A Traveller's Life (22 page)

I went to the Northern Outfall at Barking, where everything north of the river came out. Not even the most impassioned sewage engineer could say that it was a gay place. Admittedly, the landscaping had been done by the Parks Department, but even Battey Langley might have been up against it if he had to work on a sewage outfall in what had been a marsh in the Thames Estuary, itself set in a nightmare landscape peppered with electric
pylons; and with Beckton Gasworks on the right and, somewhere on the other side of it but invisible, the river, with invisible ships hooting their way up- and downstream.

The route to the Outfall was by an interminable processional way devoid of trees, which reminded me of pictures I had seen of parts of New Delhi, except that a blizzard was raging. Apart from a man bent over the handlebars of a bicycle saying, ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard!', as he ground along into the teeth of it, there was not a soul in sight. Perhaps he was the secretary of a religious, cultural, educational, political or social society on his way to fix up a conducted tour for the members, or an illustrated talk on the main drainage.

Inside the embankment on which the road was built were five horseshoe-shaped sewers which delivered everything produced by three million people in an area of a hundred and twelve square miles of London north of the Thames. It was an experience that I was not particularly keen to repeat, to stand over the detritus pits, surrounded by drag-line scrapers, conveyor belts, hoppers and dumpers – all the tools of this melancholy trade mercifully worked here by remote control – with my mouth clamped grimly shut like a captain on the bridge of a destroyer closing with the enemy, and to think what was passing under my feet: something that looked like mulligatawny soup with dead rats floating in it.

The detritus pits caught the ten thousand tons of road grit not removed by the flushers from the sewers in the course of a year. Eventually it was dragged from the pits and used for what was called ‘reclamation', whatever that meant. On a dry day, and this was a dry day, ‘on account of everything bar sewage being frozen solid', as someone vividly put it, one hundred and seventy-eight million gallons of the stuff flowed out of the five horseshoe tubes. On a nice wet day it rose sharply to two hundred and eighty million gallons. Between eight and nine in the morning, with
everything in North London going full blast, a hundred and ten million gallons went into the main sewers in that one hour. It took seven hours to arrive at the Outfall from the furthest points west, out towards Kensal Rise and Shepherd's Bush. If it was high water for sewage at Kilburn at nine in the morning, it was high water at Beckton between three and four in the afternoon. Dead low water in London was around two in the morning, apart from the odd man from Fleet Street having a bath and Chinese restaurants still washing up, so that, in theory, the quiet hour for the staff at Beckton was around nine o'clock.

Most awful was the screen house where things that were not road grit passed through screens and were disintegrated. For the screen house only some disjointed notes in a discoloured notebook have survived, in which the word ‘Things' appears frequently:

Pipes blowing Things back into the sewage upstream that have already passed through the Medium Screens … Bubbling sounds … Smells like Hell! … Looks like Hell! … Barrow loads of Things that failed to pass through the Coarse Screens … mechanical Rakes slowly lifting Things on which jets of water play until they fall off … Houseproud men painting everything in sight made of iron a dull red … Told that the nastiest job is clearing blocked pumps. See man doing this, or something similar – Could be inhumane alternative to capital punishment.

Outside, in the primary sedimentation tanks which looked shallow but were eleven feet deep, seventy per cent of the remaining solids were removed for further treatment. The liquid part was now chocolate-coloured. How this could be when the last time I looked it was mulligatawny was a mystery.

At this point about fifty per cent of the sewage, thirty per cent of it sludge and Lord knows what else, went straight into Barking
Creek by a sort of stage door and then into the Thames. When the Outfall was originally built no allowance was made for any treatment of the sewage at all. Four large reservoirs were built which could hold six hours' flow until the river was on the ebb, when it was all released, with spectacular results. At the time I was there the sewage men aimed to return to the river fifty per cent of well-treated sewage, the colour of mushrooms, free of sludge and apparently bounding with oxygen. This seemed pretty old-fashioned to me until I heard an Australian expert, who was on a grand tour of European sewage, say – with his teeth chattering, for the wind that day was straight off the Urals – ‘That's nothing, sport. We let the whole lot out at good old Bondi Beach, just as mother makes it.'

The thickened sludge from the primary sedimentation tanks went through two processes of primary and secondary digestion – an unhappy term for these processes, especially for me, recovering from an unseemly lunch of overcooked sausages and custard wodge in the canteen. The sludge produced enough methane to operate a large power-house. The hard-core was pumped at the rate of six thousand tons a day to the end of what must have been the coldest jetty in Britain where, through a big black pipe that looked like an elephant's trunk, it sank into the holds of four sludge ships and was taken twenty-seven miles out into the Thames Estuary to the Black Deep. There, at the south-western end, in the spoil grounds marked by four conical buoys, they let it go. I did not ask the crews whether they enjoyed their work or not. They sailed nine tides out of fourteen a week, in all weathers.
¹

Before going down the Ganges we were invited to go shooting by two Indian princes who were nephews of the Nizam of Hyderabad.

At seven-thirty in the morning the sun was shining almost horizontally through the tops of the teak trees; the jungle floor was still in shadow. We were in deep jungle south of the Godavari river in Andhra Pradesh, in what used to be the State of Hyderabad before the Nizam was shorn of his powers in 1948. This was different jungle from anything I had seen before. Its floor was flat and sandy, and the little water that still came down from the
nullahs
between the hills spilled on to it in places, making it damp and cool. Nearby there was a lake on which, at dawn, we had seen ducks in flight. Beyond it was a village inhabited by Gonds – aboriginals – by nature honest and truthful but now, influenced by plainsmen, drunken and indolent; the men squatting in the shade while their women, who were extremely personable, toiled in the fields in the forest clearings. Near this village a tiger had killed a water-buffalo three nights previously, not for the first time and it had now been declared a cattle-lifter. In the village there was a woman who had been seriously injured a fortnight previously by a bison. Here people were apprehensive of wild animals.
In the fields at night watchmen sat in little
machans
(watch towers) to see that the wild pig and the bison did not damage the crops. They sat in them all night from sunset until dawn with a little fire in a pot for company, alternately groaning and striking some metal object in the hope of frightening the beasts away.

There were tracks of bison everywhere in the forest and somewhere, if one could find them, there were big herds including magnificent black bulls that were absolutely fearless but very difficult to get close to. There were signs of tiger and panther, too, in the dried-up river-beds, and there were the marks left by the sloth bear: deep holes excavated in the search for beetle grubs, shattered ant-hills and the nests of wild bees from which nourishment had been sucked.

Now, without seeing a single bison or a sloth bear, we had been trailing another tiger that was supposed to be a cattle-lifter, trying to anticipate what it would do next. We had set off from the camp that the Nawab had set up in the middle of the twenty-four thousand acres he had rented for this
shikar
, and had followed the dried-up bed of a river which was thick with the prints of tiger: a large one going upstream, a smaller one down. We crossed a mountain on which the rock looked like chocolate. Late in the afternoon we heard the ghostly hootings of long-tailed langur monkeys high in the forest trees. ‘Sign of tiger,' everyone said, including the Gonds.

The big tiger was attacked and eaten by wild dogs, the most terrifying of all living creatures to other wild animals. They tore it to pieces as it ran. The smaller tiger killed a water-buffalo and its calf. It ate part of the big buffalo and dragged the calf eight hundred yards down a watercourse and into a thick clump of thorn in the middle of an open expanse of tall grass. ‘We're going in to get it,' Owly said, and as we went in the words from a hymn, dimly remembered up to now – ‘In Death's Dark Vale' – came
back to me clearly as being curiously appropriate. The tiger was not there. It was not more than a couple of hundred yards away but it was not in the thorn clump. I was pleased.

The Gonds built a
machan
, three feet square, in the top of a rotten old tree above the dead calf. I spent eighteen hours crouching in it without moving, waiting for the tiger which was still not more than two hundred yards away. Instead of coming for the calf it walked up to the river-bed and finished eating the large buffalo.

We had been invited by the Nawab Habeeb Jung of Paigah to go on a hunting expedition to see how the company formed by a consortium of princes, of which he was vice-president, made the arrangements for well-heeled tourists to live the princely life in the jungle, having had a princely time of it in and around Hyderabad, including an elaborate reconstruction of a seventeenth-century Mughal procession, a Durbar in a tent, and a Mughal banquet.

What we were doing now was rather different from anything the paying guests were likely to experience. Before leaving on the expedition I had expressed reluctance to shoot a tiger, or any other wild animal. I was told not to worry. If a tiger was shot it would be a man-eater or a cattle-lifter, and the hunt would take place on foot: there was no question of a
battue
, as the Nawab and his younger brother, the Nawab Naseer Jung (otherwise known as ‘Owly'), found it more exciting to walk them up.

Now, immediately ahead of us was a large humpy black quadruped. ‘Sloth bear,' Owly said. ‘Very dangerous. If it sees us it'll probably attack. You'll have to hit it first and you must kill it clean. They're terrors when wounded.' The Gonds, who had been with us up to now, were already high up in one of the two climbable trees. The Begum, Habeeb's wife, and my wife, were both plaintively trying to climb the other one which was already occupied
by a forest guard, who was busy telling them that there was no more room.

The bear was some thirty yards away, just disappearing behind a thorn bush. It showed no intention of attacking me, but I was now the central figure in a ritual and there was no way out but to do what I was told. Praying that I would not miss I knelt down and waited for it to appear on the other side. I fired the left barrel.

The recoil was something I was unprepared for. The rifle was a .465 calibre Holland & Holland ‘India Royal' with twenty-four-inch barrels, specially designed for Indian princes with a predilection for stalking big game on foot instead of sitting on an elephant and having them driven towards them. It weighs only 10¾ lbs, compared with the .600 Express, which was as big as an anti-tank rifle, fired a 900-grain bullet, and weighed anything from 14½ to 17½ lbs. Although the India Royal had the lowest chamber pressure of any large-bore rifle, it also had tremendous hitting power. The velocity at a hundred yards using a 400-grain, soft-nosed bullet was 2300 feet per second. This was Owly's rifle. At that time it cost £800 ($2240). His other rifle was a single-barrelled .375 Magnum Holland & Holland, firing a 300-grain bullet with a flat trajectory and delivering a knock-out blow not much inferior to the .465. These rifles, Owly's pride and joy, although he had others, were probably the finest heavy- and medium-bore sporting rifles in the world. The only practice I had had was with the .375, shooting at bottles on a lonely forest road which, I was assured, was a perfectly safe place for the purpose, although I thought it dangerous for such an exercise; and I was confirmed in this belief when, in spite of range precautions, six men rode up on bicycles. Life is cheap in India.

Instantaneously with squeezing the trigger I saw the bear rise up in a cloud of dust and then fall, out of sight. The jungle, which up to now had been quiet as the grave, became bedlam. Clouds
of green parrots rose screaming from the trees. I started running towards the place where the bear had fallen, tripped over a stump and fell in a ludicrous position seldom adopted by serious big-game hunters, with both feet in the air. I picked myself up, feeling foolish, and went on. Owly was ahead; my wife and Owly's wife, the Begum, were still up a tree.

The bear was lying on its side, like a great hairy hillock. Blood was oozing from a point somewhere below the shoulder. It looked very dead.

‘Watch it,' Owly said. ‘It may be shamming. And there may be another one.' As he said this the bear began to get up. I fired the right barrel and it fell palpably dead.

At the same moment there was a terrible screeching sound. It was a sound that resembled nothing that I had ever heard. I turned, to see another, larger, even hairier bear tearing towards me out of the bush on all fours. It had a white snout and long, curved white claws; its teeth were bared and saliva was dripping from its mouth. It had none of the pop-eyed false
bonhomie
of the normal bear. Head-on, it looked like a pig wearing a fur coat. It was very angry and the person it was angry with was me.

There was nowhere to run to, no tree to scale. Anyway, sloth bears think nothing of climbing forty feet up toddy palms at night and drinking the toddy from the pots until they've had enough, when they drop off like great hairy footballs. It was the conventional situation in which one always imagined hunters to be, having fired both barrels and with no time to reload. The thing was now twenty feet away, coming straight at me. I had two more bullets but they were in my shirt pocket.

I was very frightened because I knew I was going to be torn to pieces in about ten seconds. For a moment I considered hitting it on the head with the India Royal but it would have been like trying to stop an express train with a stick; besides, incredible as
it now seems in retrospect, I experienced a feeling of prejudice against using a rifle which cost £800 for such a purpose. It was not mine and it might damage it. This may seem unbelievable, but it is what I felt.

When it was about twelve feet away, there was an enormous explosion close to my right ear and a sudden spurt of flame as if someone had just lit a blow lamp. The bear uttered a terrible sound and fell flat in its tracks. Owly had shot it at point-blank range using the .375 from the hip.

I was deeply moved. ‘You saved my life, Owly,' I said.

‘I know,' he said. ‘Lucky it stopped him. Lucky I didn't miss. The .375's only single-barrelled. I only had one round.'

In spite of being told that the bears had attacked a Gond woman I did not believe it and I felt bad about having shot them. Later, when we were back in camp, sitting in copper hipbaths, I said to him, ‘Look, Owly, if there's anything you'd really like …'

‘Well, actually,' Owly said, ‘there is one thing.'

What, I wondered, did Indian princes who were nephews of the Nizam of Hyderabad ask for when they have saved someone's life – another India Royal to make a matched pair for lefts and rights at bison, something operated by clockwork from Fabergé, a saddle from Hermès, a deep-frozen showgirl from Salford?

‘What I would really like,' Owly said, wistfully, ‘is
Dog World
, the Christmas bumper issue. I can't get it here because of the currency regulations.'