WHILE sitting out in the back garden with a book the other day, I witnessed a charming episode in human relationships. A joiner and his lad were fitting a new lock and door handle on one of the old cottages nearby.

I couldn’t help overhearing their pleasant, friendly conversation in which they touched on Arsenal football team, last night’s telly and where they might go for their pint when they were finished. Job done, they started to pack up. The lad went off first to the van, and it was then that the mood degenerated.

The boss shouted: “Hey, come back ’ere you stupid ******* ******! Come and see what you’ve ******* done. How the **** anybody could be so ******* barmy beats me. You’ve put the lock on OK, but the ******* handle’s the wrong way ******* round and now we can’t open the ******* door!”

What impressed me most was not the boss’s mastery of invective – he could have got his PhD in profanity – but his sheer incredulity.

He was a craftsman and it was simply way beyond his understanding that even the most callow apprentice could make such an obvious error.

He went on shouting for several minutes, labouring the point with magnificent intensity.

Then something marvellous happened.

The boss gradually calmed down and, obviously fixing the handle himself, quietly asked the lad to pass him first this tool and then that one. In a few minutes, they were talking about Arsenal and beer again until finally I heard the old man say: “Come on, then, lad and I’ll buy you that pint.”

I nearly cried at the restoration of tenderness.

Clearly the boss, like a father, loved the apprentice. And all the shouting and swearing was nothing except profound unbelief that such a silly mistake could have been made in the first place.

That paternal, loving relationship between an older, experienced man and a boy starting out and learning his trade is one of the loveliest things in all human contact.

I was moved also because it took me back to my own youth and reminded me of my dad. Jim Mullen was a marvellous craftsman and it was a source of enormous frustration to him that his son didn’t take after him.

When it came to practical work with hammers, chisels and screwdrivers, I was worse than useless. More than once the scene between the boss and his lad was replayed between my dad and me. Dad didn’t have that joiner’s proficiency in the art of cursing, but he would end up saying: “Honestly, Peter, if there’s two ways of doing a job, you’ll always pick the wrong ’un. Go and put the kettle on and we’ll knock off and have a cuppa.”

My incompetence may have tested my dad’s patience, but it didn’t spoil his affection for me. That’s what came back to me the other day in the garden and that’s why I could have cried. I can recall the boot being on the other foot, so to speak.

When I was a schoolteacher I spent hours and weeks trying to interest schoolboys in the English poets. It was an uphill struggle.

The boys were not disrespectful, but it was obvious they would rather have been doing something else – anything else. Then on the last day of term one Christmas, a boy came out to the front of the class and presented me with a paperback edition of the complete Shakespeare. They had all signed the title page. Makes you cry, doesn’t it?