When Helen Nightingale joined the National Rivers Authority, the predecessor to the Environment Agency, in 1991, she thought of her work as a calling. She had been fascinated by nature since she was a child, when she used to poke around in the earth on her father’s allotment, looking for worms and beetles. In her job, Nightingale spent most of her time walking along the rivers in Lancashire and Merseyside, taking water samples and testing oxygen levels. She was responsible for protecting rivers, and she often learned about sewage and pesticide pollution from members of the public who called a dedicated hotline. “They’d phone you up and say, ‘There’s something wrong.’ And you would go out straight away,” she recalled. “You stood a much better chance of figuring out what was wrong if you could get there quickly.”
Nightingale, who has a Lancastrian accent and curly blond hair, investigated pollution like a hard-nosed police detective inspecting a crime scene. She would visit dairy farms, industrial estates and sewage treatment plants, dressed in a raincoat and boots with steel toe caps, and usually started with the same question: “Can I look at your drains?” The work was demanding, and the pay, when Nightingale started, was just £9,500 a year (the UK average at the time was around £12,000), but she was proud to be protecting the environment. “It was a dream job,” she told me. “If we sat in the office, our boss would say, ‘Why are you here? Go out and look at something.’”
