The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  In 1898, nine years after the Paris trip, another delegation travelled south, this time to London, where they were shown the system of sewers, sewage works and, lastly, sewage ships which carried the capital’s waste to its destination far out in the Thames estuary. They were impressed, and by 1910 Glasgow had a similar system in place – the second-largest (after London) in the world, with three great sewage works sending their produce down the Clyde in ships.

  The passengers came later, just after the First World War, when a benevolent but cost-conscious Glasgow city council (then called the Glasgow Corporation) decided that convalescing servicemen would benefit from a day out on the Clyde. Cruising on pleasure steamers up and down the estuary and across to its islands was then Glasgow’s great summer pastime; the sludge boats offered the city council the prospect of killing two birds with one stone. Their voyages were already paid for out of the rates. The servicemen could travel free. It was seen as an expression of socialist goodwill – allied with the enlightened Victorian municipalism that had given Glasgow its lavish water supply and so many public parks. The vessels were rebuilt to carry passengers, fitted out with more lifeboats and saloons, equipped with deck quoits. By and by, their traffic in convalescing servicemen died away, to be replaced, thanks to the charitable offices of Glasgow Corporation, by old people who couldn’t afford cruises on the regular steamships, but who may have been encouraged by the doctor to take the air.

  And so it was, in the summer of 1995, that I came to be travelling with the Clydebank Holy Redeemer’s on top of 3,500 tons of sludge.

  Everything – or everything visible to the passenger – on the Garroch Head was scrupulously clean. The wooden table and chairs in the lounge shone with polish; the urinals gleamed; the deck was as free of dirt as any deck could be. The haphazard filth and toxic stews of Glasgow were kept well out of sight. There was a sense among the crew that it was this opposition of cleanliness to filth that carried them and their ship forward on each voyage.

  We sailed past the grass and rubble where the shipyards used to be – Connell’s and Blythswood to starboard, Simons and Lobnitz to port – and I talked to a woman who was leaning on the ship’s rail and enjoying the breeze. She was called Mary Kay McRory, she was eighty, and she had a big green cardigan pulled across her chest. Her eyes ran, but she laughed a lot as she spoke. She said the first time she had sailed on the Clyde was in 1921, when she had travelled as a six-year-old with her family on the steamer that took cattle and people from Derry in Ireland to Glasgow, and very seldom took the same ones back again. Mary Kay’s father was escaping some bother in Donegal; he heard of work in Glasgow, came over and was employed right away as a lamplighter. Then he summoned his wife and the six children. ‘We came away from Donegal with biscuits,’ Mary Kay said. ‘Everybody would throw biscuits over the wall to you. They were good biscuits. The food over there was good.’

  She had worked as a waitress, when the city was still full of tea rooms, and then on the Glasgow trams for twenty-five years. I asked her if Glasgow had changed much, and she got me by the arm. ‘Ye can say what ye like,’ she said, ‘but there’s no poverty now, none.’ She talked a lot about sanitation, about toilets and baths, in the way many old Glaswegians do. Those who remember lavatories shared with neighbours and trips to the public bathhouse tend to talk more about these matters than people like me who grew up thinking it was nothing special to have porcelain bits at the top of the stairs stamped ARMITAGE SHANKS.

  Plastic bags were being rustled in the lounge. Out of them came the day’s supplies: sandwiches of white bread cut into quarters and filled variously with slates of corned beef, chicken breast, shiny squares of gammon, salmon paste and cheese spreads. And then the treats to follow: Paris buns, Blue Riband biscuits, Tunnock’s Teacakes, Bourbon creams. Some of the women dropped sweeteners into their tea and stirred melodically for a long time after. Others placed ginger snaps at the edge of their saucers, or unwrapped tight wads of shortbread, ready for distribution. Neat stacks of white bread and sweet acres of treats stretched on the table, in front of every passenger. All the mouths were going – shredding meat and sloshing tea – like washing machines on a full load.

  This was not lunch for the Holy Redeemers; merely elevenses.

  Sludge, in the particular sense of our sludge boat’s cargo, comes about like this. The sewage pumped into Glasgow’s three sewage works is twice screened. The first screening takes out large objects – lumps of wood, rags, metal – that somehow find their way into the sewers. The second screening extracts smaller, abrasive materials such as glass and sand. Then comes the first separation process, designed to make the organic component of the sewage sink to the bottom of the tank (just as sediment will settle in a bottle of wine). They call this the stage of primary settlement. The heavy stuff at the bottom is called raw sludge; the clearer liquid above is settled sewage.

  The raw sludge is not ready to dispose of; it needs further modification and is subject to biochemical breakdown. Some of it goes through a process called digestion. Bacteria are allowed into the holding chambers, where they feed energetically on the proteins and carbohydrates, diminishing the organic matter until the sludge is fit to be spread on farmland or made ready for dumping at sea. Then, at the works near the wharf at Shieldhall, the sludge is ‘settled’ one last time, to increase the content of sinkable solids in the watery mix. The stuff in the hold has passed through many systems – biological and mechanical – and it will have no final rest from the biological, even at the bottom of the sea. It degrades there to feed marine life (the fishing near the dumping ground is said to be fairly good) and continue its journey through the ecosystem.

  There has, however, been an awful lot of it dumped, and all in the same place. In the first year of the sludge boats, 213,867 tons were carried down the Clyde. In 1995, the figure was 1.8 million tons. The total for the century is 82.6 million tons. The seabed at the dump’s centre is said to be damaged, its organisms contaminated. The EU has delivered its verdict. Glasgow needs a new venue for the sludge, and old ideas are being re-examined. Fertiliser, for example. Sludge is rich in nitrates (4 per cent), phosphate (3 per cent) and potassium (1 per cent), and full of nutrients – it could do a good job on the land, and farmers seem willing to try it for free. It is also well suited to grass-growing and is already being spread on derelict industrial sites to prepare them for reclamation. A new product range – sludge cakes, sludge pellets – will be tried on the waste ground that was once the Ravenscraig steelworks, the largest and last of Scotland’s steel plants, where the soil has been poisoned by decades of metal wastes. Sludge used there could make a meadow grow.

  We passed Greenock, which used to make ships and sugar, and then veered left into the Firth proper. The Garroch Head was going at a fair pelt now, and most of the passengers had their eyes down, playing a restive round or two of bingo. Some were nibbling still at the corners of buns and sandwiches. From the saloon porthole the water looked silver, as if some giant shoal of mackerel swam just beneath the surface. The islands of Great and Little Cumbrae stood out, like two large boulders only recently dropped into the sea.

  We passed them. Up on the bridge, they were slowing the vessel down, ready to discharge their load. We had reached the dumping ground, and as soon as the position was right a crewman on the bridge flicked a switch and I heard a little rumble. The valves were opening. I thought I could feel the cargo starting to be pulled by gravity from its tanks.

  I went down from the bridge to the deck nearest the water and saw the first of the billowing columns. Fierce puffs, great Turner clouds of wayward brown matter, rose up and spread in an instant over the surface. The waters of the Firth were all at once rusty and thick, and the boat was an island in a sea of sludge. This was all in the first few minutes.

  We moved off, leaning to port, aiming to complete a full circle as the sludge descended. A group of pensioners stood in a row looking out, covering their mouths and noses with white hankies. All th
e worst odour of a modern city, until now stored and battened down, was released in this time-stopping, comical stench. I looked up at the coast and wondered for a second where it had all begun, because this was an ending, and the sense of an ending was as palpable and strong as the brew in the sea before us.

  The ship turned about and headed home. Its emptying had taken ten minutes. Back in the saloon, the pensioners were dancing to a song called ‘Campbeltown Loch, I Wish Ye Were Whisky’. My tea sat just where I’d left it, and I was happy to notice it was still quite warm.

  Celebrity Memoirs

  JANUARY 2003

  If you want to be somebody nowadays, you’d better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can’t prove they’ve been nobody all along. Today’s celebrities hack their cloth to suit the fashion of the times: the less you do the more you are doing, the less you know the more you are knowing, the less you wear the more you are wearing, and so say all of us. God loves a chancer more than he loves a trier, and the tabloid newspapers – who recognise no higher power than themselves – speak every day for a Britain that is perfectly in love with its cellphone democracy. This is William Cobbett’s country no more, so let us sling a troubled thought among the Christmas books.

  The sufferings of a celebrity, despite the enjoyments, despite the privilege, are supposed to embody the sufferings of us all. They remind us how we are all the same, that even Christ suffered pain, and suffered it for our sake. Is that the only sainthood we can know? You see it everywhere now: on EastEnders, in Heat magazine, on television chat shows and movies produced by Miramax. Pain is one of the new pleasures, abuse is the new nurturing. A hummable, weepable, narcissistic self-pity, hitherto only available in the speeches of Billy Graham and the recording work of Tammy Wynette, has, over the last few years, taken Britain by storm, and it is nowhere more evident than in the new style of celebrity autobiography.

  Many modern celebrities call everyday people ‘normals’, and it was a proper normal, Dave Pelzer, who gave these plot-losing self-describers their narrative arc and their sad tone. Since it came out in 1993, A Child Called ‘It’ – a whole book of seismic wallowing – has inspired the famous with the notion that a brutal life story generously told could guarantee unlimited book sales. Suddenly, people didn’t experience their childhoods, they survived them, they didn’t live their lives, they ‘came through’ them, and right there, one small step for the mangled, one giant leap backwards for mankind, these authors grasped a powerful rationale for adult self-obsession and the eternal hungers involved in fame. They found they could set themselves up as a principality of wounds. Here’s Pelzer:

  Standing alone in that damp, dark garage, I knew, for the first time, that I could survive. I decided that I would use any tactic I could think of to defeat Mother or to delay her from her grisly obsession. I knew if I wanted to live, I would have to think ahead. I could no longer cry like a helpless baby. In order to survive, I could never give in to her. That day I vowed to myself that I would never, ever again give that bitch the satisfaction of hearing me beg her to stop beating me.

  And then, a hundred pages of thick ears and italicised selfhood later:

  I’m so lucky. My dark past is behind me now. As bad as it was, I knew even back then, in the final analysis, my way of life would be up to me. I made a promise to myself that if I came out of my situation alive, I had to make something of myself. I would be the best person that I could be. Today I am. I made sure I let go of my past, accepting the fact that that part of my life was only a small fraction of my life. I knew the black hole was out there, waiting to suck me in and forever control my destiny – but only if I let it. I took positive control over my life.

  There was a point not long ago when Dave Pelzer’s self-rescue manuals held the top three spots in the best-seller charts. In Britain, it is likely that one out of every fifteen adults will have read a Pelzer book, and the ‘inspirational’ style in general, with its page-turning mix of the brutal and the banal, its triteness of phrase and sentiment, has changed the memoiring business for good. ‘Making something of yourself in the world’, as Pelzer sees it, is the only way to rob a sad childhood of its dark victory over your experience. For the newer kind of celebrity, the contemplation of the Nobody years becomes a guaranteed way of justifying the Somebody years and all the excesses that Somebodyhood might involve. Fame finally gets to have an essential moral component: it is the work of self-preservation, a summit of reason, a resounding answer to the riddle of life, a compact of exemplary human capabilities, a reverie of the perfect comeuppance, the ideal riposte to familial abuse. Being famous comes to seem like the natural order’s premier reward for martyrdom.

  The relationship between sainthood and stupidity – think of Charles Bovary, a fool raised by what he endures, or Princess Diana, the patron saint of non-swots – is a connection that lies too deep for tears in these biographies. Yes, they are simple-hearted bids for approval, but there is also something vicious in the journeyings of self-glory that they represent, something rapacious and nearly vengeful in the attempt to position famousness as a corrective to the unfair balance of power in the average childhood. In every one of these books, the dedication is the key: in most cases they tell you everything, a hard haiku of explicitness, set before the swirling poetry of the difficult life.

  The Scottish singer Lulu is Pelzer in a feather boa. ‘To ma mammy and ma daddy,’ she starts off. ‘This would not have been possible with you here, but would never have been possible without you.’ As dedications go, this is pretty scruffy, but you soon see how beautifully it encapsulates the trouble at the centre of our Lulu’s life. Right away, before you’re halfway down Garfield Street, the demons are stalking the tenements, made to appear in a puff of psychoanalytic smoke:

  Even when cut and bleeding, my mother kept goading him. I don’t know what she wanted to prove. Maybe she was looking for attention. Or maybe she wanted to be punished. Some people would rather be beaten and abused than ignored, particularly when they are lonely and hurting. There were nights when the fights would wake me, but I was always ready to be woken. I slept with my muscles taut and my teeth clenched. My heart would fly into my mouth. Blinking into the darkness, I’d look across at Billy. I didn’t want him to cry. We’d huddle together, flinching as the fists landed. Neither of us wanted to believe our parents could hate each other so much.

  And, of course, not long in bringing up the rear is the neediness, the attention, an obsession with fashion detail the like of which we haven’t seen since Patrick Bateman was looking out his tie in American Psycho, and, then, of course, there’s the friends. Lulu has more than your average head for vertiginous name-dropping: it’s Elton this and John Lennon that, insecurity all the way, but this doesn’t stop the portrait from becoming something of an anthem to Little Me-ism. Lulu is a Sixties being: one of the first of that generation of pop stars to be found cool on account of their class, their vowels, their cheek and their style. But thrillingly, Lulu – unlike so many of her starry pals – has held on to her hunger, and every paragraph of her autobiography is a battle to win ground from the hurters: every sentence sets out to convey the message that success is an essential part of the revenge strategy for the abused and the self-abused, all of which makes her a very contemporary kind of self-revealer. Lulu is a Scotch egg: ginger on the outside, hard-boiled on the inside, and a favourite at the parties of the resolutely unposh. Yet, in her own account, her life has been a rather sophisticated battle with her own gigantic feelings. Celebrity writers are obsessed with feelings:

  I just had this innate understanding that I had to keep working. With hindsight I can see it was a mishmash of Protestant work ethic, a sense of responsibility for people and a desire not to be forgotten. I didn’t ask myself what I could do differently. That sort of introspection came years later when I learned how to get in touch with my feelings and learned how to look after the world inside me, not just the world outside. Joh
n was working harder than ever. He had a growing client list and was making a real name for himself as a celebrity crimper and ‘top London hairdresser’ as the papers referred to him. I used to get annoyed with him for never being home. I wanted more of his attention.

  Following some bad times with the crimper and the loss of her record company, Lulu has found popularity again by singing with the boy band Take That, and now she is the beautifully nipped and tucked grande dame to a whole new generation of self-seekers, kids who, all over again, are in love with the idea that someone from nowhere can take everywhere by storm. Her new manager is the teen-wrangler Louis Walsh, who can be regularly seen making and breaking young hopefuls on Saturday-night television. Out of her troubles – and the overcoming of her troubles – Lulu has become poster-girl for a new generation of the enduringly ambitious. Her latest album went straight into the UK pop charts at number four.

  Self-hagiography – and its popularity – probably has more to do with needs than choices, but what happens when those needs are shared by the people who know you best? In literature this sort of thing has a heartbreaking history, if one thinks of, say, Jane Welsh Carlyle, or Mrs Tennyson, or Vera Nabokov; but what if Pamela Stephenson, the clinical psychologist married to Billy Connolly, is the modern version? Here is a woman who never fails, in her ultra-bestselling biography Billy, to take advantage of her domestic arrangements, so that every semi-recumbent position poor Connolly might assume becomes an opportunity for the wife to conjure with the old psychic woes. Dedication: ‘To the Connolly and McLean families, in the spirit of healing through understanding; and to all families who are divided by religious differences, or who struggle with abuse, poverty or addiction.’