AXE

— Оn the rubbish dump at that time you could often find stones, to be precise, big brick blocks which you could break up and get good bricks from. But how? You could do it with a hammer but it didn’t quite do the job. And I needed bricks a lot at that time — it was when I was building a garden shed (…) And at our blacksmith’s (in the factory) they made hammers. Good hammers. I went to see the blacksmiths and asked them to make me not a hammer, but an axe from a hammer. That is to say, they made an axe from a hammer (…) the metal was very good, it was possible to heat it up. With the help of such axes we cut the old mortar away from the bricks. It was like that with those axes. We cut out a lot of bricks from that rubbish tip. We put it on a pile somewhere but someone took it away, stole it.