be undignified for a
Special Constable to sit down. It is possible that a penalty of three
days in a dark cell awaits the transgressor. We do not know, and we do
not enquire. In that deadliest hour beyond the dawn, when the street
lamps splutter out and the ruthless morning light reveals us to one
another unwashed, unshaven and horribly all-nighty in appearance, it is
indeed a grateful relief to sit down on the wooden Windsor chair and
wait the six o'clock of release in blankness of mind.

The Generating Station, we are given to understand, does some magic with
electricity. That is not our concern. We are there to pace up and down
outside its walls, and watch for the man with the bomb. It has the
advantage of being a bulky building; therefore a long beat. Up to
midnight it looks over to a blank wall which forms a London lovers'
lane. We speculate on the progress of courtship. The Generating Station
is not odorous, and therefore is accounted the picked beat by the
aesthetes among us.

The Sewage Station, on the other hand, is very lively with odours. They
dominate our meals for at least twenty-four hours after duty. Some
attribute them to a candle-factory opposite, labelling them as warm
decomposing tallow. Another school of thought places them as the outcast
_debris_ of a sugar-factory. A scientist amongst us claims that they are
saccharine which has taken the wrong turning. To myself the taste
suggests mellow Limburger cheese.

They raised a classic law-suit a few years ago, taken up to the House of
Lords. On the one side a string of tough sturdy bargees testified that a
few whiffs made them totally unable to face their dinner. On the other
side an array of sanitary experts claimed that they were not only
pleasant and invigorating, but a potent factor in local longevity.

The machinery of the Station has hitherto been idle. Its borough
officials apparently do nothing but fitfully polish brasses. It seems
that these lucky sinecurists only work in times of violent storm, once
every few months.

The neighbourhood may be odorous, but it is full of human possibilities.
One midnight, two ladies started a scrap. A Special Constable, raw and
without experience of militant femininity, blew his police-whistle. The
whole slum-district turned out, dressed or half-dressed, like a fevered
anthill. It took the regular police half-an-hour to clear the streets,
the original cause of tumult vanishing in the swirl. In this
neighbo