Buckingham Palace, 1953 - Child Labor

The basement, accessed from the rear of the Trustee’s, was lit by a single naked bulb that hung from above. The room, about twenty foot square, lay in the back corner. The ceiling rose to an height that was sufficient for Don and I, but compelled Dad, who stood six foot-three, to crouch in a perpetual stoop.

The place emitted an earthy redolence. The outer walls were part of the foundation, but inner walls rose to only four feet. A dirt crawl-space that ran throughout the building’s underbelly was accessable above the inner walls. Don and I, enticed by its dark reaches, tried to deflect light from our single source into that void only to have it swallowed by an eternal night.

We were there to work and never got a chance to crawl into that particular adventure. The two of us consoled ourselves with jokes of what might be found out there - rats, skeletons, buried treasure?

The boiler sat on a concrete platform raised above the floor in case of flooding. It was original equipment, old enough to be retired, but circumstance demanded that we coax a few more years out of it. Dad came down that first day to show us what to do. We removed the outer metal cover exposing the entrails of the rusty thing. There were eight or ten heavy cast-iron sections, each measuring about 3 feet by 2 by half a foot.

We took the sections apart, cleaned out the rust and reassemble them with new fittings. Dad dropped in a couple times each day to bring parts, check our progress, and show us the next stage. It seems that it took about a week, maybe a bit longer to finish the project Dad fired the boiler that fall, and there was much hissing and clanking as steam surged through the system to the radiators.

Wallpaper covered the upstairs rooms and halls, many layers, one pasted on top of another, decade after decade, till the rooms were smaller for it. Our next job was to remove the wallpaper from all sixteen rooms, three long halls, and four bathrooms.

Summer was coming into full heat, and Dad rented a piece of equipment, a wallpaper steamer, that made things even hotter and stickier. The commercial steamer delivered volumes of bellowing steam through a hose to a flat plate with a handle on one side and many holes on the other. We were to hold the plate against the wall, and until the steam penetrated the layers of paper.

In theory it worked fine, in practice, not so well. One of us would stand several minutes pressing the steamer against the wall, but when we shifted position hot gas bellowed from under the tool scalding our forearm. We donned long sleeve shirts when we would have preferred to work in bathing suits. And when it finished cooking we had one small patch of limp paper to peal off.

It wasn’t working, so we tried closing the room, firing the steamer, and doing something else for an hour or two. The room filled with hot vapors that soaked into the wallpaper. When the room cooled enough to get back in the paper peeled off in long wide strips.

Our goal was to see how long of a piece we could strip off before it broke. The ceiling was the best arena for this contest as gravity helped peel the strips, sometimes from wall to wall - that was equivalent to a “home run“. Some rooms had vinyl wallpaper within the layers. We figured those rooms might have functioned as kitchens at onetime. Those took more steaming.

We got so efficient that we could strip a room in a day, wash the paste off the plaster, and clean up the debris by the 5:00 PM quitting hour. We were usually cleaning up one room while steaming another.

GO TO: Part 3, More Child Labor