IN AN ENGLISH COUNTRY DUSTCART

Zygmunt Zamoyski joins up

as a Refuse Enumerator in rural Somerset

`WHY don't you write to the council, they might have something?' the Job centre man suggested, in reply to my enquiry about a temporary job. The winter is not the best time to find temporary work, but perhaps there's some tax job, I thought. Taxation is seasonal, after all. I composed a letter which I thought would be suitable for an aspiring bureaucrat and was a bit surprised to receive a prompt reply sug- gesting I attend an interview for the post, of Trade Refuse Enumerator (Temporary).

What did a Refuse Enumerator enumer- ate? I wondered. Would it involve the malodorous eviscerations of black plastic bags in some draughty depot? The inter- view with Mr X would reveal all. I won- dered how I should dress as a potential Refuse Enumerator. A suit would, perhaps, be too upmarket, jeans and a jersey might suggest too great a laxity in enumeration. I compromised and went in corduroys and jacket, with a shirt collar neither white nor blue. Thus attired I presented myself at an imposing public building in Yeovil. To my relief I saw no row of other hopeful enumerators. A kindly receptionist led me up a flight of stairs, illuminated by the faces of former mayors of Yeovil, and I was ushered in through an open door. Inside was not just Mr X, but a large table across the room with a panel of three behind it. The post of Trade Refuse Enumerator (Temporary) was clearly of more importance than I had appreciated.

At the interview I learnt that I should have to go round on the dustcarts and count the number of trade refuse bags. I was given to peruse the special form for this. Luckily only one copy was required. Had I any questions? Yes, in country and residential areas there would be few if any traders, and consequently little or no enumeration to be done. Could I help load the rubbish? Yes, if I wanted to. It was not officially my job, but it was not prohibited, it was up to me. I felt that I could not sit idle on my high horse (the dustmen do, in fact, sit higher than the driver, on a bench behind him) as an Enumerator, when there was work to be done. I hoped I could do it. Forty-five is not the best age to take up heavy lifting.

An unseasonably fine, warm autumn had suddenly turned into the best of English winters, icily cold but with glorious sunshine and a cloudless sky. I was kitted up in a waterproof top and trousers and a glaring yellow careless-driver-stopping waistcoat. There had been a lot of ice still on the windscreen when I had left home at ten past six, but my old car managed to start and after about half an hour I was at Chaffcombe, near Chard. There I was hailed by a most familiar accent. Slavonic speakers, who learn English late in life, all have as distinctive and recognisable an English as a Liverpudlian or a Geordie. When I hear it in England and strike up in my poor Polish, it invariably evokes a warm and enthusiastic response.

`Dzien dobry panu. Czy pan jest polak?' I essayed. For some moments there was a dumb bafflement within the orange over- alls. Rather surprised, I repeated my greet- ing and enquiry. I had felt very sure of my ground. This had to be 'George the Pole', whom I had been told about the day before. After another silence the answer came, No, I not Polish. I Ukrainian. But I was in Polish Army, in Second Division; but now I not speak it much.' Well, I had better not pursue this, I thought. Ukrai- nians have had quite as sad a history as the Poles, if not worse, since their moments of national liberty and identity have been far more fleeting and their deliberate starva- tion by Stalin before the war far worse in scale than anything the Russians have yet done to the Poles.

There is also quite a history of friction between Poles and Ukrainians. My great- uncle, a Potocki, had governed part of the Ukraine for the Habsburgs and had been assassinated by a Ukrainian nationalist. I remember my father telling me that the first bullet from the assassin's revolver lodged in the hard bone between the eyes and that it had taken two bullets to kill our uncle. However, being a Pole was obvious- ly not too black a mark with George since he had said that he had fought with them during the war.

`You must be Jerzy,' I said, since this is Polish for George and Ukrainian is a very similar language.

`No, no. My name Jaroslav, but every- one call me George.' Yes, a good English name, I thought, patron saint of many a pub. Nothing outlandish about George.

A car drove in to the refuse yard and another figure appeared in the half-light.

This was Paul. Again a foreigner, but not from quite so far. From Slough in fact, and only four weeks into the job. We were on the country run. Another Chaffcombe lorry covered Chard and Ilminster.

`I'm all right in the towns, but all green fields look alike to me,' Paul said.

George was therefore to be our guide, a Ukrainian cicerone for our Somerset tour, and what a wealth of knowledge he stood possessed of. Every farm, every isolated cottage had its tag. The fierce and the friendly dogs were all distinguishable, the habits of nearly every isolated householder well known. The famous television perso- nality was carefully pointed out and the story told of his high fence that the council had disapproved of.

`Back up that one. No turning at top. Not far, just round next corner. She always have one for us. Never miss.' Or 'They never have none. Save it all up for Christ- mas.' At a particularly isolated farmhouse: `Plenty kids here; about 20, I think. They have nothing to do out here, only make kids.'

But I anticipate. Tommy was yet to join us. An actual Somerset native this time and with an accent so pronounced that we all found him hard to understand. Under- standing was also, on his part, difficult.

This was ascribed to an accident when he was a child. He never went out of the cab onto a busy road without a friendly 'Mind the traffic, Tommy,' from George. Once some road-menders put their 'Men at Work' sign near a couple of rubbish bags.

George caught Tommy just in time before he reached the dustcart, rubbish bags in one hand and the road sign in the other.

Tommy was immensely strong and picked up all bags with equal nonchalance. After some special rubbish-moving feat, for ex- ample clearing a cul-de-sac before we reached it and thereby saving the lorry much time, he would get a congratulatory `You are hero!' from George.

Some of the bags were feather-light, but many were not. This was autumn and the gardeners were at work. I picked up one little bag and was amazed at its weight. `They got nothing for us here so they give us stones,' George remarked. Well, we had not asked them for bread. But there was a farmer whom George once asked for a bit of holly for Christmas. 'He not give me nothing. He so tight, you ask for a drink, he give you water.' At another farm an immensely corpulent farmer emerged from a very brambly yard and thrust a full whisky bottle into George's hands as if he had been posting a letter. The colour was a bit strange I thought. 'Cider,' George said. `When I first start I always drunk, so many give us cider. But not so much now. I not like the stuff. Too strong. Only drink a little and you drunk. Wife always said I come from union meeting, not work.'

Some while later a delicious aroma of fermented apples invaded the cab. We were passing a farm and I asked if they made cider there. 'No, they not make it there, not now,' George answered. We checked the cider bottle for a leak. No, the top was firmly on, but the level was down. 'I was thurzty so I 'as to quench me thurzt,' Tommy explained apologetically. I had been bent double doing my best to look out of the window and had not noticed him. Dustcart cabs are not designed for viewing the countryside — not anyhow from the dustmen's bench high up behind the driver.

Iwas new to Somerset. My English family roots are West Country, but not Somerset. My grandmother's family have recently surrendered their Dorset Corfe Castle and Kingston Lacy estates to the National Trust but my grandfather's family still live on properties in Devon that they have had since the Dissolution of the Monasteries and before. But for me Somerset was very much a foreign field. Cricket Malherbie, Coombe St Nicholas, Donyatt and Dowlish Wake were all as novel to me as Sarawak's Sibu, Simang- gang and Santubong had once been. There are still a few wild and woody bits of south-west Somerset spared from the mechanical improvements of modern farm- ing. We often felt the brush of hedgerows on both sides of a lane as we squeezed along it, a strip of grass running down its middle. 'Another motorway,' Paul would shout as he wrestled with the wheel and the endless gear changes.

A hare raced along in front of us. The morning light was still so faint it was hard at first to make out exactly what it was. I remembered the Polish for it. ' Zayonts,' I said to George. He smiled, a very long pause, and then, with obvious pleasure, `Zayats in Ukrainian.' He probably had not spoken that word for 40 years. His wife, now dead, had been Somerset and his language was now, most definitely, English — his English.

We saw plenty of pheasants and the occasional hawk and for the first time in my life I saw a white rabbit in the wild, presumably an albino, not an escaped pet. It was also surprising to see two camels and a dromedary out of the dustcart window. They looked most incongruous in the parkland of Cricket St Thomas, now, among other things, a Wildlife Park. Most of the hedgerows were close-cropped and surburban-looking, now that cutting them by tractor has become so easy, but there were still some unkempt ones such as I used to know. One such had ripped off our wireless aerial so, although we could some- times pick up short-wave calls from the powers that be in the Council, we could never give them any reply.

I am not a morning person and seldom feel properly awake and human until around eleven. Our morning departures from Chaffcombe were sometimes in pitch dark. But there were compensations. I don't think I shall ever forget the beauty of the white rimy fields stretching away on both sides of our high cab, night still on one side and the beginnings of dawn on the other, a rich orange-gold band of light along the horizon tingeing the hoar frost with a pink light and showing up black skeletons of hedgerow trees in silhouette. The lights of one house we came to were on and the curtains drawn back. A family was starting its day. A toddler stood at the window in his pyjamas and waved at us as we passed. George gave a friendly wave back. 'He want to be dustman when he grow up,' he quipped. George seemed to be friends with everyone. And more than just friends sometimes. Once he pointed with pride, 'My daughter', and on another occasion, 'My granddaughter'. He has no sons and does not seem inclined to marry again. His family name will not therefore cpntinue in Somerset in the way that the Dutch names of Chedzoy and Cornelius have survived from the imported wetland drainers of the 17th century. I discovered very little about George's origins. Our one meal break lasted barely a quarter of an hour and conversation then was general. Once on the move, the noise of the engine and the grinder precluded anything more than short shouted ex- changes. George was certainly, however, no townsman as, when we saw a pile of sugar beet, he recalled childhood days of stealing it from the fields and of his mother boiling it down for sugar. I was surprised that he had never seen a pheasant before he came to England, but perhaps the Ukrainian winter is too much for them.

George is amazingly fit for a man of anY age, let alone 62. Not long ago he was flat on his back in hospital for six months .

wonder where I to when I wake up,' he said. He explained that his son-in-law had wrapped a new car around a tree as if it were the most natural little mishap. Once, when he was complaining about his im- mense tax bill I suggested he should marry again and have some more children. 'NO, no. Plenty girl friends. No wife no more.

happy as I am.' He is indeed a happy man doing a worthwhile job and greeted every- where with smiling faces and jokes. He collects the rubbish and distributes his happiness wherever he can. The fifth day was my last with the Chaffcombe country cart. My next week was with the town cart and I missed the countryside and villages, but, far more, the companionship and example of this, in the best sense of the word, Gentleman of the Road. I little thought, when I started, that I should so soon come to regret the fact that my days on the Chaffcombe country cart were enumerated.