The joinery shop on Barton Road was frigid in winter, with only a woodstove for heat. I hadn’t yet learned to drive, so I rode my bicycle to work from Friday Bridge, some four miles away. The flat route wound through small villages with picturesque names such as Elm, surrounded by fields of strawberries, beetroot, or Brussels sprouts, depending on the season. For a few months each year it was as dreamy and charming as it sounds. But winter, which felt as though it lasted a calendar-defying nine months (at least, for those of us on bikes—”performance fabrics” had not yet been invented), was miserable—an extended season simply to be endured.
There was no escape from the cold. I wore two pairs of socks covered by plastic sandwich bags inside my work boots. (I imagined the sandwich bags would provide some sort of insulation, unaware that by trapping moisture they would instead exacerbate tissue damage.) Invariably when I got to work my toes ached and stang. Fingers, exposed to the breeze, were a source of even greater wretchedness (gloves? even gloves fortified with sandwich bags? the wind made mockery of such feeble resistance); the bone-deep shooting pains only worsened as the flesh revived in the lesser frigidity (one could hardly call it warmth) of the shop once I had lit the fire. My fingers were perpetually red, my toes purple—a condition I discovered had a name: chillblains. It would take years for their normal coloring to return.
Never remove your jacket and gloves
It sounds so Dickensian. But this story involves no exploitation of workers by greedy businessmen. I had chosen my circumstances. I had my diploma, my skills. I had artistic ambitions. And I felt compelled to make a break from my live-in relationship. I had placed an ad in the local paper, seeking a workshop with living space where I could set up my own business. Of course I knew nothing, nothing, about business. But I was 21, and determined.
