Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (4 page)

My pocket is heavy with change. The Chobham boys know the precise cost of their mid-morning sugar hits, the quantity of tobacco required to pace the day. They wait by the fence: big Horse and his pie-munching mate, Streak. Horse is no cob, a shaggy, heavy-boned shire. Monobrow. Dense sideburns like wings on a helmet. Dandy’s floral neckerchief, knotted at the throat, to dress the brown smock. A giant and a fop, despite the flat-footed, stately waddle towards the incoming lorry. The thump of greeting. Streak is a Dodger figure, quick, funny, neat as a knife. Quilted waistcoat over denim jacket, muffler at the throat in the old Silvertown fashion. A type. An archetype. But they are men of this place, both of them; the lumbering Horse and his goading, protective mate. Who snaps through bacon rolls, pies, cheese sarnies, mugs of tea, without putting on a pound of weight. Married with kids, responsible at twenty-two, and advising Horse how to go about it, how to get a good woman into his bed.

Why Horse, I wondered? From the TV show
Bonanza
, the dim brother of the Ponderosa ranch? Wasn’t he Hoss? It was a family thing, the big man told me, while we waited on a case of spanners that couldn’t be found. A desultory chat between accidental colleagues. They were fishermen, his folk, from the mouth of the Thames Estuary, the mudflats. They pushed a sledge-like device called a horse out in front of them. And it took some pushing. To the line of nets in all weathers. That was the legend. Horse belonged in
Great Expectations
, where Streak with his natty outfits, his chat, was a man of the city, comfortable with coded language and arcane practices. A survivor with the eyes of a ferret.

One of the strange aspects, thinking back, is that we didn’t talk football. Tom and I, middle-class dropouts, we talked football. We made expeditions at the weekends to White Hart Lane, Highbury, Upton Park, even Stamford Bridge, without any convinced tribal allegiance; a nod towards Tottenham, an antipathy for Arsenal, but essentially it was the journey to the ground, the theatre of it, in through the turnstile on a whim. Upton Park: the monkey chants for Clyde Best. The fabled wit of that academy of footballing science: ‘Where’s your handbag, Moore?’ As Bobby, comb in hand, strolls through another routine encounter, not yet sainted and marooned on a triumphalist plinth in Barking Road. The Chobham mob, drawn from everywhere, grafting to get by, would take overtime before Saturday spectatorship without a moment’s hesitation. Football was no longer the opiate of the workers and not yet the corporate monster devouring the world’s financial systems, smokescreen respectability for oligarchs, arms dealers and corrupt statesmen.

There was another reason for leaving the site during working hours. And it shocked me. One of the young married men passed, at a clip, as I emerged from the newsagent. ‘Can’t stop, mate. Only got twenty minutes.’ He was seeing a woman on the estate, a quickie, before her husband came off shift. This was accepted behaviour, a casual genetic exchange, a break in the day for both of them, reflecting the chirpy atmosphere of Joan Littlewood’s 1962 film,
Sparrers Can’t Sing.
Every man a James Booth. Every housewife in the new tower block a Barbara Windsor. Details of the encounter, positions achieved and attempted, kitchen table, shower cabinet, enlivened our early-afternoon torpor. ‘She said, so I said. Wash your fucking hands, before you put your fingers up my arse. I told her. Dirty mare.’ Then home to the wife and kiddies for tea. Life happened in separate compartments. One law for the terrace, one for the high-rise. The Chobham Lothario didn’t look much like James Booth or George Sewell. Still less Michael Caine in
Alfie.
He could, at a pinch, have been number three or four from the left in the Dave Clark Five.

Freddie Tanner, our checker, was a youth of about eighteen, very sure of himself, unfazed by coping with two members of a different species. We did the job, he took the piss. Skinny. Long-fingered. Cupped cigarette. One-handed virtuoso of the forklift. He lived at home with his mum and dad in a tower block overlooking what is now the Olympic site. He loved the way you could move from room to room to enjoy sunrise or sunset. The complexity of all that life: railways, Stratford Broadway, Lea Valley. Hoists, scrub woods, marshes, roads where the traffic never stops flowing.

The view that Freddie describes is a novelty, no working Londoner has ever seen it before. He buys into the utopianism of the planners’ vision, the vertical streets with their smart Swedish kitchens and bathrooms: the setting for Joan Littlewood’s film. New buildings provoke new energies. You drudge down there in the mud, hassled by foremen and time-keepers, underpaid, underappreciated, and you are still in the great hive, the buzz of argument, jokes, rucks, snatched sex, thieving, comradeship. Then you retreat, at the end of the day, to the pristine flat. The floating pod that demands an upgrade in furniture, bed linen, electrical goods. A social space inspiring adulterous encounters, no strings, by evading the constant vigilance of the terraced streets, the twitching curtains. Gossip at the front step. Accountable neighbours.

After a few months as a Chobham labourer, the system was changed. No longer did we receive pay, cashmoney, in little envelopes (deductions itemized). It was a pinched season of power strikes, rubbish strikes, ineptitude and obfuscation: with not a cigarette paper between the political strategies on offer. Wage snatches were a natural extension of industrial work practice. Professional villains, local firms in Canning Town and Forest Gate, operated on the model of dying Lea Valley enterprises. The checker (or wheelman) and his group of tried-and-trusted associates. Put in the graft and spend the profit before the week is out. The only difference between hardened thieves and disaffected workers is the rush, the adrenalin boost of high-stakes risk. The wages you collect, as an over-the-pavement merchant, belong to someone else. You cut out the middlemen, the accountants shaving their percentage. You drop the tedious business of card-punching, the long hours. Crime was a logical response to illogical conditions.

Management at Chobham Farm responded by instructing their workers to open bank accounts: thereby initiating them into the slippery world of credit, the festering itch of material ambition and future catastrophe. The old cash exchange worked pretty well, you could see what you had. Money was divided to pay the week’s bills. What was left over went on pleasure. You started each week with empty pockets and a clean slate. Or so I rationalized the process. As we ambled down Angel Lane, saluting that lovely creeper-covered Victorian cottage, towards Stratford. The paperback in my pocket was a beat-up, grime-fingered Dante. When I stole a few minutes, lolling on an Australian sack, in a furtive alcove, I leafed back and forth through the sticky pages, to find the stanzas I would reread before I nodded off. The stuff about lost wretches who prostitute themselves for gold and silver. The torments waiting for usurers in red braces.

Bankers with heavy bellies, advocates of fiscal alchemy, let them dance on hot coals and wade, up to the chin, in tides of their own excrement. Delightful reveries for a walk to the Midland Bank. Most of the boys handed over their cheques and took their weekly wages in cash. Others were seduced by the potency of slim new chequebooks. They were in the system now. Tom, his film money not quite depleted, banked his tithe and built up his reserves. Freddie, he considered, was a natural for the new City. A whippet on the trading floor. Lively. Quick-witted. Amoral. Uninhibited by education. Why wrestle a forklift truck over buried rails when you could be cruising tarmac in a silver Porsche?

The panorama from Freddie’s Stratford tower was echoed by the establishing shots in
Bronco Bullfrog
, the 1970 film by Barney Platts-Mills. I took this as a timely conjunction of two worlds: the independent, low-budget cinema we had left behind and the dramas of territory in which we now worked. Freddie, if he hadn’t been otherwise engaged, could have played a part. Non-actors, inspired by Joan Littlewood, and given just enough of a framing structure by Platts-Mills, enacted a fable of place, shot in the wake of Italian neo-realism and the mood of British Free Cinema. The way Oxbridge directors, living vicariously, explored aspects of proletarian life, boys’ clubs, funfairs, bikers’ cafés, the seaside. Platts-Mills was the son of the barrister who defended Ronnie Kray at the 1969 trial in which he received a guilty verdict and a life sentence, with the recommendation that he serve ‘not less than thirty years’.

Viewing
Bronco Bullfrog
while working alongside the rail yards where a fictitious robbery occurs was a disorientating experience. The film was produced by Andrew St John, a friend of Renchi Bicknell, and the man who set up
Mari’s Girls
, Renchi’s abortive ballet short. The editor was Jonathan Gili, an associate of John Betjeman. And in later years a customer for my used-book catalogues. Beyond his involvement with Betjeman’s topographic excursions, Gili designed the illustrated bear story
Archie and the Strict Baptists.
Philida Gili, whose drawings accompany the Betjeman text, was Jonathan’s wife and the daughter of the celebrated engraver Reynolds Stone. It struck me that the credits for
Bronco Bullfrog
, this modest Stratford story, shot at the optimum moment of social transformation, with disenchanted kids breaking away from the limited expectations and timid conventions of their parents, represented an honourable form of cultural tourism. The modest budget of £18,000 was enough, even then, to buy two or three terraced houses in the area, or a large property, with established garden, on a Victorian square in Hackney. The crew were West Londoners, while the cast, or most of them, came from the streets in which the film was set. The entire episode, like much that followed, was an invasion, a raid on exoticism. East London was a tribal, sexualized wilderness. The docks were dying, but you could smell the river.

Cinema, like rock music, was a way for connected public-school boys to slipstream the energies of a romanticized underclass. The process of colonization went back to the post-war landscape of ruins, when London thrillers exploited bombed docks, rubbled terraces, street markets and rail yards. Among the jobbing repertory company of English gargoyles, you might find Dirk Bogarde as a quiveringly neurotic cosh boy, slumming spivs with strangulated RADA elocution, and teenage psychopaths impersonated by Dickie Attenborough. The movies paralleled, or anticipated, regeneration packages. If an area was striking enough in its dereliction to work as a film set, it was ripe for development. The Barney Platts-Mills expedition to Stratford, for all its virtues, was a signifier of coming land piracy. The arrival of our small troop of counterculturalists at Chobham Farm represented the same process in a different form. I was not there because I wanted to lose myself in a George Gissing abdication of status and identity. The landscape seduced me, it was an unwritten nowhere in which to launch a lifelong journal. My workmates were not heroic presences, trapped by economic pressure in degraded wage slavery, they were characters who might or might not turn up in a future fiction. Fortunately, the typed blue sheets, bound with twine, on which I kept a record of that winter’s work, have been lost. I can recover the diary film of the yards, bruised light, burning railway carriages, autumn sunrises, but the emotional formulae of the time, stark language seizures, have vanished into the attic jumble where everything has an equal value and nothing can be located on demand.

The double-barrelled film-makers of the Platts-Mills era (
Bronco Bullfrog
was photographed by Adam Barker-Mill) were the pre-forgotten. Respectable British Film Institute footnotes. The valiantly unnoticed waiting to be discovered by media-studies theorists. Platts-Mills came east to collaborate with local kids doing classes at the Theatre Royal. In workshop exercises, initiated by Joan Littlewood, youths from the estates pantomime the toffs: class satire taking the crap out of judges and bent briefs, a milieu with which Barney Platts-Mills had some familiarity. He documented these sessions, preparation for
Bronco Bullfrog
, in a short film called
Everybody’s an Actor, Shakespeare Said.
As with all period footage, it is the random details of time and place that catch our eye. A torn centrefold from a vanished publication,
Parade
: Jayne Mansfield, her augmented bosom in a wispy white wrap, recalling her visit to Hackney for a budgerigar show. A poster for Edward Judd in
Invasion.
‘Aliens crashland near a hospital and mount a night attack on an English village.’ Scratchy young men in considered outfits that don’t cohere, tight trousers showing white socks, work boots with cardigans and trilbies, negotiate with the camera: actual and simulated boredom, snorts of derisive smoke.

‘Hang about the streets, it’s all I’ve ever done … Stratford, Plaistow, Forest Gate, East Ham, Leyton, Chingford, everywhere.’

‘It’s not acting,’ one of the lads says, ‘it’s remembering.’

Washed-out colours of Hackney Marshes. Blue-grey prairie divided by scraggy rivulets and clogged canals. The Stratford boys, time out from work, kick a ball around, encumbered by one-size-fits-everybody overalls. They decide that the theme of their drama will be redevelopment. They have done the research. They know that civic structures have been torn down to provide a car park. They pretend that the marshes are a private golf course, on which developers schmooze corrupt politicians. ‘From St John’s Church to Maryland Point, that’s what I want to bung you for – to get the buildings off it, to build a car park.’ The fantasy is recurrent and persuasive. A reflection of the late 1960s and an anticipation of the coming millennium. ‘I’ll make a bomb off it, off every car that comes in there … Take everything down, no clubs on Stratford Broadway.’

The script of
Bronco Bullfrog
, unconstricted by a bullshit narrative arc or conventional three-act structure, derives from the earlier Theatre Royal exercises. Characters, remembering not acting, move around just enough to quantify a portrait of place. Allotments. Prefabs. Tower blocks. Steamed-up, all-day-breakfast caffs. Launderettes. And the rail yards that provide the setting for the fateful robbery: the Borstal runaway Bronco Bullfrog, in his premature braces, wedged in a room of useless white goods. Territory is familiar, lifelong, and endured with affectionate exasperation: circumscribed lives made awkward by hormonal surges and the transitory beauty of youth. You can’t help wondering about the afterlife of Anne Gooding, who was discovered by Platts-Mills while ‘working in a dairy shop’. Her presence on the screen, docile but dissatisfied, not yet resigned and defeated, is easy and authentic. Tumble of hair and panda eyes. That sense of always looking out of the frame in any conversation, expecting the worst. Del Walker uses a flair for troublemaking as a badge of integrity. ‘He challenged Joan’s or anyone’s authority,’ Platts-Mills said. Del is the one slumped at the back of the class, cranking up the volume on his alternative soundtrack. The actors were given a share in the phantom profits of the film’s brief notoriety.