Jonathan Dodd: Gypsum Days

Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed

I was standing in the changing room at the Heights, where I can be seen a couple of times a week in the gym, being punished by the machines there. I’m the one pinching the very tip of the sleeve of my tee shirt, above the elbow, because that’s usually the only thing that’s still dry.

On this particular day I was redressing myself, and I looked down at the floor, which was sprinkled with dry white powder. I knew what it was from years of nappy-changing, but I couldn’t remember using talcum powder before on myself. And then I remembered Erith.

There is such a thing as gypsum
There is such a place called Erith. I once spent a summer there with my friend Steve from Teacher Training College. We were staying with his parents and we worked at the docks there for the summer while we tried to find a flat to share for our second year. I remember that we were supposed to help with the unloading of gypsum.

East Jetty at New Holland

There is such a thing as gypsum. It comes in chunks, and looks a little like dirty chalk, but it’s lighter. They use it in plaster, and in talcum powder. Back then it used to come in the holds of merchant ships, which would tie up at Erith on the south side of the Thames, and the unloading would involve a crane with a great grab.

Chunks of gypsum flying off
The grab would plunge its open jaws into the hold, and emerged closed and full, with chunks of gypsum flying off in all directions to bury themselves in the pile again, as if trying to escape. On the dockside there was a great hopper, and a long roller that rose into the sky, where the gypsum would be poured onto great heaps, and that reminded me of Middlemarch.

Silo Conveyor Belt:

My subject at college was English, and as potential teachers we were required to become quite academic in our subject, as well as being able to teach it, which are quite different things. So we had reading lists and we had to write essays. One of us had to climb up the great spidery roller housing to the top and watch it all rumbling upwards, just in case the roller broke or some other unnamed catastrophe happened.

I found George Eliot quite hard going
I liked to volunteer for that, and I spent much of the day reading Middlemarch, occasionally checking the rumbling gypsum, ready to hit the red button if it started piling up, but mostly looking out over the great blue sky and the expanse of the Thames, feeling all those youthful thoughts about all the wonderful things that life was going to hand me.

Rosamond Vincy and Tertius Lydgate

I found George Eliot quite hard going. It was a very long book, and I can remember nothing about it. This is odd, because I can usually remember something about every book I’ve read, but Middlemarch is a complete blank. I never was a mid-Victorian literature fan, so I spent more time daydreaming, and being paid for it.

There was nowhere to run down there
Occasionally I would look down to see my fellow workers on the ground, clutching their shovels, and we would wave to each other. When the hold was nearly empty the gypsum flow would stop and I would have to climb down again. The second part of my job wasn’t half as pleasant. The crane grab couldn’t catch every piece of gypsum, so we would have to go down into the hold and shovel all the chunks from the corners into the mouth of the grab.

Shovel

It was filthy and hot, the air full of dust, and we had to work hard and fast. When the grab was full it would be lifted up and away to be emptied into the hopper, and we would lean on our shovels and pant while the air cleared a little. Then the grab would come back, and we would scatter, hoping the crane driver was paying attention, because there was nowhere to run down there. And that reminded me of school.

The rules were simple
When I was at school we had to get up very early every day for some outside exercise. I mean every day here, because it was that kind of school. The least unpleasant of these daily tortures involved playing a game that had no name. It involved about forty boys in a space that had walls round it. The rules were simple. One person was handed a ball and he had to throw it at someone else, who would attempt to evade being hit by it.

Dodgeball

Once you were hit you became a thrower, and gradually there would be more throwers and fewer evaders. For some reason – probably an advanced sense of survival, I was very good at it, and I was usually one of the very last to be hit. That’s just my luck, the only game I was any good at didn’t even have a name. Years later they made a film called Dodgeball, and when I watched it I remembered that game all over again.

I kept hold of my shovel
That’s what I remembered after the grab descended and caught the edge of the hold, and two of us had to move like lightning as it swung towards us. I’m sure we were never really in serious danger, although it felt like it at the time. For some reason I kept hold of my shovel, but the other student dropped his, and it was smashed and mangled beyond repair. For some reason I was very proud of protecting my shovel.

Shovel face :

It took me a while to finish redressing myself before leaving the changing room, and I was wondering at the weirdness of memory, which can conjure up such vivid experiences when they’ve been buried for so long underneath such a weight of later stuff, as if they were individual chunks of gypsum at the bottom of the heap suddenly emerging into the light in a random sequence.

I really don’t know
And then I wondered briefly if they were really memories at all. I suppose it would be weirder for me to invent such a sequence of images than to remember them. I really don’t know. So I looked things up on Wikipedia. Apparently gypsum isn’t made into talcum powder after all. Talc is ‘hydrated magnesium silicate or magnesium silicate hydroxide. Its chemical formula is written as 3MgO.4SiO2H2O’. It looks like this.

Talc block: