the floods.
The shop is the end unit of the Yard, north-lit, which matters. North light does not move. A dent under it at eight in the morning is the same shape at four, and in this trade the eye is the only honest instrument you own, so a light that lies by the hour is worse than no light. Keep the skylight clean. The ladder behind the privy wall wants a new third rung; I have said so in the book every year since 1994, and I say it here so the saying survives me.
I took the bench from Ellis Garside in March 1979, when the mill ran three shifts and the band ran two rehearsals, and I have held it since: forty-seven years, though I count forty-six, because the year of the flood I mostly bailed. Forty-six years is enough to know my faults. I am slow on woodwind pads, I overpolish, and I keep things I should return. You will find evidence of all three.
The bench top is sycamore, replaced once (1988), scrubbed weekly, oiled never. Oil on the bench finds its way to pads and pads do not forgive. The vice is a Record No. 3 with leather jaw-liners; the leather is cut from a bell-rope the church let go of, and when it wears, cut more from the coil under the bench, third drawer down, behind the felt.
The drawers are labelled in Ellis's hand and then in mine. Where the hands disagree, trust his for the contents and mine for the location; I moved everything in 1991 and he died in 1990. He would have minded. He minded most things quietly.
Ellis taught me one rule. He taught me a hundred procedures, but only one rule, and he gave it in the old talk, which I will set down as he said it because translating it killed it the one time I tried:
Wood wants watter, brass wants blood, and tha wants nowt. That's t'trade.
I did not believe him. I was twenty and I believed in solvents and in the catalogue from Birmingham and in the idea that wanting was a thing you did off the clock. Keep the rule anyway. It is load-bearing. I will show you where.
The clarinets and the one oboe (Howarth, cracked top joint, ledger p. 211) are blackwood, and blackwood is a rainforest tree living in a town where the weather comes off the moor sideways, and it copes the way anything copes with exile: badly, and in private. A drying body cracks. A cracking body has been drying for months while seeming fine. By the time you are told, you are late.
So: the humidor is the old biscuit tin marked HUMIDOR, because labelling a thing plainly is half of keeping it, and inside is a sponge in a soap dish. Wet the sponge every Monday, which you will forget, which everyone forgets — no, which everyone chooses to forget, it being a job with no visible product — so put it where the kettle is and wet it while the tea draws. The kettle is reliable. Be the kettle.
Bore oil twice a year, March and October, sparingly. A flooded bore swells, a swollen bore goes sharp up top, and then a child stands up at Saddleworth and the adjudicator writes intonation suspect about someone who did nothing wrong. The wood was thirsty in February and the child carries it in June. That is the shape of this work. Get used to the shape.
This part concerns the burnisher, which is the tool the bench is named for in my head, though no one else calls it anything.
It hangs on the second hook: a steel finger, slightly bent, polished by use to a brightness the catalogue cannot sell you, the catalogue selling burnishers and this being a burnisher plus forty-six years. When a bell takes a dent you do not beat it out, whatever the drummers tell you. You raise it on the mandrel and you rub it out, stroke after stroke, pressing the metal back toward a shape it has merely forgotten, and the metal remembers, brass being the most forgiving material God permitted and the least forgetful. Every dent comes out. Every dent leaves a record under the lacquer that only you will ever see. Both things are true and you will live inside the overlap.
Now the blood. Burnishing is done with the thumb riding the steel, and the steel heats, and the work-edge finds the same place on the thumb every time, and by Friday the place is open. You will bleed on the work. Everyone does. Wipe it before it etches — sweat etches too; some hands are worse than others, and mine are bad, which is why I overpolish, see §1 — and understand that Ellis was being literal. Wood wants water. Brass wants blood. He was not being wise. He was being accurate, which around here was the same career.
The third clause took me longer.
The ledger runs from 1953: every instrument in and out, what was done, what was charged, what was waived. Read the waived column for the town's true history; the mill's bad years are all there, written as n/c in a steady hand.
You will find one irregularity, and since you will find it, I will catalogue it properly.
Between 1979 and 1987 a cornet appears thirty-one times. Boosey & Hawkes Sovereign, serial 654---, the ledger has the rest. No cornet needs thirty-one repairs in eight years. The player was M. W., principal seat from fifteen, and the instrument came in because she practised four hours a day in an unheated front room, and condensation is acid, and acid eats valve casings from inside — but that accounts for perhaps twenty visits, and the truth is the other eleven were brought in for nothing, a sticking trigger that did not stick, a leak that was not there, and I took the work every time and charged for none of it and kept the instrument overnight when an hour would have done. She would collect it the next day and play a scale to test the valves, standing by the north window, and the scale was only a scale, and I want it understood that nothing was ever said, by her because there was nothing she knew to say, and by me because the trade is the trade. Tha wants nowt. I held the third clause of the rule for the full term of service and was never once asked to put it down, which I tell you not as a sorrow but as a specification: it is possible to do this job correctly for forty-six years. The scale was B-flat major. She had a way of leaning on the fourth note going up, the way you'd test a floorboard, and the room is north-lit, as I have said, so I can tell you the light never lied about her either, not at eight in the morning and not at four, and —
Forgive the above. It has no place in a maintenance manual, and I have re-read it and will not strike it through, because a record once made should stand, but I apologise for it and it will not recur. The procedural content is this: charge for your work. The waived column is for mills, not for men.
She left in 1987 for the college in Manchester and then further than that, and the seat passed to the Tinsley lad, who blew sharp. The ledger resumes its ordinary rhythm thereafter and you may trust it.
There is a wireless on the shelf for testing nothing; it is simply company, and you should know its habits. It drifts off-station in cold weather. Of an evening they play the kind of singing that gets called crossover, and there is one singer they favour — she records under one of those single stage names, like a perfume — and I will admit her records are the only ones I turn up rather than down, because she attacks a note the way a good cornet player does, from underneath, leaning on it like a floorboard, no scoop, and her breath is so long that the engineers must splice it, though I have listened closely and can find no splice. Whoever taught her embouchure-breathing for a singer knew their business. It is a small pleasure of the post. Take it where you find it.
Maintenance of small pleasures is the whole job.
I will say the feeling once, here, in the manner of the ledger, and then the manual will continue: it is a debt, it has compounded annually since 1979 at a rate I never set, and the party to whom it is owed has no surviving address, so it compounds still, payable to no one, and I carry it the way the bench carries the vice — bolted on, bearing load, part of the level surface everything else gets done on. Entered. Carried forward.
Per §1, I keep things I should return. Most are honest clutter: pads, springs, a straight mute (item 12, return to the Tinsleys if any remain), a lyre off a marching trombone whose owner marched nowhere after 1996, and a mouthpiece, silver-plate worn to brass at the rim, which its player will not miss because its player does not know it was ever swapped for the loaner. Items 1 through 18 may be disposed of at your discretion. Item 19 may not, and requires its own storage instructions:
Item 19. One roll of film, 35mm, Ilford FP4, exposed to frame 14 of 24, rewound, in canister, in the tobacco tin marked SHIMS — DO NOT MIX. Exposures 1–13 are the band on the Institute steps, Whit Friday 1986, taken at the committee's request and never asked after. Frame 14 is the north window of this shop on a June morning, with someone standing in it testing valves, and a B-flat scale will not show on film, though the breath before one might, and I took the frame and then I stopped — not stopped, decided — and the reasons are outside the scope of this document. Frame 15 was never made.
Storage conditions: cold, dry, dark, in that order of importance. The bottom drawer against the north wall serves; it has never gone above twelve degrees in my tenure, and the tin keeps its own dark. Add a sachet of silica from the box on the shelf each October when you do the bore oil, so the two jobs remember each other. A latent image fades, but slowly, and slower still in the cold; rolls have been measured printable after sixty years, which is longer than the post will need. Do not develop it. Development is fixing, and not everything wants fixing; some images are better maintained than finished. This is the only item in the inventory whose entire maintenance consists of leaving it alone, and I find that no harder than the rest of the work, or not much, or not any more.
The post is yours from Monday noon. I have left the burnisher out on the bench, against my own rule about hooks, because a tool put away looks finished with and this one is not; the thumb-hollow in the handle will take your thumb soon enough, the way the bench took the vice. I have left the lamp on over it, which the committee will call waste, but the bulb is the last of the old warm ones and I want it burning when you first open the door, so the room looks like work interrupted rather than work concluded. That is the truthful look. Nothing in this room concludes; it is only ever maintained, and in all the decades since anything last happened here, the maintaining has held, which is the most I can certify and more than most trades can say.
The Sovereign cornet, serial as above, is on the strength still, unplayed since the Tinsley lad emigrated. There is verdigris starting at the second valve casing, from the inside, where the old condensation got in and was never quite chased out, and it will want the burnisher and an afternoon and possibly the thumb. It is mine to do one more time and then yours.
But it is Monday morning yet, and the post is mine until noon, and the kettle has just gone on. Wet the sponge.