Brian went home that evening, for it was school in the morning. His small figure walked quickly along, waving a stick, his pockets jingling with pennies and ha’pennies that his grandad, uncles, and aunts had given him.
CHAPTER 5
Eight-wheeled lorries came by the motorworks and followed each other towards the high flat tongue of land that had been raised by months of tipping and was slowly covering a nondescript area of reedgrass and water. From nearly every precipice men walked to where they hoped the loads would be dumped. Empty sacks flapped over their shoulders, and they called to each other, waving sticks and rakes. Brian, having already used his judgement, was scraping into a heap of swarf and scrap steel picked clean days ago, but which still gave off a pleasant smell of aluminum shavings and carbolic, oil and the brass dust of big machines his father had sometimes worked. He kept one eye on the rapid movements of his flimsy rake, and the other on a small pile of wood covered with a sack nearby. Bert had promised to be at the tips later, and Brian hoped he’d come soon to get something from the four lorries — and the convoy of high-sided horsecarts trailing at walking pace behind.
“Where’s it comin’ from, mate?” Brian asked. Steelpins were popped out and the back ascended slowly. Half a dozen men, waiting for the avalanche of promise, watched the heavy handle being worked by a driver who rarely spoke to the scrapers, as if he were ashamed of being set within the luxurious world of hard labour. Even uncommitting banter was rare, and the scrapers looked on, waiting, never offering to help so as to get the stuff rolling sooner to their feet. “Prospect Street, young ’un,” the driver answered.
Them old houses. A few bug-eaten laths. Wallpaper, dust, and brick was already streaming down the bank, filling up oil-stained swamp-pools and crushing rusty tins at the bottom. A piece of wall made a splash like a bomb, and that was that. The back was wound up, and the lorry driven off. Brian rubbed pieces of cold water from his ear. Men were scraping systematically at the rammel, though expecting little from those poverty-stricken, condemned, fallen-down rabbit-holes on Prospect Street. Yet you never knew: such exercise in hope may gain a few brass curtain rings, a yard of decayed copper-wire (from which the flex could be burned over the flames), or perhaps a piece of lead piping if it was a lucky day. A man whistled as he worked: speculation ran too high for speech.
Brian, having netted a few spars of wood, rubbed grit from his knees and stood up, gripped by a black, end-of-the-world hopelessness: Please, God, send a good tip, he said to himself. If you do, I’ll say Our Father. “What’s up, kid?” Agger called from the top of the bank.
“I’m fed up,” Brian said gloomily.
Men looked around, grinning or laughing. “Are yer ’ungry?” Brian said no, scraped a few half-bricks to reveal a fair-sized noggin of wood. “Sure? There’s some bread and jam in my coat pocket if y’are,” Agger said.
“No, thanks. I’ve got some snap as well.”
“What yer fed up for then?” He couldn’t answer. Like the old man often said: Think yourself lucky you’ve got a crust o’ bread in your fist. Then you can tek that sour look off your clock. But Brian couldn’t. “What does your dad do?” Agger wanted to know.
“He’s out o’ work”—already forgetting despair.
Agger laughed. “He’s got a lot o’ cumpny.” Agger came on the tips every morning — in time for the first loads at nine — pushing an old carriage-pram, an antique enormous model that may once have housed some spoon-fed Victorian baby and been pushed by a well-trimmed maid. There was no rubber on the wheels; all paint had long since blistered from its sides, and a makeshift piece of piping served for a handle. Another valued possession of Agger’s was a real rake unearthed from a load of brick and tile tippings, an ornate brass-handled tool of the scraper’s trade with which he always expected to pull up some treasure, good reaching under the muck for good, but which he used with relish whether it made him rich or not. Other scrapers envied it: Brian once heard one say: “Lend’s your rake five minutes, Agger. I’ll just get some wood for the fire.” The men around stopped talking, and Agger stayed mute: just looked at the man — a faint touch of contempt at such ignorance of the rules of life — though the blank look was forced on to his face mainly because the request was unexpected, and unanswerable if he was to maintain his sharp gipsy-like dignity. The man got up and walked away, beyond the fire’s warmth. “The daft fucker,” Agger said loudly. “What does he tek me for? He wants chasing off the bleddy premises.”
Agger often referred to the tips as “the premises”—a high-flown name as if “premises” was the one word and only loot he had carried off under his coat from some short term of employment — at being ordered off them himself by a despairing gaffer. “Premises” to Agger was synonymous with some remote platform of life where order might have been created from the confusion within himself, if only he could be respected as king for some qualities he hadn’t got — but wanted because he knew them to exist.
Winter and summer he wore a black overcoat that reached to his ankles and flapped around his sapling body. On the morning when his weekly gatherings had been sold to the scrap-shop for a few shillings, each deep pocket of his coat held a quart bottle of tea, panniers that steadied the folds of an otherwise voluminous garment. Each morning he coaxed a fire from the abundant surface of the tip, stoked it to a beacon with old oil cloth, tar-paper, and arms of brackenish wood that had laid between the floors and walls of back-to-back houses during generations both of people and of bugs.
On fine days, Brian noticed, some scrapers worked little, stood talking by the fire, and only ran madly with coats waving when a lorry came; others scraped industriously every minute of the day whether there was a fresh tip or not, working solidified rubble on the off-chance of finding something that might have been missed. Brian belonged to the latter sort, searching the most unpromising loads because hope was a low-burning intoxication that never left him.
While the damp wind — seemingly foiled by jersey and coat — concentrated on Brian’s face, he forgot it was also reaching into his body. He whistled a tune through a mixture of brick, wood-chippings, and scraps of slate, feeling snatched only when the division between an unreal cotton-wool dreamland and the scratches on his numbed fingers broke down and flooded him with a larger sensation: “snatched”—eyes and face muscles showing what the innermost body felt even though he hadn’t been aware of it, perished through and through, so that a blazing fire would only bring smarting eyes and a skin thicker though not warmer.
Agger worked nearby, cleverly wrapped up and more impervious to cold because he had been on the tips longer than anyone else — straight from Flanders at twenty, he said. The useless slaughter of employable sinews had crushed his faith in guidance from men “above” him, so that he preferred the tips even when there had been a choice. Sometimes he’d gaze into the quiet glass-like water of the nearby canal and sing to himself — a gay up-and-down tune without words — punctuating his neanderthal quatrains with a handful of stones by aiming one with some viciousness into the water, watching the rings of its impact collide and disappear at the bank before breaking out again into another verse that came from some unexplored part of him. Born of a breaking-point, his loneliness was a brain-flash at the boundary of his earthly stress. Still young-looking, though lacking the jauntiness of youth, perhaps out of weakness he had seen the end too near the beginning, had grafted his body and soul into a long life on the tips even before his youth was finished. The impasse he lived in had compensations, however, was the sort that made friends easily and even gave him a certain power over them.