The electricity is carried along the wires or conductors strung underneath the pylon in “quad” or “twin” formation—that is, two or four wires are suspended from each arm, being held apart along the span between the pylons by spaces at regular intervals. The stack of porcelain or glass disks hanging from the arms are the insulators that prevent the current flowing through the rest of the pylon and to earth. I know all this now, I didn’t then. When I was about fourteen I read a book about training electricians to work on live wires. It looked easy, it looked as if you just had to be fairly careful. There was an anecdote in the book about a man who pioneered work on live transmission lines and was raised to the line in a steel-mesh cage. That’s the point, that cage, as you’ll later see. He leaned out and lit his cigar from the current. If he could do it, I could do it. The trouble was, I joked with myself, that I didn’t smoke. I started smoking the following year.

Nearly all pylons have guards on them at about head height from the ground to prevent people climbing up. Some are like a raft of interwoven barbed wire and others are more of a frill round each of the uprights. Daniel said they were barbed-wire garters on the pylon’s legs and that that proved it was a girl like in the poem, but where he had seen real garters I don’t know. The guards wouldn’t stop anyone who really meant to climb up.

On most big pylons there are four crossbars with struts crisscrossed in between them. Above that it’s all latticework to the top, which is a triangular shape or pentahedron. The six arms start about halfway up the latticework and end just below the top. By the time I met Daniel I had climbed all the pylons in the field up to the lowest arms, either cutting the barbed wire with wire cutters or, later on, when I was more proficient, climbing up inside the guard. Several times I saw the National Grid engineers come in their white van and mend the guards I’d damaged. Mum and Dad said they couldn’t understand such vandalism, what sort of a person would want to destroy a pylon guard, it was mindless wanton destruction by some idiot taking revenge on society. No one ever knew it was me, no one saw me on the pylons as far as I know. The fact is that a lot of people don’t see pylons, they’ve unconsciously trained themselves not to see them because to most of us they’re as ugly as Spender said they were, a blot on the landscape, a violation of the countryside. So it seemed that when I was on them I became as invisible as the steel tower I climbed.