Bill & Eddie & the sea

My grandfather stood handphone in ear outside a small redbricked one-story unit, he stopped pacing as the call connected and though his jumbled salutations and disjointed nervous spurts of laughter, I could tell he was more excited than he'd been in a while...

'Um hi uncle Bill!', 'Hello..?'  "...Bill! yeah! we were just in Geelong and um, we're outside your house! Haha yes! actually the front door. ha!ha! no it was open! um yeah I called your name but nobody. Oh. Ah, Happy new year. yes, oh. Sorry, I didn't know you'd still be asleep. Yes we thought we'd surprise you. Oh heh ok.'

He's sheepish when he hangs up the phone and paces back over to us, where we'd been standing for the last 10 minutes waiting for him to reach the illusive Uncle Bill, a man who had served on several ships with my grandfather since the early 60s, and was now living in a small 4 unit retirement village in Geelong, a 1+ish hour drive from central Melbourne.

Uncle Bill, as it turns out is not one for surprises and was a little startled/ frustrated by the 11am wake up call from his old friend, family + grandson.

No Matter, he invites us in and my granddad begins a very slow but cordial unravelling of their collective histories. I sit on the corner of a tattered and slightly over crowded living room covered in hardcover books reading "NATURE! AT ITS WORST!", and stacks of technical magazine's like the local electrical engineer's digest.

Uncle Bill tosses me a silicone chip board covered in multicolored knobs and solder he'd been working on with one of those magnifying headsets people at electronic assembly lines wear. He tells me its form his radio that he's fixing.

3 hours on, we're driving out of Geelong and towards Cliffton Hill where uncle bill's son Shawn works. We pull up outside a industrial sized garage with all sorts of vehicles pulled up outside, including a Jetski, Speed boat, a corvette and a huge minivan with 'Shawn's Autorepairs' stencilled on the side of it in a flaming hot-rod type font.

Shawn is a pretty heavy set eurasian guy wearing khaki racer overalls and has a steel harley davidson ring on his ring finger. He'd been working on fashioning a shaft for a speedboat engine, and has to wipe the grease off his fingers several times before giving us handshakes and a quick demo of his machine shop - where he fabricates all manner of metal parts for engine and body repairs to any kind of vehicle.

He complains about how it's a damn shame how kids these days are so into computers they forget the importance of a basic knowledge of industrial and electrical engineering. I nod as I run my hand against the steel frame of a new wheel base he'd just welded together which will form the chassis for a new race truck he'd built from scratch.

As we leave Shawn pats my granddad on the back. 'You know Eddie (my granddad's name), a lot of my mates working the ships still talk about how hard you were on them.' My granddad grins for a bit and then gets bashful. It turns out he'd trained a lot of the electrical engineers and apparently had a reputation for being the strictest and harshest of the lot. Uncle Bill smiled a little and continued to pace around and admire he's son's latest engine block.

It was a long, slow and quiet drive back to Melbourne as it dawned on me how little I actually knew about my grandparents and how small my size felt.