Brian broke wood into small pieces and filled his sack, stuffing each bundle far down. “How are yer going to carry it?” Agger asked.
“On my back.”
“It’ll be too’ eavy.”
“I’ll drag it a bit then.” After a pause for scraping, Agger wondered: “Do you sell it?”
“Sometimes.”
“How much do you want for that lot?” Brian reckoned up: we’ve got plenty at home. I wain’t mek much if I traipse it from door to door. “A tanner.”
“I’ll buy it,” Agger said. “I know somebody as wants a bit o’ wood. I’ll gi’ yer the sack back tomorrow.” Brian took the sixpence just as: “Tip,” someone screamed towards a corporation sewer-tank veering for the far side of the plateau. Agger ran quickly and Brian followed, more for sport since his only sack-bag rested by Agger’s pram.
He scrambled down the precipice to watch the back open above like a round oven door, a foul liquid stink pouring out. Then the body uptilted and a mass of black grate-and-sewer rubbish eased slowly towards the bank, coming out like an enormous sausage, quicker by the second, until it dropped all in a rush and splayed over the grass at the bottom. “Watch your boots,” Agger snouted as he began scraping through it. “This stuff’ll burn ’em off.” He turned to Brian: “Don’t come near this ’eap, nipper. You’ll get fever and die if you do.”
Brian stood back as half a lavatory bowl cartwheeled down from a lorry-load of house-rammel. “Tek a piss in that, Agger,” the bowler shouted. It settled among petrol drums and Brian amused himself by throwing housebricks at it until both sides caved in. One of the men uncovered a length of army webbing: “Here’s some o’ your equipment from France, Agger”—throwing it like a snake at his feet.
Agger held it on the end of an inferior rake. “It ain’t mine, mate. I chucked all my equipment in the water on my way back”—put his foot on it and continued scraping. The stench made Brian heave: he ran up the bank holding his nose, and stopped to breathe from fifty yards off.
At twelve they straggled to the fire for a warm. All swore it looked like rain, some loading their sacks to go home, though Agger and most of the others stayed through the afternoon. Brian took out his bread, and Agger passed him a swig of cold tea. Jack Bird lay back to read a piece of newspaper: “Now’s your chance, Agger,” he said, lighting a lunch-time Woodbine. “What about joinin’ up for this war in Abyssinia?”
Agger reclined on a heap of shavings. “You on’y join up when they stop the dole and chuck us off these bleeding premises — when there’s nowt left to do but clamb.”
“They’ll never stop the dole,” Jack Bird said. “It’s more than they dare do.”
“It wouldn’t bother me, mate,” Agger rejoined, “because there’ll allus be tips, just like there’ll allus be an England. You can bet on that.”
Brian emptied pebbles from his left boot, shook the sock, and put it on again. Holes were visible, and when he pulled to tuck them under at the toe the gaps ripped wider. He doubled the long tongue of superfluous wool underfoot to keep stones from his flesh, careful at the same time to leave enough sock above the boot-rims to stop them chafing his ankles. It was a successful reshuffle of wool and leather, he found on standing to walk a few yards, bumpy underfoot, but there wasn’t far to go.
An empty tipscape stretched to the motorworks. Lorries wouldn’t be back till two, and he swivelled his head to view the building at the opposite far end of the tip, where corporation carts unloaded dustbin stuff into furnaces. Its high chimney sent up smoke as thick as an old tree trunk, a forest giant whose foliage flattened and dispersed against low cloud. The red-bricked edifice was far enough off to be slightly sinister in appearance, an impression added to by its name, the Sanitation Department, or Sann-eye, as the scrapers called it. A miniature railway had been laid towards the tip, where men wearing thick gloves worked all day pushing wagons of still hot cinders along its embankment, emptying them into the marsh on either side and forming another tongue of land which would eventually join up with that made by the lorries.
“Then they’ll make an aerodrome,” Brian speculated, “to bomb old houses like ourn was on Albion Yard.”
“To flatten the Germans, you mean,” a scrapper put in.
“They’ll build a factory,” Agger argued. “Or a jail. I’m not sure which they’ll need most by then.”
Along the high embankment by Sann-eye Brian saw his cousin Bert. Was it? He shaded his eyes and looked again. Yes, it was — walking towards the tippers’ camp — a long way off and coming slowly with hands in pockets, kicking the occasional half-burnt tin into the too-easy goal of waterpools below.
To meet him meant crossing the swamp by stepping-stones of grassy islands, and tin drums that had rolled from high levels. Brian’s feet were pushed well forward as he went through spongy grass towards the opposite ash bank, surprised that such a varicoloured collection of mildewed junk could meet in one place: half-submerged bedticks and ’steads, spokeless bicycle wheels without tyres sticking like rising suns out of black oily water, old boxes rotting away, a dinted uninhabited birdcage in front like a buoy at sea. Farther in the canal direction lay a dog-carcass sprawled half out of the water, its scabby grey pelt smoothed down by wind and rain. I’ll bet there’s rats whizzing round here at night, he thought, big rats with red eyes, and maybe cats with green ’uns. The pervading stench was of rotting diesel oil, as if countless foul dish-rags were soaked in suffocation and held under the surface. Patches lay on the surface like maps of gently rounded coasts, making whorls of blue and purple and greyish Inland, beautiful patterns that he now and again pelted with stones to see if they were real enough to stand explosions, but they merely let the stones through, and re-formed to a slightly different design.
He walked on, excited at swamp-roving, zigzagging from what he sensed were deeper scoops and gullies. His no-man’s-land was small, for he could still hear the sharp-voiced scrapers on the tip behind, and at the same time see Bert almost above him on the grey wall in front, a ragged-arsed sparrow calling out:
“Don’t come up: I’m coming down. I’ve got some chocolate ’ere”—patting his back pocket, walking to different parts of the slope before deciding which was freest of hot cinders. He waded through a pile of blue-shining burnt-out tins, stepped over ragged clinkers (like a cat on hot bricks, Brian thought), holding into the steep slope in case he should keel over and begin rolling. “Who gen yer the chocolate?”
Without looking up, Bert answered: “Nobody. I got it from a shop.” He disturbed a mass of tins and ash: “Never known anybody to gi’ me owt, ’ave yer?”—and an avalanche rolled into water, drops splashing against Brian: “Where did you get the dough from then?”
“Pinched it, if you want to know.” He walked to Brian and sat on a petrol drum: “I pinched this as well, from Doddoe’s pocket,” he added boastfully, drawing out a whole cigarette. “He’ll think our Dave done it, and paste ’im. And it’ll serve ’im right, because our Dave batted my tab last night, for nowt.”
Sandy-haired and pint-sized, one of the many kids broadcast from Doddoe’s loins, Bert’s fever-eyes and white face marked him a born survivor. He wore long trousers, a baggy cut-down pair of Dave’s. Like Brian, he had first lived in the bitter snows of March, was suckled under the white roof of a pullulating kitchen, then set free from everyone’s care because another kid was queuing up for air and milk behind. He pulled a match sharply against the drum and helped its flame to life in the cup of his dirt-worn adult hands. “I like a smoke now and again. It meks me feel good. I had a whole packet once all to myself and I stayed in the woods smoking ’em.”