Twenty Boats on One Wall

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where the river widened out towards the marsh and two boat builders kept their sheds within a hundred yards of the same slipway.

Two boat builders in one town, the same oak and elm and the same river.
Both built punts for the marsh and wherries for the staithe, and both built them soundly.
Both carved a half model before they laid a keel, as every builder did.
One planed his models down and used the wood again. One drove a nail and hung them up.
By the tenth year, strangers were choosing one of them before he had said a word.
Which, and what was it on that wall that did the choosing?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two boat builders, in a town I have never named. Both worked in open sheds that smelled of tar and sawn elm, the shavings going out of the doorway on any wind off the water. Both built flat punts for the men who cut reed on the marsh and heavier wherries for the maltings at the staithe. Both charged within a shilling of each other, and neither was the better builder.

Both began a boat the same way, too. A builder in that trade does not draw a boat on paper. He carves one half of the hull, to scale, in soft pine, works it with a drawknife until the shape satisfies him, and takes his lines off the model. The model is a tool, and it has done its work before the first plank is bent. What became of it afterwards was the whole of the difference between those two men.

The first builder had a launch day like anybody. The owner came down with a jug of something, the hull went off the slipway with that noise a boat makes going into water, and within the week it was four miles up a dyke where no other soul would see it. The model stayed in the shed a while and then got planed down for the next set of lines, pine costing money and the shed being narrow. Ten years of work, and nothing in that shed but the boat on the stocks.

So when a stranger came in, a man with a weed-choked dyke and no boat that would float in six inches of water, the conversation went the only way it could. The builder said, accurately, what he could build, and that he had made a dozen punts of the sort. He offered a parish seven miles off where one might be seen, if the man cared to go and find a reed cutter who was on the water all day. He left with a courteous account of boats he could not see, and a price.

The second builder did one thing differently, and it cost him a nail and a strip of backboard. He did not plane his models down. He pinned each to a board with a card in his own hand beside it: the year, the parish, the length, what the boat was for, and the one awkward thing about it. Shallow for weed. Well amidships for eels. Wide in the stern for a man who stood up to haul. Then he hung it with the others, over the bench, where a man waiting for him had nothing else to look at.

By the tenth year there were twenty-three hulls on that wall, in the order they were built. The stranger with the weed-choked dyke came to that door too. He did not ask what the builder could do. He looked up, pointed at one near the middle, and asked what that one had been for. He got the dyke, the weed, the two inches taken out of her draught and what it cost her in stiffness. And then he said the sentence every one of us waits to hear, which is that his own dyke was worse than that.

From there it was not a sale but two men discussing one particular boat. Nobody asked how many punts had been built, twenty-three of them being on the wall, and the price arrived into a head already full of evidence and did very little arguing.

Be fair to the first man. Launch day is the day you are owed money, the day you are tired, the day the next keel is ordered. Nothing on it stands in front of you asking you to keep anything, and a tool that has finished its work looks exactly like firewood. He did not throw away his proof. He never once thought of it as proof.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Your finished work is evidence for a single afternoon, and then it belongs to somebody else; what you keep of it is what sells the next one. Every trade comforts itself that the work speaks for itself. It does, and you should be clear about who it speaks to. It speaks to the one household that bought it, behind their own front door, for as long as they trouble to mention it. Everybody else gets your description instead, and a description is a claim, and a claim is discounted the moment it is made, which is the matter of the glazier and his hammer.

The difficulty is that your work will not hold still. It goes out of the door into a private house and becomes somebody's floor, somebody's accounts, somebody's quiet Tuesday, and you cannot ask to be let back in to show it to a stranger. So the evidence must be taken while the work is in front of you, in the hour you are least inclined to do anything but sweep up and go home.

Mind above all the half that goes missing first, which is the before. Nobody records a thing while it is still ugly. The rotten sill, the cupboard that would not shut, the ledger in the state it was handed to you: all of it is there for two minutes and never again at any price. Half of what a customer pays for is the distance between those two states, and a stranger shown only the finished end is being asked to admire a tidy room. Show both, which is the evidence your customer has turned round the other way.

Then there is what a row does that no single one can. One kept job is an anecdote, and an anecdote invites the question of whether you have ever done it twice. Twenty in order, dated, says the thing no man can say about himself aloud without sounding ridiculous, which is that he has done this many times and is not guessing.

You carry in your pocket a better recording instrument than an evening with a drawknife, which is why the failure is now almost universal. Nine thousand pictures in no order and none of them labelled is not a record; it is a drawer. A record is a small number of jobs, in one place, each with a line of writing: what the trouble was in the customer's own words, what you did, the month, and the figure if you are willing. A picture tells a stranger what the thing looks like. The sentence beside it tells him what you were thinking, and that is what he is buying.

Two cautions. Keep the ordinary jobs and not only the handsome ones, since the customer you want is buying an ordinary job, and a wall of nothing but cathedrals tells the man with a leaking punt he has come to the wrong shed. And keep nothing you have not the right to keep: ask leave before you take anything out of a customer's house, and keep faces, names and door numbers out of it. Let the business take two minutes at the end of a job rather than an evening at the end of a week, since a record that needs an evening is abandoned inside a month.

Three questions, and the first can be answered before you put the lamp out:

1. What did you finish this month that you can now show to nobody at all? Count it honestly. That number is the proof you threw away, and it will be most of it.
2. Where is the before of the job you start tomorrow? It exists until you pick up a tool. Two minutes is the whole of the cost, and it buys the only half of the story a stranger finds interesting.
3. Could somebody standing in front of you see twenty of your jobs, in order, inside two minutes? If it must be fetched, searched for or sent on later, it is not a record but the rumour of one. Put it where people wait.

The Answer to the Riddle

One planed his models down and used the wood again, and one drove a nail and hung them up. By the tenth year, strangers were choosing one of them before he had said a word. Which, and what was it on that wall that did the choosing?

The second builder hung them up, and what did the choosing was not his skill, the two men having the same. It was twenty-three dated hulls with a card in pencil beside each, in a row where a stranger had to look at them, saying without boasting that all this had been done before and had gone right. The first builder built the same boats and kept nothing of them, and so was obliged, every time, to describe his work to people with no reason to take his word for it.

The verse:

Each boat you build goes down the stream
And takes its proof away.
So keep some small true piece of it
Where the next man stands to pay.

Until next time. Go and record the next job at both ends, before you lay a hand on it and again when you have swept up, and put the pair in one place with the date and a line of writing.

P.S. A record of your work is worth more to the man who has not asked to see it than to the man who has. The customer who writes and requests examples has half decided already and wants permission to stop looking. The one who needs your wall is the man who came in to ask the price of a punt and leaves having seen ten years of work without being told a word about it. Which is why it belongs where people stand and wait, and not in a drawer to be fetched on request.

Also in the archive: The Mason's Witnesses, Four Doors Either Side and The Washing Out by Ten.