Lynn Leggat has always “kept wood stacked around the place,” she says. She picked it up here and there for a notional future when she would make something with it. For her 60th birthday, her husband Alan, a builder, bought her a set of power tools. “He said: ‘You keep talking about it, now go and do it.’”
Woodworking has always felt important to Leggat, now 62. She was born in Manchester, and when she was five, in 1966, the family emigrated to Wellington, New Zealand. Her father was a carpenter who made wooden patterns for ship parts, and Leggat learned at his side. “He taught me to knock a nail in when I was seven or eight, and how to hold a saw. He thought it was important for girls to have the skills that boys have.” Her father “made tables, cupboards, kitchens. Whatever was needed in the house, he made it – a conservatory, an orangery, a games room. He just kept building things. I think doing the practical stuff with me was his way of showing me how much he cared. I knew he loved me,” Leggat says.
By the time she was 15, Leggat’s father had gone out of business. She left school shortly after. “You only really went to sixth form if you were going to college or university. My mum and dad couldn’t afford a uniform,” she says. To find work, she opened the Yellow Pages and turned to “banks”. The first one she called invited her to interview.
“I worked in a bank, a finance company, and for EMI … I was never really happy with what I was doing, so every 18 months I’d change my job,” she says. She was also “a restaurant manager and a waitress, did bar work, marketing, and demonstrations in supermarkets”.
At 22, she returned to England to connect with her wider family. One night, her uncle persuaded her to accompany him to a Catholic dance. She bumped into Alan (quite literally) on the dancefloor. He walked her home. They have been together for 38 years, and have three children.
Leggat restarted her education when she was about 30, sitting A-levels in a hall full of teenagers, and later doing an Open University degree. At 40, she started working for Manchester city council in regeneration and youth services, and for the past 10 years has specialised in charity work, teaching women DIY at a local community centre.
“I went out into the world at 17 and I had a lot of the skills you need to survive,” she says. “What my dad taught me has stood me in good stead over the years.” He died of a heart attack the year before Leggat turned 60.
“When I got the tools, I did cry,” she says. “Every time I work in my workshop area, even if I’m just moving the wood around or thinking what I’m going to do with it, I get a sense of being close to him.”
At first, after she got the tools, she tried them out on pieces of wood she had lying around. She progressed to renovating a stool, making plant boxes out of an old wendy house and turning scaffold boards into art. Sometimes her nine-year-old granddaughter helps. “She knows how to use a heat gun, how to screw things, hammer things.”
For Leggat, using the tools is also a form of resistance training. She has had both hips replaced since turning 60: “I had very little mobility for about three or four years – it was horrendous. I feel I’ve got time to make up.”
Next, she plans to build a storage unit for her youngest daughter, and to set up a workshop in the basement. “It would be nice if there were one or two things I made that were there after I have gone – a couple of things I could make for my family,” she says. “My husband and my dad have got things in the world that have lasted a long time.”
But all the things her father made are in New Zealand, and the cost of travel has become prohibitive. “I may never get over there. Maybe that’s why I want to do it,” she says. In the workspace “he is there, guiding me”.
