Rubbish

The morning sun shone cleanly, brightly and warmly for once.

Putrid discards of meat, rotted and were awash with maggots. They nestled amidst tea and coffee grinds, worn and holed female tights. Which in turn sought to strangle empty baked bean tins and flattened empty milk cartons sprinkled with left over breakfast cereal, and browned cigarette butt-ends from the week’s smoking. Sweet decaying odours mixed with sharp rancidness to form the not so delicate aromas of household rubbish. The rubbish truck stank, the rubbish bins stank, the rubbish in the rubbish truck stank - and I stank.

Insistent flies targeted me like the walking rubbish I had become. They formed buzzing satellites around my head, like some two dimensional cartoons or comedy comic book. My shoulder-length hair was matted at the back of my head, where the dust of ash had fallen from the heavy rubberised skips we used to transfer rubbish from the galvanised metal bins to the business end of the noisy, stinking, rubbish-truck. Those discards caked themselves into my freshly washed hair, at the juncture of my black Led Zepplin T-shirt, and my increasingly moist neck. My new blue (French look) beret was equally covered in ash and dust, and served little purpose except for a quaint sense of the aesthetic. My aesthetic failed, and I looked less like the French existentialist I wanted to be than the newbie rubbish man which I was.

The end of the 1960s, its dreams and romance left me forlorn and back in my home town, broke. I had subsequently married young and now had the responsibilities adulthood coupled with sensibilities of a not yet grown child. I felt so out of place in both worlds, but further out of place in the world of rubbish collection. It could not have seemed stranger had I actually been transported to Mars, and frequently thought I had been.
Gone were the dope and music filled days and nights. Gone too were the passions which left me seeing the dawn in over multicultural West London. Gone the free concerts and the sham camaraderie of the flower children underground with its International Times, Oz and Friendz.

The death of The Beatles ushered in a new age. The flower power revolution bubble burst and, while some managed to continue their hedonism for a few more years, for many of us the starkness of reality hit us well and truly. It was very much a man’s world, a world rejecting romantic, poetic, notions of communes and tribes, replacing them with heavy labouring where little thinking was involved.

In the world of rubbish, all the men on the truck wanted to do was to get the round over as quickly as possible, then drive the fragrant truck to the even more fragrant rubbish dump and dispose of the days’ stinking load. After that, providing the round was properly finished, they were let loose on society for the rest of the day.

I was twenty. I was in the only job I was qualified to do and, surprisingly enough, I hated ever single un-poetic minute I was there. The only saving grace to this bad situation was that I was not alone. My friend J, also moneyless and lacking the credentials of diploma or degree, joined the borough refuse department at the same time and, sneakily, we would try to engineer working together by us both arriving late in the morning. That meant that we had to be put together either on a rubbish truck, a pick-up van, or street sweeping. Of course the rubbish manager was not as stupid as we supposed - having spent most of his life working with human rubbish. He soon caught onto these pathetic ruses.

The worse scenario was when the rubbish truck crews were so depleted that there was little choice but to go on separate trucks for that day. I wish that I could honestly say that I made friends on all the trucks I worked on – I didn’t. Ex-hippies were as strange to the earnest rubbish collectors as they were to us. It was not a marriage made in heaven, but some other place, hotter, and with no air-conditioning.

On the days when J and I went our separate ways I was acutely conscious of just how bad a rubbish collector I actually was. The constant bruising to my left knee and left shoulder were testimonials to this. There is a knack, a technique that a rubbish collector learns pretty quickly. In a sweeping motion he jerks the rubberised skip, full of other people’s waste materials, from the ground, bumps it with his left knee and swings it to his shoulder – the left shoulder. From that position he is able to walk, or stagger, the distance to the rubbish truck and hopefully tip the waste in there. But it takes practice. Practice and a certain dexterity that only some newbies have – I didn’t, hence the bruising of the left knee and left shoulder.

A further point which needed to be learned was timing. A rubbish man does not have a lot of time to perform the above mention function. Speed is the essence. Should, for whatever reason, the rubbish man delay, dilly dally, lose speed or just engage on a go-slow the truck will not wait. This effectively means that the slow rubbish-man necessarily has further to travel with his stinking, full, rubbish skip and each footfall means that the skip is feeling heavier and heavier and the day hotter and hotter, and the truck further and further away. Not to mention that your fellow rubbish men will now be starting to pick up your rubbish bins and empty them into their skips – effectively doing your work, as they must finish the whole round before departing. This means that the slow rubbish man becomes very unpopular with his fellow workers, and begins to gain a most unfavourable reputation.

And so it was.

From the dizzy heights of the rubbish truck collections I was down-graded, or elevated, depending upon your viewpoint, to the pigs-swill truck. This rusting yellow truck was less tall than the rubbish trucks, and had side openings which slid upwards. These were more multi-purpose vehicles used to transport anything from the debris from house clearances, pigs-swill from various restaurants and the charmingly perfumed effluence discarded from abattoirs - it was my honour to help shovel and transport it all.

Gone were the dubious perks of broken and discarded radios - which almost worked, the dress that “will fit the Mrs, it just needs a little darn here and there” or the dead and corroded car batteries which could be traded in for cash, providing you had enough of them and really didn’t mind carting these weighty items around. The only benefit to be earned amidst all this glorifying effluent work was a one pound bag of sausages each, for the yellow truck driver and me his temporary mate, for clearing the abattoir waste and not vomiting into the paper masks the abattoir provided. These plump, freshly abattoir produced, succulent goodies were often proudly presented by nice young men in white overalls, wearing white hats and white aprons sprayed and splattered with cooling animal blood.

Rubbish days lasted for nine months – a pregnancy length and time enough to seek less putrid employment. A man was born. I turned twenty-one while working with eleven old men and their incontinence, at a home for the elderly. I had traded animal excreta for human – I was on my way up.