The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  At Moorgate, at least on the day I sat there, two distinct types of givers revealed themselves. One is a giver-despite-himself; he’d Federal Express the coins if he could. The other more often than not is a woman; glad to be of help, and happy to give coins and food and advice. She thinks there’s something wrong with a society that keeps people like this; we’re losing our way; she’s concerned at the way we seem to be going. She will often give a pound or more.

  ‘How long have you been like this?’ a woman asked me with a pained expression on her face. I quickly made up a figure. ‘I wish I could do more,’ she said, giving me a pound and some coppers and an apple from her bag. A red-faced man with gold-rimmed glasses gave me a banana from his briefcase; a beautiful girl gave me a cheese sandwich in a plastic wrapper and some change; a sick-looking man with liver-spots on his hands and face rubbed my head and told me I was young, then he gave me 70p. Thousands of people must have passed over the hours I was there. Most of them, as usual, would ignore me or curse or snigger. But it wasn’t a bad pitch at all: the hours of asking and waiting had brought £18.86, an apple, a banana and a sandwich. That was the first day I’d made more than a fiver. And it was my last day.

  *

  As I waited for the train that would take me away from there, I remembered being told by a coroner’s officer at King’s Cross that eighty people this year, in London alone, have died by throwing themselves in front of trains. I waited for my return passage to a world of CDs and aquarium fish and beers in the fridge. The other kind of beggar, the real kind, goes for days without money or proper food. Many are mentally ill and alone in the definitive sense; out of touch with family, social services and the network of names and phone numbers that keeps us going. A tribe of the needy and bewildered, they march – now and then stopping to make a few quid – aimless and unhelped, toward some vanishing point real or imagined.

  For me, the surprise at the end of all this was my lack of surprise. Whatever the situation thirty years ago, I’d always felt – sniffling toward adulthood in the 1980s – that my time was one in which the sight of a few people eating out of bins, and begging in the street, was acceptable. It was something that happened. And it never gave pause with us the way it did with parents or others who spoke of a time when things were not this way. Two weeks after that last day at Moorgate, I stopped outside Warren Street station to buy a paper. A beggar under a blue blanket reclined against McDonald’s window. While we talked, about Scotland and about Wales, he said that he knew me, or used to know me. I joked about the unlikelihood and, itching to be in some other place, found a way to say that I’d never seen him before in my life. I was back among the passersby.

  The Garbage of England

  MAY 2007

  By the time I worked out the style of our death the leaves were back on the trees. The journey in search of rubbish had taken the whole winter long and now I was here with the bins. The evening it was all over I emptied the latest rubbish onto some newspapers spread out on the kitchen floor – a cornflakes packet and old razor blades, apple cores and cotton buds. Looking through the stuff I felt how secret the story had been. I’d gone looking for the end but had always been brought back to this, the rubbish on the floor appearing grave and autobiographical. The seasons are like that and so is our trash: you examine their habits of repetition for long enough and you begin to think of lost time.

  It began one night in Camberwell when the orange of the street lamps was fighting to show through the fog. Alf started up his van and weaved past some roadworks, dodging the cones but not the sleet that flew to the windscreen and vanished. ‘My goodness,’ he said, ‘if this is life I don’t want it.’ He was talking about the way he felt when he worked as an account executive in a marketing design company. ‘I finally found out that it was only worth living for love, not money.’

  ‘What do you mean, living for love?’ I said. He ran a hand through his hair and stroked his cheek.

  ‘Putting other people’s needs before my own,’ he said. ‘When I left that hideous job I got a sense we were all interconnected. Freeganism tries to connect with people’s needs – putting community first. In 2002, I decided to devote my life to getting the message out and living as sincerely as possible. Instead of using money and all that I wanted to tread more lightly on the earth. I took everything to extremes in my old life.’ Alf is thirty-three years old. His friend Martin, a fellow Freegan, popped his head through from the back of the van and pushed his glasses up his nose. Martin is thirty-six and comes from Sydney. He said he was disillusioned as a teenager by the way everyone was obsessed with money and ownership. ‘You’ve got to take everything to a logical conclusion,’ he said. ‘We’ve given up all our possessions, because, like Mill said, if you want to bring down a corrupt system then you might want to stop buying its products.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Alf. ‘You’ve got to fight the greed in the world by fighting the greed in yourself. Look. Forty per cent of all food in the UK is wasted. Studies say we’re the biggest wasters in the world. And the religion of economics has waste as an important component in it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Martin. ‘True spirituality overcomes the greed. What we want to do is relinquish power. Lay down your life. Share what you have.’

  We passed Peckham Rye and could see blue rooms, television pictures flashing in each flat. Alf and Martin were saying that the way to live properly was to resist commerce. Their philosophy, like that of many Freegans, is a sweet-sounding blend of Karl Marx and Jesus Christ, with quite a bit of Tolstoy and Gandhi thrown in. Not using money means that they pick up food from bins: they have regular haunts, up and down the country, and they visit them when travelling around to give out leaflets. ‘We feel joy at all this free food,’ Alf said. ‘And you also feel disgusted to see all this rubbish in the world.’

  ‘We choose our ignorance, bro,’ said Martin as Alf stopped the van in a car park behind Somerfield.

  ‘Do you have a relationship with this store?’ I asked.

  ‘Not one they know about,’ said Alf.

  We sat in the van for an hour or more talking about the ethics of waste. I must have got a little tired of Martin saying that everyone should share and that we should all love one another because I asked him how he intended to deal with people who are without virtue. ‘I don’t believe that anyone is without virtue,’ he said.

  ‘In the spiritual realm,’ added Alf. ‘The greatest leader is the greatest servant.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s all right. But Jesus had a slave’s mentality.’

  ‘We just want to save resources,’ said Martin with a sigh. ‘It’s more of a Robin Hood model – we’re stealing from the corporations. We found a bin today with fifty or sixty cartons of milk inside.’

  Everything Alf and Martin own is in the van. They sleep in the back and they don’t have sex with anyone. I asked Alf if there wasn’t a lot of anxiety involved in living like this. He told me that the word ‘mortgage’ means ‘death grip’. Rain was coming down heavily on the roof of the van and we sat thinking amid the smell of diesel and socks. ‘Suddenly, everybody in the world needs a dishwasher,’ said Martin.

  We pulled up our collars and walked over to the wasteland behind Somerfield. The housing estate wasn’t far away – the flashing blue light was still evident – but there was something very remote about the supermarket at that hour of the night. Alf put a torch on a band round his head. He looked like a miner as we turned to where the bins stood, then I saw other lights, and a large group of strangers. ‘Bin raiders,’ said Alf. ‘They all come out at night.’ Some of them were immigrants from Eastern Europe, who had come to London to live the dream. A man from Poland had laid out five plump grapefruit on top of a wooden palette. ‘Are very good,’ he said. ‘Not rubbish.’

  Alf and Martin dived into the bins – the Americans don’t call it bin raiding: they call it dumpster diving – and pulled out bread, vegetables, ready meals, packs of mince. They offered much of it to the Polis
h guys, but they said they already had enough and had a long way to walk home. An old black lady in a claret hat came round and picked up items here and there. ‘Very good here,’ she said. ‘Terrible to waste things just like this.’

  ‘This is England now,’ I said to Alf, his face lighted somewhat ghoulishly under the lamp on his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is the world, bro.’

  The old lady had a large family of grandchildren and lived not far away in Camberwell. She said this was a way to get along.

  The men took large clear bags of rubbish back to the van and spread some of the contents on the floor. Alf wiped the items down with a cloth dipped in bleach water and showed me them. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Sell-by date is two days away. This one, today. Perfectly good to eat.’ Packets of biscuits were lying there and a giant heap of broccoli. Martin read out some of the labels: ‘Chicken and stuffing. Yorkshire pudding. Cashew nuts. Bananas. Three chicken pies. Yesterday.’ The lady in the claret hat came up to the door of the van to ask if we had any butter or bread.

  ‘Mince?’ asked Alf.

  ‘Yes,’ said the old lady. ‘Yes. Now, what nice boys you are.’

  ‘And how about broccoli?’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘Just enough for tomorrow. That’s great. Are you boys all right for rice?’

  ‘Very much so,’ said Martin, sheltering from the rain. ‘We’ve got everything we need. Every last thing we need.’

  *

  The British government’s review of its waste strategy is due from Defra at the end of this month, but the matter is as much philosophical. The question of what it means to live a good life has become the occasion for personal accounts of what one does with one’s rubbish. This is the way we manage news on the subject, with a growing and often panicked sense of what our personal habits might say about our harmfulness. There are other pressing topics of course, but the environment – and the very local matter of rubbish – is the pamphleteering issue of our time. Yet none of us feels safe with it, none of us knows exactly what to think; intimate disquiet about waste is liable to spring a trap in our minds. ‘Rural England is where urban England now dumps its rubbish,’ Richard Girling writes in his book Rubbish! ‘Here it tips everything from garbage in landfills to fridges in ponds, broken cars and surplus people.’ The Daily Mail says there is a plague of rats in Britain as a result of the lack of care taken in refuse collection. The government has revealed that urban waste is growing by 3.2 per cent a year in volume – faster than GDP. ‘Despite dramatic improvement in recent years, the UK still has the worst recycling record in Europe: 27 per cent of domestic waste, as opposed to Germany’s 57 per cent and Holland’s 64 per cent,’ according to a draft policy document shown to me by the Community Recycling Network. ‘The average person in the UK throws out their body weight in rubbish every three months,’ says Friends of the Earth. ‘Most of this could be reprocessed but instead it is sent to incinerators or landfill.’

  We used to stub a cigarette out in an ashtray and never think of it again. Now we think, where will the stub end up, the ash and the tip and the paper? We grew up imagining that rubbish was taken away, only to find there is no such place as ‘away’. The by-products of our desires are hidden in the earth or burned to make a toxic canopy over our heads: we are aware of that now, and that awareness has grown to feed a spirit of personal regeneration. At some level we recycle not to save the planet, but to free the part of ourselves that is enslaved to the world’s goods and the body’s functions.

  Some people simply choose to be more sensible about separating what they throw out, nothing more complicated, and I salute them while continuing to believe that the pressing morality of rubbish – the summits, the sea-change, the plains of discourse, and the brave new worlds of anxiety – represents a powerful turn in our collective mind. At its simplest, we are now putting the Sunday papers in the recycling bin, but at its less simple we may be seeking what Emerson called, in Nature, ‘an original relation to the universe’. The times may have become ripe for turning self-control into a form of evangelism, sensing that our wish to be the planet’s saviours is also a bid for immortality. We discern a new mastery to be enjoyed over the life of everyday stuff and we consider ourselves responsible for stewardship of the ecosystem, or the egosystem.

  *

  High above the Brent Reservoir a fringe of red, trailing light was spread across the sky at half past five in the morning. It was still dark on the road and the houses slept as the lorries pulled into the depot. In the artificial brightness of the ‘office’ – a huddle of Portakabins – the binmen were gathered around a newspaper. ‘Here,’ said one of them. ‘Have you seen the new lottery?’

  ‘Na,’ said another.

  ‘Breast reduction, mate. Tummy tucks. That’s what you win if you win the lottery: cosmetic surgery.’

  Les said he liked the early start and the afternoons off. He has worked in Harrow for more than a dozen years, up early every day and out clearing the bins before anybody is awake. He now drives the truck and considers that a significant upgrade. ‘I’m the gaffer,’ he said, ‘but not really.’ Les and I tried to make jokes but tiredness got to us and the laughter came slower as we progressed along the route. Every few hundred yards I jumped down and joined the lifters as they rolled the bins from people’s yards. That morning the crew were only responsible for collecting organic rubbish. ‘It’s a nightmare,’ said Joshi, whose parents were born in Bangladesh. ‘No matter how many times you give them information, or mark their card, they still contaminate the bloody recycling bins. They hide all sorts of stuff at the bottom of the organic bins – like machine parts. There’s no telling them.’ He showed me one of the bins outside a large house; it had grass on the top and Tesco bags full of paper underneath. Harrow has a system of compulsory recycling: green bins for paper, cans, bottles, and brown bins for organic waste, which includes garden waste and leftover food. People in Harrow who mix the stuff up, or ‘contaminate’, have their rubbish left uncollected, and must pay £20 to get it picked up, after they’ve sorted it; persistent offenders can be prosecuted and fined up to £1,000.*

  Les keeps a chart of the offenders and notes down their addresses. Next to the Rayners Lane Conservative Association, he tried to reverse the bin lorry up a dark lane and Joshi came up to his window shaking his head. ‘Number 9,’ he said. ‘Contaminated.’ Les put on his handbrake and lifted his pen, turning to me at the same time.

  ‘That’s a bad one, Number 9,’ he said. ‘Number 63 is the same.’

  There was a camera in the cabin and I could see Joshi and Sam lifting the bins of the better citizens onto a lifting device and then the stuff being tipped into the compactor. Les started telling me he drove both a BMW and a Renault and that he used to be a bodyguard for the 1970s rock groups Slade and Mud. It was clear he felt he had led a progressive life, and he seemed very composed as he pulled and hauled at the steering wheel. By then the sky had become bluer and people were beginning to queue at the bus stops, heading for Pinner. ‘A lot of the old people,’ Les said, ‘they get worried because of recycling. They don’t understand the new ways and are afraid of the fines.’ As he said this I noticed an elderly lady sweeping open the curtains of a mock-Tudor house with a two-car driveway. ‘But we’ve gone too far, too fast on the recycling,’ he said.

  Next to the Jewish Free School, Les beeped his horn when he spotted another veteran of the Harrow refuse system, Fred, who was driving his truck on the other side of the road. ‘Spent years in rubbish,’ Les said. ‘He’s about to retire.’

  ‘Lucky bastard,’ said Joshi.

  It took the best part of six hours for the team to do their round, emptying the bins and marking the contaminators, and the morning was in full flow as Les pointed and laughed at an England flag waving over a house in Hereford Gardens. Half an hour later, we were beyond the suburban rim of Harrow and into the Middlesex countryside, heading at speed for the composting site at the extremity of north-west Londo
n.

  The place smelled powerfully of rotting Christmas trees. There was smoke rising from the composting area; the process takes ten weeks from the delivery of vegetable matter to the maturation of compost, and not only is it a fulfilment of local councils’ commitment to go greener, it also costs a great deal less than sending the rubbish to landfill sites. West London Composting is licensed by Defra and is the biggest facility of its kind in London, processing 50,000 tons of organic waste a year. When we arrived on the site Les’s vehicle was weighed on a weighbridge; this determined the price that Harrow would receive for the load. I stood at the side of the tipping shed as other trucks arrived and dropped their material into a large hangar, where it was scooped up for shredding. Already steaming, the shredded material is then taken to the composting sheds, where its temperature and oxygen levels are controlled. At the end of the ten weeks it will be bagged and sold for agricultural and commercial use.

  Les was shaking his head. The inspector who examines the material in the back of the bin lorries before it is offloaded was not happy. ‘No,’ said the man with the clipboard. ‘Contaminated,’ and then he signed a sheet and handed it to Les. Despite their efforts the gang had allowed too much non-organic rubbish to be tipped into the back of the lorry.

  ‘The people who are serious about it are very serious,’ said Les.

  ‘And what about this load?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not good enough,’ he said. ‘We’ll take it to Ruislip tip and Harrow will have to pay to dump it there.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ I said. ‘A long morning too.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Les said, turning the wheel and smoothing his hair in the rear-view mirror. ‘We won’t be saving the world today.’

  *