Moleskin Joe - Patrick Macgill

MOLESKIN JOE - PATRICK MACGILL

What do you need to do to earn a nickname like 'Moleskin Joe'? It's enough to make you want to read the book of that title just to find the answer, and the fact that it was published by New English Library in 1973 only adds to the curiosity. The NEL publication, however, is actually a reprint of the original first published in 1923, but on realizing this it simply serves to put the subject matter into some sort of context.

Moleskin Joe is a navvy - a manual labourer of old - working on the construction of canals and railway lines just like those whom Shane MacGowan sang about in his song Navigator on The Pogues' debut 'Rum, Sodomy & The Lash' album. Moleskin Joe is also somewhat of a gentleman of the road as they used to be called, bedding down at night in barns, sheds or under haystacks if the night is balmy enough. He's a confirmed bachelor too, that is until the night he saves the life of a girl from drowning and after her planting a kiss upon him is struck with love. From there on he's a man possessed, and when the girl leaves town the next day with her family, Joe spends his days thinking of little other than making her his wife and so sets out on an endless quest to find her again.

All in all it's quite a simple story but the beauty and joy of it is in the way it's written and the command of English that author Patrick Macgill displays. It's classic English language, I would say, filled with colloquialisms and phrases that are no longer heard nowadays but which at one time would have been the everyday parlance of the English underclass. It's Shakespearian. That's right, the language of the uneducated, English proletarian underclass was once the stuff of Shakespeare. 

Early on in the book, Moleskin Joe returns to the farm where he was raised as an orphan by a farmer who had mercilessly exploited him to the hilt. The farmer, however, has passed away during the six years since Joe had fled. 'What did you want him for?' asks the new owner of the farm. 'To make him die violent,' Joe replies. And what more eloquent way could there be to declare an intention to murder? The book is full of phrases just like this. As for the police, the navvies hold an almost natural dislike of them: 'The devil roast them!' as one of them puts it.

Moleskin Joe by Patrick Macgill is in no way a brilliant book especially as it's let down by some glaringly obvious plot turns that you can see coming like an articulated lorry reversing with all lights flashing. It is, however, a seemingly forgotten curiosity that captures a beautifully vibrant sub-strata of Englishness now long gone. Apart from learning that moleskin is the material used for durable clothing favoured by working men, we don't, unfortunately, discover how Joe came by the name 'Moleskin'. Not that it particularly matters though because Joe's characteristic traits are so well portrayed that you end up seeing the man behind the name, as a fully-rounded character with a heart of gold who, I'm happy to reveal without spoiling the plot, wins out in the end against all the odds.

In his song about 'navigators', Shane MacGowan showed nothing but respect for them, acknowledging the fact that they were a breed of worker who are now somewhat forgotten to history: 'They died in their hundreds with no sign to mark where, save the brass in the pocket of the entrepreneur.' Shane's song acts a poignant marker to their memory and so too does Patrick Macgill's book.

John Serpico