DUSTMEN'S DAY

By KENNETH HOPKINS T the far side of the cricket field, and a little apart from the main colliery, stood a long row of buildings. These were much older than the colliery proper, and were probably once part of a farm hereabouts. They had now been converted into a club-house and so forth. As I advanced over the field, successfully trying not to feel like a miner, I could see over one door the little notice board I was looking for : "Ministry of Labour." I have drawn the dole here and there up and down the country in my time, and glad of it, too, but never before in a cricket pavilion. I used to enjoy those walks through the fields.

One morning the clerk beckoned me to one side and said, "Have you thought at all of taking a job ? " As he said this a person by the door drew near us, and for a moment I thought I was going to be arrested. But he was the representative of my future employers. "It's healthy work," he said without heat. "Plenty of overtime," urged the clerk, unaware that he had said the wrong thing. "You can knock up as much as three-ten a week," the stranger promised.

Pensively, I capitulated ; it wasn't the three-ten, but I allowed myself to hope that after a few weeks or months with the Rural District Council I might qualify for a pensicin. When I returned home my wife was a little surprised to hear that I had taken a job, especially when I told her I was going to be a dustman. Very much too early for my convenience the next morning I set out. I was to meet the dust-cart and her crew down at the next village. I was rather shy. I felt too well-dressed.

I am a little handicapped because I can't remember these chaps' names, except one they called Ack. But they were as friendly and idiosyncratic a collection of citizens as you'd find anywhere. And I'll tell you a strange thing: you know here in the South we smoke a lot of Weights and Woodbines ? Well, up there it's mostly Robins and Park Drive. I've seen a Worksop dustman go white with rage when he couldn't get ten Robins, just as a Metropolitan might if he couldn't get Woodbines.

Well, the way they do it in those parts is two men go in with a little trolley and trundle out the dustbins to the pavement edge. The lorry-driver gives them half-a-street start. Then he brings along his lorry and the rest of the crew, and they tip the rubbish into the lorry. A final chap on his own trundles the empties back. This is a lonely job unless you know the customers pretty well and also exposes you single-handed to the dogs. But, on the other hand, there isn't any heavy lifting.

Do you know what these colliery people do ? They fill up their dustbins with the lumps of solid rock that come freely mixed with their free coal. Accordingly, quite a small dustbin with a few innocent tea-leaves and ashes on top may turn out to weigh three hundredweights. My first morning I was assigned to Ack and sent on ahead to learn to trundle out. I had the little trolley, and Ack with matchless aplomb trundled the dustbins out by hand. By God, what a genius that fellow had I Tilting a heavy dustbin on its edge, he would propel it by an easy movement of the flat of his hand and wrist on the top of the lid, rather as you used to be able to sec porters do with milk-cans. My trolley had two wheels and a sort of double hook which hitched under the dustbin handles, after which one canted the whole thing forward and lifted the dustbin up. The offside wheel squeaked execrably, and quite spoiled my pleasure in an otherwise innocuous operation. It was a little more difficult with dustbins with one handle torn off, and quite impossible with old galvanised baths. A lot of the people, I suppose for fun, had dustbins with no bottoms in, which could be trundled out by a careless operator leaving a long trail of peeling; ashes, bits of rock

and baked-beans tins along the pavement. •

Half-way through the morning we knocked off for a bit of snap. I had not the faintest idea what snap was, and I suppose you haven't. It turned out to be food. We sat on a wall, or on the pavement edge, eating snap and disparaging the foreman—I don't mean Percy, but the chief one at head office. Percy told me I valluld have to join the union, and showed me what to do. I don't want you to think that we country dustmen arc slow chaps.

We were quite as good as they arc in the town. We had the most modern equipment, too. Our lorry went up at the sides like a fish- and-chip oven. Come to that, it had a slightly fishy smell to it, as well. At the end of the day, especially if it was raining, we used to go home in it with the covers down, and it felt rather like being inside the drum of some fantastic lottery. Ack and the others would sit round smoking and chatting, and every now and then as we went over a bump a shovel or a pepper-pot of that curious pink powdet would come sculling across the iron floor. By the end of the day everyone had some little treasure or other—for people often throw things away that arc really not a bit worn out. I found six or eight dozen razor blades once, obviously the accumulation of a lifetime, and hardly used at all. Then there's the kitchen fender, which looks quite nice now it's painted Now I discovered I'd need one of those enamel cans with a cup. shaped lid for making tea in. Tea, by the way, is never " made " in those parts. It's "mashed." And tea mashed in a bucket is a very different affair from tea made in a pot—though mind you I've never tried it with China tea. At the end of my first day I could smoke Robins and discuss the foreman with anyone.

We had two lorries and several branch establishments. At one of these, in a couple of tumbledown barns, an old, old man who was past even trundling the empty bins back was busy all day sorting bottles into different piles, and bashing tins flat. He had a rough and ready press which would squash tins and make them up into a short of square cake, ready to be sent away and made into new tins again—or bombs, I suppose in those days. Ile also pottered about putting cardboard boxes into heaps. When the rain dripped through the roof he used laboriously to shift all his carefully stacked cakes of flattened tin to make room for the cardboard before it got wet ; and then the foreman would say, "Don't put that tin there or it will go rusty," and it all had to be shifted back. No one ever thought of mending the roof.

Another of our outposts was the Corporation tip, a wild barren spot inhabited by one old man who sojourned in an open-fronted hut not much bigger than a sentry box. The first part of every day he spent collecting sticks for his fire, and after that he was employed in keeping the tip tidy. That is, he went round after the lorries had tipped their load, rake in hand looking for rats, and occasionally he kvelled the ground a bit. This was a rugged old man like a latter-day Lear, and I greatly admired him.

One day—it was the winter of 1941, when we had all that snow— we all went off early and didn't bother with dustbins. We had a shovel each, and we drove out to the tip where the snow was four feet deep, and began digging. I worked like one possessed. I was convinced we were digging out the old man. But he turned up from some corny at snap-time, and we were only digging a road in for the lorries. The tip, of course, was always on fire underneath, and it was odd to sec smoke curling up through the covering snow.

The way you lift a full dustbin up is like this. Two chaps stand one each side of the dustbin, which is beside the open lorry.

With their backs to the lorry they lift a handle each of the dustbin, with a " Hup ! ", at the same time catching it underneath by the other hand and tipping it over the side of the lorry. It sounds complicated, and perhaps I haven't got it right, but it was some such method. I've lifted hundreds, I can tell you. You had to be careful that the lorry didn't drive on while you did it, but it never did because Peroe was most considerate.

You wouldn't think chaps would have to work overtime emptying dustbins, but we did. Some of our best men had gone to the war, and we were short staffed. On the other hand, people seemed to be chucking out more and more cabbage stalks, ashes, and baked- beans tins. At one time, indeed, there was talk of working till mid- night with flares, but it never came off because of the black-out. And daily I got more and more sturdy and like one of themselves, they told mt.

A few days before I received my calling-up papers for the Army I got the sack. It was some system they had—the chaps told me—of getting out of having to re-engage me after the war. So I never actually qualified for a pension. And I suppose when dustmen see me now they look upon me as just another civilian.