The Big Necessity Read Online Free PDF Page A

jumps to 4,000 gallons. Thanks to the WC, the flow is 98 percent water.
    Down below, I am unhooked. My safety now depends on the monotonous beeps of the turtle, which signal safe air, and on the men in front and behind me. They set off with the walk of the flusher and I do my best to copy. The sewerman does not walk like an ordinary man. Lifting the feet, as a normal gait requires, risks kicking up the flow and splashing foul water on yourself or your workmate. For this reason, and to get better purchase on slimy brick, it’s better to glide. Feet close together, buttocks clenched (as tightly as the lips, which are best keptpursed to defend against splashes), smallish steps. It’s mincing that manages to be macho. I try to glide satisfactorily while I take in the sights. There are bricks, shadows, and light. There is a surprising amount of beauty, which explains why sewers have their obsessive fans, and why they are so beloved of filmmakers. What lighting director wouldn’t want to rise to the task of shadowing a Harry Lime in black, white, and gray menace?
    The men have their eyes cast upward, looking for the incursion of leaked water. Mine look the other way, into the stream. I am nervous about what I might see and curious about what I might recognize. There’s a floating bloated tampon. There goes part of a polystyrene cup. I find myself peering for brown solids, alert and excited, like a kid with a fishing rod. In olden days, sewers had hunters called “toshers.” They moved into the sewers from the banks of the river, in search of discarded riches. Sometimes they found gold; sometimes they lost their lives. There are still sewer hunters today, and there is cause: the flushers find all sorts of things in the flow. Bits of motorbikes (easily shoved down a two-foot-wide manhole), baby strollers, goldfish. Coins, sometimes, and jewelry. Cell phones by the hundred (one recent survey concluded that 850,000 handsets a year are inadvertently flushed down British toilets). That’s all due to haplessness, but there’s also ignorance. Wastewater utilities have had a long-running “Bag It and Bin It” campaign to educate people into what they shouldn’t flush. The list includes condoms, tampons and applicators, sanitary towels, panty liners and backing strips, facial and cleaning wipes, diapers, incontinence pads, old bandages, razor blades, syringes and needles, colostomy bags, medicine, toilet roll tubes, and pantyhose. Bras are also unwanted: in June 2007, a lingerie set flushed down a toilet clogged sewers in County Durham, collapsed a road, and caused £15,000 in repairs. “Throwaway society,” says Smith. “My goldfish has died? Throw it down the toilet. My hand grenade doesn’t work? Throw it down the toilet.”
    Hand grenade? It belongs in Smith’s best sewer anecdote, which he has told before and will tell again. He was working with a gang in the mid-level sewer near Greenwich when a flusher handed something to him. It was filth-encrusted but then he made out its shape through the muck. “I thought, ‘Oh shit.’” He couldn’t see if the grenade was live,but if it had been, it could have blasted a hole up to the sewer above. The gang would either be blown up or drown, or both. Smith climbed up the ladder one-handed, having warned the lads above, who disappeared. He lobbed it down an embankment and hoped for the best. “The next day,” he says, “a policeman phoned to ask me why I’d done that. I said, ‘I didn’t have a choice.’ I asked him if it had been live, and he said, ‘You don’t want to know,’ so I presume it was.”
    I love sewer anecdotes as much as the men like telling them. The stories are rich and funny, with a spirit mined from working at extremely close quarters—flushers have to pull and push each other in tight spots, in splendidly intimate isolation—in a job that