Whispers Under Ground

Greenpeace activist during a protest in Trafalgar Square and she’d told me, in more detail than I would have liked, that pig slurry was essentially useless as manure. More like toxic waste from a factory, she’d said. And the Quiet People couldn’t have been dumping it in the Thames because Mama Thames would have come round and had a ‘conversation’ about same.
    ‘What do you do with the pig shit?’ I asked.
    Ten-Tons squeezed my forearm in what I was beginning to recognise as his way of expressing approval and drew me down a corridor lined with shiny white tiles. ‘Cleans up nice and easily,’ whispered Ten-Tons when I stopped to feel the slick surface.
    We were following one of the guys with a barrow as he wheeled it up the corridor to a vaulted chamber lined with the same white tile. There he lifted a hatch in the floor and tipped the slurry down in one practised movement. With a rattle, he seized a bucket of water placed nearby and sluiced down the wheelbarrow and the edges of the hatch. Then he refilled the bucket from a tap mounted in the wall and wheeled his barrow back down the corridor, presumably for more shit shovelling. As he went I saw another barrow wrangler heading towards us with another load of slurry.
    When he led me into the next room I thought I knew what I was going to see next.
    I was wrong.
    I looked up the figures later; your average pig produces over ten times what a human does per kilo body weight and given that these were big pigs, we were talking a shitload of pig shit. Now, not only is that enough to drown in, but it’s also the vilest-smelling animal by-product known to man – which doesn’t endear you to your neighbours. But you can take that slurry and run it through what’s called a horizontal plug flow reactor. Pig shit goes in one end, some seriously good fertilizer comes out the other and you get methane out the top. It also gets rid of the smell, and some farms do it for that reason alone. The thing is, in a cold climate like what we’ve got you have to use most of the methane to maintain a useful operating temperature, which is why this technology has never taken off in Northern Europe. It’s the sort of sustainable low-tech engineering favoured by progressive development NGOs, Greenpeace and middle-aged men in leather-patched tweed jackets.
    I was expecting something simple.
    What I got was a ten-metre wall of brass pipework festooned with dials and gauges and stop valves. Two older men in moleskin trousers, white shirts and sleeveless leather jerkins were shading their pale faces while they worked two banks of brake levers, the kind I associate with old-fashioned railway signal boxes. A whistle blew, one of an ascending bank mounted near the centre of the contraption, and one of the engineers stepped smartly over to a row of gauges. There he brushed his fingers around the face of the dial – there was no glass – before calmly pulling two levers in quick succession and turning a valve wheel a quarter turn to the left. The whistle stopped.
    My industrial chemistry had been leaking out of my head for over seven years, but enough of the basics remained for me to spot a cracking plant – even one that had dropped out of a Jules Verne novel. The Quiet People were refining their pig-generated hydrocarbons on an industrial scale.
    And that was when I realised that Tyburn was wrong.
    There was no way we could allow the existence of the Quiet People to become general knowledge. If the Health and Safety Executive didn’t close them down then the inhabitants of one of the richest neighbourhoods in London, which the bloody refinery was built under, would. And the HSE would probably be right, because no doubt it had been built with the same concern for worker safety that had made Victorian factories the happy places to work they were.
    That wasn’t counting what the farm welfare people would say about the pigs, or OF WAT about the connections to the sewage system, OFSTED about the children’s education – if they even were educated – or Kensington and Chelsea’s social services or housing. The Quiet People would be swept away as quickly and with as little fuss as a pygmy tribe living in an inconveniently mineral-rich part of a rainforest.
    ‘We’re right proud of this,’ whispered Ten-Tons, mistaking my sudden paralysis for awe.
    ‘I’ll bet,’ I whispered back, and asked him what it was all in aid of.
    The answer turned out to be firing pottery – as if I