LONDON LIFES 5
HELEN FITZROY

Last year, Helen ‘Stinky’ Fitzroy briefly revived the forgotten Victorian London trade of Pure Taker, by gathering dog excrement from the streets around her Islington home, which she then attempted to sell to the Leather Industry.

When I tell people that I once tried to sell dog excrement to strangers, they often look at me askance. But I am an educated woman, who has spent twenty years in Public Relations putting brands like Front and Big Brother on the map, so I would hardly waste my time trying to push worthless filth on people without a very good reason, would I? One night, my husband Tony, who is an underpaid academic and obviously looks down on what I do for a living, had been reading Sir Henry Mayhew’s survey of 1850’s city life, London Labour and The London Poor. He remarked how he lamented the loss of the old London street characters, the costermongers, the pearly kings and so forth. ‘Once,” he had said, in his stupid quavering Yorkshire accent, “London was full of costumed figures, all singing the songs of their trade. It would have been a pageant, a pageant everyday.”

Tony is fifteen years older than me and I hate him. He taught me poetry at North London Poly in the mid-80’s and one thing had led to another in a disused toilet on Highbury Fields and then I was trapped, trapped by Tony, trapped by London! I was halfway into our third bottle of red, so I let him have it, both barrels! “There were women in London back then, Tony” I remember shouting at him, “who made their living by gathering up dog’s muck, and selling it to tanners to dye leather. Does that seem quaint? I suppose you’d like it if I did that?” And I waved the bottle and he put up his hands to shield his face and said, “Go on then. Go on. If you want to.”

So I did. I don’t know exactly what possessed me but I did. I stumbled out into the street and crossed Essex Road to Islington Green, away from stupid Tony, where I found myself crawling along the road towards The Angel gathering up the doggy doo and putting it into my handbag, laughing. People are more conscientious than they were in Victorian times, but eventually my bag was half full. I felt a strange sense of pride. What did I do every day in my Soho office? I tried to sell worthless ideas to worthless people using worthless images and lies. But here I was, a few hours after I first left the flat, with a whole handbag full of dog excrement. Finally, London has actually given me something to show for my labours, something solid and pungent and real. London has helped me to learn the dignity of labour.

And so it was, after haggling with a mini cab driver who objected to the smell, that I found myself on the North Circular, just up from Hanger Lane, at three a.m, banging on the door of World Of Leather, asking the security guard if they still did their own dying, and passing him a handbag full of dog mess through the grill. We ended up drinking our way through a whole bottle of a vodka as we tried out a succession of reasonably priced leather sofas. London’s like that. It knows what you need and its gives it to you at exactly the right moment. I needed dog mess and affirmation. I left my handbag in the back of the minicab I took home. Its moment had passed.

Helen Fitzroy was talking to Stewart Lee