I think I was possibly one of the first people to find out about working from home. I looked at what work I was doing and where I needed to be for it, and I said to my boss, “I could take a day off each week, for only a little less money.” So I would motorbike all the way back home to the Mendips, and it was a good time. I had just become a father and we had less money, but plenty of time together.
The song of the mushrooms woke me from my bed. And I groped my way into the laid-out clothes and crept downstairs, it being somehow wrong to put the lights on at five in the morning.
Past the cat, asleep on her chair, and the evening’s last log crumbling into ash. Up the garden a cockerel starts to crow. Damn thing seen kitchen light flicker on at last; where hell paper bag? Ah—
And out past the sleeping houses, keeping to the grass because boots ring like bells on the road at this hour. I’ve probably been spotted, even so. (My father recalls trying to fit a new windscreen on his old Singer, on a driveway completely surrounded by bushes and, furthermore, up a grassy lane. It didn’t fit. When he went to the pub that night, a man from the other side of the village gave him a grin and said, “Dint fit, didit …”)
Mist curls like a cliché over the fields, and there’s half a mile of them to cross. Rabbits scatter. A larger mammal, possibly a hippo, trundles away through a spinney.
There’s many a clump of ink caps along the forestry track. They’re fungi, and melt into an alarming black goo when ripe. But they’re edible, and taste like mushrooms, and are shunned by the ignorant masses, thank goodness, which means I can pick them without competition and eat them by the plateful as mushrooms should be eaten.
But this morning picking them would be like shooting a hen. The quarry is more elusive, more unreliable, more like a gift from the gods.
Through a bramble hedge and there’s a small misty field. It’s a blank green until you get into the way of seeing and look for the right kind of grass.
Once the eye gets the hang of it, the mushrooms spring out like stars.
Pick one—and there is a slight cough. Nothing offensive, mark you, just a sort of verbal call sign. There’s someone else in the field. He carries a plastic bag.
We regard each other for a few moments, then go back to our tasks, each surreptitiously watching the other. He’s got the right technique—ignore the little buttons and rotting giants, and pick the nice pink teenagers. Not that a really ripe mushroom isn’t tasty if you’ve a robust palate. Two years ago I knew a field that sprouted huge horse mushrooms and even after I’d taken my shirt off and filled it, I hardly made an impression.
In a few minutes I’ve got my ration and my solitary co-picker passes me on the way to the stile at the opposite side of the field. We nod. Speech in a mushroom field at half past five on a misty morning is sacrilege.
And back home, pausing twice to leave mushrooms outside the back doors of more favoured neighbours. At this stage a few ink caps go into the bag—shame to waste them.
And there’s happy and sad thoughts. Happy because there’s a breakfast of mushrooms and huge knobbly tomatoes. Sad, because somewhere there are mushroom fields I shall never visit and no one knows about—oh, it makes the fingers tingle.
After breakfast the sky’s light grey, and some cottage lights are on. Wellington boots clang down the road—someone thinks he’s going after mushrooms, and he’ll probably look in the local fields, where the farmers use fertilizer out of a bag, and say there’s no mushrooms again this year. You’ve got to look sharp—when the song of the mushrooms drifts out of the night.
INTRODUCTION TO THE LEAKY ESTABLISHMENT by David Langford
January 2001
This says it all, really. We both worked in places where science, engineering, and bureaucracy crashed into one another.
As a press officer, a man responsible for getting information out in a hurry (sometimes, at any rate) I was forbidden to touch a typewriter. Strictly speaking, I was supposed to write out releases in longhand and send them to the typing pool, from whence they might be returned to me tomorrow. However, by this time the average nuclear reactor can be quite well alight, so I just typed stuff anyway, and no one said anything.
It was, in retrospect, a great life for an SF fan. After Chernobyl it seemed there was no question too weird for the local Nodding Acquaintances of the Earth to plant with willing reporters. Will your nuclear power stations withstand an Ice Age? No? Why not? (Answer: because a two-mile-high glacier scouring the continent down to bedrock puts a crimp in everyone’s day.) Isn’t it scandalous that there’s a fault line running through the power station car park? (Answer: Not really. It’s about 200 feet long and hasn’t moved for 60,000,000 years.…)
One of my many strange jobs was escorting TV and movie researchers when they were scouting power station locations for upcoming dramas. I’d take them up to the pile cap (the top of the reactor) and they’d look around in dismay at the total absence of green steam. They never believed me when I told them that green steam is not a normal reactor product. Then they’d bring their own for the shoot. Oh, and big fake panels covered in flashing lights, too, because we didn’t have enough. In fact, our power stations were a complete disappointment. They were so unlike the real things.
I had eight years of this. It was a great life, if you held on to your sense of humour.
As far as I’m concerned, The Leaky Establishment was one step away from being real.
I hate Dave Langford for writing this book. This was the book I meant to write. God wanted me to write this book.
For a large part of the 1980s I effectively worked (which was definitely not the same as worked effectively) for the civil nuclear industry, or at least that part of it that produced cheap, clean nuclear electricity, if I remember my facts correctly, in South West England.
Reactors hardly ever exploded. I was a Press Officer, so you can trust me on this. But they didn’t have to explode. Some little-known component of nuclear radiation made certain that life for anyone involved with the public face of the industry became very weird. And I worked with Dave Langfords all the time. I had to. I knew about words, they knew about uranium. They were a fine body of men, with a refreshingly different view of the universe.