We all lost a top man over the weekend, a big man with a huge heart who made a massive contribution to life around here and none more so at our little cricket club across the way from where he lived and liked to watch the odd game or two.
Few will realise to what extent but you could say, without him, we may not have had a club at all at the Villas.
So I wanted to say a personal thank you and a sad goodbye to Derrick Armitage – D – on behalf of countless people that have, and will hopefully continue, to enjoy his outstanding legacy, the new clubhouse at the Villas.
Rebuilt in 2007 under his watchful master builder’s eye and owing much to his patience, perseverance and sheer goodwill, D enabled an almost impossible dream to become a proud reality.
I don’t know if D ever played cricket but, for a while his son Tom was a promising junior. Sadly Tom’s passion for the game gradually ebbed but D would often be perched most Saturday afternoons on the wall by old Laurie Nicholson’s gate, polo shirt on whatever the weather, those huge Popeye-like forearms on show.
Fortunately for the club, D was never slow to lend those forearms whenever a building project required his expertise allied to our collective blind ignorance and enthusiasm, doubtless saving one or two of us from maiming ourselves in the process.
Way back in 1999 D was invaluable in helping us re-lay the two concrete strips we used as practice wickets in those days. The original surfaces had started to crack and the variable bounce as a result was threatening to crack a few bones as well.
Although we had a grant for around half of the cost, we needed to save money where we could and so, under D’s guidance, a group of us toiled all weekend to break up the old strips, in the process filling numerous skips.
Almost a hundred square yards of six inch thick concrete meant few of us could ever have realised what we had taken on; ignorance is indeed bliss.
When D’s pneumatic drill had the initial impact of a toothpick, bouncing off the concrete early on the first Saturday morning, most of us looked ashen, but D just smiled that reassuring smile and hammered a bit harder. Soon the two strips were like broken ice flows and he was orchestrating our removal of the slabs.
Even that genial smile was tested though, when we found another much older strip running diagonally under the two we had just uprooted; were our forefathers constantly laying concrete?
By the end of a very long weekend we had saved about £500 which was critical as it was money we simply did not have but we could never have done it without D and that big drill of his.
Secretly, I think he enjoyed seeing a few of us do some real work for a change and our bodies ached for days after. None of us sought a change of career in the building trade as a result, not that D saw any budding potential.
A few years later when, in an act of either bold optimism or sheer stupidity, we decided to rebuild our crumbling shack of a clubhouse, D was the only man that could have made this even a possibility.
We neither had the money nor any remote possibility of raising the sums we were told we needed. However, D convinced us that through a beg, steal and borrow approach we could pull this off; there were times I thought he had spent too long in the sun out on site.
So, for the next five years or so we would meet him periodically, tell him how much we had raised, wait for the sympathetic smile, a shake of his head and go off and try to raise some more.
It was during this time that D’s luck took a devastating turn for the worst when he fell off a ladder resulting in horrific injuries that meant he would not walk freely again nor ever work as builder full time.
Despite all this he never let us down and he kept pushing us forward, his knowledge and our blind naivety an unlikely pairing. One winter’s night he assessed where we were again and, although there was precious little wiggle room, it was now or never.
Kevin McLoud would have been shaking his head in disbelief, Sarah Beeny would have done a runner but, Grand Design or not, D was insistent we could do it. If he harboured any doubts he hid them from us which was perhaps just as well.
Of course there were many others that turned this ridiculously small pot of money – some fifty grand – into a building we had been quoted over three times as much to build.
D though was the man who had the knowledge, the contacts and could pull all the parts together at the same time as building a new career for himself as a college lecturer, finally seeing the attraction of indoor working as we had been telling him for years.
He had no end of contacts in the trade but few can have been as left-field as our “brickie” who turned up under the surveillance of one of Her Majesty’s tags and enjoyed the odd spliff or two on site.
One or two walls may not have been entirely plumb straight and there are still some quirks of the finished build that suggest weed and building do not go well together.
D also provided us with two “chippies” who were a comedy act in their own right as were the trio of singing plasterers, almost dancing on their stilts as they slapped on buckets of plaster to perfection, if not ever sounding as if they could ever enter X-Factor.
Of course there were some moments of pure farce, strangely mainly revolving around the toilets.
One day D and I were “summoned” by one of the members, out inspecting progress as many were fond of doing. His gripe was that he felt the newly constructed cubicles were not wide enough, almost insisting we knock them down and start again.
At one point I thought D was going to either knock him down or lock him in one just to prove he could actually fit inside but once again he kept that legendary cool, smiled and just cracked on.
I will never forget my starter class in plumbing by D one brutally cold January day. We had to connect the new waste pipe to the old one which, to complicate matters, was concreted in.
This involved carefully chipping away the concrete around the join we were seeking to link to; too heavy handed and we had to dig further up the pipe to find the next join plus the only way to find the join was by hand. D patiently explained this before vanishing around the corner laughing.
A freezing afternoon with my hand up a waste pipe was lit up by D’s big grin as I silently cursed him each time he walked by to see how his apprentice was doing, head down a stinking hole, groping into the slime of almost 25 years, wondering if I would ever use my fingers again.
We had no right to end up with what we did and I’m not sure few people really know how it all happened. D, typically, never wanted any fuss and soon faded into the background again, content with his spot on Laurie’s wall, job done so to speak.
The best we could do was simply make him an honorary life member of the club. You would think a man who had put so much into improving other people’s lives, despite all he had endured in recent years, would merit a bit of good fortune but along came cancer and it is a cruel, indiscriminate and destructive disease.
Seeing the slow destruction of a man as strong and powerful as D makes you appreciate the people who care for millions of sufferers up and down the country on a day to day basis.
As for D, the last time I saw him was New Year’s Eve as a few of us shuffled in, hoped we looked “normal”, cracked a few weak jokes and tried not to say anything stupid as we said what would inevitably be our final goodbyes.
People talk of the bravery of those who fight against this thing; D was very brave and good company for us all to the last despite the inevitability. We lost a really good bloke who gave us all so much.
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