Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (3 page)

In architects’ drawings, this 150-foot tall, open-frame playpen resembled an Ikea warehouse, the distinguishing structure of future edgelands: the blank-walled storage shed. An all-purpose unit modelled on a Kleenex dispenser. The Fun Palace would, like the asbestos-saturated Palace of the Republic, in Marx-Engels Platz, East Berlin, be all things to all men: debating chamber, bowling alley, boozer. A non-space given interest by ramps, travelators, walkways and ‘variable escalators’. As in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, it would take you several visits to work out a way of navigating from one floor, one viewing platform, to the next. The Fun Palace, unlike the Millennium Dome, had the good sense to remain a series of drawings, PR puffs and rhetoric from culture hustlers. An heroic failure charming us with its non-existence. The thing that doesn’t happen displaces its own weight in our imaginations.

Wick Woodland, where tinkers and travellers parked their caravans under the motorway bridge, was nominated for a Japanese garden, an English eighteenth-century garden and a landing stage. The planners of the Civic Trust, unconvinced by the need for separate cycle tracks, lobbied for a series of recreational centres linked by a four-lane, dual-carriageway park road. An eco-friendly green highway of the kind originally proposed by Abercrombie. ‘A pleasant drive is hard to find,’ said the commissioned engineers, Sir William Halcrow and Partners. And where better than an urban parkland motorway, up on stilts in the spirit of J. G. Ballard, a tarmac causeway across the marshes?

Financial constrictions, the difficulty of sustaining the alliance between the boroughs, between local and central government, dished most of the options. The 1979 Broxbourne rowing centre came with so much baggage from the council that it was left, permanently, in the pending file. Most of the grand schemes crumbled and failed, before settling into their comfort zones: as ruins, squatted husks, discontinued adventure parks, graffiti auditions. In September 2008, as budgets were trimmed to fund the biggest extravaganza of them all, the Broxbourne Leisure Centre was closed. Leisure was being privatized. Elite athletes would swallow whatever loose change could be found, to offer them a reasonable chance of bringing home the medals that would promote Britain as a viable world power.

The excitement of winning the bid for the World Athletics Championships of 2005 was premature. The development package for the stretch of the Lee Valley that touches on the satellite estates and retail parks of Waltham Abbey and the M25 corridor couldn’t be made to work in time. Westfield didn’t fancy a superstore in Picketts Lock. One hundred million pounds was promised by the Sports Council (now rebranded as Sport England). It wasn’t enough. Somebody took one of those corporate helicopter rides over the territory and noticed the awkward proximity of the London Waste facility at Edmonton. The smokestack belching its toxic filth over the proposed 43,000-seater stadium. The project was abandoned. A disaster was not allowed, not then, to become a catastrophe. Total financial meltdown. Debts that would never be cleared.

The Duke of Edinburgh, making the opening address to the Civic Trust, in Hackney Town Hall, back in 1964, revealed that he frequently overflew the Lea Valley in his crested helicopter. ‘The place on the whole,’ he said, ‘is a pretty average mess.’

We come off the road, through the gate, across the mud, into the farm: Chobham Farm. A progression of clapped-out warehouses, divided into high-stacked alleys, set hard against a mesh fence and the spread of the Stratford rail yards, sidings, national and international freight terminals. A hub. A junction. A defunct investment portfolio. A clanking, hissing, weed-and-wild-flower theme park of labour history and social stagnation, in close proximity to all the other cemeteries and memorial gardens in that convenient fold of the map, between the new tower-block estates of Hackney and the collided villages, swollen hamlets and dispersal zones of late-industrial Essex.

If you have seen Robert Hamer’s 1947 film,
It Always Rains on Sunday
, you’ll appreciate the romance of East London rail yards; the night-and-fog drama of a fugitive dodging through shunting coal trains, leaping over glistening tracks, to demonstrate, in his doomed flight, the scale and majesty of these forbidden places. A mundane, workaday reality overwhelmed by metaphor: ramps, cattle cars, misty haloes around light poles, agitated guard dogs. The poetry of the rail zone works everywhere. The French with their yellow cigarettes and zinc-bar passions, train drivers seething with lust and rage: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon. American Beats making poetry of the ironhorse highways of the Far West: Allen Ginsberg sitting beside Jack Kerouac, ‘under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive’, to eulogize a soul-shuddering sunset. Kerouac and Neal Cassady, those brakemen of language, struggling to keep alive the ride-the-rails hobo myths, in a time of war-world innocence. Short-term labourers addicted to dry-mouthed Benzedrine riffs and the holy legends of trailer parks and wood fires under bridges. Young men reconnecting with old landscapes.

The reality of Chobham Farm was very soon apparent; we were a disposable element at the bottom of the food chain in a speculative operation that might collapse at any moment, and whose legacy would be strikes, picket lines, low wages, aggravation. At first we were general labourers, beasts of burden, unloading containers and loading lorries. Slippery, brown-paper sacks of talcum powder that bent awkwardly in our arms, like small drunk children, slithering away from the grip: one sack at a time was too easy, three sacks impossible to control. Bags burst. We slid and skidded. The ghosts of defunct railway lines came under the perimeter fence and into the sheds. We tripped on raised metal, stubbed our toes on sharp-edged concrete pillars. We wrestled dripping barrels of putrid animal stuff, suspended in vinegar. We cut our fingers on the wire bands holding together rancid sheep casings. We were confused but willing, overwhelmed by the richness and strangeness of this location, charmed by the exoticism of our workmates. They asked few questions, made no judgements; all of them prepared, as we were, to wait and watch.

Faces. Chobham faces. Lived-in, puzzled and generous faces of men confronting a camera. The little, lithe, ‘Cape Coloured’ South African with the beanie cap pulled down to his eyebrows in autumn warmth; the dazzling smile of supersize false teeth like the fenders of a Detroit motor on a Dagenham forecourt. They joshed him, the others. And he took it in good part, until young Freddie snatched off his cap. Baz had been a sailor, Merchant Marine, he dressed in expectation of foul weather, a clear unblinking gaze scanning the Stratford horizon for signs of trouble. In breaks, between jobs, I leant against his forklift, while he advised me, in a whisper, to make the best of the situation, but to be ready, as soon as opportunity presented itself, to move on. Never trust the bosses beyond the next pay packet. As casuals, we had to report back to the Holborn office, after work on a Thursday, to pick up our wages: £15 for a week of early starts, dirt, hard graft and no facilities.

‘Join the firm, full-time,’ Baz said. ‘Don’t give those bastards a slice of your money for nothing.’

He was saving. He was plotting. Kitbag packed beneath the bed. He kept his own counsel. He never read a newspaper.

Liam, the smiling, pink-faced Irish checker with the red hair, shoulders too solid for his donkey jacket, had no problem with typecasting: conviviality, physical strength, a temper. He would give you the chat, a loud ‘How you doing now?’, to signal the end of conversation, not the beginning; there was another agenda beyond the bonhomie of the yards and I would never be a party to it. Another lorry to stack: boxes, tea chests, slim packages, bundles of rods, washing machines, drums of honey. The first driver in the queue would present a docket, and the checker, on his forklift, would set off to locate the specified cargo in its numbered slot. We were doing dockwork, four miles inland from the Thames. Once a week, no choice about it, we paid our dues to the Transport and General Workers’ Union. A mark on the pink card. The only way out of the drudgery was politics. If I had to do this for life, I would exploit my gift for bullshit, never letting facts get in the way of a good story, and become a spokesman, a fixer. As a labourer, I was willing but handless.

After a month or so, Renchi dropped out. Tom, calmed by the regular slap of the brown envelope, the simple tasks that defined a soothingly proscribed world, decided to stay on. Chobham was an inland voyage, an interlude of physical labour, a palliative to mental torment. The Hackney phone might ring while he was out here, behind the wire, inside the gloomy warehouse, a private space where nobody could find him. It would ring in an empty room. He wouldn’t have to agonize over taking the job, hacking out another script. They might pick up on one of his Hammer Films outlines: revenging plants maddened by the greed of humankind, vampires who read Thoreau and made their own coffins out of recycled packing cases. But he would never hear that terrible bell. He would not be at home to answer the call. Chobham Farm, Angel Lane, E15, was an oasis, a Zen monastery. With the mystique of rail tracks, the yarns of itinerant workers, the flood and flux of cargoes, Tom was journeying without going anywhere. The ponytailed hippie-pirate drivers, gold rings in the ear, joints burning yellow fingers, spoke of the open road: India, Nepal. It was enough. We sat in the sunshine, in our rags, books in pockets, mesh fence supporting our aching backs, and admired the persistence of giant sunflowers growing out of oily gravel. We would sign on, we would stay for the winter. Perhaps for ever.

Looking back now, watching the 8mm films, the story breaks down into two elements: faces and terrain. Our films are mercifully silent. But I miss the voices of those Chobham men, the monologues and sharp banter that I struggle to recover.

The Cob, I remember him. I gave him that name and it stuck. After the Welsh cob ponies, short-legged, strong in the back. Uncomplaining. The Cob was a welcome addition to any work gang; shirt off, jeans with cowboy turn-ups, scars and tattoos, constant motion. The times when there was nothing to do, contemplative, roll-up intervals between lorries, hurt him. He jumped on and off tailgates. He hurdled barrels. He rolled drums and then kicked them back where they came from. He did robotic press-ups in the mud, calling out numbers. He shadow-boxed. He punched holes in rotten wood. Then the shout – YES! – and another tottering stack of tea chests to manhandle, another rattle of pipes and random packages. The jagged tin edges of the chests slashed the Cob’s palms. He licked his wounds and grinned like Dracula.

Mick watched him. He was as strong, physically, but he wouldn’t venture one drop of sweat more than was strictly necessary. There was something held back and threatening in Mick’s silence; the way he stood, arms folded, at the edge of alien conversations – cinema, books, newspaper babble – and studied our faces. Mercury-grey eyes. The twitch of his lips, at the pretension, the absurdity. In tea breaks, Mick became the dominant presence, as others like the Cob and Liam, through a furious response to the challenge of moving obstacles from one place to another, did when we serviced the queue of lorries from far-flung places.

A packing case stamped
ROCKLEA QUEENSLAND
becomes an improvised card table. Cribbage. Pegs in a board. Mick’s stubby hands: an indelible compass rose blue-inked over a river system of veins. A bird with spread wings. Four needle-sketched diamonds echoed by the playing cards spread, face up, by his thick fingers. A stained white mug with broken handle. Mick knows how to occupy dead time. He has come straight from prison to Chobham. He’s waiting to get away and talks about Canada. The card games are a useful interlude in which, without specifics, dates and methods, to plot future crimes. They say he killed a man in a pub brawl. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t talk about women.

They owe us. This much is agreed. The owners, the operators. A modicum of low-level pilferage, self-awarded bonus payment, is tolerated: tins of fruit, sardines, paperback books, broken wax from which to make candles against the threat of power cuts. Traditions of the docks are honoured, within unspecified limits. It’s a cowboy operation in an unresolved wasteland. One of the lads, from a Canning Town family, is putting in a few months before he gets his dockers’ card. He is treated with respect, an aristocrat of labour. He will take up the position vacated by a relative who is retiring to the sun. Seasoned Chobhamites, caps, dungarees, donkey jackets, their dark-rimed eyes, pinched faces mapped with worry-lines like ridges in wet sand, harbour no grudges against those who are more fortunate than themselves. There is an established hierarchy of caste: workers with union connections, foremen out of the army, ex-paras with a limp and the habit of command, unknowable bosses, white shirts and braces, figures of fate. Workers are trapped within the minutiae of whatever is proscriptively local: niggles, feuds, blocked toilets, cold tea, a permitted Christmas drinking session and the hope of overtime. The bosses, when we see them, are embarrassed to be caught on the site from which they make their money. The details of the operation are shameful: all these men standing around, talking, scratching their bollocks, slapping cold hands together, breaking up good pallet boards for oil-drum fires. And the sheds themselves, with their inverted W roofs, broken-glass panels, dead chimneys and twisted smokestacks, are a rebuke; a daily reminder that it takes serious investment to translate a set for the last act of
The Sweeney
(screaming rubber,
you’re nicked, you slag
) into an automated, multifunction coldstore.

Tom and I are the only ones who leave the yard during the course of the working day, because we want to explore and evaluate the ground that envelops us. I volunteer for sandwich duty, a walk out of the gate, down Leyton Road into Alma Street, to the small precinct of shops intended to service the surrounding estates, the dejected scatter of railside industries. Cigarettes, cans of fizz, crisps, chocolate bars. ‘Take your time.’