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Philip Reeve
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SYNOPSIS |
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Tom found himself being sent off to do Gut-duty while all the other apprentices were busy .celebrating the capture of Salthook. After a long, embarrassing lecture in Pomeroy's office ("Disobedience, Natsworthy. . . Striking a senior Apprentice. . . What would your poor parents have thought?") he trudged over to Tottenham Court Road station and waited for a down elevator.
When it came, it was crowded. The seats in the upper compartment were packed with arrogant-looking men and women from the Guild of Engineers, the most powerful of the four Great Guilds which ran London. They gave Tom the creeps, with their bald heads and those long white rubber coats they wore, so he stayed standing in the lower section, where the stern face of the Lord Mayor stared down at him from posters saying, Movement is Life - Help the Guild of Engineers keep London moving! Down and down went the elevator, stopping at all the familiar stations - Bakerioo, High Holborn, Low Holborn, Bethnal Green - and at every stop another crowd of people surged into the car, squashing him against the back wall until it was almost a relief to reach the bottom and step out into the noise and bustle of the Gut.
The Gut was where London dismantled the towns it caught: a stinking sprawl of yards and factories between the Jaws and the central engine-rooms. Tom loathed it. It was always noisy, and it was staffed by workers from the lower tiers, who were dirty and frightening, and convicts from the Deep Gut Prisons, who were worse.
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