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the public sewers pumping in all day, it’s like a prisoner up to his neck in water in a cell with only a hand-pump to keep himself conscious, the whole place is always on the point of going under.
    So we only treat the primary flow, we keep it moving up these screws, we get the solids settled out and then push the activated sludge back through. Not much I can do.
    I walk on metal grilles above smelly water, I climb the ladder, I stand on a bridge above a brown lagoon, little flocs of sludge and clarified liquor spilling over the edge of the outer circle. The bridge is turning very slowly, sweeping the spill-off round and I’m thinking illicit sneaking thoughts – no one can see me up here, just me and machinery and tiny organisms.
    I’m in charge as far as Dartmoor, the metabolism of the whole South West, starting with clouds and flushing down through buildings and bodies into this underground grid of pipes, all ending up with me up here on my bridge – a flare of methane burning off blue at one end of the works and a culvert of clean water discharging out the other end, twenty BOD, nine ammonia, all the time, as and when
    It happened when oak trees were men
    when water was still water.
    There was a man, Trojan born,
    a footpad, a fighter:

    Brutus, grandson of Aeneas.
    But he killed his parents.
    He shut his heart and sailed away
    with a gang of exiled Trojans;
    a hundred down and outs the sea
    uninterestedly threw
    from one hand to the other, where
    to wash this numbness to?
    An island of undisturbed woods,
    rises in the waves,
    a great spire of birdsong
    out of a nave of leaves.
    There a goddess calls them,
    ‘Take aim, take heart,
    Trojans, you’ve got to sail
    till the sea meets the Dart.
    Where salmon swim with many a glittering
    and herons flare and fold,
    look for a race of freshwater
    filling the sea with gold.
    If you can dip your hand down
    and take a fish first go
    or lean out and pick an oyster
    while a seal stares at you,
    then steer your ships into its pull
    when the tide’s on the rise
    at full moon when the river
    grazes the skirts of the trees
    and row as far as Totnes
    and there get out and stand,
    outcasts of the earth, kings
    of the green island England.’

    Thirty days homeless on the sea,
    twelve paces, then turn,
    shacked in a lean-to ship,
    windlash and sunburn.
    Thirty days through a blue ring
    suspended above nothing,
    themselves and their flesh-troubled souls
    in sleep, twisting and soothing.
    They wake among landshapes,
    the jut-ends of continents
    foreign men with throats to slit;
    a stray rock full of cormorants.
    They sail into the grey-eyed rain,
    a race of freshwater
    fills the sea with flecks of peat,
    sparrows shoal and scatter.
    And when they dip their hands down
    they can touch the salmon,
    oysters on either side,
    shelduck and heron.
    So they steer into its pull
    when the tide’s on the rise,
    at full moon when the river
    grazes the skirts of the trees.
    Silent round Dittisham bend,
    each pause of the oar
    they can hear the tiny sounds
    of river crabs on the shore.
    A fox at Stoke Gabriel,
    a seal at Duncannon,
    they sing round Sharpham bend
    among the jumping salmon.

    At Totnes, limping and swaying,
    they set foot on the land.
    There’s a giant walking towards them,
    a flat stone in each hand: stonewaller
    You get upriver stones and downriver stones. Beyond Totnes bridge and above Longmarsh the stones are horrible grey chunks, a waste of haulage, but in the estuary they’re slatey flat stones, much darker, maybe it’s to do with the river’s changes. Every beach has its own species, I can read them, volcanic, sedimentary, red sandstone, they all nest in the Dart, but it’s the rock that settles in layers and then flakes and cracks that gives me my flat walling stone.
    The estuary’s my merchant. I go pretty much the length and breadth of it scrudging stuff for some tiny stretch of wall, looking for the fault lines and the scabs of crystals and the natural coigns which