I remember going to the dump with my Dad in his big baby blue work truck. He’d sing “We’re off to see the Wizard”. When the fuzzy black cover for the bench seat got a hole in it, Mum sewed a big red fun-fur heart over the hole to patch it up, to keep it going for a couple years longer.

The decal on the side, in black and red, said CR Industrial Machine Works Ltd.

My Dad welded that truck bed together. The deck itself was made of heavy plate steel with raised diamond shapes for friction, so the load wouldn’t slew about when you took a corner and the rain of a November gale came sluicing in under the blue plastic tarps. Round the edge of the deck was a rail with gaps that accepted the flat hooked ends of tensions straps.

The mechanisms were cold and stiff to my small hands. They fascinated me. I’d find the compartment where the straps were kept, rolled up. Pulling them out onto the dying lawn, I’d unravel them to feel the bumpy weave of the strap, it’s pebbly texture under my fingers. Once they had been yellow but time sun and grease had faded the straps to a grubby tan.

After slotting the bent-plate hooks into the gaps in the rail round the matte black truck bed, you’d ratchet the mechanism, winding in the flat strapping onto a reel. I repeated this motion again and again to hear the well-oiled clicking sound of the steel mechanism. Eventually you’d have hundreds of pounds of pressure pent up in the broad strap, pressing down on a milling machine, or a second-hand piano.