The Great Stink

by Clare Clark

  On the last day of January 1856 they were married. Polly arranged everything and refused to be discouraged. He needed time to adjust to being a father, she told them both. He needed rest and wholesome food to put the flesh back on to his bones. Most importantly of all he had to find work so that they could live together as a family. The stipend from the Army was barely enough to support William himself, let alone to allow for Polly to leave the doctor's household. She encouraged him to look for map-making work, engineering apprenticeships to build upon his work in Scutari. Secretly, her tongue poked out between her teeth in concentration as she laboriously formed the words, she wrote to William's Mr Rawlinson appealing to him for help. He replied with great courtesy that he had considerable respect for her husband but, convalescing himself, could offer her no suggestions at the present time. She did not show William the letter, telling herself it would only discourage and disappoint him. As it was he had little stomach for the search for a position. He was exhausted, of course. He moved slowly and slept little. He grew thinner and sometimes when she spoke to him he had difficulty hearing her. Soon after his return from Turkey she insisted upon bathing the wounds on his forearms. She examined them briefly and then briskly bandaged them with fresh rags, commenting only that she supposed it was his weak condition that meant they were taking longer than they should to heal. After that she let him dress them himself. In the Grainger nursery her voice was shriller than usual and her temper shorter. On one occasion she slapped George so hard that his cheek bore the red imprint of her hand. When she begged his forgiveness they both wept.

  The letter arrived in late June. The Metropolitan Board of Works wished to offer William a position on the surveying team of the Metropolitan Main Drainage Scheme. The letter informed him that Mr Rawlinson, previously of the Sanitary Commission, had recommended him for the post personally and with considerable warmth. The salary would start at one hundred and twenty pounds a year. When William told her Polly laughed and cried together, pressing his hand against her cheek. When he took his hand away he stared in confusion at the tears that glistened upon his knuckles. She paid him no mind. Instead she threw her arms around his unresponsive body and kissed him. One hundred and twenty pounds a year! There could be nothing wrong with a man who was thought by so eminent and important a body to be worth one hundred and twenty pounds a year. They could afford to take a small house, perhaps even to have a girl come in to do the heavy work. They would be respectable; they would be happy. Just as she had always known they would be. The unfamiliar black shadows that had lurked in the unseen corners of her heart in the previous months vanished quite suddenly in the dazzle of her restored spirits. She had never acknowledged them; now she forgot them altogether. Each of her hopes was safely back in its place. It was no more than anxiety about their future that had caused William to be withdrawn since his return. As a man of honour and conscience the responsibilities of a wife and son naturally weighed heavily upon him but, steadied by respectability and a regular and robust wage, and soothed by the loving attentions of his wife and son, he would be soon restored to health. It was thus with a light heart that Polly took her leave from the doctor's household and settled with her family in a small terraced house in Lambeth at a rent of eighteen pounds a year.

  VI

  Dogs were a curse in the sewers, everyone knew it. There were two lessons you learned straight off if you were on the tosh: walk slow and steady, and no dogs. It was true, dogs might be worth something against the rats if the beasts set their minds on attacking you, but that wasn't much good when you couldn't get within a hundred feet of the creatures. One sniff of a dog and the rats melted away. Then the sound of their barking (and they always barked, for if the dark didn't do it for them there was no stopping them once they caught the scent of the rats) could be heard a street away and had the traps down on you faster than you could say beadle. You might as well stand under a grating and flash your lantern like a lighthouse as take a dog down the tunnels. It was an out-and-out invitation for trouble.

  Red Joe knew that Tom knew this well as he did, given Tom'd been the one to teach it him in the first place, but he said it all the same, scowling at the dog that slunk at Tom's heels. It was a mangy-looking beast and no mistake, downright decrepit with its ears sprouting in different directions and its fur stretched so thin over its body the skin showed through. It couldn't as much as look you in the eye. For the life of him Joe couldn't fathom why Tom had taken such a fancy to it. It had been weeks now. The first time Joe had seen them together he'd laughed out loud at the sight of them, side by side with their muzzles stuck up in the air and their mouths open so that they seemed to be tasting it, for all the world like a pair of chipped teapots ready to pour. He wasn't laughing now.

  Tom squatted in the mud, pressing his fingers into the corners of a crate to test their sturdiness.

  'We ain't taking it/ Joe said again, glowering at the dog as it cringed against Tom's leg. One of its ears was torn and its lip too and the reek of defeat rose off of it like steam. The rats would rip it to pieces soon as look at it.

  Tom reached into one of his pockets for a curl of iron-wire.

  'She won't bark,' he said with quiet certainty, twisting wire tight around the hinges of the crate.

  'What you reckon it will or won't do ain't neither here nor there. It ain't coming. And that's final.'

  'She won't bark,' Tom said again and fondled the dog's head.

  Joe wanted to kick it.

  'They all bark,' Joe said mulishly. 'You learned me that, remember?'

  'Not her. I swear it. Not so much as a whimper, not even in the thick of it in that cavern under Queen-lane. Silent as the dead.'

  'You mean —'

  'I took her down already, Joe. Five times since Sunday.'

  'You done what?'

  'She's a ratter. I had to see what she was good for.'

  Joe gaped at him, his mouth round as a flounder's.

  'She ain't bad neither,' Tom added. His lips twitched as he hooked an arm round the dog's neck and rubbed her whiskery chin. She tucked her head into Tom's armpit and looked steadily up at Joe with her pink eyes. 'She ain't half bad at all.'

  Tom took a kind of satisfaction from Joe's astonishment but when he'd said the dog wasn't half bad he had to confess he wasn't being entirely truthful. The fact was that she was better than that, much better. If he'd not seen her with his own eyes Tom would never have believed it. She didn't look like a ratter, for starters. And ratting wasn't something you could teach a dog. A beast either had the taste for it or they didn't, simple as that. If this one didn't have the stomach for it that was her business. Meanwhile she stayed and he found he didn't mind. He liked the warm indentation left on the blanket by her curled body, the way, when Tom had finished his supper, she slipped her muzzle without ceremony into his hand. He liked the company.

  And then, one afternoon when the dog had been with him for close on a week, Tom had been obliged to bring back to his lodgings a crate of the beasts after the proprietor of the King's Head on Cock-hill welched on a deal for one hundred of them. The dog raised her head from the bed as Tom pushed open the door. He set the crate on the floor and clicked his fingers at her in greeting but she did not look at him. Her pink eyes were fixed on the crate, her nostrils wide and all aquiver. The rats could smell her too. Inside the packed crate they screamed and writhed. Filthy gobbets of fur pressed between the narrow gaps in the wire. Tom clicked his fingers again but again the dog paid him no mind. It was as if he weren't even there. Very slowly she raised herself up on to her front legs and ran her pink tongue over her Hps. Her eyes were sharp, focused as a pickpocket's, and a silvery thread of saliva looped from her mouth as, with great deliberation, she pushed herself off the low bed and crept towards the twisting mass of rats, her belly low against the splintered floor. Tom stared. Then, without stopping to think, he plunged his hand into the crate and pulled out a rat, throwing it across the room. It was a big one, broad as a man's thigh but ag
ile too, and it streaked away towards the corner of the room towards a battered three-legged stool. The dog was too fast for it. Before the rat had got halfway to the corner she had pounced, clamping it between her jaws. It tried to twist itself out of her grasp but she bit down upon it so hard that Tom heard the crunch of the rat's bones. It went limp. Carefully, without ceremony, the dog laid the rat at Tom's feet and waited.

  That night she slaughtered twenty of the unsold rats. And every time, even at the last when Tom released ten of them together, the dog set about the task without so much as a sound. She had about her an air of precise purpose that made Tom think not of other fighting dogs or even of the brisk butchers at Smithfield market, but of men of business, the starched and bespectacled clerks with their chained bill-books and their rigid mouths that marched daily across London Bridge to the counting-houses of the City. The Old Lady of Threadneedle-street, he thought to himself and smiled. Though Lady'd do. When she was finished he took Lady on to his lap and, dipping a rag into a kettle of water that was cooling beside the crumbling fire, he gently wiped the blood from her face. That night she slept with her nose in the V of his arm.

  Two days later he took her into the sewers.

  They became a familiar sight, Long Arm Tom and the rum-looking dog that stuck like a silent shadow to his heels. In the taverns and coffee-houses he frequented it could always be found under his chair, its chin on his feet. For all that they couldn't warm to the beast the others got used to stepping over it. It didn't growl at you and bark like some of them, in fact it was silent as death, but it was an ugly mutt and unfriendly as they came. If you got yourself too close to it it would back away like a weanling to hide itself in Tom's coat. It wasn't unusual to see him share his dinner with the animal and slipping it some of the most succulent pieces of meat into the bargain. There were those that said such strong affection for a dumb animal was one of the sure signs that a man was preparing to turn up his toes. Well, when Tom's day came he'd be missed, they agreed on that. Tom was a quiet cove, a man not known for giving much in the way of quarter, but he was as much a piece of their part of London as the stink of the gully holes. When Long Arm Tom breathed his last it would mark the passing of something. There would be no more toshers like Tom to step into his shoes when he dropped them, for all the pair of them was worn down to slops. The city was changing and all of their lives were set to change with it. There were no two ways of looking at that.

  VII

  Polly was not altogether wrong about the significance of William's work upon his state of mind, although in the confusion of the Greek-street offices there was little routine and even less regular assurance of funds, at least in so far as public works were concerned. The Board had been established to transform the chaotic clog of London into a city of purposeful movement — of water, air, traffic, people and commodities — and their greatest priority was the construction of a sewer system that would provide a clean water supply and safely extract the city's waste. A grand plan indeed. But Parliament had not considered it necessary to endow them with the fiscal and administrative powers they required to force through so vast a project. Instead the Board was caught up in endless disputes with the city's vestries, whose approval needed to be obtained for all expenditure and over whom the Board wielded no direct authority. Proposals were issued, questioned, contested and withdrawn for reconsideration. Recommendations were blocked on the grounds of expense, of inconvenience, of principle, and frequently for the simple pleasure of saying no. Meetings were convened to contest the conclusions of previous meetings. Those plans that were eventually ratified found themselves bogged in a mire of politicking, endless circles of postponements, protocols and paperwork.

  Meanwhile the senior members of the Board quarrelled amongst themselves. The most heated debate turned upon the necessity of a system that would allow for the conversion of the city's waste into manure, a system the Chinese people were claimed to have adopted with great success. One hundred and forty such proposals were invited and considered and, in the face of Bazalgette's arguments against such a notion, there was for a time intense pressure to replace him. But despite these obstacles Bazalgette remained calm and practical. Every day in Greek-street he presided over the painstaking assessments of depth and bore, of pressure and power, of tide and gradient, until there grew beneath the pencils of his draughtsmen the vision of a mighty new city beneath the old, a magnificent metropolis contained by iron walls with hundreds of miles of pipe-lanes and pipe-streets criss-crossed with pipe-rivers and, in three great swathes to the North of the river and two to its South, five mighty thoroughfares with buttressed ceilings as high as cathedrals. The four pumping towers were the underground city's spires, reaching up so far they pierced the cloud of ground level, with the pumping station at Abbey Mills, conceived in the Venetian Gothic style, its royal palace, presiding over all. It was a city of pomp and splendour, a place as far from the primitive labyrinth William knew as the new stucco squares of Belgravia were from the squalid piggeries and potteries of Notting Dale. Except that this city was for everyone. In this place there would be drinking-fountains where fresh water would be freely available. No one would have to dip their pail into the foul brack of a common ditch and drink. There would be no open sewers that bubbled up into the houses of the poor and poisoned the earth and the air. In this city there would be no festering cesspools, no open gully holes where the cholera and his monstrous cousins might crouch and wait. They would be borne away, as the excretions of the people would be borne away, carried on an irresistible tide towards the sea. Disease would be all but vanquished, as it had been vanquished in Scutari. It would have constituted a miracle if William still believed in miracles. And in a way he did. His faith in a merciful and loving God had collapsed like ashes in a dying fire but there was still a faint heat in him that warmed his blood and it was kindled by that most earthly of saviours, sanitary engineering.

  If Bazalgette's vision was the future William clung to, the rotting sewers they would replace were his refuge in the present. He had been away from London for fewer than twenty months and yet it seemed to him that the population of the city had doubled, trebled during his absence. According to the information furnished to the Board the population of the city was in the region of two and a half million souls, perhaps a little more. William was no more able to comprehend such a figure in relation to the London that he saw than he would have been able to understand from a figure of gallons the immensity of the seas. But he felt it and it overwhelmed him. The noise and the stink of the traffic as he crossed the river, heavy wagons, laden with bales and barrels, pushing and shoving for space with gigs, broughams, hearses, hansoms, knackers' carts, Barclay's drays and herds of pigs and sheep and foot passengers, left him dust-blinded and shaken. At night, in spite of the opium Polly assured him would help him sleep, the unholy chaos and clamour of the city sweated into the horror of his dreams. He would have been unable to countenance his work, the long walk to Soho and back through the elbowing screeching streets, the brusque demands of the senior engineers, the harried impatience of the clerks, had it not been for the tunnels. The other surveyors complained bitterly about the foul conditions underground. Their ventures into the system were hurried affairs, sufficient only to take the baldest necessary measurements. The flushers that acted as their guides, parish sewer-cleaners by turns scornful of and cowed by the presence of gentlemen in their private territories, were glad to be rid of them. Mr May was another matter. He lingered in the tunnels until they tired of the wait. Before long it was agreed that, once he had been taken to the correct part of the channel, he might be left alone there, a rope marking the route back to the nearest exit, as long as one of the flushing team remained above ground to warn him of adverse weather conditions and to guide him, if necessary, back to safety. When they first settled in the house in Lambeth Polly had suggested to William that he might begin a garden in the muddy slice of yard behind the cottage, a garden not just for vegetables but for the f
lowers he had always loved, a refuge full of colour and fragrance, as different from the dark stinking sewers as snow from soot. She brought home a seed catalogue and placed it beside his plate at dinner. He didn't open it. He couldn't bear to. A garden was impossible, utterly impossible. The dark stinking sewers, meanwhile, drew him like a magnet.

  At first the sewers were no more than a private darkness in which to cut. The intensity of the cravings frightened and disgusted him but he could not smother them. They were stronger by far than he. They swelled and strengthened within him until they occupied him completely, obliterating all sense and feeling except this, his flesh on fire and screaming for the knife. And, as much as he dreaded them, he longed for them. Wherever he was working he concealed a knife behind a loose brick in the crumbling wall so that he might always be ready. He hid a roll of bandage in his pouch. Polly could not always fail to notice the bandages. She rebuked him lightly, teasing him for his carelessness with his tools, but in the face of his silence she quickly changed the subject. She had no wish to dwell on it or to spoil things. On the days he came home bandaged he was her William again. He was affectionate, even sentimental. He stroked her cheek and called her his little milkwort and the tears sprang easily into his eyes. He swept his son up on to his lap and kissed his golden head, trying not to flinch when the child wriggled playfully inside the circle of his arms. On those days they were happy.