The Storytellers, page 6
Ralf took it from her.
“Thanks, love. You’d best go home and get some sleep. I’ll make sure you’re covered.”
“We’re going to win, aren’t we?” she questioned. “My man’s on the picket line and we could sure use the extra money.”
“Aye, lass, we’re going to win.”
Ralf Drydon’s certainty reassured her and she left looking fulfilled. For her, and most of the wives whose husbands were ‘out’, it was about keeping ahead of inflation, not changing the world.
“A communication from the top,” he announced as he read the faxed message. “From our executive officer, Alex Kitson, telling us to let essential supplies through or have the government declare a state of emergency and bring in the army.”
Mention of the army pumped Max up like a shot of steroids. In his eyes, any week without a confrontation was a wasted one.
“You’re not going to agree to that, surely,” Jack demanded.
“We’ll see,” he answered. He knew his members were more interested in getting a good part of their 40% pay claim than in adhering to the fine print of the Marxist-Leninist rulebook.
“Solidarity, brother,” Jack reminded him, but Ralf had his mind on other things and the telephone rang. Answering, he listened, looked pensive and then cupped the speaker.
“There’s trouble up at Hunters, an independent distributor near Tamworth. You boys interested?”
“Right bloody right we are,” answered Max before Jack had time to assess the full, strategic implications of the situation.
Taking that as a collective ‘yes’ he told the caller: “I’ll have some lads up with you within the half hour.” And then, turning to Jack, explained: “Hunters are trying to get their lorries out. They’re only a small outfit with five tankers, I think it is, but letting them get away with it wouldn’t sit well with my boys here. You up for it?”
The strike at the Kingsbury depot was a big story and Jack had hoped to get himself onto the evening news. But with Max already flexing his muscles and Ralf Drydon’s men exhibiting all the discipline of a well-trained army, making his presence redundant, he had to agree.
“I’m not sure the three of us will achieve much,” he prevaricated.
“I’ll send five of our lads along in the van,” Ralf countered, adding with a grin, “five of our more motivated brethren.”
It only took him a few minutes to pull his posse from the picket line because the night shift was over and a fresh batch of men, for want of anything else to do, had already started to drift in. Jack could see that those selected were not unexercised tanker drivers, but some of the shock troops Ralf Drydon used to crack the whip and ensure that any driver foolish enough to cross the picket line remembered his mistake.
As he and his travelling companions left Kingsbury, having expressed their fraternal solidarity, the Trot from Cowley feared he was about to be part of little more than a barroom brawl. But events are rarely predictable, even in a Marxist world, and before the day was out he would have garnered more publicity than he could possibly have imagined.
* * *
Harvey had received a message from George Gilder the day before that he and his photographer should get up to Tamworth right away. An independent distributor, incensed by the union’s grip on his business, had agreed to take a stand and there was sure to be a confrontation. Harvey suspected his editor had been alerted by a contact in MI5, probably the fabled Peter Betsworth, whose real name George Gilder undoubtedly knew. Sylvia had taken the call from The Sentinel and was in a state of high excitement when her son returned for the evening, barely allowing him over the threshold before sending him off to the station with a packed sandwich and thermos of tea.
The bed and breakfast his taxi driver had taken them to was walking distance from Hunters’ yard and their hosts, Doug and Marjory Faversham, seemed to have as little time for the unions as did the taxi driver who brought them to the door. ‘They shouldn’t be allowed to hold the country to ransom,’ was Mrs Faversham’s opinion, candidly delivered along with that morning’s bacon, sausage, fried bread and two eggs, a sentiment his mother certainly shared.
He probably shouldn’t have been surprised to discover a handful of other journalists already outside Hunters, being handed cups of coffee and tea by Doreen and Anthony Hunter, assisted by their two sons, Amos and Virgil, and daughter, Abigail. The Hunters had even typed up a page of history about the firm. It was started by Tony’s father, Tom, shortly before the Second World War, which it had survived thanks to Tom’s wife, Constance, driving their one truck in support of the war effort. The aftermath had been harder on account of the depressed conditions, but they were up to three trucks when the first Arab oil embargo hit in 1967. This they overcame, but were almost brought down by the second oil embargo in 1973 and rapid inflation it caused, followed by the three-day week introduced by Edward Heath at the end of that year as part of his battle against the National Union of Mineworkers.
Somehow they pulled through and had since even managed to increase their fleet to five trucks, with the help of a sizeable bank loan secured against the business and their homes. Now, however, they were boxed in. Although all five trucks were full of diesel oil, they knew they would be barred from entering the Kingsbury depot to replenish their supplies. Hunters’ loyal customers, built up over many years, depended on them and there was simply nothing they could do. So the family had decided to go out, if that was to be their fate, in a blaze of adverse publicity for the unions. They had even had one of their drivers pretend to be a member of the TGWU and alert the Kingsbury shop steward that his firm planned to make deliveries.
It was not a good morning for any kind of outside confrontation; so bitingly cold, even the scattered snowflakes were half-hearted. Harvey felt sure that opposing sides in a mediaeval battle around Tamworth Castle would have agreed to postpone hostilities, at least until the frost had left the soil and made the ground safe for horses. But such considerations were not part of modern man’s lexicon. So much now took place inside that the outside and its character was unfamiliar territory, leading urban children to think that cornflakes were grown at supermarkets inside pretty coloured boxes.
The journalists had quickly turned their backs on winter but the arrival at Hunters’ gates of Jack Pugh’s battered Ford Cortina and the van from Kingsbury caused them to consider leaving the warmth of Doreen Hunter’s kitchen. But Tony told them to ‘sit awhile,’ saying ‘that lot can freeze their buns off until we’re good and ready’.
The plan was simple. On his nod, the trucks would drive from the yard, single file, at slow speed, so that the photographers, who would already have taken up positions beyond the gate, could get some action shots of the gauntlet his two sons and three other drivers would have to run. The rest would be down to the stories accompanying the images which he was confident, following his and Doreen’s hospitality, would be well weighted in their favour.
* * *
They’d arrived around 9.00 a.m. and it was now approaching midday. The van had kept its engine running, but Jack was trying to conserve fuel and the three inside the Cortina were numb with cold. Max’s ‘for Christ’s sake, Jack. You’re a bleeding shop steward. You can get as much fucking fuel as you want!’ had yielded nothing. Jack had not wanted to get into the subtle difference between a shop steward and an organizer, which he was, and expose the limitations of his power. Real power would come later. For now his priority was to conserve sufficient fuel to get himself back to Oxford where he expected an enthusiastic Miranda would be waiting to welcome him from the revolutionary front.
“Here we go,” Max said as people started to emerge from the house adjacent to the yard.
“Are those reporters?” Jack asked, seeing cameras slung over the shoulders of some of those exiting the building.
Things were at last looking up: action and limelight, his twin passions. Stiffly the three eased themselves from the car. But like reptiles emerging from the night’s cool air, it was taking time for their metabolisms to become fully charged.
Next to them bodies tumbled from the warm van and it was clear these had not been idle. A playing card fell to the ground and Jack noticed what looked like an empty bottle tucked under one of the back seats. The heavies stamped the ground like bulls and watched their breath vaporize into steam.
“Had a good morning boys?” one of the cameramen mocked, as he passed through the open gate.
“Fair to middling,” a heavy replied, eyeing the cameramen up with obvious distaste. Their kind of work was best practised away from public gaze.
As the photographers and journalists clustered on one side of the road, the Kingsbury boys stood ready on the other, the side the tanker drivers would be on when they finally made a run for it. Max drifted over to join them, but Jack and John Preston stayed with the press.
The confrontation started in surreal slow motion. At a crawl, the five tankers, headlights blazing, moved out of the yard towards the gate, one after another. The throbbing sound of their engines swallowed up the space around them, obliterating the outside world. Three of the pickets moved to the centre of the road. The photographers moved behind them to get shots of the first vehicle approaching the human barrier. Its driver appeared heavily dressed, with a grey woollen hat, but his youthful features were evident.
As the cameras clicked like castanets and the first truck pulled level with the van, the driver was dragged from the cab, becoming invisible to the onlookers. A rain of blows fell onto him from boots with metal caps as the truck lurched to one side, scattering journalists and cameramen, and only just missing the Cortina, before sliding drunkenly into a ditch.
Barely audible, the cry came up from Max: “Jesus, it’s a bloody wench!”
Against her father’s orders, Abigail had persuaded her brothers to let her drive the first truck. ‘It’ll show them at their worst,’ she’d said.
And now she lay by the side of the road, bloodied and beaten, her long hair clearly visible beside her grey hat.
Incensed, the Kingsbury men reached inside the van for clubs just as the cameramen grasped what had happened and descended on the prostrate girl like vultures. As fast as they snapped, their cameras were grabbed from them and smashed to pieces on the frozen ground.
By now Abigail’s two brothers and the two other drivers, each with clubs of their own, had waded in and a group of men, led by Tony Hunter was approaching from the house. As he and one of his lads pulled Abigail clear, the fight became brutal until it was obvious to Ralf Drydon’s men that they were outnumbered.
Thrashing and hacking, with the Hunters side increasingly gaining the advantage, the Kingsbury lads backed themselves towards the van. They wouldn’t have got away unless Tony had reined in his men. With the five surrounded, he could have had them reduced to pulp. Instead he told the interlopers to bugger off and that it was about time they did an honest day’s work. As the van was manoeuvred away, a cascade of blows fell on it, converting the carrier’s outside into scrap metal.
Following his gruesome discovery, and seeing that the odds were against him, Max had panicked. Screaming at Jack to ‘get the fucking Cortina away’, the two had slipped on the ice while racing towards it. The club Max had used flew up, catching Jack on the side of the head, knocking him unconscious. Max and John bundled the organizer into the car and succeeded in driving off while the action was focused on the van.
* * *
The drive back down to Longbridge was fraught, with John at the wheel of an unfamiliar car and a sobbing Max, repeating ceaselessly, ‘I didn’t know she was a girl. She shouldn’t have been there. How was I to know?’
“Do you fink you killed ’er?” John quickly regretted his dumb question as it unlocked another torrent of self-recrimination from Max. Meanwhile, Jack Pugh had come round and was burbling about a great victory while clutching his throbbing head and speculating that he might have broken the leg he’d twisted in the fall. His nose must have taken a knock as well because it was bleeding like an open tap, further adding to the bedlam inside the car.
“For Christ’s sake, block it man,” pleaded Max who was showing an unexpected aversion to blood. “It’s fucking well getting everywhere.”
At Longbridge John dropped Max at their flat. The man was falling apart, now concerned less with the girl and more with the possibility that the Kingsbury boys would fit him up for a murder he might have committed.
“You’ll back me up, John, won’t you? I wasn’t there.”
John couldn’t be bothered to remind him that Jack had introduced them both to Ralf Drydon. What was the point? The poor bastard was screwed whatever way round you cut it.
“I’ll be back inside the hour,” he reassured him. “Must drop Jack back at Cowley. He’s in naa fit state.”
As he closed their flat door, Max was still baying like a bereft she-wolf. “I wasn’t there. I just wasn’t there.”
* * *
A few miles out of Longbridge, with Jack now nursing himself in the front seat, John asked, “Where exactly d’ya liv’ in Cowley?”
“On the south side,” Jack told him. “But you can drop me at Oxford University. It’s closer.”
“Goen ter drop a bomb then?”
“I’ve an engagement.”
“Whereabouts?” John asked, resisting the temptation to press what a Trot from Cowley planned to do inside the establishment’s advanced seat of learning. “Yoi’r in naa fit state ter walk.”
“Brasenose College. I’ll give you directions when we get there.”
Jack’s conversation was monosyllabic, as if he were giving painful birth to every word. After establishing their altered destination, he just fell asleep.
* * *
With the help of a college porter, John Preston managed to get the Cortina round to the back of the building, along Brasenose Lane. As luck would have it, the porter had seen Jack before and after they had deciphered his repeated ‘Miranda, must see Miranda’, helped him haul the wounded revolutionary up to the lady’s room.
Out for the count on her small bed, Jack Pugh looked like the girl had looked, curled up defenceless on the ground, arms wrapped around her head protecting it from the blows. Max might have been distraught to discover the sex of his victim, but John had been disgusted by the whole fucking thing. If this was Jack’s revolution, he could stuff it.
As he started to check over the room’s contents, he wondered if he should have asked the porter to call a doctor. Then something caught his eye – a letter addressed to Miranda de Coursey. He’d read about a financier called Sebastian de Coursey who was interested in parts of British Leyland. His Longbridge brothers had pinned the article with a picture of the man to their dartboard and there hadn’t been much of it left last time he looked. But what a sweet effing possibility! This surely warranted a report and would justify a visit to Stacy. Then a troubling notion occurred to him. Supposing the Trot from Cowley was working to save the nation too?
* * *
The aftermath at Hunters’ yard reminded Harvey of Wellington’s comment in a letter to a friend after his battle at Waterloo, that nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won. The ambulance had collected Abigail and she was now on life support at the local hospital. Tony had ranted at his sons for letting her drive and then cursed himself for delaying their exit.
“Those men had been drinking. If we’d gone out first thing, maybe it wouldn’t have happened.”
Amos and Virgil, caked in their own blood and that of their adversaries, had tried to comfort their mother. Now the family was standing vigil beside Abigail’s hospital bed.
The photographers had combed the ground for their camera parts like scavengers searching for anything that could still be used. Hunters’ other drivers quickly extracted the first truck from the ditch and had already left to deliver what was likely to be their last load. A couple of policemen were taking statements and measuring distances and a colleague was photographing the blood on the ground where Abigail fell.
Harvey took one last look at the scene before he and his neutered accomplice climbed into one of the taxis summoned to take the journalists to the station. On the train he wrote, crossed out and wrote again. By the time they’d reached London he felt he had it, but still managed to make some changes on the way to St Paul’s.
George Gilder was grim-faced.
“I need pictures. I must have pictures.”
While Harvey’s almost indecipherable freehand piece was being coaxed into life by an imaginative typist, George Gilder was on the telephone to the other editors whose journalists had also been at Hunters – had anyone retrieved a useable image? A photographer with The Tamworth Herald had managed to secure a picture of Abigail in hospital and was now negotiating his price, while the local police were being persuaded to release a picture of the blood-stained snow to a courier standing by.
By 6.00 p.m., things were looking up. The police, anxious to catch Abigail’s assailant, had agreed to release a picture and it was now in The Sentinel office. One of the photographers, although not Harvey’s, had had the presence of mind to gather up all the unfurled film spread around the site like tagliatelle, and one grainy image had been retrieved. It hurt George Gilder to have to negotiate with a counterpart, but his determination to get a photograph of the blockade overcame his natural frugality. Only then did he grab Harvey’s piece from the typist’s desk and retreat to his office.
The day had been something of an epiphany for Harvey. For the first time in his life he had come face-to-face with thuggery, the muscles of the authoritarian mind. He had also witnessed the courage needed to resist it.
In her primitive, intelligent way, his mother had often talked not so much about as around freedom, a concept she instinctively understood but would have been hard-pressed to define, just as countless academics had been. For her, it didn’t need defining. It was obvious. If there was no law which applied to all, and if people were unable to associate with one another for their mutual benefit as they chose, there was no freedom.
