Two scavengers in a truck?
I live in a small village in the Pennines. Itās just in the lee of the Pennines, in fact: I used to say that it was āin the foothillsā, until someone told me that I was making myself sound like Sherpa Tenzing. But I was right ā these are foothills. Anyway, our house is served by an excellent local authority (very hot on value for money and citizensā rights! It is in the Peopleās Republic of South Yorkshire, btw).
Iām mentioning all of this because the week started with a public holiday. Public holidays are fabulous (though if you work from home you hardly notice them), but in this village, as I guess in many towns and villages up and down the land, they cause a major anxiety: will the dustman (no, Iām not going to say ādustpersonā) come on the same day as usual or not?
I have to say that our dustmen are usually excellent and although they may come late after a holiday, sometimes accompanied by relief workers, they try to stick to the correct date. But there is another, related, angst: will the bank holiday have caused the rubbish collection schedule to go awry?
For the past several years, collecting, storing and disposing of rubbish in this community has become, if not a fine art, then at least an activity requiring more patience and practical intelligence than I, for one, possess. I leave all this to my husband, who on Tuesday evenings may be observed standing outside engaged in earnest conversation with a knot of neighbours. All are keen to get it right – otherwise Armageddon may come lurching round the prettily carved millstone which heralds the start of the village, and the streets will be strewn with detritus.
Iām not the expert, as Iāve said, but Iāve worked out this much: We have four bins, which are blue, brown, grey and green… and a green box. The bins are for paper,Ā glass/cans/plastic, garden rubbish and ādomestic wasteā (I think that means everything else). The box pre-dated the bins, but I understand that itās for bottles and cans (I am now reliably informed that it has been superseded by a bin, but passes muster as an overflow when the grown-up children come to stay) . Each household is issued with a rota.Ā For groups of houses, there is a bin collection point, to which owners must trundle their ‘wheelies’ (rumblingĀ characterises Tuesday evenings). One bin, the grey ‘domestic waste’ one,Ā is emptied on alternate weeks; the three others and the plastic box in the intervening weeks. Woe betide anyone who puts out the wrong bin, puts the bins out in the wrong place, puts the wrong rubbish in any of the bins or fills a bin so full that it wonāt close. The dustmen will then ignore them, refusing to empty them. Recalcitrant or exceptionally stupid householders might even be reported for fouling up the process!
The twenty-first century has debunked or devalued many occupations. Lawyers have lost their gloss and bankers are positive pariahs. Teachers and nurses are still respected by ordinary people, but continue to have scorn sprayed on them by the government. Jobs in high street retailing, always a young personās industry, have been decimated by out-of-town shopping centres and semi-automated check-outs. It is with a mixture of irony and amusement, therefore, that I observe that the opening decades of this century have witnessed the rise and ever-upwards-rise of the dustman. Dustmen today are no longer Alfred Doolittles orĀ Lonnie Donegan’sĀ āMy old manā. They are not shuffling, shifty or half-sharp. They are tough and businesslike, assiduous workers running a streamlined system, a system that is vital and in which they are all-powerful. These dustmen are not the bent-over, bandy-legged figures of my youth. They are tall, strong men*, rather smartly dressed in their donkey jackets, uniform overalls and fluorescent gilets, all sporting safety boots and brightly-coloured industrial rubber gloves. Anger one of these dustmen at your peril.
It is a supreme example of social justice at work. Having been a bookseller, which I admit is a privileged career, certainly at what is known as the āhigh endā of retailing, Iāve often reflected how much we undervalue those who perform the services that make our daily lives run smoothly. Waiters and waitresses have always been near the top of my list of the under-appreciated, because, as a student, I worked as a waitress (also as a chambermaid, which was close to being a slave, in a posh hotel). Iāve no first-hand knowledge of emptying bins (a job at which Iām sure I would be very bad), but I do know that, for at least a century, dustmen were practically the British equivalent of untouchables. How magnificent that they have turned the tables now! More power to their elbow! May their spirits ever increase!
Perhaps by the middle of this century, when weāre told that most of us will be living in cities and have to find new ways of working together with less personal space, dustmen will have climbed much further up the ladder-rungs of the career hierarchy. As university degrees become more devalued and more bright young people choose apprenticeships or go straight from school to manual work, perhaps āYou might consider being a dustmanā¦ā will be one of the options offered from the career adviserās portfolio. And, rather as in Eastern Europe over the past fifty years, perhaps some of our greatest future authors will have supported their early writing years by emptying dustbins.
I feel inclined to refer readers of this post to Lawrence Ferlinghettiās wonderful poem, āTwo Scavengers In A Truck, Two Beautiful People In A Mercedesā, which just about sums up my feelings. Sometimes itās great to be grungy āin the high seas of this democracyā!
[*In July, in Germany, I watched a refuse collection team;Ā itĀ included an immaculately groomed young woman, who engaged in all the tasks and inĀ the banter.Ā I have yet to see aĀ dustbinwoman in this country; even though there may be some, they are a rarity.Ā Ā I blame the grunge ceiling.]