Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (7 page)

Tom’s warrior credentials went as far as his army surplus jacket with the deep pockets. We were of an age to have escaped National Service, narrowly, while catching what purported to be an education between European and colonial wars. There was a residue of guilt, emphasized by memorials to the 1914–18 generation, parades and sermons. Bad Wednesday afternoons, bulled boots and blanco’d gaiters, drilling with the Combined Cadet Force. When Tom crossed the open yard at Chobham, back to his car, a few rescued strips of magnetic tape about his person, he recognized our ex-para foreman as a figure very much like the school sergeants of old. A professional brought in to get his revenge on the inadequacies of the future officer class. A man of honour who knew when to look the other way. ‘Pick those bleeding feet up – sir.’

It was a few months before we were let in on the scam. We had worked our way up to the forklifts, jockeying down long aisles, scraping prongs beneath sheep bales and packing cases. Tom had his own vehicle and a new gang. I stayed with Freddie and Mick. One afternoon, the under-foreman, truly one of life’s lance-jacks, stood us aside, before issuing us with pickaxe handles.

‘Smash ’em,’ he said. ‘Smash the fucking lot.’

But with discretion. An old-style CID kicking, if you like: rolled-up directory, no visible bruises. The word had come, on a nod and a wink, that a consignment of gleaming launderette machines was to suffer a malicious and unprovoked assault. An insurance thing. Crushed, splintered, traumatized in the container. Rough seas. Bad roads. Act of god. Property insured far beyond its real value.

At first our blows were apologetic: Freddie cupping a cigarette on the inside of his hand, Mick hunched in donkey jacket. Bright enamel chipped and showed grey. Viewing panels splintered. The multiplied novelty of the innocent machines, stacked in their dim bay like Rachel Whiteread’s reserve stock, was a crime. They were asking for it, weren’t they? All paint and flashy Italian finish. The tarts. It was hard graft, not as easy as it might seem, to play the sanctioned vandal. We tumbled Arctic-pure cubes out of their packaging, down from the top of the heap, and the madness took over. When Leslie the under-foreman returned, clawing back crow-slick hair, chewing thin lips, the job was done. A field of ruin, disembowelled white goods, powdered crystal. There were official forms, pink and yellow sheets, to be completed. Les licked his indelible pencil: ‘Damaged in transit.’

From that episode, the slide into more serious, potentially gaol-time criminality was swift. Chobham Farm was my first intimation of how future grand projects would operate: put up a fence, trade on misinformation, turn a blind eye to misdemeanours. So long as targets are met. One of the defining aspects of current politics is that impossible trick: the manufacture of new clichés.
Direction of travel.
Whatever the mire, whatever revelations of malpractice and incompetence, you trot out this phrase: direction of travel. A committee is sanctioned to draft a report on the latest catastrophe, but all is well in the best of all legacy worlds. We have it sorted: direction of travel. Only the sourest critic would quibble over a sack of lost spanners in Chobham’s mud, or the £100 million misplaced by the London Development Agency, on the same ground, in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.

The
London Evening Standard
(24/6/09) informed its readers that Gareth Blacker, the man who oversaw the purchase of the Olympic site in the Lea Valley near Stratford, was now on indefinite leave, as was his accountant. ‘There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by either of them.’

Forensic accountants are attempting, without much success, to trace the vanished loot. Millions, allocated as compensation for businesses forced to relocate from the Lea Valley, have evaporated like sweat on blotting paper. A spokesperson for the LDA admitted that there had been ‘unforeseen spending commitments’, but any shortfall could be made up from ‘savings elsewhere’. Whose savings he did not say. And none of these local difficulties would affect the confirmed direction of travel. To hell in a handcart.

When I hear these words, in close conjunction, ‘Olympics’ and ‘legacy’, I remember that legacy is a two-edged sword; it cuts both ways through time. And I repeat this mantra: Berlin ’36, Mexico City ’68, Munich ’72. Count the cost. Heap up the dead. Bury that in the direction of travel.

Freddie and Mick are operating a little number on the side, topping up their miserable wages with an unapproved bonus system. And so is Liam. And Clancy. And Gary. And Patrick. It’s never discussed, but there is enough in it to keep a generally depressed and ill-informed workforce happy. They are encouraged to believe, it’s good for their self-esteem, that they are putting one over on the bosses, on the cruel fate that landed them in this wind-swept, hole-in-the-roof, hazchem mire. Foremen and under-foremen, the eyes and ears of the operators, the ones with a key to the toilet, know what is happening, but they say nothing. It can be lost in the paperwork. Your cargo never made it from Tilbury. Road pirates. River thieves. You know what those bloody dockers are like.

The lorry drivers and independent van operatives were grudgingly admired. They pulled away from the gates, they were free men. One cheroot smoker with a black leather cap, like Oskar Werner in
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, was known as the Oncer, meaning he was rumoured to trouser the legendary sum, a sort of sound barrier or four-minute mile for Stratford peons, of £100 a week. Cashmoney. Then there were the ponytail-and-elastic-band, rings-in-the-ear, slogan-T-shirt working hippies, standing off by the rusty chain-link fence to smoke and admire quotation sunflowers, while we trundled boxes on to the flatbed: soon they would be away to Italy, Greece, Turkey. I was never party to those deals, the unlicensed substitutions and additions of freelance travel agents. And their desperate human cargoes. Some of whom, unpapered, would be working alongside me. Their stories, when they told them, when they had the language, merging into the universal babble, the threnody I sometimes imagined in the song of the pylons, the robot-speak of reversing trucks.

The most basic villainy was the old cargo switch. Driver presents bent checker with docket for five cases of baked beans. Bay and slot numbered. Forklift zooms off. Labourers climb among the stacks of unclaimed goods. Lorry departs, papers initialled, with three cases of beans and two cases of tools. A bung for the checker, a few quid for the others. The whole accountancy system is a preamble to insurance forms, misattributions, amnesia. The cargoes of the world sweep in and out again. It’s a lucky dip. You receive the expected number of items, but the contents will be mysterious. Spanners, hairdryers, golf clubs: they vanish. Into pubs and street markets. Sheep casings, slithery talcum powder, outdated Balkan foodstuffs, they are in the Farm for the duration. Kick through bindweed, they’re there now.

All of this winked-at naughtiness, as in a British caper movie with Jack Hawkins, was a rehearsal for the big one. The whisper went around that certain characters – Fred, a bad-lad favourite of the foreman, among them – would be given overtime, night overtime, when the rest of the workforce had dispersed. We would be handling a secret shipment, on bonus. Gold, banknotes marked for incineration, nobody knew. The rumour was confirmed when dark-windowed security vehicles arrived, late in the afternoon, and began setting up silver-dazzle light poles.
It was a film set
. A compound within a compound. The lowlife wanted a piece of this, but they didn’t know what it was.

Duckboards went down across the mud. The goods would be heavy,
heavy.
Uniforms took up positions around their fence within a fence, arms folded. Some of the Chobham suits, careful about where they stepped, looked in, nodded, and drove away. They never risked contamination by talking to the labourers. Come close, by accident, on a fact-finding tour laid on for investors, and the fat man would not acknowledge your presence. You didn’t register. You were not there. If he heard the voice, the RP, the subjects under discussion, he visibly flinched. Then pretended it wasn’t happening. I could see one illuminated window, the outline of the fat man, staying late, keeping out of the way, watching us.

The main gates are closed and secured. Armed, helmeted and visored mercenaries surround the brightly lit pathway between the truck that is more like a safe on wheels and the unmarked vans brought in, one after another, to take the drums away. Now we hear, a guard mentions it, what the cargo is: platinum. More valuable, so they say, than gold or silver. Weighty to manhandle, impossible to divert. The drums will be redistributed and gone in a single session. They come off a train in an unregistered siding and they will be departing who knows where. And every canister, every nugget, is accounted for, ticked off on the manifest.

Freddie can’t see a way round this, it’s out of his league. Mick laughed when the boy smoker suggested piercing the drum with the tines of the forklift. The men from the Mint were too canny for that: no forklifts, no mechanical assistance. Heft, sweat, manhandle, two to a drum. Checked and numbered. But Mick had the tattoos on his knuckles, the mythical past. Mick was away to Canada. He studied the necklace of lights, the halogen lamps, and identified a small pool of darkness. The drums were standard issue. We had others very much like them. After an hour of repeated journeys, truck to van, we were given a tea break.

‘Get the forklift,’ Mick said.

Freddie, extinguishing his cigarette, was away. He could navigate the aisles at night, using his radar like a bat. If the switch could be made, the heavy drum, the one packed with nuggets of platinum, money purer than money, rolled into the dense undergrowth, out by the fence, they would come at it, before morning, from the other side. Wire-cutters and white van: an uncanny replay of
Bronco Bullfrog.
Neither Mick nor Freddie had a car, or a licence. Nothing to search. They were clean. The presumption, when the switch was discovered, next day or soon after, was that outsiders had broken through, while the operation was in progress. An inside job. Lengthy, sweated interviews for all concerned. Freddie would brazen it out. Mick would be gone. Mick had a record. Mick would be fingered. If they could find him.

Freddie told me, if his story had more validity than any of the other legends of Chobham, that the platinum nuggets were the coldest metal he had ever held in his hand. He lost his nerve, went out fishing with a mate, dropped the half-full canister into the Lea, not far from the Manor Garden Allotments. Mick was never heard from again. The single nugget Freddie retained was a fetish for what might have been. It didn’t happen. On my last Thursday, after we’d been down to the bank to collect our wages and gone across the road to a panelled pub, Freddie put the nugget on the table.

‘I’m off,’ I said. ‘I’ve saved a couple of hundred. We’re going back to an island called Gozo.’

‘Do what?’

He couldn’t get his head around it. No clubs, no action. No workmates. No women. I wasn’t stupid enough to mention the writing, the book I wanted to complete.

‘Pick it up.’

The nugget was the size of an after-dinner mint, curved, silvery. It rocked, on and on, when you set it down on the flat surface. As if it had absorbed the rhythm of the world. It was fused from two separate parts; smooth on the surface and like glinting charcoal in the crack. A mysterious and beautiful trophy I had no desire to possess.

Years later, addicted to circumambulations of the Olympic site in the Lower Lea Valley, I found myself drawn back to Angel Lane in Stratford, the site where Chobham Farm had once been. In September 2009, entrance to the Greenway, running from Old Ford to Beckton, was prohibited.

WELCOME TO THE PEOPLE’S PARK
.

The latest security guards are Gurkhas, beneficiaries of a campaign by Joanna Lumley. An invading regiment, self-contained, easy in movement, with whom pedestrians are not inclined to argue. Helmeted, they sit in kiosks or invigilate tiny portions of mesh fence, making time into a grid, witnessing this monumental project of reverse archaeology. To the lazy occidental eye, the Gurkhas suggest a terracotta army nodding visitors through, waiting to be buried in the trenches of a structure in which they have no investment. An artist of the edgelands has pressed a bunch of yellow tennis balls into the fence, strange fruit losing its fur to the weather.

SECURITY DOGS PATROL THIS AREA
.

A technician in a yellow hard hat, raised by the arm of a yellower cherry picker, is knitting extra strands of wire into the new perimeter fence. Fences replace fences, at mounting cost, as the grand project evolves. The Greenway landscape is like one of those ever-rolling advertising hoardings you watch while waiting for the lights to change on the A11 into Stratford. The operatives have a name that captures, quite accurately, the keynote of the Olympic development: Teutonic efficiency (engineering, surveillance) and Celtic PR (otherwise know as bullshit). VolkerFitzpatrick (a VolkerWessels Company).

Ah Stratford, my Stratford! If there is a less enticing blot in this country, than the haemorrhaging roadcrash of the area surrounding the transport-hub station, I’ve been fortunate enough to avoid it. The air around here
isn’t
. It’s something else, something new, requiring gills and built-in decontamination filters. Particulates, red dust. Carcinogenic dreck painstakingly excavated to facilitate economic adventurism and botched vanity architecture. Labyrinthine pound-stretcher malls. Ramps going nowhere. You can’t breathe. You don’t want to breathe this stuff, it shreds your lungs. The treacle of incineration: human, plastic, verminous. A crazy street-preacher screaming into a loudhailer. Mobs seething towards escape hatches, viral-torpedo buses. A state-of-the-art station with the same old cattle-car service. Now enhanced by disembodied voices bringing you up to speed on the latest cancellations.

The thing Stratford has going for it, at the point where visitors are collected by safari vehicles or minibuses for their tours of the Olympic site, is a world-class fence.