Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (6 page)

Crowborough has a marginal distinction that Petit does not mention. It is the town where Edwin and Willa Muir translated
The Castle
by Franz Kafka. Windlesham Manor, once the home of Conan Doyle, is the most famous literary shrine in the area. After the death of the creator of Sherlock Holmes in 1930, the house was ritually exorcized.

These were some of my fictions as I invited Tom to dredge up his account of our Chobham Farm days. I was hoping for details I’d missed. The kind I stumbled on when digital technology allowed me to freeze-frame the VHS tape of the old diary films. I saw myself in the bath reading a letter I’d forgotten from an American woman, the mother of a friend who had gone missing, so it appeared, in Afghanistan. Before this man set off on his great adventure, the mother, English-born but long resident in New York, treated us to a meal at Rule’s in Covent Garden. She recalled, a highlight of her youth as a publisher’s secretary, being propositioned, over lunch, by a rather flushed Graham Greene.

I took Tom right back to the start. We relocated to a corner near the kitchen. He had crafted the work surfaces, fittings and cupboards, but left out the sink. He fetched water from the floor below in a plastic bowl, saying that he relished the inconvenience. It taught him patience. A proper kitchen was at least thirty years in the making. He flicked through the photographs for a few moments and then spoke, without hesitation, laughing over forgotten follies, the innocence of those times. Stratford East: 1971.

I don’t know that I gave up on film, but film had given up on me. Chobham only started a few months before we went there. It was clearly set up to circumvent the docks. Once the container system was in place, containers could be unloaded anywhere. We were dealing with mixed containers. They had to be emptied. A container might have goods in it from ten different companies.

They came off a ship in the docks, on to a lorry. And instead of having to pay the dockers to unpack it, they sussed that they could recruit the riff-raff of the world. Which was us. On the lowest possible wages.

That was my interest in Chobham. The people who had drifted in from everywhere. They had no careers, they went from job to job. I didn’t get to know many of my fellow workers very well. I was struck by one man, an old man, he’d been a waiter on a train. A steward. Serving meals on night trains to Scotland.

My strongest memory of that winter was of February 1972, the earliest flower to come out in England. I can’t remember its name. It pokes its nose out of the rubble. In the darkest days of the year, a yellow daisy.

So much of the stuff in the containers got broken. One of the saddest sights was the goods coming back from Australia, domestic stuff, tea chests of emigrants who had decided to come home. If you fill a tea chest up completely, it’s bloody heavy. Pots and pans and books. We found it very difficult to unload tea chests without damaging the goods. Everyday domestic things were tipped out on the floor.

There was a lot of root ginger at one time. Chickpeas too. I was eating chickpeas for months and they’re not very tasty. Sacks of chickpeas.

The worst thing was plastic glazing material. Whole containers full of the stuff. We didn’t have the equipment to unload them. We had to do it by hand. That was ghastly.

The most fun was driving the forklift truck. You press the left-hand side of the accelerator and you go forward. You press the right-hand side and you go back. It’s very quick. Two levers to lift or lower the forks. And another to tip them back and forth. You have three movements going on at the same time. It was lots of fun.

I wasn’t frustrated by working in such a cold, dirty environment for so little money. There were no facilities, but I didn’t want facilities. In the tea breaks, everyone else would go into the tearoom and play cards. You and I would sit outside on the forklifts and read the newspapers. Mostly we had to read the
Sun,
because that’s what people left lying around. I don’t think I ever bought a paper. I do remember reading a book. I read
The Wisdom of Insecurity
by Alan Watts. Wonderful. I must have read Thoreau’s
Walden
at that time.

I do remember being horrified, quite late on, when I discovered that staff, the office staff, had a separate lavatory. Which had its own key, to stop the riff-raff getting in. I thought, ‘Shit! This isn’t right.’ I can see now, thinking about how filthy we were, that the social distinction might not have been such a bad thing.

We were a little different. John the foreman knew that we would understand things. We could do forms. We had to fill in these forms when they took us on. And, foolishly, we put down all our degrees. They did tease us about that. Mostly they said, ‘Wow, what are you doing here?’

There was a certain sense of liberation in this. You didn’t have to feel guilty about not having a career. I had no idea really what the hell I was doing. Not at all. I’d stopped making money out of film, but I hadn’t started making anything out of building, painting and decorating.

I left Chobham because my son, Ned, was about to be born. Most people who are having a child try and earn more money. I became unemployed. Family was more important, I thought. With hindsight, my attitude was totally irresponsible.

I can’t remember what else I did. Motorbike messenger? That was in the winter. I skidded in the snow on Old Street. A year or two later, I got a job in a tomato greenhouse. Then Renchi’s brother-in-law asked us to work on his house in Essex – so I gave up the greenhouse. And learnt a bit more about being a builder. I’ve done that for ever.

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.

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 learn warfare through warfare.