The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees by Robert Penn

Author:Robert Penn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141977522
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

I See You Baby, Shakin’ That Ash

‘For runners, the rings of growth of the tree should be as far apart as possible: that is to say, they should be fast growing. Ash with narrow rings breaks. There is ash and ash.’

Apsley Cherry-Garrard,

The Worst Journey in the World

A year had passed since I had felled my tree. A great deal of my timber had been delivered to a myriad of craftsmen and the products of their endeavours had filtered slowly back into my house. At first, my three children showed an interest: Scarlett, aged eleven, loved eating her cereal from one of the bowls; Lucas, fourteen, was enamoured by the bodkin-tipped arrow; while Katrina, ten, was adamant that I use the ash pegs when we put my old canvas tent up in the garden on a sweltering weekend at the end of summer. They all enthusiastically invited any visitors to the house to admire the grain in the new kitchen worktop, but then their interest waned. Ash panelling went up on the walls of my office: it was barely acknowledged. Benches were fitted in our back room: ‘More ash,’ they groaned. I even heard Katrina whisper to a neighbour who’d come to blag some firewood: ‘Don’t take the ash logs. Dad’s a bit weird about them.’

‘Why don’t you make something out of the ash for the children?’ my wife suggested. Great idea, I thought, but what? The answer came from my mum. She reminded me of the hours of finger-throbbing, sock-soaked, skull-numbing joy my brother and I had often experienced in the half-light of a winter’s day on our wooden toboggan. Perfect.

‘We do make sleds and luges for Olympic athletes, and we have customers from all over the world for these, but most of our business is making toboggans for recreation and amateur racing in the Alps. Here in Austria, almost every house will have a toboggan, but they last a long time. We have customers with fifty-year-old toboggans, which they bring back to us for repairs. They are like heirlooms. Our company philosophy has always been to make a quality product at a fair price, and that quality starts with good ash,’ Christian Gasser told me, while making coffee. I had travelled from the UK to Austria on an overnight train, sharing a sleeper carriage from Paris to Munich with five students who had just finished their exams. I needed coffee.

‘We are well known in this business because we have been making toboggans for so long. We are a small company with eight employees, but we are healthy and busy all year round,’ Christian said, pouring the coffee. He was short, sinewy, square-shouldered, strong and full of energy. His youthful eyes never rested.

Johann Isser, Christian’s great-great-uncle set up in business as a wheelwright in 1909 outside the small town of Mattrei, beside the road over the Alps from Innsbruck in Austria to Bolzano in Italy, via the historic Brenner Pass. Repairing the wheels of old wagons and, later, the carriages of the first motor vehicles must have been a good business – at least in summer.

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