To Keep or Not to Keep?

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Written September 2020

They’re really decisions we make every day, but packing up and moving on tends to brings it all to a head. What do I keep, what do I throw away? There are decisions for now; there are recollections from the past; there are thoughts of the future. They merge into the excitement and stress of relocation.

Speaking of things to get rid of, I remember the sanitary lane of boyhood where the truck trundled along between the houses, picking up everything from the bucket in the toilet at the bottom of the garden to the rubbish bin at the back gate. The pungent smell of everybody’s left-overs lingers in the mind with flash-backs every time I visit the local dump. In those days I never gave it another thought as to where it went. I was just glad to be rid of it.

Cecil Dark was a Canadian Salvation Army brigadier. He’d been an auditor and spent some of his retirement years helping out with finances around the world. He visited us at Chikankata. ‘Wherever I go I want to see how people dispose of their rubbish,’ he explained. ‘Some visit art galleries and beauty spots. I go to the dump. It tells me something about them as people.’ So I took delight in showing him the little dumper truck left behind by civil engineers who’d constructed a dam on the stream that flowed through the mission. It went round the mission, delivering the refuse to a specially prepared site just outside the perimeter fence. We’d asked the engineers to excavate it. Every now and then soil would be shovelled in to cover it over, but not before the crows and the local children had sorted out what they might want. I also took Brigadier Dark to the burnt brick incinerator where clinical waste was delivered. Everything from a placenta to an amputated digit would smoulder. I hated the smell. Was that what the gas chambers and the crematoria of Nazi Germany had smelt like?

We’d had decisions about what to leave behind when we left South Africa in 1967, stored for a future use that mostly never materialised. We left nothing behind in Zambia, except the unmarked grave of five-day old, Alan John. He was wrapped in a knitted blanket and lovingly laid in the dark red soil that in later years would become a maize field. It was not far from the rubbish dump, but placing him there was very different from the dump run. Disposing of the layette brought tears as Margaret and I agreed it should go. So some newborns born at the hospital ended up wearing his things until they would have outgrown them.

One of Margaret’s Chikankata tasks was to open the parcels sent by well-meaning supporters overseas. The blanket had come with them. She took delight in holding the occasional ‘next to nothing’ clothing sales on a Saturday morning or taking heavy winter coats to nearby villagers. Yes, it can get very cold in Zambia. But she did get rid of the threadbare underclothing and the ‘once-used’ tea bags.

Back in England in the 80s, with our Salvation Army allowances pitched just enough for us to have to pay tax, we had a taste of finding our way round the charity shops. Some probably went back to the charity shops to become third-hand once-loved clothing when we left England in 1990. The big decision of the move to India was whether or not to take the piano. It travelled by container ship and we took delivery of it at the Port of Madras. It did not go with us five years later on the transfer to South Africa. We gave away our dozens of vinyl records. Although we sold the piano, that didn’t in any way cover its original price or what we paid for its container shipment. I hope the person who bought it had as much joy as it had brought our family.

I didn’t ever visit a rubbish dump in India, but certainly saw plenty of litter. I was always troubled to see it filling up the tracks at railway stations. But you come to accept these things as ‘normal’ with time. Mind you I’d say that even the old London Bridge Station could come a close second. We seem more respectful in its modernised version. But the streets around south London still accumulate ‘disposables’. Margaret and I enrolled with PALS, becoming two more ‘pensioners against litter’. We’d have our litter-pickers in one hand, a plastic bag in another as we went for an evening walk. We received the occasional strange look but also a commendation now and then. I took comfort in the thought that even Vaughan Williams did his bit to keep his town tidy. He probably had similar reactions around Dorking. I doubt that any of that would have influenced his classic music. I couldn’t pretend is was anything like his music, but a line or two about him: Vaughan Williams Pilgrimage. There are also a few about what we throw away: On the Street.

Open House London about 20 years ago, and Margaret’s choice was to visit SELCHP (South East London Combined Heat and Power Plant). I recall her excitement on looking through the glass of the incinerator as many tonnes of refuse go into generating many megawatts of power. Here was another example of something good coming of what we throw away.

For me, household rubbish still has to be religiously sorted for the weekly collections. The mantra: repair, re-use and recycle now seems ingrained. And of course, there’s the crow to feed and the compost heap to pile higher with left-overs from the kitchen or the garden.

There’ll always be decisions about what to keep or what to discard? Memories of a lifetime are revived as I pick up this or that. Should it go, can I keep it, will I use it now, will somebody want it one day? Should I sell it, give it away? Things pile up on their way to the dump or to the charity shop. As we sort through things I’m comforted by the 2500 year-old wisdom of ‘the preacher’:


A day or two back I found myself alongside west London’s domestic waste recycling unit. The seagulls love it there. Then they fly across the Thames to one of the access shafts to the new Supersewer, still under construction. Those places are an important part of life for us and them.
 
September 2020