It was blue. Standing alone in the middle of a field. A monolith rising from the dirt. The port-a-loo. It stood devoid of even a tree for modesty and was the sole loo available to myself and the forty Englishmen who worked on my section. The smell, I will leave to your imagination. To this day, I am forever grateful for the existence of large American hamburger chains with a restaurant on every corner.
The field described was indeed a field as this was England. And this field was bounded by a Nestles' factory wafting the smell of brewing coffee into the thick summer air, the London-to-Bristol railway line and a brook. We must admire the English for their quaint sayings but describing a nasty, stagnant drain running through an industrial region of outer London, as a brook, quite takes the crumpet.
So here I stood, in an English summer, in the middle of a field with a port-a-loo, looking at a railway line and a brook, over both of which we were to build a bridge. And this was my introduction to the construction industry and my first day on the job as an engineer.
Whilst my schoolfriends chose careers in medicine, law, teaching and the arts, and worked in hospitals and schools and glossy, high-rise buildings in the city, I chose engineering. And worked in a field. In steel-capped boots and a white hard hat. And shared a port-a-loo with forty blokes whose habits are not those I pictured of English gentlemen.
And I thought: "what have I done?"
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