Characters: Wilson Squarebridges

This Future Learn course - which I shall have to either revisit, or re-register when it is relaunched (I wonder what you might call a three way repetition of 're' prefixes in the same sentence - all these things have names: grammar is like cricket, everything is collected,collated and classified), as again I have fallen away.

However I have been working my way through some of the exercises.  This one below, which was subject to the most stringent word limit (the course writers have a clever way to enforce the limit by ensuring that the blank template for uploading your work ceases to function once you hit it), is about creating a character snapshot which should include unexpected elements - playing with the readers expectations I think it what it was titled.

I drew this one out pretty quickly though what I could do with him now that he exists I am not so sure. The flower caused me to have a near fit with auto correct - it is correctly spelled, and nothing to do with the human senses. Anyway here he is:

In the mid 1950s Wilson Squarebridges spent his working days huffily teaching boys metalwork at a well respected public school. Boys he considered nothing more than polished turds, destined to become MPs or barristers; professions Wilson regarded as obscene and other worldly. Foul tempered and ancient looking he had served as a gunner and reserved blacksmith during the war which had conspired to render him quite deaf. His unruly white hair which collapsed around his ears, his wrecked, calloused hands, his stubborn attachment to his hissing gas bottles, lump hammers and shrieking files, combined with his deafness, made him a bad tempered figure in his spattered overalls which failingly protected his frayed suit. Wilson avoided the cushy and sociable extra-curricular options available to the schoolmasters. He had little interest in sports and even less in school travel days, preferring to spend his days in his fuliginous refuge: the Hades of the filthy workshop which was to him a natural habitat and comfort zone, but to others a diabolical network of forges, flames, filings and the whispered profanities of other, 'f' words. But no one could guess how often tears pooled in those white-heat and war damaged eyes. And few knew of the exquisite artistic beauty of the intricate metal sculpture work he crafted to lift the spirits of his terminally ill wife, or the fragile natural beauty of the auriculas he cultivated for the hospice staff.