life: railways, Stratford Broadway, Lea Valley. Hoists, scrub woods, marshes, roads where the traffic never stops flowing.
The view that Freddie describes is a novelty, no working Londoner has ever seen it before. He buys into the utopianism of the planners’ vision, the vertical streets with their smart Swedish kitchens and bathrooms: the setting for Joan Littlewood’s film. New buildings provoke new energies. You drudge down there in the mud, hassled by foremen and time-keepers, underpaid, underappreciated, and you are still in the great hive, the buzz of argument, jokes, rucks, snatched sex, thieving, comradeship. Then you retreat, at the end of the day, to the pristine flat. The floating pod that demands an upgrade in furniture, bed linen, electrical goods. A social space inspiring adulterous encounters, no strings, by evading the constant vigilance of the terraced streets, the twitching curtains. Gossip at the front step. Accountable neighbours.
After a few months as a Chobham labourer, the system was changed. No longer did we receive pay, cashmoney, in little envelopes (deductions itemized). It was a pinched season of power strikes, rubbish strikes, ineptitude and obfuscation: with not a cigarette paper between the political strategies on offer. Wage snatches were a natural extension of industrial work practice. Professional villains, local firms in Canning Town and Forest Gate, operated on the model of dying Lea Valley enterprises. The checker (or wheelman) and his group of tried-and-trusted associates. Put in the graft and spend the profit before the week is out. The only difference between hardened thieves and disaffected workers is the rush, the adrenalin boost of high-stakes risk. The wages you collect, as an over-the-pavement merchant, belong to someone else. You cut out the middlemen, the accountants shaving their percentage. You drop the tedious business of card-punching, the long hours. Crime was a logical response to illogical conditions.
Management at Chobham Farm responded by instructing their workers to open bank accounts: thereby initiating them into the slippery world of credit, the festering itch of material ambition and future catastrophe. The old cash exchange worked pretty well, you could see what you had. Money was divided to pay the week’s bills. What was left over went on pleasure. You started each week with empty pockets and a clean slate. Or so I rationalized the process. As we ambled down Angel Lane, saluting that lovely creeper-covered Victorian cottage, towards Stratford. The paperback in my pocket was a beat-up, grime-fingered Dante. When I stole a few minutes, lolling on an Australian sack, in a furtive alcove, I leafed back and forth through the sticky pages, to find the stanzas I would reread before I nodded off. The stuff about lost wretches who prostitute themselves for gold and silver. The torments waiting for usurers in red braces.
Bankers with heavy bellies, advocates of fiscal alchemy, let them dance on hot coals and wade, up to the chin, in tides of their own excrement. Delightful reveries for a walk to the Midland Bank. Most of the boys handed over their cheques and took their weekly wages in cash. Others were seduced by the potency of slim new chequebooks. They were in the system now. Tom, his film money not quite depleted, banked his tithe and built up his reserves. Freddie, he considered, was a natural for the new City. A whippet on the trading floor. Lively. Quick-witted. Amoral. Uninhibited by education. Why wrestle a forklift truck over buried rails when you could be cruising tarmac in a silver Porsche?
The panorama from Freddie’s Stratford tower was echoed by the establishing shots in Bronco Bullfrog , the 1970 film by Barney Platts-Mills. I took this as a timely conjunction of two worlds: the independent, low-budget cinema we had left behind and the dramas of territory in which we now worked. Freddie, if he hadn’t been otherwise engaged, could have played a