– Henry Ford
Tower Bridge
Yes, I had made it back to England following a long journey through 8 countries and now here I was on London Bridge looking down the river at the twin columns of Tower Bridge. It was time to reflect. The grand European adventure I’d embarked upon with McClain four and a half months ago was now at an end. What now? Well, the first thing to do was to locate a logging somewhere. I had family in the vicinity of London, that’s true, but they hadn’t proved too welcoming in the past. No, I'd prefer to find my own accommodation. On that matter, I thought that Mrs Sheppard might have a vacancy, but I preferred not to return to that morgue of a dwelling and her .
While I was deliberating, a nasally voice twanged my name. I turned to
recognise, standing out from the crowd, Peter Johnson, the American fellow I’d
left back in Belgium London
After we’d
exchanged tales of our separate expeditions to the middle of London Bridge England London
“I know where we
might find a place in Streatham,” I said tentatively.
The afternoon
was advancing. If the choice was to be between Mrs Sheppard and a park bench in
England
160 Ellison Road, Streatham
A day or two
later, I made the short trip to South Norwood where Vince King lived, for I’d promised to visit him when I returned
to England
100 French franc notes of the time
To recover my motorbike, I soon made a trip to West Wickham where I learned that McClain had long been back in England. He’d lasted just a month on the Continent, he said, as he hadn’t liked it. I suspect he just missed the Swan and his rugby-playing,
smutty song-singing mates. McClain, I’d realized, possessed little in the sense of an independent personality. He prospered better as a member of a group - despite (or
maybe even because of!) his apparent lack of affability. I often wondered what had urged him to commit to that hitch-hiking trip in the first place. Maybe a squabble with his friends and a severance that he presently came to regret and quickly made haste to repair.
Interestingly, this group consisted exclusively of males, whereas
my interests were perennially turned towards girls – despite my endless failures
with them! Still, never say die. But at that time, my only chance to satisfy
that fancy lay with a girl – another New Zealander – Twan and I had met
briefly somewhere in the south of France
To be frank, I
hadn’t been strongly attracted by Kathryn. She was just another plain but
pleasant girl I’d happened to meet on my travels. Maybe I shouldn’t bother, I
thought. But she lived not far away and, well, what did she look like anyway? I
couldn’t precisely remember. It was over three months since I’d seen her. Maybe
she wasn’t that bad. And what did it matter anyway? Was it not possible just to
be friends with a girl? Dammit, I would
go and see her.
Answering my
knock at her door, she invited me in, pleased to see me. Now I remembered. She
was tall and dark-haired but with a chin that jutted out a bit too much, I
decided, as I trudged inside behind her. We talked for a time over coffee, and when we’d exhausted our conversation, she said that when I’d knocked she’d been applying some
therapy to her neck and shoulders which sometimes troubled her. Would I mind if
she carried on? When I said I wouldn't, she removed her top, revealing a black bra, switched on a heat lamp
and lay prone on the settee underneath it.
Gazing at the
whiteness of her back now and the elastic strap of the black bra that
traversed it, my dull wits began to wonder if this was an invitation. A silence
ensued. Then she asked me if I wouldn’t mind massaging just here – she pointed
over her shoulder. This was an
invitation! I now sat down beside her and grasped handfuls of skin either side
of her neck. And kneaded. And kneaded. And kneaded – trembling a little, for young
fellows rarely get to manhandle girls in their underwear. But nothing came of
the incident. The magnetism just wasn't strong enough, I suppose. When I left,
I did not suggest we meet again, though as I write I can’t help wondering what
would have happened had we been squeezed together in my sleeping bag in the
foothills of the Alps !
Peter proved to be an intelligent, as well as a sensitive, fellow. He came from Berkeley, California, he told me, and had been attending university there before he left. However, he had no inkling to go home for the moment, because he wanted to avoid being drafted into the U.S. Army for service in Vietnam. His pre-emanant aim now was to get a visa that would let him remain in England, as he had managed to land a job in an office somewhere in South West London. We got along very well, Peter and I, despite the fact he was no great drinker.
That’s not to
say he was insensible to the seductions of other intoxicating substances. One
night he came home with a small packet of foil which he unrolled to reveal a
tiny hunk of some brown stuff.
“What is it?” I
asked.
“Hash,” he said.
Hash? All I
could connect with that word was some repugnant dish my mother used to concoct
from scant resources in the days of my childhood. I watched now while he cut
the ‘hash’ into little grains and added them to a quantity of tobacco. Then he
stuffed the mixture into his pipe, tamping it down with his index finger. Now
he lit the stuff, took a few puffs and then handed the pipe to me. I puffed on it, inhaling the smoke somewhat anxiously because I had never taken ‘drugs’
before. Actually, like everyone else, I had been taking drugs for years in the
form of alcohol and nicotine. The trouble is that this particular drug was not
sanctioned by the law. What harm might it not do? But I trusted Peter’s basic
good sense. I did not think he would offer me anything harmful.
“What’s supposed
to happen?” I asked.
“You’ll feel
good,” he said.
“When?”
“Just wait.”
I waited,
wondering if the backs of my hands might turn hairy or something, but nothing happened. I decided finally that this ‘hash’ business was just a bridge
for asses, a species of chicanery, a hoax, a spoof, an April fooling, a decoy
for gullible ducks. Peter might have been fooled, for all his intelligence, but
not I!
But now that I
had solved the problem of where to lodge in London London Bridge
But I had
learned something crucial in the past four months. I had learned that these
people of easy and agreeable existence were blessed with less than exceptional
intelligence, a notion entirely new to me. For my conception of things until then
had been born and nurtured in the large working class hatchery of North
Winnipeg, where I had absorbed with my mother's milk the notion that working
class lads did not go to university. That was for 'eggheads'. But one of the
critical lessons I had learned on my travels was that I harboured no less egg
in my head than many I had met on the road who already strode those hallowed halls. Indeed,
the suspicion had taken root in my brain that many of these favoured folk were
blessed with less intelligence than me!
With this
important lesson learned, I resolved to return to the city of my upbringing and
attend its university. In theory, the scheme would be relatively easy to
achieve. To unlock the academic doors, all I had to do was study the one
subject I had failed in my final year at high school, and then pass an examination in
it. But colossal obstacles lay in the way, and the biggest of them all
was that I had no money, for I had spent the little I had possessed on my 'coming of age'.
But one step at
a time. First: how to finance a flight back to Winnipeg, and how to pocket it in just seven weeks, for I hankered to be home for
Christmas. When I put the question to Vince, he said I might try to find
work on the new Victoria Line of the London Underground that was just then under
construction. The pay was low, just the minimum wage of five
shillings tuppence ha'penny an hour, but it was a little more lucrative than other jobs
because you worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. I decided to try my luck
and was hired on the spot for the night shift. Now no longer the wanderer without purpose, without
future, without aim, at almost 23 years of age I had finally seized the helm of my life's
vessel and set sail for more promising waters.
The days of my
new working life were dismally unlike the earlier gently rolling ones
of my travels, passed mainly in the bright, open, invigorating air. Now they fled in
sleep, while my nights dragged by in labour underground. My daily habit was to
leave my digs in Streatham at about six in the evening and trudge to Streatham
Common Station, buying a copy of the Daily
Mirror on the way to nose through on the train, for in those days I’d
joined the great newspaper reading public of the country, and craved daily doses of gossip and scandal.
AtVictoria,
At
Entrance shaft at Cavendish Square, Oxford Circus
At the bottom, a
gate in the cage was opened and the men marched into the mouth of a tunnel
strung with electric lights that shone mistily in succession for a score of
yards before vanishing in the damp darkness.
Access Tunnel under Oxford Circus
The digging in
this access tunnel had been completed, and its walls had been buttressed with
countless courses of segmented cast iron lining rings, while along its floor
ran a pair of rails used to support the tubs loaded with clay spoil that had to
be towed to the entrance shaft for hoisting to the surface, where their contents
were transferred to wagons and hauled off for dumping somewhere in the
countryside.
Train of wagons
loaded with spoil
Hanging from the
upper seams of this heavy casing you sometimes saw a grey ooze of sand and
cement set hard that had been pumped in to fill the space behind. The men
strode rapidly along this subterranean passageway, which soon opened into a
large well-lit gallery where most of the men came to a halt, while I trudged on with others, in relative darkness
again, several feet more into another short tunnel radiant with the light of a
dozen bulbs and ending in a solid wall of London clay that loomed behind a
scaffold. This was the place of my labour.
The digging was
done by a trio of meaty, pasty-faced navies from the west of Ireland
My job - a
somewhat redeeming term for the cross I was making myself carry - in company
with a workmate was to manage the tubs, huge cast iron wagons that could be
coupled together to form a train. When a tub was full, my companion and I had to strain our backs, arms and legs to push it along the tracks back to the entrance tunnel where it
was linked to others and towed by a small locomotive to the foot of the entry
shaft.
At half past nine every night, the three navvies downed tools and then just simply vanished. Their custom, as I was told on asking, was to ascend to the surface at
that time of the evening to swig six pints of Guinness at a local pub. In the meantime, we two
attendant flunkies took a break and ate our snap underground. I no longer recall my companion’s name, but he was not a common labouring man. His speech alone attested to that, since he did not talk ‘common’.
However, his reason for drudging underground like any mole when he was plainly capable of better things intrigued me. He said he was an out-of-work actor waiting for the pantomime season to begin. But from his conversation I sensed that little work in the limelight came his way. Here was a fellow who rejected steady employment, but who was ready if necessary to condemn himself to hard labour, just for the sake of a few fleeting moments upon a stage!
In one of the rare moments of conversation occurring between us and those whom fate had placed in a position of dominion over us, my colleague revealed that he was an actor. If the trio acting out its own comedy on this subterranean stage had been English, it is likely that this half of a pantomime horse that had hobbled to the bottom of this dungeon would have been the victim of some ribbing, since the English working class, like their Canadian counterparts, tend to mock those who aspire high. But here the remark only seemed to breed bafflement.
“An actor?” one of the tunnellers grunted, looking as puzzled as if my friend had said he was an astronaut. He paused for a moment, holding a hunk of clay against his crotch to prevent the word from escaping his brain and swapped vacant looks with his two mutely labouring mates before dumping his possession into the tub. It was as if these three creatures of the inferno suspected the things we said were just meaningless declarations of aliens from the upper world. Why, they even shared a kind of costume to mark the difference, for all three were clad in black shirts, brown trousers and grey gloves. The garments of the underworld? There was a marked difference of etiquette too between these denizens of this netherworld and we two beings from above, for they never asked us our names nor ever told us theirs.
Navvy at work
Navvy enjoying a
drink of water
The navvies were
paid a piecework rate, so much per foot of tunnel dug. Not so us. We were paid
a flat rate, so that we couldn’t earn a penny more no matter how hard we
worked. When the tunnellers tumbled down from the pub every night and clambered
to their planking, we knew straight away what sort of night we were in for.
Depending on how the drink had seized them, they would either continue their
toil in a tranquil manor, labouring steadily through the night, or else they
would attack the face with a vengeance, as if each hack or cut could suddenly
expose a vein of gold. Then the tubs were filled – and overfilled – faster than
we could replace them, and we struggled like a pair of pit ponies that pushed rather than pulled enormous loads of waste from this modern day Hades,
while our trio of tormentors stamped up and down their floodlit planking,
dropping clods with a bang, and damming our alleged idleness with whatever
names their rudimentary brains could shape.
My workmate and
I were mutually civil, even friendly, in the beginning. But as time wore on, the
strain of this enforced suppression to the level of draught animals
struggling under the weight of their load in a dank cavern ruled by a trinity
of oblivious apes began to bite. We argued over rational things at first, but
more and more the dialogue descended into petty abuse. In the end we renounced
human speech altogether and like the beasts we’d all but become just suffered
in silence side by side, shoulders rammed against a great tub overloaded with
muck.
--------------------
Working hours
like ours left little time for socialising, but sometimes I managed to visit
Vince. He was the first person I'd ever met whose musical tastes ran beyond pop
songs. He liked jazz, he told me, a taste that I was never able to nurture, and
he had a fancy for the classical composer Benjamin Britten. I remember once
having a discussion about music with him and his friend Tom, who shared his taste for
classical music. In my proud ignorance, I maintained it was all rubbish, so
Tom took us to his house one evening and played some Chopin. Afterwards I had to admit it was not bad, so
that another of those working class prejudices imprisoning my budding spirit
began to crack.
Other idols
began to tumble too under the impact of Peter Johnson’s keen intellect. To him
I owe the first scrap of psychological knowledge I ever got hold of. I remember
his remark that a motorcycle was a
phallus symbol. After such an assertion, of course, he had to explain to me what a phallus
symbol was. I was scarcely more enlightened by the explanation, but I stored
the label in my brain as a tiny foretaste of those many mysteries I felt would be unveiled at university.
In December, I
was introduced to the theatre. Through McClain I met a girl called Janice from Beckenham. She was pretty and tall and slim.
When she agreed to go out with me I asked her what she wished to do. She said
she had a fancy to go up to London
In the third
week of December, I put an end to my wretchedness as an underground ox and
collected what wages were owing to me. That sum, added to another one kindly
lent to me by my brother, permitted me to buy an air ticket back to Canada. A further
twenty pounds would be coming to me for the sale of my motorbike to McClain, who
lacked any plans for returning home,
and on Monday, December 20th, after saying good-bye to Peter, my
cousin Terry drove me to Heathrow Winnipeg
Trans-Canada Airlines had now changed its name to the bilingual one of Air Canada
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