When I was a boy, we lived in a bungalow in Essex, on a neat suburban street leading down to the railway station.
Every week the dustmen would empty our two metal bins – one for household waste, the other for the ashes from our Creda boiler.
They’d walk round the back of the house, hoist the bins on to their shoulders and, having emptied them on to their cart, would bring them back to where they belonged, behind the coal bunker.
Another man went in their wake with a broom, sweeping up anything that had fallen out and scooping it up on a giant shovel.
I can still see them now in my mind’s eye, wearing donkey jackets with heavy duty leather patches across their shoulders.
Strong men, doing men’s work. The kind of English yeomen you’d always want alongside you in a fight.
When it came to doling out Christmas boxes, the dustmen were first in line for a mince pie and a half-crown.
They were admired, stock characters in popular culture. Think Stanley Holloway’s roguish Alfred Doolittle and Lonnie Donegan’s Number One My Old Man’s A Dustman.
So how on earth did we get from there to a situation where, in Britain last year, there were a record 228 assaults on dustmen?
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Garbage seems to bring out the worst of human nature and bureaucrats. In my community, our garbage collection is done by city employees. When holidays occur, the day of pickup changes. It is such a pain in the garbage can. Every month the pickup day changes. I check what the neighbours are doing before I pull my garbage to the curb. Cheers.