Groundbreakers

GARY’S OLYMPIC GAME

The following narrative depicts understandings of ground, history and place from the perspective of a pair of groundbreakers from the ‘Dig, Design and Demolish’ phase of the Olympic site’s transformation. The transcript below is from an interview recorded by Phil Cohen with Gary Carpenter, then aged 18, who describes the people he met and incidents that happened while he was working with his dad as an assistant rigger. Riggers own their own ‘rig’ which makes bore holes into the soil to take samples, which are then sent to a laboratory for analysis in order to provide a close mapping of the underground terrain through which the tunnelling is to take place.

 Phil first met the Carpenters during a health and safety induction session at the Carpenters Road site and subsequently conducted interviews with each of them separately and one with them together. He was immediately struck by the closeness of their relationship and by the fact that this father and son team represented a very ‘old fashioned’ aspect of working-class culture. Gary had started working with his dad as soon as he left school, and in effect became his apprentice. They both took great pride in the job, and also from the fact that to a large extent they were their own bosses. They were taken on as a team, controlled their own work process, and moved from site to site, deciding when and where they would work. At 18 Gary was earning very good money and drove a Lamborghini to prove it.

Mark Carpenter was very knowledgeable about soils – in effect he was a geologist - and also something of an amateur archaeologist since his hobby was collecting objects he unearthed around the site. He had found Roman coins and pottery fragments, and many other things, each of which had a story attached to them. But he was as interested in the present as the past and what was going on in and around the site, as well as what lay underground. He was a great story-teller and for his son’s eighteenth birthday, made him what he called ‘Gary’s Olympic game’ as a souvenir. It took the form of a Monopoly board which he adapted so that it represented a series of site-specific features and events. ‘It’s full of little private jokes,’ Gary told me, ‘while for Mark it was a good bit of memorabilia for us’.

One day Gary gave Phil a guided tour, telling the stories as he went. Some of the sites marked where they had worked. ‘Vine Street’ becomes Marshgate Lane and Euston Road gives way to Waterden Road which led onto the Olympic site. Gary joked that his dad only put them on so he knew where he was. In a geography which was changing so fast, with buildings being demolished and a whole street pattern erased, a few fixed points of reference came in handy.

Many of the stories were about their workmates and their personal idiosyncrasies. Local cafes and pubs also feature prominently. Some of the references are autobiographical, some touch on family conflicts, and others on their perceptions of the local community. Some stories are what Gary called ‘rude’: ‘Dave’s Hairy Pie Shop’ would certainly put you off eating there.

 In constructing his Monopoly board, Mark’s topographical imagination follows a narrative, not a spatial logic. Real and imaginary sites are haphazardly mixed together, and many were place holders for private in-jokes as well as public ‘craic’. Gary described the function of the game as an ‘aide-memoire’: ‘so I can look back and remember everything that happened’.

The significance of the map is as much political as personal. In authorised cartographies places are named after the famous by those who have the power to confer that recognition, but in this narrative landscape is organised around people who might never get their names on any official map. Both Gary and Mark were insistent that the workforce who built the Olympic Park should have their contribution recognised and their story told. ‘If it wasn’t for us there would be no Olympics’ they said.

GARY

‘I work with my dad, I’m his assistant, what they call a second man. We bore holes in the soil to get samples for them to send to the laboratory. I like my job. I was born to be a rigger. You have to learn it by your hands, and by watching what the rigger does. Every hole is different. You have to know what tools to use for what conditions. You can’t learn it out of a manual or by looking at a diagram.

The way I am on site, I’m a name, I like to feel it’s my site, I’m in control. People know me, it’s all down to reputation and respect, everyone knows everyone on this site and I’ve made loads of friends. I’m proud to be here, to be part of the Olympics. In 2012, I’ll be 23, maybe I’ll have kids and I’ll be able to tell them, ‘look I helped build that’.

A lot of people say the East End is a shit hole, it’s a dirty area. Its gun crime, its stabbings, its lawless. But I found the people were decent, friendly folk who have hard lives like us. Mind you they are not all like that. There was this scrapyard merchant down the road and he had a Rottweiler. I knew he was mistreating it. He didn’t feed it properly, just left it out in the damp and cold. He was due to move out so I said to him ‘I’ll buy it off you and give it a good home. How much do you want for it? And he goes ‘five hundred quid’. Well there was no way I could afford that, so I rung the RSPCA and told them about it and they come down and took the dog away. I said I’d like to have him, but they rang me the next day and said that he had to be put down cos he was suffering from hip dysplasia and cataracts - he just hadn’t been looked after. But I have a heart, you know what I mean, I could never mistreat an animal.’

Gary’s tour of the Monopoly board: an annotated map

Marshgate Lane and Waterden Road

These are roads leading on to the Olympic site. I think they are just there because everything is changing so fast, so just to get our bearings. We done a lot of work down there.

Ed’s Boatyard

Ed was the site engineer and if we had any problems we’d go to him and he’d either tell us to carry on or pull us off the job. He liked his boats, he knew a lot about them and when we got ours he used to help us a lot, telling us what to do, what stuff to get.

 Brocarts

This is a local road and what it was, I’d just started driving and when I’d come up to the lights, or a roundabout I used to hesitate sometimes. And my dad was with me and whenever I did this he’d go brocarts,bro,bro,brocarts ( makes a sound like a hen clucking ) so it became like a private joke between us.

The Perfumed Skip

There was this distribution centre up the road and they deal with perfumes, and cosmetics. And they was always throwing stuff out in the skip, even if just the packaging was damaged. So I used to go up there in my lunch break and have a sniff around and I got loads of good stuff out of there, which I gave to my girlfriend.

 Blackwall Crash zone

I had a tasty little crash there, went into the back of a Land Rover, only at about two miles an hour, but it all counts. My dad used to bring it up.

The Lying Tongue

This is about my Uncle Pau. When I first started drilling with my dad, he worked with us. But when I started getting more comfortable with my dad, and we’d do a lot of horseplay, he didn’t like it. perhaps he felt left out, I dunno. He realised that my dad had ideas for me getting into drilling and being part of the business. Then one day he rang up and said he was quitting, cos I was taking the piss out of him all the time. My dad told him I was no threat, but he said he was going back to lorry driving. But then we found out that he had gone and got himself a job with another drilling company, so he lied to us. He’d got a long tongue but he lied with it, even though my dad had taken him in when he needed help.

Hotel California

It’s a strip bar in Stratford. There was a bloke called Dave who worked for the bomb disposal squad. He was always going on about this place. He loved it in there and spent most of his free time there. Quite a few of the lads used to drink in there, but I never went there myself.

 Goth’s Graveyard

This is about another Dave, also in the bomb squad. He’s just come back from Iraq. He seemed like a normal bloke, but then he met this girl, she was Goth. So one day he turned up with a Mohican and pink hair. Then he was off for a few days and we spread a little rumour that he’s been caught shagging his missus in a graveyard. Every time we saw him on the site we’d go ‘been down the Graveyard recently?’ But then his girlfriend left him. His money from Iraq started running out, then he lost his job. He had a lot of bad luck.

Hawkins Wine bar

This is about a bloke called Hawkins, he was very dedicated to his work. He never left the yard till about eight o’clock at night. He was very friendly but quite posh. He’d say ‘I’m quite partial to a thimble full of wine’. He never actually drank very much. Anyway we liked him, so we gave him a wine bar, because we could.

Trent’s Moustache Road

Trent was a bit of a ladies man, very good looking. He decided to grow this moustache. It was hilarious. He’d got big lips and a wide mouth, perhaps he was trying to hide them, but the tache was huge. It looked like a rat hanging off his mouth, and it looked ridiculous on such a young bloke.

Ghana Drilling Ltd

There was a bloke we met on the site who knew nothing about drilling, but he went and bought this rig, and he would ask us for our advice. But he was very slow, you’d explain things but somehow he just couldn’t grasp it. People think drilling is easy but it isn’t. He wanted to go out to Ghana and he wanted us to come with him. But we knew he’d stand no chance out there. He came back after a couple of weeks and he’d taken all the wrong gear and didn’t even get to bore one hole. He wanted us to come back with him, but it wasn’t a nice part of Africa where he was living, so we just said, sorry, no.

The Gaping Mouth

There was a bloke on site called Paul Mann. He was an ex-traffic warden but decided to become an engineer. And there was this other guy Jordan, he was an Australian, and we used to do a lot of Jamaican talk like ‘yeah, man’ and ‘howya doing bro’, and all that. Then one day we was with Paul and Jordan come up and ask him what his name was and he went Paul Mann, so of course just thinks he is trying to be cool, saying ‘man’. Paul used to just stand there all day with his mouth open, doing nothing. He was the laziest man on the site. He was always stuffing his mouth, and if you threw anything in his direction it was bound to go in. He was just a very annoying kind of bloke.

 Gary and Amber’s Love Nest

I’d just met my girlfriend and my dad liked her so he put this one on for us both. There’s not really a story to it, it’s just a nice thing.

Lala Song Nite club

This is about my uncle Paul again. He was always singing to himself. He likes cabaret and musicals. But he could never remember the words. So he’d just lala along. So we used to take the mick and lala back at him.

Aidan’s Army Surplus Store

He was also a bomb detector and a very good mate of ours. He was ex-army, he’d been a sergeant major. He was a very military bloke, the way he walked, swinging his arms. And he talked kind of strange – he’d use these big words, which you didn’t know what they meant until he explained. But he wasn’t at all stuck up. He also had a moustache. I asked him once if he’d seen any fighting, but he didn’t like talking about the army. He used to bring in his old army stuff, trousers, jackets, waterproofs, all nice stuff. We always used to ask him to check out bore holes for bombs because we knew he was reliable. They found lots of munitions on the Olympics site, hundreds of shells.

Carpenter and Son Drilling

It’s just my dad’s way of saying that I’m part of the business. It’s a nice thing to hear. He’ll let me know when I’m ready to have a rig of my own. He says I could be earning 50 grand a year by the time I’m 25, and as it is I’m getting 350 a week which is a lot more than my mates are getting.

 Jodie’s Excavations

She was an archaeologist we got friendly with. Aidan also liked her a lot. She’s another person on the site I’ll always remember. She used to go out with us when we were boring a new hole, in case we found anything of interest to her. We found a sheep’s skeleton once. I found a lot of old bottles, and an inkwell covered in mother of pearl. And loads of bits of dolls. I got interested in the bottles. People collect them, you know. California Hotel Dave was an expert on them. He knew how they were made; he could tell you stories about them. He had quite a collection, over a thousand bottles.

 Beercan n Eggs Cafe

This was a local caff run by Jamaicans where we used to have breakfast sometimes. So we’d do a bit of Jamaican and ask for ‘beercan n eggs’.

Bywaters Hovercraft

They used Hovercraft to collect water samples from the marshland. They had been in the James Bond movies – the one with Piers Brosman in it. They were army style, really cool, I’d have loved to have a go in one. Got my photo took in the driving seat; near as I’ll ever get to it, I guess.

Riding Dirty Road

This is just a song I used to play as I was driving around. My dad also liked it which is probably why he put it on.

Jordan’s DVD Emporium

He was a young lad, and very laid back. He was in control of the site and he just used to sit in his hut all day and listen to music and watch DVD’s on his laptop. You had to knock on his door and make sure you weren’t disturbing him before you want in. Mind you he had everything under control.

 Lord Lambeth

Lambeth is the name for a soil formation, you get it a lot, it’s also called Woolwich and Reading. There was this bloke Dave Rosser, who really knew nothing about geology, but we taught him stuff and then he set up as a site authority on the subject. He was annoying at first. He started off being the head honcho and you didn’t really know how to act around him. But he ended up as just a regular geezer. So we used to call him Lord Lambeth.

 General Thornton

 Aidan’s second name was Thornton so we used to call him General Thornton. We got a spray can, what they used to mark the ground, and sprayed ‘General Thornton was Here’ everywhere. We had a lot of good times with him.

 No-one thinks of these people like Aidan. But if he hadn’t been there we might have had a bomb go off and there would be no more Olympics. Everyone on the site did something towards the Olympics and they should get recognised. I met so many characters on the Olympics, but now everyone has gone away. Jordan’s gone back to Australia; Goth’s gone back to Yorkshire. I’ll never see them again, but we all remember each other. When I come back to it in the future I can think ‘yeah that’s what happened, that was really good’.