The Storytellers, page 20
He had come to realize that those of his university acquaintances of a socialist persuasion would have regarded his mother’s ideas as unsophisticated and simple. And perhaps they were simple. Her two core beliefs were that deeds counted for more than words and that to give up responsibility for oneself was to accept a form of slavery. While left-wing radicals talked loudly about saving mankind, she would be round at a neighbour’s house helping out. It was not that she thought men shouldn’t organize to protect themselves – that was what a nation was for, after all – but to sell one’s soul to the devil, to union bosses, or to national politicians in return for promises of succour, well that, for Sylvia, was a blank cheque too far. She admired the sentiments behind the welfare state, created after the Second World War, but remained acutely suspicious of its implementation.
‘You mark my words, Harvey,’ she told him, more than once, ‘if it is left to politicians, they’ll just try to bribe us with our own money. It will end badly.’
Had she studied economics, Harvey thought, she would have added ‘and better still, try to bribe us with our children’s children’s money’, until that great Ponzi scheme was exposed for the fraud it was. Her sophistication lay in an implicit belief that life was about what individuals did to and for each other. Institutions were essential means to specific ends, but never a substitute for that. Had his mother lived long enough she would have understood exactly what Margaret Thatcher meant when she said there was no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families, even if more sophisticated commentators would feign otherwise.
He must have dozed off because suddenly he became aware of sunlight streaming though the curtains and the smell of death permeating the room. He got up, kissed his mother on the forehead and went to the hall to call an ambulance, dabbing tears from his eyes. Life was for the living, not the dead.
Part Three
CHAPTER
IT WAS 1983. Since his compact with the security service and break-up with Miranda de Coursey, Jack Pugh had become an increasingly bitter man. He had seen the financier’s daughter once since Oxford. She had taken him on holiday with her to the French Riviera where he had wallowed in the luxury that surrounded her, only to be humiliated in front of her friends and dismissed at the end with the crushing rebuff: ‘when it comes right down to it, Master Trotsky, you are nothing, not even a good fuck. I don’t really want to see you again.’ MI5 appeared to have dropped him, too. More than ever, he was convinced that the system was rotten to the core and had thrown himself behind Arthur Scargill, elected president of the National Union of Mineworkers by a landslide in 1981.
To make matters worse, Margaret Thatcher, buoyed up by her victory over the Argentines, had been returned to power in June, winning a majority of one hundred and forty-four seats in the House of Commons with only 42% of the popular vote, against a hopelessly divided opposition. From demon to demigod in the space of a few months! If that didn’t illustrate the false consciousness that underpinned democracy, he didn’t know what did. Voting was little more than a sham in support of the status quo and financiers like Sebastian de Coursey. The right had shown all the daring. That had to change.
He strode into the room, accompanied by John Preston. This was the fourth meeting he had addressed that day. In spite of their working relationship, he wasn’t close to his colleague. The man toiled hard enough for the cause, but rarely stayed for the late night ‘put the world to rights’ sessions he so much enjoyed. Jack reasoned that not everyone could have his intellect and besides, armies needed their foot soldiers.
“Brothers!” he called out. His customary greeting was met with nods and grunts, and sometimes silence, depending on the mood of those being addressed. On this occasion, the sounds were warm and supportive. The NUM had secured a substantial pay rise and a promise of no immediate pit closures from the first Thatcher Government. Now, with their champion, Arthur Scargill, in charge, the men were starting to feel invincible.
“As you know, in March of this year, Margaret Thatcher” – he had learned to fairly spit out the words Margaret and Thatcher, eliciting the desired murmur of disapproval – “appointed Ian MacGregor to head up the National Coal Board. I have been finding out about this man and, brothers, we have Thatcher in trousers, or possibly a kilt – he is a Scot.
“He was born in 1912, in Kinlochleven, some two hours north of Glasgow. His father was an accountant at the nearby aluminium plant and his mother a teacher – so the MacGregors were a bourgeois family to the tips of their fingers.”
Not much imbued with Marxist theory, the bourgeois reference was largely lost on his audience, but Jack had become used to that. His job was to lead the proletariat, not educate it.
“Young MacGregor studied metallurgy at Glasgow University,” he continued, “and then joined his father at the plant. But Ian had ambition and was soon recruited as a junior manager by William Beardmore and Company at their Parkhead forge making vehicle armour. It was there he had his first run-in with organized labour, seeing off a strike by crane drivers when he actually drove the cranes himself. A super-scab from the word go! Naturally the chairman of the company was impressed, and Ian’s career has been on an upward trajectory ever since. The ruling class supports its own.”
By now his audience was quite impressed with the Coal Board’s new chairman and a few even wished that their sons could do as well. One thing Jack Pugh did not mention, doubtless because he didn’t know it, was that, from its foundation in 1894, British Aluminium, where MacGregor had cut his teeth, was increasingly run as an arm of the state, supported by highland landowners. As the importance of its product to aircraft manufacture in the First and Second World Wars increased, its relationship with government grew closer. The statist model, implicitly endorsed by Jack Pugh, had served the country well in wartime, but had produced nothing but rigid inefficiencies afterwards and it was these that Mrs Thatcher was attempting to unwind. So, youthful communist agitator though he might have been, Jack was actually an arch conservative. What drove him, however, was not a love of the past, but his ill-disciplined frustration at not being central to the present.
“At the start of the Second World War, MacGregor went to work for the Ministry of Supply,” Jack elaborated, “travelling to the United States and Canada on procurement missions. So, as you can see, his relationship with government goes back a long way.”
The irony that the career moves he was describing could as easily have been applied to a communist apparatchik was quite lost on Jack and hadn’t even occurred to his audience who were more concerned with such bourgeois issues as the size of their pay packet and the security of their employment.
“Our man remained in America after the war and became known, brothers, for his aggressive tactics against organized labour.”
Recognizing that the word ‘brother’ was their cue to participate, a rumble of disgust spread around the room and Jack looked fulfilled.
“In 1977, it was Prime Minister James Callaghan, a union man himself who should have known better, who brought MacGregor back to this country as the number two to that South African snake Michael Edwards, at British Leyland. But after helping to get rid of our esteemed brother, Derek Robinson, he left.”
There were a few gasps. Red Robbo had become an icon.
“As Secretary of State for Industry, it was our Prime Minister’s intellectual guru, Keith Joseph, who appointed MacGregor chairman of British Steel. Well you all know what happened there!”
This evoked widespread murmurs, as to some degree or other, everyone did.
“When he arrived in 1980, British Steel employed one hundred and sixty-six thousand people and was producing fourteen million tons of steel a year. When he left early this year to become chairman of our Coal Board, there were seventy-one thousand people employed and less than twelve million tons being produced.”
There were gasps across the room. The parallels with their own industry were clear. Few were sufficiently good at mathematics to see that if employment had fallen by 57% and output by 14%, productivity had improved dramatically and Jack was not about to point this out. Neither did he intend to mention that when MacGregor arrived, British Steel was losing £1.8 billion annually and that when he left the loss had been cut to £265 million.
“Can you imagine what this did to the steel communities?” he shouted instead. “Yes, it has utterly devastated them. That, brothers, is what capitalism does to you. That is what we must resist!”
John Preston watched from the side as the men in the room fell squarely behind their organizer, clapping enthusiastically as much to counter their fear of the future as to congratulate Jack Pugh. Who was fooling whom? Hadn’t Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivization of farms in the Soviet Union resulted in the death of millions? It sure as hell wasn’t just capitalism that could make people’s lives a bloody misery.
* * *
The girl at the bar didn’t seem to be attached to anyone and Jack felt like company. He had agreed to have a drink with John Preston and his girlfriend, after their last meeting of the day in Barnsley. The crowd had been enthusiastic. This was Scargill country.
“My friends and I wondered if you’d care to join us?” he asked as he stood at the bar waiting for their drinks.
The girl looked at him and then towards the table he had come from.
“Yes, why not,” she said.
“What are you drinking?”
“Shandy,” she answered.
“And could you add a shandy?” Jack called across to the barman who had already earned his respect by recognizing him as the speaker earlier at the Cortonwood Institute.
“Great talk, by the way,” the barman said as he handed Jack the tray of beverages.
“Thank you,” Jack acknowledged, gathering up the tray with aplomb and guiding his catch back to their table, although it was unclear who had caught whom.
“Mona Dexter,” the young woman announced, leaning over and shaking hands with John and Stacy.
As Mona slid into the booth next to Stacy, her already short black dress crunched up like a compressed accordion before she managed to pull it back down again. Jack felt immediately aroused in the way of a bee attracted to pollen inside a flower. There was just something about white knickers next to brown skin.
“So what was your talk about?” Mona asked after everyone had been introduced.
“You are in the presence of the union organizer,” Stacy eulogized, knowing that any such introduction would have stuck in John’s throat. “Jack travels round the country motivating the members and explaining the big picture.”
Instantly John’s girlfriend went up in the organizer’s estimation and for a moment he imagined a threesome. But then there was John to consider and he certainly didn’t fancy making it four.
“Explaining how the mining life is under threat, mostly,” he told Mona, with uncharacteristic modesty, “and that miners had to stand firm against this evil government.”
“So are you a miner then?” she asked.
Luckily Jack did not spot John Preston’s smirk as the organizer told his new disciple that only someone like him, with a true Marxist understanding, could explain to the miners how they were being manipulated and describe to them the nature of the forces they were up against.
“We must engage in permanent revolution,” he told her, “and not allow the social democratic charade, so beloved of the bourgeoisie, to distract us from our objective. I am at the coalface of ideas each and every day,” he explained, adding with a theatrical flourish: “I am, indeed, a miner!”
“How wonderful,” expostulated Mona as John Preston almost choked on his beer and Stacy had to lift a napkin to hide her mirth.
“Well, just this ’un an’ we’d best be off,” said John. “It’s a two hour drive ter Longbridge. You comen’ wi’ us, Jack, or are you stayin’ here tonight?”
“The union’s booked me a room in the Bull, so I guess I’ll stay here.”
“That’s a shame,” complained Mona, “I’ve hardly got to know you people before you’re off.”
“Oh, I’m sure Jack will make up for us,” said Stacy.
“Yer can be sure o’ that!” added John.
“At least I might be able to enjoy a sensible discussion tonight with this intelligent lady,” Jack protested, which John and Stacy both knew meant treating Mona to one of his political monologues and then attempting to bamboozle her into bed with fancy words.
The four talked on until their glasses were empty and the travellers left. Jack wasted no time in suggesting he and Mona continue their drinking at The Bull, which was more intimate and conducive to discussion, he said, and only a short walk away. Mona did not need persuading as she had already decided how the evening was going to end.
“They just don’t understand,” the organizer protested as they huddled together in a corner of The Bull bar with a fresh round of drinks.
“What don’t they understand, Jack?” Mona asked.
“How capitalism works,” he said. “If you’ve got the money, you call the shots, you see. And what do the people with money want? They want more money. So what do they do? They pay their workers as little as possible to maximize their profits.”
“Who’d be a worker, then?” quipped Mona.
“Just about everyone without capital,” Jack told her, his irritation that she did not appear to be taking his revelation seriously tempered by his desire.
“That’s what you’re here for, Jack, to explain things to the workers.”
“Yes, that’s true. But it’s really the whole system we want to tear down. And all these bloody workers want is higher wages and jobs for life. They are so damn bourgeois!”
“Well I wouldn’t mind more money,” said Mona, “although I’m not sure I’d want a job for life. How boring would that be!”
“Unless power is taken from the owners of capital and transferred to the people, they will always be slaves.”
“So if everyone has a little and no one has a lot,” questioned Mona, “who gets to make the decisions?”
“The party does, for the people.”
“So we become slaves to the party rather than to capital?” she asked.
“But the party works for the people. Capital just works for itself.”
“Well, you’ve clearly thought it all out, Jack. I wish I had your brains.”
That was just what Jack needed to hear. There were not enough people like Mona able to grasp the essentials.
“How close are you to Arthur Scargill?” she asked.
Jack pressed two fingers together. “That close,” he said, exaggerating, but how was she to know?
“Will there be strikes ahead?” Mona asked.
“When Arthur thinks the time is right.”
“When will that be?” she asked.
“When he’s got the membership behind him. People are not riled up enough yet. As soon as the government starts closing pits. That’ll do it.”
“Then what?”
“Then we bring down this fascist government.”
“That sounds exciting,” she purred, moving closer.
“Another drink?” he asked, “or shall we go upstairs?”
It was always a tense moment in a man’s life when he revealed his intentions. That was when courtship was over and rejection hovered overhead like an ugly bird, ready to pounce. But Mona had no intention of rejecting him. She had a job to do.
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said.
Upstairs Mona slipped into the bathroom only to come out and find the organizer perched on the side of the bed in his underwear with tears streaming down his cheeks.
“Heavens, what’s the matter?”
“Sorry,” he said, his earlier bravado having melted like an early dusting of autumn snow. “I just don’t know what I’m doing.”
“I rather hoped you were doing me,” she said sitting next to him and reaching down to find some life, but he pushed her hand away.
“You’re just tired,” she told him while stroking the back of his head. “You’re doing great things. You know you are.”
“Am I?” he protested and she marvelled at how easily grown men could become little boys.
“How many of your talks have you given lately?” she asked.
“Twenty-eight in the last seven days,” he told her. “It’s as if I’m running for office.”
“Well there you are,” she comforted. “That would be enough to tire any man.”
“I was so certain once,” he rambled on. “Provided I spoke eloquently enough, the workers would see sense. They had to. They would withhold their labour, the government would collapse and a new order would rise from the ashes. But instead of that it’s all being broken up, shrunk and sold off. Workers strike, here and there, but it’s all random and usually for money. And then that woman goes and fights a pointless war thousands of miles away and the country loves her again. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.”
“It never is,” whispered Mona into his ear as she massaged the back of his neck. “Now, let’s get under the covers and forget all that.”
“I’ve done things. I don’t think I can,” he responded mournfully, at which she sunk her teeth into his earlobe.
“Ow! That hurt. Why did you do that?”
She studied his angry face, dug her fingernails hard into his flesh and grinned.
“Damn!” he protested again and nature offered up her answer. Looking down Mona could see that it was still somewhat tentative, but it would do.
Later the following day, after Jack Pugh had returned to Longbridge a reinvigorated man, Mona called Stacy and told her that she didn’t think strike action was imminent.
