Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  Film had completely petered out. Partly because I wasn’t at ease in the film world. I was never any good at ringing people up. It went on for a time after Mike Reeves died. My first wife had met a man called Max in Hollywood, an Englishman. She’d been working as a nanny for Raquel Welch and Pat Curtis. This man Max came back to London and took me on, with the William Morris Agency. A tremendous start. He got me various jobs in television, rewriting television, story-editing. I was commissioned to write a number of outlines. None of them were ever taken up. This went on for quite a while, a couple of years. Perhaps my ideas weren’t good enough. Hammer Films didn’t pick up on any of my outlines.

  Things drifted. Then I met Barney Platts-Mills. He knew of me through Renchi. He contacted me and said the word was that Ringo Starr wanted to be in a pirate movie. Barney and his partner, David Astor, were looking for a pirate script. Would I write a pirate movie? I said, ‘OK.’ I wrote rather a good pirate script, I think. The deal was they would pay me a cut: if it was taken up … I think that was the last film job I ever did.

  I had meetings with Andrew St John, a friend of Renchi. He’d been at school with him, Winchester. He produced Bronco Bullfrog and also Renchi’s ballet film. There was an office in Hereford Road. In Notting Hill. They were operating a bit. But nothing came of it. Ringo didn’t bite.

  A similar thing happened, you remember, in Mike’s days. When we did a story for the Shadows. Mike was living in Yeoman’s Row. Paul Ferris, who wrote the music for Mike’s films, also did quite a few Cliff Richard songs. So we were drawn into writing that outline, about the Shadows and their alien doubles running about Ireland. They knocked it back. Cliff decided he didn’t want to copy the Beatles. Ha! He’d keep clear of the Dick Lester stuff. Pity. I like musicals. No violence. You went off and did that Conan sword-and-sorcery script.

  I liked the marshes. We went there as soon as we moved to Hackney, to the house in De Beauvoir Road. I remember picking a stalk of dock. Or was it teasel? To give to someone. A waste plant from a wasteland: as a birthday present!

  We walked down Angel Lane into Stratford, the town centre, to get paid. Down past that old cottage and the Railway Tavern. Over the humpback bridge. The Theatre Royal was out in the open. They pulled down a number of streets and terraces around it. It stood alone. The theatre was the only reason I’d ever heard of Stratford.

  When Ned and I walked around the Olympic zone, a few months ago, at the nearest point you could get to Chobham Farm, just past the old entrance, I noticed that the famous Japanese knotweed was coming up. They thought they’d got rid of it: at considerable cost, thousands and thousands. But on this little side road that goes into an industrial estate, the knotweed is back. They have bright new fences. And surveillance cameras. But it doesn’t matter. On the wrong side of the fence, Japanese knotweed is pumping up through the tarmac. Quite astounding! It has no respect for fences. It will be back inside the Olympic Park in no time.

  I remember the one-day strike, after Barbara Castle’s 1969 White Paper, ‘In Place of Strife’. She was suggesting methods to control the unions. To fix the fact that there were always strikes.

  I went into work, absolutely. I thought, ‘Why should I lose a day’s pay? This strike isn’t going to make a hoot of difference. I’m in this for the money.’ So I climbed in my car and went to work.

  All was well until I turned off the road and drove up to the gates. And there to my horror were a bunch of my mates as serious pickets. I thought, ‘Shit, this isn’t a good idea.’ People were waving at me. I either had to stop and turn round or keep on going. As it happens, I kept going. Luckily, they weren’t that serious. The foreman didn’t send me home. I worked a full day. There were a number of other people in the warehouse. I wasn’t the only scab.

  I was a bit concerned the next day, but there was no bad feeling. I was embarrassed. I was a bit scared.

  Then, later, after I’d left Chobham, the dockers decided to take it over. They started picketing in earnest. They told management that they had to give employment to dockers. To be a docker you had to get a ticket.

  I did feel for the guys who worked there. So many had dodged about all their lives. By the time I left, three-quarters of the place had been demolished. There were bulldozers and giant claws ripping the site apart.

  I was amazed by that huge area on the edge of our yard. It wasn’t totally derelict, but all those buildings we worked in had railway lines into them. Trains did go past every now and again. They were marshalling yards.

  I don’t like horses very much, but I like western movies. It struck me that being a forklift driver was the nearest thing to being a cowboy. You could move these things around like a cowboy flicks the reins and the horse changes direction. We would tweak one of the levers.

  We weren’t skiving. I never bloody skived at all. I liked physical work. It doesn’t do you any good, but it’s very enjoyable at the time.

  I had a near bust-up with one of the bosses, after you left. A fat man. The boss of bosses. One day, we didn’t have any trucks coming in. I must have been a checker at the time. I decided to park my forklift at the head of the queue, just where the trucks would arrive, and to read a book until the first truck appeared.

  The fat man clocked me. He wasn’t rude to me, directly, but he was bloody rude to John, the foreman. He said: ‘I’m not having people out there, looking as if they’ve got nothing to do.’

  I don’t know what he was scared of, his investors perhaps. He didn’t own the place. He was dead scared that a man seeming to do nothing but read a book, on a 6-litre forklift truck, might be perceived as a serious risk. A bad impression for anybody passing on the road.

  I think, on the particular occasion when I got into trouble, I was reading Alan Watts. What does he say? Something about how in each present experience you are only aware of that experience. You can never separate the thinker from the thought or the knower from the known. All you are ever going to find is a new thought, a new experience.

  Manson is Innocent

  We found our own ways to excuse the pilfering. For some of the men it was part of the long-established traditions of the river – and we were honorary dockers, were we not? – to take a tithe, little extras for the table. It had been difficult, dangerous work, in years gone by; memories were part of their inheritance, the Irish boys and the others had scores to settle. The odd can or bottle. An ornament or a holy picture to dress a bare room. The routines of Chobham, on the flank of Stratford, beside the railway, were as dirty as ever, as badly paid, if not as life-shortening.

  They came in from Forest Gate, Upton Park, Leytonstone, men willing to put in a full day, somewhere near the bottom of the heap, for a minimal wage. It was their right, and their duty, to balance the books, to reassert their manhood, their duty as husbands and fathers, by showing the bosses that they couldn’t be exploited. Underneath the banter, acquiescence in the face of hierarchies of unreasoning authority, was a constant nod and whisper of petty conspiracy. A few, not many, bunked off to see convenient women, to proclaim their masculinity that way, by talking it through afterwards. Others argued the case for union action, fraternal relations with revolutionary comrades to the east. The only constant, as I saw it, was the landscape, the place in which we found ourselves, this miracle of sunlight burning through mist across the marshes. An endless parade of lorries heading out on to the roads of England.

  Like Tom I recoiled at the idea of taking anything from the tea chests of the failed emigrants, household goods shipped back from Australia. The pocketing of dry beans, wax, sardines, or the gulping on the spot from a punctured wine keg, could be justified as legitimate, live-off-the-land strategies. Mao’s red plastic-covered book, about the size of a snout tin, nestled in my pocket: unread, unopened.

  What is work? Work is struggle. There are difficulties and problems in those places for us to overcome and solve. A good comrade is one who is more eager to go where the difficulties are greater. Our chief method is to lea
rn warfare through warfare.

  Tom’s warrior credentials went as far as his army surplus jacket with the deep pockets. We were of an age to have escaped National Service, narrowly, while catching what purported to be an education between European and colonial wars. There was a residue of guilt, emphasized by memorials to the 1914–18 generation, parades and sermons. Bad Wednesday afternoons, bulled boots and blanco’d gaiters, drilling with the Combined Cadet Force. When Tom crossed the open yard at Chobham, back to his car, a few rescued strips of magnetic tape about his person, he recognized our ex-para foreman as a figure very much like the school sergeants of old. A professional brought in to get his revenge on the inadequacies of the future officer class. A man of honour who knew when to look the other way. ‘Pick those bleeding feet up – sir.’

  It was a few months before we were let in on the scam. We had worked our way up to the forklifts, jockeying down long aisles, scraping prongs beneath sheep bales and packing cases. Tom had his own vehicle and a new gang. I stayed with Freddie and Mick. One afternoon, the under-foreman, truly one of life’s lance-jacks, stood us aside, before issuing us with pickaxe handles.

  ‘Smash ’em,’ he said. ‘Smash the fucking lot.’

  But with discretion. An old-style CID kicking, if you like: rolled-up directory, no visible bruises. The word had come, on a nod and a wink, that a consignment of gleaming launderette machines was to suffer a malicious and unprovoked assault. An insurance thing. Crushed, splintered, traumatized in the container. Rough seas. Bad roads. Act of god. Property insured far beyond its real value.

  At first our blows were apologetic: Freddie cupping a cigarette on the inside of his hand, Mick hunched in donkey jacket. Bright enamel chipped and showed grey. Viewing panels splintered. The multiplied novelty of the innocent machines, stacked in their dim bay like Rachel Whiteread’s reserve stock, was a crime. They were asking for it, weren’t they? All paint and flashy Italian finish. The tarts. It was hard graft, not as easy as it might seem, to play the sanctioned vandal. We tumbled Arctic-pure cubes out of their packaging, down from the top of the heap, and the madness took over. When Leslie the under-foreman returned, clawing back crow-slick hair, chewing thin lips, the job was done. A field of ruin, disembowelled white goods, powdered crystal. There were official forms, pink and yellow sheets, to be completed. Les licked his indelible pencil: ‘Damaged in transit.’

  From that episode, the slide into more serious, potentially gaol-time criminality was swift. Chobham Farm was my first intimation of how future grand projects would operate: put up a fence, trade on misinformation, turn a blind eye to misdemeanours. So long as targets are met. One of the defining aspects of current politics is that impossible trick: the manufacture of new clichés. Direction of travel. Whatever the mire, whatever revelations of malpractice and incompetence, you trot out this phrase: direction of travel. A committee is sanctioned to draft a report on the latest catastrophe, but all is well in the best of all legacy worlds. We have it sorted: direction of travel. Only the sourest critic would quibble over a sack of lost spanners in Chobham’s mud, or the £100 million misplaced by the London Development Agency, on the same ground, in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.

  The London Evening Standard (24/6/09) informed its readers that Gareth Blacker, the man who oversaw the purchase of the Olympic site in the Lea Valley near Stratford, was now on indefinite leave, as was his accountant. ‘There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by either of them.’

  Forensic accountants are attempting, without much success, to trace the vanished loot. Millions, allocated as compensation for businesses forced to relocate from the Lea Valley, have evaporated like sweat on blotting paper. A spokesperson for the LDA admitted that there had been ‘unforeseen spending commitments’, but any shortfall could be made up from ‘savings elsewhere’. Whose savings he did not say. And none of these local difficulties would affect the confirmed direction of travel. To hell in a handcart.

  When I hear these words, in close conjunction, ‘Olympics’ and ‘legacy’, I remember that legacy is a two-edged sword; it cuts both ways through time. And I repeat this mantra: Berlin ’36, Mexico City ’68, Munich ’72. Count the cost. Heap up the dead. Bury that in the direction of travel.

  Freddie and Mick are operating a little number on the side, topping up their miserable wages with an unapproved bonus system. And so is Liam. And Clancy. And Gary. And Patrick. It’s never discussed, but there is enough in it to keep a generally depressed and ill-informed workforce happy. They are encouraged to believe, it’s good for their self-esteem, that they are putting one over on the bosses, on the cruel fate that landed them in this wind-swept, hole-in-the-roof, hazchem mire. Foremen and under-foremen, the eyes and ears of the operators, the ones with a key to the toilet, know what is happening, but they say nothing. It can be lost in the paperwork. Your cargo never made it from Tilbury. Road pirates. River thieves. You know what those bloody dockers are like.

  The lorry drivers and independent van operatives were grudgingly admired. They pulled away from the gates, they were free men. One cheroot smoker with a black leather cap, like Oskar Werner in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, was known as the Oncer, meaning he was rumoured to trouser the legendary sum, a sort of sound barrier or four-minute mile for Stratford peons, of £100 a week. Cashmoney. Then there were the ponytail-and-elastic-band, rings-in-the-ear, slogan-T-shirt working hippies, standing off by the rusty chain-link fence to smoke and admire quotation sunflowers, while we trundled boxes on to the flatbed: soon they would be away to Italy, Greece, Turkey. I was never party to those deals, the unlicensed substitutions and additions of freelance travel agents. And their desperate human cargoes. Some of whom, unpapered, would be working alongside me. Their stories, when they told them, when they had the language, merging into the universal babble, the threnody I sometimes imagined in the song of the pylons, the robot-speak of reversing trucks.

  The most basic villainy was the old cargo switch. Driver presents bent checker with docket for five cases of baked beans. Bay and slot numbered. Forklift zooms off. Labourers climb among the stacks of unclaimed goods. Lorry departs, papers initialled, with three cases of beans and two cases of tools. A bung for the checker, a few quid for the others. The whole accountancy system is a preamble to insurance forms, misattributions, amnesia. The cargoes of the world sweep in and out again. It’s a lucky dip. You receive the expected number of items, but the contents will be mysterious. Spanners, hairdryers, golf clubs: they vanish. Into pubs and street markets. Sheep casings, slithery talcum powder, outdated Balkan foodstuffs, they are in the Farm for the duration. Kick through bindweed, they’re there now.

  All of this winked-at naughtiness, as in a British caper movie with Jack Hawkins, was a rehearsal for the big one. The whisper went around that certain characters – Fred, a bad-lad favourite of the foreman, among them – would be given overtime, night overtime, when the rest of the workforce had dispersed. We would be handling a secret shipment, on bonus. Gold, banknotes marked for incineration, nobody knew. The rumour was confirmed when dark-windowed security vehicles arrived, late in the afternoon, and began setting up silver-dazzle light poles. It was a film set. A compound within a compound. The lowlife wanted a piece of this, but they didn’t know what it was.

  Duckboards went down across the mud. The goods would be heavy, heavy. Uniforms took up positions around their fence within a fence, arms folded. Some of the Chobham suits, careful about where they stepped, looked in, nodded, and drove away. They never risked contamination by talking to the labourers. Come close, by accident, on a fact-finding tour laid on for investors, and the fat man would not acknowledge your presence. You didn’t register. You were not there. If he heard the voice, the RP, the subjects under discussion, he visibly flinched. Then pretended it wasn’t happening. I could see one illuminated window, the outline of the fat man, staying late, keeping out of the way, watching us.

  The main gates are closed and secured. Armed, helmeted and visored mercenaries
surround the brightly lit pathway between the truck that is more like a safe on wheels and the unmarked vans brought in, one after another, to take the drums away. Now we hear, a guard mentions it, what the cargo is: platinum. More valuable, so they say, than gold or silver. Weighty to manhandle, impossible to divert. The drums will be redistributed and gone in a single session. They come off a train in an unregistered siding and they will be departing who knows where. And every canister, every nugget, is accounted for, ticked off on the manifest.

  Freddie can’t see a way round this, it’s out of his league. Mick laughed when the boy smoker suggested piercing the drum with the tines of the forklift. The men from the Mint were too canny for that: no forklifts, no mechanical assistance. Heft, sweat, manhandle, two to a drum. Checked and numbered. But Mick had the tattoos on his knuckles, the mythical past. Mick was away to Canada. He studied the necklace of lights, the halogen lamps, and identified a small pool of darkness. The drums were standard issue. We had others very much like them. After an hour of repeated journeys, truck to van, we were given a tea break.

  ‘Get the forklift,’ Mick said.

  Freddie, extinguishing his cigarette, was away. He could navigate the aisles at night, using his radar like a bat. If the switch could be made, the heavy drum, the one packed with nuggets of platinum, money purer than money, rolled into the dense undergrowth, out by the fence, they would come at it, before morning, from the other side. Wire-cutters and white van: an uncanny replay of Bronco Bullfrog. Neither Mick nor Freddie had a car, or a licence. Nothing to search. They were clean. The presumption, when the switch was discovered, next day or soon after, was that outsiders had broken through, while the operation was in progress. An inside job. Lengthy, sweated interviews for all concerned. Freddie would brazen it out. Mick would be gone. Mick had a record. Mick would be fingered. If they could find him.

  Freddie told me, if his story had more validity than any of the other legends of Chobham, that the platinum nuggets were the coldest metal he had ever held in his hand. He lost his nerve, went out fishing with a mate, dropped the half-full canister into the Lea, not far from the Manor Garden Allotments. Mick was never heard from again. The single nugget Freddie retained was a fetish for what might have been. It didn’t happen. On my last Thursday, after we’d been down to the bank to collect our wages and gone across the road to a panelled pub, Freddie put the nugget on the table.