I live in Little Wakering in Essex, where the sea comes to within 150 metres of my house. It’s everything I want. Fishing and boating and sailing and the sea — that’s me. The sewer system behaves differently depending on the tide, so the tide timetable stays with me wherever I am: it’s by my bed, in my coat pocket and in the car.

When I first left school I worked as an oyster dredgerman, so tides and the weather have followed me throughout my life.

The sewer system runs from west London to east, on a downward tilt. I work on the trunk network — the big, main-entry sewers. I don’t get involved much with the local network to individual houses. Put it this way: if a trunk sewer got blocked, it wouldn’t be one toilet backed up, it would be thousands.

I usually have porridge or cereal for breakfast, shower, shave, and then I’m away. I keep a sleeping bag and complete sewer kit in the car: disposable overalls, gloves, waders, safety harness and mask. Sometimes you find yourself waist-deep in sewage. I don’t really give it much thought — it’s just something that goes with the territory. I’ve worn a full dry-suit before now, but I hardly ever use the mask. Down in the sewer your sense of smell can save your life.

If you smell petrol or solvents, you know there’s been a spillage up on the road and it’s time to get out quick.

Trunk sewers range from 1.2 metres by 61 centimetres up to 5 metres high by 3 metres wide. We carry oxygen tanks and gas detectors which detect noxious gases and low oxygen. But the smell isn’t that bad. It’s not just sewage down there, it’s also water from baths and washing machines and industrial plants and road gullies. The smell changes day to day, hour to hour. In the morning, when people are squirting toilet cleaner down the loo, it’s all right. It isn’t anything like as unpleasant down there as people think. Then again, I was somewhere the other day where you don’t go without breathing apparatus. There are things down there that you don’t want
to know about.

I have fruit for lunch, or maybe a bowl of cereal. With some sewers I eat after rather than before I go down. The sewers below Soho are the worst: you get huge blockages of fat from the restaurants mixed with everything else that goes down the loo. We jet it and try to flush it through, but sometimes we have to get right down there and hack it out with a spade, and that’s deeply unpleasant. What’s most worrying when you’re 30 metres under is what’s behind that blockage. A lot of my work involves risk assessment, and sometimes you just think: “No. The risk is too high.” Being flattened by a giant lump of fat and sewage is not a great way to die.

You need a warped sense of humour to do this job. You can’t afford to let your mind wander. One lad was sent a mile and a half down a tunnel, without a light, to find our gang. He never reached us. When they got him out he was in a terrible state. The mind plays tricks on you. Women surveyors come and go, usually at the first sight of a giant rat. Actually, the rats aren’t that big. It’s just that most of the guys working the sewer system also fish, and the fish is always bigger, isn’t it?

Part of my work is diverting flow within the system so that a gang can go in and do repairs. Generally we shout to one another and we carry a foghorn — two blasts means trouble. It’s a beautiful thing, the sewage system. The stuff we build now is all in concrete segments, but the Victorian sewers were all hand-built, brick by brick. It’s unbelievable down there. One hundred years old and the condition is phenomenal.

The microbiological treatment goes on down-river at Beckton, the biggest sewage treatment works in Europe. The floating debris comes out — cotton buds, condoms, sanitary stuff — and the sludge, the crap and toilet paper, is compressed and burnt. Then they introduce bugs which remove the toxins from the rest. The remaining effluent is good enough to drink.

My official leaving time is 3.30pm and I’ll go home and do reports on the laptop. I shower with coal-tar soap before I go, especially if I’ve been doing something really dirty and nasty. I’ve got lovely nails. My wife manicures them. Big woofter, me. In the evening I get in my shed and build things for the grandchildren — all sorts of toys. In summer I make my own fishing nets. It’s my place and it’s complete chaos. Dinner is whatever my wife cooks. I do a lot of decorating in winter because come March I want to be on the boat again. I like boating magazines but I can’t read in bed. My wife tells me I’m unconscious as soon as my head hits the pillow. I love my job, I really do. I’ve shown lords and ladies underground — even Prince Charles. It’s very levelling, the sewer, because it doesn’t matter who you are, everyone has to go to the toilet.