Rubbish Raker
To those of us who have been brought up in what we consider to be normal conditions, in moderate wealth, health and happiness; to those of us who like to believe we are endowed with normal attributes, the senses of humour and proportion, self-discipline and a modicum of selflessness, John Petty seems to come from another world. For he is one of the Angry Ones, one of the ever- growing brigade of young men who live in a state of perpetual indignation tempered by bouts of acute self-pity. It is hard to understand them, harder still to love them, but they are too disturb- ing to be dismissed with a shrug.
John Petty makes his living by picking waste metal off 'tips' near Walsall. Though suffering from a severe physical disability, though con- stantly racked with pain, he journeys miles every day in every weather to rake through rubbish, facing further hardships in the shape of bellicose rival rakers, police, and rats, in surroundings of unparalleled desolation. At night time he writes —and writes extremely well—with an invalid father and mother going insane as company.
Mr. Petty conforms to no known pattern. He is neurotic, articulate, and fastidious, yet chooses to work with illiterates and bullies. He is not brandishing a political torch. He is only occasion- ally aware of class distinctions. He does not markedly range himself on the side of the under- privileged and yet his book, with its searing descriptions of poverty and misery, might be the Work of an anarchist. His ability to make vivid
the scenes he portrays is only equalled by his capacity for self-absorption. For, like all who feel they are outcasts, who cannot fit into the con- temporary mould, John Petty relates everything to himself. All the cruel brilliant passages in his book as well as the sudden dives into senti- mentality come from a man who is supremely aware of his own importance.
A poet, a dreamer, scratching for aluminium runnings on a scrap heap, with a tearing pain in his chest, Mr. Petty has not so much been rejected by the Welfare State as rejected it. He is an uncompromising individualist, and like some sick eagle, bats his wings in the face of the world from the top of his sad slags, rather than come down and be caged. Happily he writes with a golden quill, and his record of a baffling life spent with Dickensian characters in a lunar landscape
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