A Traveller's Life (21 page)

I arrived back in London from Florence at 6.30 a.m. on a nasty grey morning in early August to find a letter from the Chairman, giving me the sack. I had hoped to get my resignation in first, as I had more or less decided to accept the
Holiday
offer. I was now an ex-Partner, one of a distinguished body which included Audrey Hepburn, Mr Roy Jenkins and Mr George (now Lord George) Brown who had been in the Fur Department in Oxford Street. In the end I never went to
Holiday
. Instead, Wanda and I went to India and among other things travelled twelve hundred miles down the Ganges by boat, which took us three months.

1963 was a busy year. It was the year I went down the London sewers, while still a fashion buyer, the year I got the sack from the John Lewis Partnership, the year I went to America for the first time, the year I went to stay in a lighthouse on a rock in the Scillies, the year we went to India and floated down the Ganges.

I had been fascinated by drains on a grand scale ever since seeing Orson Welles clattering up and down brightly-lit Viennese sewers in hand-made shoes, hotly pursued by policemen in special sewer-going suits, a fascination that not even a visit to the well-scrubbed section of the Parisian
égouts
under the Place Vendôme, which is open to the public and deadly dull, could dispel.

I soon found that one of the principal pleasures to be derived from craving permission to go down the London sewers was that the authorities did not want to give it. The London County Council made this clear to me in a surprising hand-out which read as follows:

Secretaries of religious, cultural, educational, political and social societies wishing to include a visit for their members to one of the Council's pumping stations or Northern Outfall Works or to
have an illustrated talk on the main drainage service should write to the Chief Engineer. Applications to visit sewers cannot be entertained.

After conducting a protracted correspondence with the chief engineer, in the course of which I was asked
why
I wanted to visit the sewers, and to which I replied, ‘Because they are there,' I eventually received a letter which ended, ‘… happy to assist you, subject to the Committee's approval, providing that your presence in the sewers does not increase the danger to personnel already working there.'

This letter, with its dark hint that my presence in the sewers might produce some sort of catalysis (something similar was suggested by the Elder Brethren of Trinity House when, later in the year, I was trying to get permission to stay in an offshore lighthouse), seemed more offensive on a first reading than it was intended to be.

Some time in February 1963 I took a day off from buying model gowns retailing at ten guineas upwards, and set off for my first sewer, King's Scholars Pond, better known as the Tyburn River. As a river the Tyburn rose near Marble Arch and it could still be heard, as I had discovered, gurgling away merrily beneath a twenty-four-inch manhole outside No. 3 Shepherd Market in Mayfair, the village in which, while still at St Paul's, I had had my first experience of the joys of commercial sex one afternoon after school. From Shepherd Market it ran under the dip in Piccadilly (which was really the valley of the Tyburn, and which was such an obstacle to the gun-carriage with the body of King George V on it when it was being hauled to Paddington in 1936), then under Green Park and Buckingham Palace and Pimlico, finally finding its way into the Thames by way of a disused dock, in which barges used to discharge cargo, behind the Sewer Depot in Grosvenor Road, near Vauxhall Bridge.

This last part was the only stretch of this unhallowed stream that was still open to the sky. And a good thing, too, I thought as Mr B, an assistant inspector of a London sewage area which extended from Flask Walk in Hampstead to Brondesbury and Tufnell Park, then to Blackfriars and from Blackfriars to Chelsea Bridge, led me along the muddy bottom of the dock to the underground part.

Mr B came from a family of sewermen. His father had spent thirty-eight years underground, while he himself had been at it for fifteen. He and his family lived in a charming Victorian cottage which overlooked the Thames opposite the Grosvenor Road depot, and the Tyburn ran right under it.

The bottom of the Tyburn was littered with some bizarre sorts of jetsam which included that morning a fine pair of unmounted antlers, a folio bible in the Welsh language, half a pram and an old bicycle – could they be from The Palace?

We entered the covered-in part. The water was not more than a foot deep, but the atmosphere was steamy. ‘The steamiest of the lot is Piccadilly,' Mr B said, ‘on account of the hotels and baths and washing-up going on all day and night.'

‘What about The Palace?' I asked. ‘Anything special about that?'

‘Well, you can take it from me,' said Mr B, ‘that what comes down hasn't got “By Appointment” on it.'

The truth was, as I discovered while I continued to make forays into them by day and night, that sewers are unpredictable, dangerous places into which, in addition to the more or less loathsome things they are constructed to receive, mad humanity pours all sorts of lethal stuff, all of it illegally. Even a short list of what found its way down the drains reads like a recipe for some twentieth-century witches' brew: acetylene; petrol, sometimes in large quantities; carbon dioxide, given off by hospitals and ice-cream factories; hydrogen cyanide from electroplating works,
which has a nice smell of almonds, the faintest suspicion of which sent any gang of sewermen, who were known as flushers, straight up the ladders to the street; and as smells went, which I was able to inspire for myself in the Tyburn, most ghastly of all when mixed with untreated sewage: ordinary coal gas from leaky pipes. What North Sea gas smells like, if it smells of anything, when mixed with untreated sewage, I leave to a younger explorer to discover.

For these reasons, on initially entering a sewer, my first, almost overwhelming, impulse was to light a cigarette, or if I had had one about me, a Trichinopoly cheroot; but with the possibility of some or all of these things lurking in the atmosphere I would have stood a good chance, had I done so, of rising majestically through a manhole, rather like a Polaris emerging from a submarine. Some years previously a whole stretch of Kingsway had suddenly erupted without any human intervention whatever.

There was a narrow, slippery walk on either side of the underground section of the Tyburn and we had to take care, as we were not wearing waders. There were a lot of rats slithering purposefully up- and downstream along the brickwork, jostling one another like commuters in a subway. We were bound for a side entrance called the Keyshop in Tachbrook Street, Pimlico, one of the comparatively few places underground with a fancy name. There was one called the Corkscrew, at the river end of Northumberland Avenue, but only one sewer had a name on a board corresponding to the street above – Knightsbridge.

After pointing out one or two places where the brickwork had broken away and in which rats were nesting, Mr B seemed to grow as tired of the atmosphere as I already was. At first, I had been hoping to go north under Green Park and The Palace, but the fight had gone out of me. Instead we went up a narrow side entrance, and very unpleasant it was, to the foot of a vertical iron ladder.

‘Blooming well stuck,' said Mr B, trying to force open the cover. ‘Lend a hand.' A hand was not enough, but by pushing hard with heads and shoulders we suddenly opened the cast-iron lid and shot out on to the pavement at the junction of Moreton and Tachbrook Streets, SW1, to the surprise of a girl exercising a poodle.

More serious was the visit to the Fleet Sewer. Outside Blackfriars Bridge Station a van was waiting in the road with seven men in it, all dressed in waders, flat caps and donkey jackets, and drinking tea. There was a lot of washing water on the boil and bottles of disinfectant handy. There is a nasty complaint called Weil's Disease to which sewermen are prone, leptospiral jaundice, which is transmitted in the urine of rats, called by the flushers ‘bunnies'. If it is not diagnosed correctly – it starts with a splitting headache and the symptoms of flu – it is usually fatal in twenty-four hours. It can be contracted through a scratch, which was why all the flushers I met washed themselves as religiously as any Hindu. Another disease is Miners Nystagmus, which affects the eyeballs.

This gang had come all the way from the depot so that I could go down the Fleet and they already had the cover up. They were nice without being garrulous. There was something about this job that made one want to open one's mouth as little as possible. They were glad, they said, that I was not an ambassador or some other sort of VIP, because they could only be taken down sewers that had been cleaned out specially for the occasion, and this meant a lot of work for nothing.

As soon as I had my waders on we went down a series of very slimy ladders into warm, steamy darkness, rather like a Turkish bath with something wrong with it. Again there was the awful smell that had made the Tyburn such a noxious place. Fulham Gasworks, I was told, was responsible. Whichever sewer I was in thereafter, all nasty smells were attributed to Fulham Gasworks
and so far as I was concerned they could have closed the place down at any time they liked.

The Fleet at Blackfriars was a complex place. Great iron tubes spanned its upper levels, through which the station subways and the trains ran. Seen fitfully by the light of miners' lanterns and special lamps, it was like one of the prisons designed by Piranesi. Everywhere there were rusty iron gratings, long chains hung from the roof and the storm relief sewer was fitted with metal doors which, although they each weighed three tons, were held open horizontally when the flood water came roaring over the weirs, as if they were the tongues of paper envelopes. At the lowest level the Fleet itself raced riverwards at a good ten knots, too strong to stand up in on a dry day, down a tunnel more than fourteen feet high. When there was a storm, they told me, first of all an apocalyptic wind raged through the sewer and then the rain water came thundering down, filling it up to the brim, by which time they themselves would be brewing up in their van on the surface. The most surprising thing that had ever been found in the upper levels of the Fleet, the senior member of the gang, with thirty-seven years' service, told me, was an iron bedstead. No one knew how it got there, because you cannot get a bedstead down a household drain or even down a manhole without taking it to pieces, so someone must have taken it down in bits and reassembled it.

Best of all in my week in the sewers were the night shifts, after which I used to catch an early morning train to Wimbledon and undress in the garden before having a bath and breakfast and returning to Waterloo and the MG buying office in Oxford Street. One night I helped to flush out a four-foot sewer called the Opera, on the Embankment between Westminster Bridge and Charing Cross, which served Scotland Yard and other secret places, such as the Ministry of Defence. By eleven o'clock they had the manholes
up in the side entrance in Richmond Terrace and a winch ready to haul up the iron buckets, which were called skips, to the surface. There were two top-men to work the winch and a lorry-man from a firm of contractors, who was waiting to drive the stuff away in the small hours of the morning and who was looking after the stove in the van. The men on the surface knew where the nearest telephone was in case there was need for an ambulance, the fire brigade, or smoke apparatus, or even all three at once. The nearest telephone was just over the railings inside Scotland Yard, where the policeman on duty watched our operations apprehensively, as if we might blow them to smithereens, something not beyond the bounds of possibility if we had wanted to. In addition it was the top-man's job to watch out for rain and get the gang up to the surface the moment it started. In the van there was a lifeline, lifting harness and first-aid gear.

Before the other five men had gone down, the ganger had lowered a Spiralarm gas detector lamp and a piece of lead-acetate paper in a wire cage into the sewer. If the light had gone out or the red warning light had gone on, or if the paper had changed colour, then it would have been dangerous to go down. None of these things happened, so the first man down took the Spiralarm with him and hung it in the sewer for all to see.

Down in the Opera we were bent double like convicts in a Siberian mine. I was wearing a deep wading suit which came up to my chest. ‘Your lucky day, mate,' they said. ‘Down the East End you'd be wearing a diver's suit.'

The sewage was nice and warm, just right after the freezing air on deck. It was up to my middle and the sludge we had come to shift reached my knees. The place on my face where I had cut myself shaving that morning was throbbing in a curious way and I wondered whether I was going to get Weil's Disease. I certainly had a splitting headache.

Everything was moving very slowly in the Opera, sewage-wise.
This was because a band of loonies, masquerading as workmen extending the platform at Westminster Underground Station, had poured an enormous quantity of a special filling called Bensonite into the sewers and gummed up the Opera. The London County Council was sending the bill for the flushing to the building contractors, but as one flusher said: ‘Doesn't make me feel any better, whoever pays for it.' The gang was bitter because although the work was being paid for, a lot of Bensonite was still coming down. But in spite of everything, this was a good gang. They worked fast with their sleeves rolled up, up to their elbows in sewage, shovelling the Bensonite into the side entrance where the skips were. When it had dried off a bit they filled a skip and it was hauled to the surface. Apart from shouts of ‘Orl right!' and ‘Steady, mate!' they kept their mouths shut, like the men at Blackfriars. A night's work, from ten-thirty until seven the following morning, is four cubic yards of grit, which is a lot of grit to shift in a confined space. I tried to photograph them at work but, even with the fastest available film, without a flash it was like trying to photograph a band of spiritualists.

Later, when they had finished and were washed up and drinking tea in the van, they all said how much more healthy it was working in the sewers than being in the open air, especially with the weather being so nasty. By this time I was in favour of more material rewards, such as grace-and-favour residences in perpetuity, for the flushers, who got £12.15 ($34) for a forty-four-hour week.