‘Film work is always like this,’ said Paul, an old hand in the movie business. ‘But don’t worry, it will get worse, and before you know it you’ll be reading The Sun and moaning like everyone else.’
‘I don’t mind it, really,’ I said, happy to keep my head down and do my time.
‘That’s good,’ said Paul. ‘What I find works on jobs like this is to break down your pay, so you know how much you make every minute. That way no matter how bad things get, you can always just say: “well, I just made myself thirty-two pence.” If it gets really bad you can do it by the second.’
The only break from the tedium was going into the chocolate itself, either in a rubber boat or a dry suit. The chocolate was about three and a half feet deep and came up to your waist in a thick and viscous gloop. In your tiny rubber boat, complete with outboard motor, you would move at a snail’s pace. Usually we’d go for a little trip down the river, find a spot hidden from everyone else, and play on our phones or read a magazine.
The river itself was home to the naval detachment of the safety men, also working for Legs Apart, who would cruise around waiting to rescue someone from the chocolate, an even more boring job than ours.
One of these bona fide chocolate safety crew was a South African diver and former bomb disposal expert. One day, sat moored together under the chocolate bridge, I asked him if this was the most boring job ever.
‘No mate,’ he said, ‘this is nothing.’ He had, he explained, worked for an oil company planning to run a pipeline across the Pacific. His job was to watch the footage from their robot submarine.
‘The sub had filmed the whole length of the proposed route of the pipeline, and I had to watch to see if there were any bombs left over from World War Two. For two months I sat in a tiny room looking at hundreds of video tapes of the bottom of the sea.’
‘Did you see any?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘But every week or so I’d see a fish.’
After a few weeks, the chocolate began to go ‘off’ and as it did so its smell intensified. At the start of filming, it had been a bio-free zone, and anything dropped in it had been scooped out immediately. But after a week or so the people with scoops disappeared and the trash built up: cups, sandwiches the odd floating rat. As soon as you entered the set the smell would hit you, a smell that is wholly indescribable, sort of how you’d expect an alien world to smell, but one where all the aliens had died and were rotting away – so not in a good way.
As the stench grew so did an unwillingness to go near the chocolate in the boat. Sat afloat this honking gunk you could see the whole surface shimmering with a new form of life, a polystyrene, chocolate, washing-up liquid hybrid. The smell stayed with us when we returned to the campsite, and people began to get ill, eye infections being the most common ailment. Happily, I seemed immune, no doubt due to growing up next to another chocolate river – the Humber. People started dropping out of the team, either because it was too smelly, or too boring – or too boring and smelly.
A member of the crew told me a story about how John Wayne had probably died of cancer caused by exposure to radiation while filming the Genghis Khan biopic The Conqueror close to Nevada’s nuclear test sites. This led me to imagine that some time in the future, I’d appear on Panorama, unhealthy looking, maybe with Johnny Depp, as we discussed our terminal ‘chocotosis’ brought on by working on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
One morning at breakfast, I admitted to the rest of the team that the day before, while standing next to Johnny Depp, I suddenly realised I could stab him with my safety knife.
This, I suggested to them, must be the kind of thought that goes through the mind of unhinged celebrity assassins. I shared this though because I’d found it quite worrying – the guy paid to keep Depp safe thinking about stabbing him.
Rather than greet my confession with shock, three of the team admitted they’d had the same thought, while the fourth said he been so bored he’d worked out a way of kidnapping Johnny Depp and holding him for ransom.
After a month, the first unit left and the second unit took over, filming Deep Roy, the actor playing the Oompa Loompa, doing a big dance routine. This required Roy to carry out a few short dance moves while miming to a music track, then moving a metre sideways and doing the same. Once this had been done twenty times, all the frames would be spliced together on a computer to give a Busby Berkeley dance routine, with dozens of identical Oompa Loompas dancing in sync.
At least, that was the idea.
In reality, Deep Roy had the rhythmic sense of a baked potato and wasn’t helped by having two choreographers and a mime coach shouting at him as he tried, for the ten thousandth time, to do a few moves identical to those of his other selves now stored on a hard disk. This part of filming was only set to last a week or so, but due to its complexity, the job rolled on and on.
It was during this period that I thought my mind would snap.
Again and again, there would be a shout from the second unit director to ‘Roll please!’ followed by the booming words:
Augustus Gloop, Augustus Gloop,
The great big greedy nincompoop.
Augustus Gloop so big and vile,
So big and vile.
So greedy, foul, and infantile.
Adding together the dreadful smell, the misfiring Oompa Loompa choreography and the loud song, repeated over and over again, I felt I was involved in some appalling CIA experiment in brainwashing, pushing my grip on reality to the brink.
But for two fifty a day I held on tight.
I rarely went home, and while Mandy and the kids came down and camped a few times, the long drive to Sheffield and back was too much. There was a family day one Saturday, and the kids came for that, exploring the sets: Charlie’s house, the inventing room, the outside of the Chocolate factory. It was a day they never forgot.
Mandy seemed happy enough me being away, but I felt bitter. It was okay if I was away working hard, but not if I was doing the thing I loved doing, which also made money. I’d once seen the line ‘Do the thing you love, and love the thing you do,’ written on a poster on the Underground, and it stuck with me, but I’d begun to see that if you loved something too much, it led to resentment.
The film stretched on for two months
There seemed only to be work, sleep, or travelling between the two, those twelve hours growing longer by the day. It had become a job.
I often wondered how people kept on working themselves so hard, head down, and not just step off when they realised they were selling their life and all its potential riches, even their health, for a wage, a wage you had no time to spend on anything meaningful, just stuff.
I’d seen this in the faces of many people I’d met when doing business talks, me presented as the bloke who never let work get in the way of experiences, talking to a room of people who gave everything to their companies. Now I knew it was really quite easy, especially when you’re being paid half a pence a second.
As the filming dragged on I found myself sinking into the same chocolate funk as everyone else, complaining about the smell, Deep Roy’s dancing, the lack of biscuits at break time, how horrible tea tasted when your taste buds were contaminated by the river.
I began to detest the big breakfasts, the sickly smoothies, the plastic taste of tea from polystyrene cups, hanging around with the riggers and scaffolders, gossiping, the whole while trying to manoeuvre myself into another job. In our shed I became the old-timer, bitching about people who didn’t pull their weight, thinking I should get paid more, seeing as I’d been doing it longer than anyone.
I saw I was getting fat, fatter than I’d even been before, my harness no longer fitting properly. Fat, but not arsed to go for a run or do anything about it except eat my way further into profit, food hiding the boredom.
‘I’m off, I can’t do this anymore,’ said Neil. ‘There’s more important things than this.’ I thought he was crazy.
At the start I’d wondered i
f I should have gone to Yosemite, but now I was making big money, more than I had in all my life, my old weekly wage every day. Two fifty became my mantra, ironing out any worries about what I was doing. The longer I worked the more cash I’d have at the end. No amount of misery or discomfort could stand between my paycheck and me.
The only person I never heard bitching was Mike, an old guy who looked a little like a hippy and said ‘man’ at the end of every sentence. He dressed in a tatty leather waistcoat and faded jeans. Of all the people on the set, he had the most to bitch about, being the longest serving grass fluffer.
If there is a university of life, then there is also a university of sticking plastic grass to polystyrene, and if so, then Mike had earned himself a doctorate over the last two months.
Every day he’d been ready for the call, and when it came, he knelt down and mended the grass, without fuss or complaint. Job done, he would stand, not looking for thanks and resume his place, waiting to be called back, more often than not to mend the very same piece of grass, over and over again. While the others would pull their hair out, Mike would just look content, kneel down and do it all again.
Towards the end of filming, while standing beside Mike and guarding him from falling off a bridge into what was now a chocolate sewer, I asked him a question that had been bugging me for days: ‘How do you stay so bloody cheerful?’
Finishing his work, he stood up and with a theatrical cast of his hand, like Willy Wonka introducing his guests to the crazy vista of this room full of snozzberry trees and giant candy pumpkins, he said something I could never forget.
‘I can still see the magic.’
His words were like a spell.
I straightened up, and looked around me, at the brilliantly green grass, the red toffee apple trees, their branches reflecting the shimmering chocolate, the huge twisted candy cane trees, dazzling in their stripey-ness. I was standing in a place that in a few weeks would be torn down and never be seen again, constructed from the imaginings of a genius filmmaker, an experience as valuable as any summit of any mountain.
I was taking part in something unique and fabulous.
I had to hold on to the magic in this.
I had to hold on to the magic in everything.
‘Now I see,’ I said.
And I did.
EIGHTEEN
Grounded
I made the kids’ breakfast – white toast and marmite – as they watched Dora the Explorer on television, the sun streaming in through the window. I hadn’t climbed for three months straight.
There weren’t many kids programmes I could tolerate, so I thumbed through the latest climbing magazines instead, their pictures only making me feel even more removed from it. Flicking to the pages where all the world’s new routes were recorded, I pored over those recently climbed on the hardest mountains. I read the names of the climbers, knowing many of them, feeling jealous and bitter it wasn’t me. This issue covered the latest news from the Himalaya, and after examining the lines drawn on photographs, traced my finger either side, searching for potential new routes.
I knew it was a waste of time. I couldn’t be so long away, couldn’t afford the expense, the porters and peak fees. It was just too much when you have kids. The big mountains were for the single and the selfish, those more selfish than me.
I knew I’d never climb in the Himalaya.
The kids sang along with Dora.
Where was I?
I tried to return to the living room, to Ella and Ewen.
They were growing up but I was too wrapped up to care, my head always full of mountains.
Why did I find it so hard to be here?
A friend had once pointed out that Ewen, even when he was a baby, seemed to crave my attention, but that I just wasn’t there, my head always buried in a book or magazine, or else in front of a computer screen.
Why was my love so abstract?
‘Come on kids eat your toast,’ I said. Time was moving on, the credits were about to roll, the signal to get dressed.
The kids didn’t move, but giggled instead, joining in with Dora.
‘Ella, Ewen, eat your toast, I won’t ask you again,’ I shouted, only this time in a dad’s voice.
Ella flashed me a look – ‘Don’t talk to me like that’, as though I was infringing her human rights, while Ewen blindly felt around for his toast, eyes transfixed by the screen, and ate around the crust.
Maybe none of us are really ever where we seem to be.
I brought down the kids’ clothes and got them ready, double-checking Ella was up to standard. Her school was only a short distance away, and was mostly a mix of lower, middle and upper working-class kids, the ‘upper’ meaning they were actually working. The less well-off parents dressed their kids in nice new clothes, made sure they combed their hair and had the latest trends.
The middle-class kids more often than not wore hand-me-downs, and looked more bohemian, as if they’d just come from a houseboat or a tree house. It seemed the richer you got, the more of a tramp your kids looked. I’d really noticed this when talking at private schools, where the kids often looked a real state with grubby uniforms and mad hair, something I put down to the fact that their parents must be skint after paying the school fees.
An army officer once told me it was fine to dress down as long as you wore polished shoes, just to show it was in fact a disguise, that the down-at-heel look was a choice, not a necessity. What broke my heart was seeing poor kids standing in the playground, or walking up the hill to school, alone and late, dressed in tat like the rich kids, only without their nice shoes or their self-confidence. I just knew they were unloved and uncared for, that they had a huge mountain to climb to have any kind of life.
I looked at Ella and Ewen as they half-heartedly got ready in front of the TV, finishing their toast.
How much do I love you?
Are you unloved?
Are you two just speed bumps in my way?
You tie me to this spot.
I never wanted kids.
I never wanted anybody.
…
I can ignore almost everything, but you.
I stood in the playground with the other parents, Ewen on my shoulders, Ella playing on a slide, waiting for the bell to ring. Looking around at the other grown-ups, I wondered how they felt, having to come here every day, juggling work and fun to be here at school, on time, twice a day. It was like being on parole, only for much longer. Most looked like parents should – dumpy, peevish and knackered, as if they had been ready-made for the job, all elements of themselves as independent human beings sacrificed on the altar of childcare.
The bell rang, I kissed Ella goodbye, and watched her line up with the other kids, the signal for parents to leg it. Only I didn’t, I stayed and smiled, as she smiled back, waving at Ewen, blowing kisses until they filed away through a set of old blue doors.
I felt a strange sadness at being unable to share every moment of her day.
Throwing aside such mawkish thoughts, I walked down the hill, gripping Ewen’s chubby legs, as he bobbed on my shoulders.
‘Pull my left ear to go left, and my right ear to go right,’ I called up to him, a daft game for two Kirkpatricks who couldn’t tell one from another. ‘Dad? Where are we going?’ he said, kicking his feet.
‘Ian’s house.’
Ian lived in a shared terraced house on one of the darkest and grubbiest streets in our part of Sheffield, a street overhung with dirty trees whose dead leaves never seemed to decompose, but stuck to the street like grimy glue. His landlord, another climber, lived upstairs. The other occupants were students, climbing students or ex-students.
‘Hello,’ I said as Ian opened the door. ‘Are you up for a visit?’
Ian stood in jeans and his sponsor’s T-shirt, looking tired and harried, the way he usually looked, seeming more dart-player than mountaineer.
‘I’ve been up all night trying to finish an article before I go away, but I suppose I
can take a break for you two.’
His room was through the kitchen, which you could tell was shared, because of the continuous presence of toast detritus. His own abode had all the ambiance of a garage filled with junk, only without the space, as if the contents of his entire life had been upended into this little cell, then trampled down to allow access.
If Ian’s room had been placed behind glass, like Francis Bacon’s studio, the public would have marvelled at how a person could live day-to-day like that and still be productive. The guided tour would be short: a bed, unmade and half hidden by stuff, its sheets the kind any decent mother would burn; a desk, buried under sheets of slides, broken cameras and their lenses; a grubby computer, the frame around the dusty screen a mosaic of post-it notes and to-do lists; and a wooden bouldering wall, made from a sheet of wood bolted to the plaster board with chains, a sign that this room had never been intended to be lived in, and was in fact just a large cupboard.
The climbing wall looked like it hadn’t been climbed on in a long time, its dust and old chalk marks giving it the appearance of a long forgotten piece of school apparatus. Fall from its holds, and you would likely be impaled on an ice axe, crampon or ski pole. The room’s floor was littered in climbing gear, the tools of Ian’s trade.
You didn’t walk through his room. You waded.
On the walls were pages from magazines, climbing posters, and route topos. His bookshelf held every book you could imagine on climbing. Standing in the doorway you got the feeling that this was either the dwelling of a climbing-obsessed teenager or someone who was mentally ill; in a way both were true. It was no wonder he spent so long away from home, and no surprise he didn’t have a girlfriend.
‘Got any romance at the moment?’ I asked, as Ian put on the kettle, his sideways glance signalling the answer was a no.
‘I haven’t got time for such things,’ he said, opening the fridge. ‘Erm, do you like soya milk?’
Cold Wars Page 27