by Tim Bradford
‘Piecemeal?’
‘Yes, piecemeal. We’re a piecemeal country. Some of those sewers probably haven’t been repaired for over 1000 years. It makes me ashamed to be a Londoner. We only fix things when there’s a real problem. One day it’ll be too late. They got Bob Kiley in. Ken Livingstone did. He worked for the FBI, you know.’
‘Ken Livingstone?’
‘No, Ken Livingstone didn’t work for the FBI. Bob Kiley did. He fixed the subway in New York but now the government have sacked him. Ken Livingstone knew. He used to be my boss.’
‘At the GLC?’
‘Yeah. I met him a few times. He’s a good man. A very talented man. Do you know what he does?’
‘He’s Mayor of London.’
‘No, in his spare time. I bet you don’t know what he likes. What he does in his spare time.’
‘Newts?’
He looks crestfallen. As though it was some secret that only he and Ken shared. I imagined them out for a beer.
Ken: (a bit pissed) Mr Toothless Big Hair, I’ve never told anyone this before.
Mr Toothless Big Hair: What is it, Ken?
Ken: I like … newts.
Mr Toothless Big Hair: Your secret’s safe with me, Ken.
He goes quiet. Why couldn’t I have kept my big mouth shut? My eyes drift back to the book. Then he starts up again.
‘Yeah, anyway, it’s all piecemeal. Look at the teachers. The Labour government do all that curriculum stuff. First it’s one thing then another. All they do is paperwork. Should have let the council run them. I’ve got a mate who did evening classes. Out of the kindness of his heart. The kids just – ran around everywhere. On the furniture. ‘What am I doing this for?’ That’s what he said. It was hell. So he gave it up and went to work in a pub, cleaning glasses or something. Of course, sometimes the kids go in there when they should be at school. These girls went in there and he recognizes them and what was it one of them girls said?’
Pause. Silence. The train rattles along. There are only two other people in the carriage and though they’re both pretending to read I can tell they’re on the edge of their seats. He’s a tease. He does that thing with his mouth that toothless people do. A twitchy smile. Then nothing, just silence. I take this as a sign that he’s bored with the conversation and am just about to open my book again when he blurts out:
‘I want a Coke.’
‘I have some water in my bag.’
‘Yeah, she ordered a Coke.’
‘Ah. Right.’
‘And he says, You get back to school. I’ll tell your parents, and he did tell the parents and the girl was for it the next day in school. She had loads of make-up on, though.’
Suddenly he gets up. Next stop is Woolwich Arsenal and it must be his stop, but he stands next to the door about five yards away and carries on looking at me, smiling. Occasionally he waves. I wave back.
‘Bye,’ he shouts and waves again. I smile back.
He then does a Great Big Smile and a Really Friendly Wave. ‘Bye.’ Then the train stops, the doors open and he’s gone from my life forever.
A couple of stops later it’s Abbey Wood. I ask a couple of people about the sewage works but they give me that Scooby-Doo-style ‘I wouldn’t go up there after dark if I were you, young sir’ look. Neither of them can give me directions. There’s only one bus, a 469, which goes in the general direction. But not all the way. It doesn’t get too close. I walk around Abbey Wood (tower blocks everywhere, little town centre) for a while and get completely lost, but, fortunately, I’ve got my compass. I start walking along the side of the dual carriageway. The 469 goes every fifteen to twenty minutes. One appears and I start sprinting. Two people get on – I’m nearly there – five yards short – he must be able to see me – but the cockney bastard pulls away. Fuck. I’m out of breath, sweating (I’ve got a backpack on). Now, to wait or not wait. It’s always a problem when you’re trying to catch a bus. Invariably you get caught in the no-man’s land between two stops when the bus comes.
I’ve never been this far east before. On the left is a permanent caravan site at Thistlebrook. Bright, open and flat. This is nearer Holland than Holland Park. The school coach returns, having dropped its cargo off half a mile up the road. They’ll all be settling in, getting into some deluxe sewage speedboat while, because I’m late, I’ll have to row myself out in an old wooden dinghy out to the high-tech complex in the middle of an island of sludge.
Then I see signs for Crossness and hit a long straight road that goes under a dual carriageway. Suddenly, there’s no traffic. The Lakeside serves hot and cold pub food and looks like a sixties RAF camp. Southmere Lake on the right and lakeside flats. My God, people live out here. I can see the sewage works in the distance – it looks about five miles away. To my right are around twenty tower blocks with woodland behind.
At the side of the road is a smashed-up wooden bedstead and a three-piece draylon suite also all smashed up. And a smashed-up rug. Actually, you can’t really smash up a rug. Then an early sixties cocktail cabinet with round corners and those dinky little wooden legs. I’ve some friends who’d like that. It’s way too big to fit in my little rucksack. I could pull it onto the pavement then collect it on the way home. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.
At the entrance I tell the gatekeeper that I’ve come to meet Jill Sterry. I walk across to the admin building, which is deserted. I go down a couple of corridors, opening some of the doors. There are desks but no one at them. I go upstairs. Can’t hear anything. Does being employed at a sewage works render you invisible? There’s a phone and a sign saying ‘ring the person you wish to see.’ I find Jill’s number and phone her. She tells me to go up more stairs, where I’ll see a Lady in Red called Angela. I go into a lecture hall and the first person I see is the Lady in Red, who’s halfway through a long explanation of why it’s OK to put water back into the river after it’s been treated. The kids seem to think that they might be drinking wee. Not just their own but everyone else’s. Angela explains the water cycle. I’d forgotten about that.
So it’s not wee then.
We then go for a walk, me trailing at the back and the kids eyeing me up suspiciously, working out whether I’m a quiet new teacher or a boyfriend of one of the ‘misses’. We go past a lake with herons and geese, a nature reserve that benefits from the lack of people. And the fact that most of them are invisible.
Next on the tour is a big building with an interesting ‘used football socks’ aroma. The kids are told there’ll be prizes if they can keep their mouths shut and not complain. But some of them are already wincing at the smell. Inside, it’s like a medieval torture chamber. Mangle-like machines with huge bike-chain contraptions pull the sewage up and down onto revolving spikes. Most of the stuff that comes out seems to be panty liners. This is a panty-liner retrieval unit. I ask to take a photo. Angela looks worried that I’ll think this stuff that’s obviously been knocked together by a few kindly boffin uncles in their sheds after World War II is state-of-the-art. ‘We’re going to get new ones, actually.’
Uh huh.
‘Yes, they’ll only have a 6 mm gap between the spikes.’
OK.
It’s a right whiff. I guess this is what a farm full of humans would smell like. A little boy tugs his teacher’s arm.
‘Er, is that poo, miss?’
‘No. No, not really.’
Next we go outside and see an area marked ‘Detritus Velocity Channel’. It sounds like an album by some German prog-rock band. It’s the first treatment area. ‘For Primary Sedimentation.’ Here we see water rushing about with bits in it (‘grit’, Angela calls it). But it doesn’t look like grit to me. Great big globules, like giant meatballs, being thrown around as if inside a liquid lottery machine.
‘Miss, is that poo?’
‘No.’
I’m smiling. A little girl looks at me inquiringly. Then whispers ‘Is it poo?’ I whisper back. ‘Yes, I think so.’
‘It is poo!’ she says
loudly and triumphantly to her two mates. Suddenly the Detritus Velocity Channel is surrounded by eager kids staring down into the slushy torrent.
‘Is it really poo?’ says a little speccy boy.
‘Er, yes. It is.’ says Angela. More kids appear around the edge to have a look. Suddenly there’s a huge crowd of lads going ‘Eeeeeerrrr!! Pooooooooooo!!!!!’
There’s a huge pit so deep you can’t see the bottom. It’s full of poo, and goes all the way to Australia. What, through the poo? Errrrr. Then onto the next stage – big swimming-pool-like areas filled with cleaned-out shitty water. There’s a dripping red tap with a sign saying ‘Do not drink’. Good job I spotted that sign. Then some skips with a big aluminium tube coughing up scratchings of hard material every few seconds.
‘Look, sweetcorn!’ says Angela excitedly. I ask if she likes sweetcorn.
‘You often see it. It goes right through you, you know. It’s amazing what you find.’
Pop! goes the tube.
‘Look, another bit of sweetcorn!’ she says.
‘Maybe,’ I say to her, ‘you should electronically tag some sweet corn, then trace its journey from London to this skip.’
Angela cackles maniacally then suddenly stops, as if hit by the realization that she’s got a ‘Biggy’ for the next Sewage Brainstorming meeting. ‘That’s a good idea,’ she purrs. Pop! Pop pop pop pop pop!! Some more dry bits come spitting out of the pipe. Pop pop!
‘Errrrrrr!’ says one of the boys, as if hit by some revelation. ‘That’s poo!’
‘No, it’s not,’ says Angela, ‘it’s all the rubbish from the bottom of the two cleaning tanks.’
It looks like poo to me. Dry poo. It’s mixed with some kind of polymer resin and pressed hard so it can go into the incinerator. I want to ask Angela how environmentally friendly burning polymers is but am waylaid by the thought of other foodstuffs we might be able to stick an electronic tag to.
All this time we’ve been getting used to the smell. At first it was like shit. Then rotten spaghetti Bolognese with parmesan. Now it’s a well-hung pheasant in an Epoisse sauce. This is because we’ve come to a bit with fast-spinning machines whirling the shit cocktail round with great force. This stuff is mixed with special sewage that’s got bacteria in it and the aeration caused by the spinning means that the sewage is oxygenated, making it more ready to be returned to the Thames. The power of the future must lie in harnessing the potential of human shit – high-tech super eco-friendly poo engines that turn raw sewage into electricity that powers London. Dr Johnson would definitely approve.
One of the teachers, the only male of the group, is sniggering quietly to himself. I look at him as if to say what? Go on, tell us.
‘I’ve just thought,’ he giggles, ‘you could come here and do all your craps. You know, to cut out the middleman. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.’ I hear him crack the same joke later on to someone else. We walk alongside the whirling poo water. It’s starting to spit rain but I can’t tell if that’s rain or diluted poo juice that’s hitting the side of my face. I vow to do the Camay challenge when I get home, to check both sides of my face to make sure one side isn’t covered in pustules. Then the slurry goes into a final tank where it settles and the clean water sort of drips off the top into channels which feeds back into the Thames estuary. It looks like beer. This water is officially drinkable. Could have fooled me. There’s brown foam and bits of shredded panty liner that have obviously taken the punishment and survived. They should put that in their panty liner adverts instead of having girls in leotards dancing to bad American synth rock and waggling their heads about.
We go onto a newish pathway that was opened a few years ago by Edwina Currie.
‘The river’s really dirty,’ whines one girl.
Angela is in there quick as a flash. ‘No, it’s not. There are over fifteen types of fish living in it now. Back in the fifties the only things that could live in it were eels.’
Could now be the right time to explain my knowledge of jellied eels? Maybe not.
‘Then they built the sewage works here. The smelt is sensitive to water quality. Salmon too. As the sign says, the Thames is now “the cleanest metropolitan river in the world”. But of course,’ she adds, ‘you wouldn’t want to swim in it.’
There are more than 100 species of fish in the Thames, dace being the dominant freshwater fish, occurring as far downstream as Battersea. The more estuarine part of the river hosts various species – as well as the smelt (which spawn in the river at Wandsworth) there’s sea bass (whose fry penetrate as far upstream as Chelsea) and, possibly, the shad, a species which historically spawned at Greenwich.
It’s a wide open expanse of river. On the other side is the Ford works. There are birdwatcher holes so you can spy on the mud-picker bird things when the tide is out. A boy is staring at me. What’s up, little Tommy?
‘Are you Miss McClure’s brother?’
‘No, why do you ask?’
‘Cos you look just like her. Are you sure you’re not?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘I think you are.’
A little blonde girl tugs her teacher.
‘My goldfish died last week and I flushed it down the loo. Now I know where it went,’ she sighs, looking very serious. The teachers exchange indulgent smiles. A young Asian teacher tells me she went to India and was appalled by the insanitary conditions. ‘Most people here take this kind of thing for granted.’
Back at the admin building everyone has to wash their hands in case there were tiny flecks of poo in the air. Oh great. So that wasn’t rain.
Jill arrives and says she’ll give me a lift. She’s going to lunch with Angela. I imagine them at some antiseptic canteen in the basement. But they’re off to a trendy noodle bar in Abbey Wood. Angela tells me the teachers didn’t mention to the parents that they’d be going to a sewage works.
‘They said it was a workshop about water treatment. That’s a bit sad.’ I tell them about the locals at Abbey Wood station who did the ‘Oy, wouldn’t go up there if I was you’ bit.
Angela shows me an old fifties model of Crossness in the foyer. It’s got football pitches, I was right – great, I’m not mad. Nor sad. Where are they now, the pitches? The people?
‘No one works here any more. It’s all automated, there’s hardly enough people for a five-a side team.’ Indeed, the only other people I saw were two forty-something blokes in shirtsleeves and ties having a fag behind a tank full of shit.
‘Jill’s really nice,’ says Angela, as we drive towards Abbey Wood, ‘she’s dropping you off at the station. I just drop people at the steps and they have to walk down. I’m a bit hard, I suppose.’
‘Yes, says Jill, ‘You can tell everyone that I’m wonderful. Of course, I’m Thames Water, so you expect really good treatment.
They both laugh. Before I get out I ask them if it’s healthy working near all that…poo. Jill says that in the old days people used to bring sick kids to the sewage work gates to breathe in the air so they’d be inoculated.
Jill: Even so, we make sure we don’t lick our fingers ha ha ha ha.
Angela: Ha ha ha ha.
Me: Er…ha ha…er…ha ha.
London Stories 17: Dome Time
* * *
Britain codified time – GMT – just like we made rules for football, cricket, rugby and international politics. We named time after a place in London called Greenwich. It could, in theory, have been somewhere else – Stoke Newington, say, though Stoke Newington Mean Time or Elephant and Castle Mean Time does not have the same gravitas as GMT. What’s time all about, anyway? It seems to be consistent (unless you’re in a Post Office queue or dying for a slash) but if you were really really big, time would be faster. An experiment – I walk from my house to the newsagents. Then I eat as much as I can for a week and do the walk again. Has time changed? Have I misunderstood the theory of relativity?
Another experiment. I went with my family to the Millennium Dome to see what all the fu
ss was about. We were there for three hours but it felt like thirty. I wanted to have a go on the machines where you morphed your face and saw what you’d look like when you’re sixty. I queued up for half an hour but the queue only moved about three inches because the morphing machine in my queue was being hogged by three loud and excitable Japanese tourists going through all the age ranges.
– Ah look, there is me at age twenty-five ha ha ha ha!
– Ah look, there is me at age twenty-five ha ha ha ha!
– Ah look, there is me at age twenty-five ha ha ha ha!
– Ah look, there is me at age twenty-six ha ha ha ha!
– Ah look, there is me at age twenty-six ha ha ha ha!
– Ah look, there is me at age twenty-six ha ha ha ha!
– Ah look, there is me at age twenty-seven ha ha ha ha!
– Ah look, there is me at age twenty-seven ha ha ha ha!
– Ah look, there is me at age twenty-seven ha ha ha ha!
– Ah look, there is me at age twenty-eight ha ha ha ha!
– Ah look, there is me at age twenty-eight ha ha ha ha!
– Ah look, there is me at age twenty-eight ha ha ha ha!
etc., etc…
Then, when I was nearly there (i.e. only about six places and two hours away from getting a turn) my wife said we had to go because the rubbish show was about to start. And that anyway if I wanted so badly to know what I’d look like at sixty I should just invite my dad over.
The show was, of course, rubbish. It was a kind of dance-drama extravaganza that somehow encapsulated 2000 years of Christian culture. It seemed to last for days. When a crowd of mime artists in leotards and badly gelled hair descended from the ceiling I had a vision of the future, sensing that the Millennium Dome would be closed down very soon.
23. The Tao of Essex
• The Ching – Epping Forest to the Lea