Thereafter the specators confined themselves to indistinct mutterings, and Jim settled down to form his own judgment of the case.
The hearing did not improve his temper. From what he could learn, when the witnesses' answers were not lost in the subdued buzz arising from the fans, the shopkeepers had been perfectly justified in their complaint, and the boys' act seemed to Jim oafish and inconsiderate, quite apart from the element of danger involved. He was therefore relieved to hear the magistrate find them guilty, and fine them five pounds apiece, plus Court costs, but he was somewhat taken aback when both pulled wads of notes from their hip-pockets, and paid over the money on the spot. Seeking more information on the matter, he turned to the man beside him.
“What sort of money do these Speedway chaps make?” he asked.
“Ah, they do all right, gov-nor, take it from me, they do all right, don't they, 'Orace?”
'Orace said they did very well indeed.
“It ain't the pay so much,” he added sagely, “it's the perks they git from garridges, and manyfacturers!”
Awaiting his sons outside the Court Jim reflected, a little ruefully, that his family seemed to be far more successful at money-making than he had ever been.
The twins greeted him cheerfully, hardly bothering to refer to the case. Boxer, especially, seemed delighted to see his father in Court.
“Not bad, was it? I figured on a tenner. Even brought the money with me,” he said. And then, slapping Bernard on the shoulder, “What do you say to some grub, before taking Pop over to see the track? Whad'ysay, Berni?”
Berni gave his approval, and they at once adjourned to a large and cheerful public-house, where Jim was left in no doubt as to the local popularity of the boys. The moment it was known that he was their father everyone in the bar wanted to stand him a pint, and they were still drinking, and wolfing slabs of bread and cheese, when the barman called time, at 2 p.m.
Jim had remained behind after Court with the earnest intention of lecturing the boys on their social responsibility, or lack of it, but somehow, what with the rivers of beer, and the noisy company, and all those people congratulating him on possessing two such stalwarts for sons, he had no opportunity to begin a serious conversation. It was, he reflected, through a haze of beer fumes and tobacco smoke, a sad comment on the age that an incident like this should increase, rather than diminish, the popularity of the culprits. Any ill-feeling that did show itself in the pub conversation was directed against the unsportsmanlike attitude of the shopkeepers, for daring to resent the intrusion of a wall of flood-water into their premises, when it had been directed thence by two such daring track-riders.
Soon, however, the initial cause of the get-together was forgotten in a babel of speculation on next Saturday's inter-track contest, and Jim found himself jostled down to the Speedway to inspect the new machines the boys were to ride on the occasion. He had never visited a Speedway track before, and was mildly intrigued by all he saw and heard.
“Isn't it a bit dangerous?” he asked Bernard, as the boy pointed out the most hazardous corner of the circuit.
“Not half as dangerous as it looks, Pop,” Bernard told him. “Boxer and me, we tackle it together, see, and I usually block the opposition, and let Boxer through. It works okay, Pop!”
And that's about it, thought Jim, as they walked him cheerfully to the 'bus stop, Bernard as the buffer, and Boxer the one who gathers the laurels.
So he never delivered his lecture on social behaviour after all. When they had put him on the 'bus for Addiscombe, and were standing by the kerb waiting for it to start, Boxer looked up at him with a wide grin, and said:
“Well, so long, Pop! Decent of you to look us up! Keep clear of the cops, won't you, now!”
It was ironic and exasperating that this was precisely what Jim failed to do, for in less than a month it was his turn to stand in a dock, on a somewhat more serious charge than that of swooshing flood-water into shop doorways.
2
If most of the Avenue folk were able to watch the General Strike from the kerbside, a number of them found themselves taking a far less detached view of the Depression of five years later.
Nobody bothered to make a statistical review of the Avenue's unemployed during the autumn and winter of 1931-2, but had they done so they might have found more residents on the dole than at any period since the crescent had been built.
The previous slumps had hit the artisans, and labourers, men like Carver, who, for the most part, earned their bread with their hands, but the latest depression was something quite new in slumps. Small firms, with limited reserves, began to close all over the city, and the tide of unemployment soon lapped into the outer suburbs, where the clerks, insurance agents, and the small non-salaried commercial travellers lived and dreamed.
The collapse of the Socialist Government, in the early autumn of 1931, put an end to a number of Avenue dreams. Some Avenue dwellers stopped dreaming for fourteen years, and did not begin again until the whole world had been turned upside-down, and there were things to dream about that did not exist in 1931.
Jim Carver was not unduly cast down by the Labour landslide in October that year, and the virtual collapse of the party that was to have ushered in the Millennium. He was a dedicated Socialist, but very far from being a pedant, and he had to admit that, minority notwithstanding, the Second Labour Government had made a pretty poor showing, and misused its golden opportunities. Unlike many of his colleagues, who were inclined to think that Labour was finished for all time, Jim remained optimistic. There were sound reasons for his optimism. From far off he could hear rumblings, and he reasoned that if an earthquake was to follow the landslide, then it was far better that Tories should be sitting in Westminster, where eruptions were usually centralised.
He anticipated a phrase that was to become fatuous a few years later, and told his dispirited colleagues, at a gloomy Labour Committee Meeting, that “time was on their side”, if only because no one party, least of all a Tory Party, could hope to solve the unemployment problem. A figure of three million unemployed, he argued, meant big trouble for someone, and they had already seen how damaging failure to tackle the problem could be for the Government in power!
In the event the explosion was heard a good deal sooner than he anticipated, and Jim found himself rather more closely involved in it than he could have wished. With him, even deeper in trouble, was his genial employer, Jacob Sokolski, who had never yet cast a vote for Socialism, or any other Ism, having a deep-rooted conviction, dating from earliest childhood, that “bloody bolitick iss a bloddy nuisance for efferyun”.
It all began when Jim turned up to work one morning in his best suit, a serviceable blue serge, and looked in on Mr. Sokolski to ask for another day off.
“Vot's der matter now? Iss your boys in drouble again?” Sokolski wanted to know.
Jim told him no, this was a private matter, concerning an unemployment rally.
The Russian grunted. “Ach! Der bloddy bolitick again,” he said.
“Bloody politics it is, Mr. Sokolski,” admitted Jim, with a grin. “I've promised to receive the hunger-marchers, when they get in for the big Rally. The last time I attended a rally up West I saved your furs, remember?”
“Hunger-marchers!” snorted the furrier; “you make me laugh, you Pritisch! Hunger, you say! God'lmighty, you doan know vot hunger iss, not none of you!”
“I don't know about that, sir,” said Jim cheerfully, for no one could take Sokolski very seriously, “I reckon an empty belly feels the same in Manchester as it does in Moscow. These chaps come from Jarrow, on the Tyne, and from the Rhondda mines. They've been rotting out there for years. You must have read about it, Mr. Sokolski.”
“Sure I read about it,” said Sokolski, “but vot dam' good dey do coming here? Dere's no zense in marching on empty bellies, iss there? Dey do more good sitting still on their arses, right vere dey live! Vot you say to that, my Zocialist frien'?”
“I'll tell you w
hat I say to that, Mr. Sokolski,” said Jim deliberately. “I'd say that these chaps are about desperate, and that they've got to do something that'll draw attention to what's happening to them! There were those chaps in the paper the other day, maybe you read about them, too. They'd been out of work for so long that they didn't care any more. They'd lost their grip, so what did they do, Mr. Sokolski? They clubbed together, four of them, and bought an old car with their last few pounds. Then they sat in it, and drove it slap over a cliff! Can you cap that, where you come from?”
Sokolski's thick eyebrows came sharply together, and he whistled, softly.
“So? They did that?” he said admiringly. “But that's pig! That's Russian!”
“But it didn't happen in Russia, Mr. Sokolski, it happened in Bristol, only the other day!”
The old man sat thinking for a moment, his hands clasped together over his huge, round belly. Suddenly he got up.
“It is enough,” he said, “I do more dan give you the time off, my friend, I come wid you! Let us go, hey?”
Jim was taken by surprise. “You'll come ... but you don't believe in us, you've always said ...”
“I begin to believe in der Zocialists ven dey spit so hard,” said Sokolski. “Besides, it vill be interesting to watch how you Pritisch make der Revolutions!”
Jim grinned. “You're going to be disappointed. We don't believe in revolutions, over here. Even those chaps in the car didn't, Mr. Sokolski,” He was touched, nevertheless, and added: “Are you sure you want to come?”
“I'm sure, my frien'. We go now.”
He pounded the desk bell, and the wizened little caretaker trotted in. Sokolski used him as a kind of valet, and the man helped him on with his long black overcoat, and handed him his wide-brimmed felt hat, his woollen mittens, and his bone-handled umbrella. They passed out into the street, and turned towards the park.
“A hundred years ago,” Jim told him, as they walked briskly down Oxford Street, “the chap who wrote The French Revolution came into the West End one Sunday to watch the Chartists revolt.”
“So,” puffed Sokolski, “shorten your stride, my frien', I haf der pig veight to carry—and how many did they kill that day?”
“They didn't kill anyone,” said Jim, “it came on to rain, so they all went home!”
It was raining now, a thin, depressing drizzle, but there was some evidence of the demonstration at Hyde Park Corner, where caped police stood about in knots of three and four. The crowd, sensing tension, were loitering about the speakers' pitch, where orators were already at work, and their home-made placards had been planted. The lettering was already beginning to run in the rain. One placard said: “Jarrow! What is to become of Us?” Another: “Ashton-Under-Lyne. We Claim The Right to Work, even for Next to Nothing!”
Sokolski spelled out the placards slowly, shaking his ponderous head as he did so, and hissing through his teeth.
“Dis is a strange vay of making the revolutions,” he said. “Vould it not be better to pull da policeman from his horse, and kick his face ten times?”
“It isn't a revolution, Mr. Sokolski,” insisted Jim, “simply mass protest, and that's quite different! God knows, bloodshed won't help any; it's the one thing we all want to avoid!”
The crowd was increasing every moment, and scraps of stump oratory, flung into the wind, reached them from the speakers' rostrums: “... the Socialist government were blocked by a capitalist conspiracy...” “... the cartels need a permanent pool of unemployed labour ...” “MacDonald and Snowden were bought by the bosses....”
The number of walking police began to multiply along the pavements of Park Lane, and immediately behind Jim and his employer, where they stood on the fringe of the trees, a group of mounted policemen began to edge their horses on to the grass, gently shepherding the crowds away from the more open ground.
“I'm supposed to report to my reception committee at mid-day,” said Jim, turning up his collar against the drizzle. “Suppose we have a coffee to warm us? There's a little place I know off Cumberland Place, if we can get there.”
They were unable to get to the café, for crowds were now lining Oxford Street ten deep, and a phalanx of police held the kerbsiders in a solid wedge along the edge of both pavements. Slowly the two of them worked their way to the kerb and stood there, blocked by the broad back of a Metropolitan policeman.
“Vot's diss?” Sokolski wanted to know. “Vy we stuck here by bloddy polis?”
Jim glanced at him curiously, noting the change in the Jew's demeanour. He had set out almost in protest, but later on, after they had stood in the Park for a few moments, he began to catch a little of the general excitement, and had looked around on all sides with considerable interest. Now there was a hard look in his eye, and a very determined set to his jaw. Jim noticed, with some apprehension, that the old man was beginning to look almost belligerent. He said cautiously:
“We'd better stay here for a bit, Mr. Sokolski. I've just heard that the Merthyr Tydvil contingent is coming in from Earl's Court This is their finishing point, and that'll be them, now.”
From over on their left, in the general direction of Bayswater, came a confused murmur from the crowd, and above it the faint sound of men's voices, singing in harmony. Jim edged back a few inches, and hoisted himself up on the base of a lamp-standard. As he was over six feet his additional height enabled him to see two or three hundred yards down the Bayswater Road, to a point where a procession was moving slowly in their direction. He could just pick out the cluster of banners, advancing through the murk.
Here and there, good-natured chaff was being exchanged between police and sightseers.
“Move your great blue behind, copper, and let's see something worth seeing!” piped one Cockney.
“What are all the Flatfeet here for? Do they think we're going to blow up bloody Parliament?” asked another, within hearing of a knot of policemen.
Two or three mounted policemen clattered by, riding briskly towards the procession. Their batons were drawn, and Jim was struck by the tenseness of their expressions.
Shortly afterwards, marching to the slow rhythm of Cwm Rhondda, the procession moved into general view, its leading ranks swinging slowly round to the right as its standard-bearer made for the area fronting the speakers' platforms. Jim and Sokolski now had a good view of the pinched, exultant faces in the front ranks, small men, most of them, inadequately clothed against the wind and the driving rain.
Then, as though by pre-arranged signal, two flanking bodies of police moved forward, one from each side of Park Lane, and the procession halted in some confusion. The song ceased as the men behind lost the rhythm. A mounted police-inspector, not ten yards from the spot where Jim arid his employer were standing, trotted over to the now halted leading files, leaned forward over his crupper, and said something, pointing with his baton towards Oxford Street.
“Not this way,” he shouted; “down there—keep moving down there!”
“They're heading them off,” exclaimed Jim incredulously. “The bloody fools, they'll have a riot on their hands if they head them off!”
The solid wedges of spectators immediately behind suddenly surged forward, presumably in the hope of getting a better view of what was going on, and Jim had barely time to grab Sokolski's coat sleeve before the pair of them were projected into the road. Simultaneously the police cordon broke.
At the same moment, the halted ranks behind the Welsh banners broke formation, and pushed forward in a solid wedge, shouting and cat-calling. Police from the shattered cordon began to rally to the mounted group, fumbling for their batons as they ran.
As the first of them reached him, the mounted inspector stretched out and grabbed at the banner of the man he had first addressed, but the standard-bearer, a short, stocky, white-faced man, refused to surrender it, and clung to the pole with both hands as the horse swung round, jerking him off his feet. For a second or two he hung there, while another policeman pounced on him from behind, and
a third doubled round the hind-quarters of the horse and began belabouring the standard-bearer's shoulders with his baton.
It was difficult to discover how Sokolski became involved. One moment he was beside Jim, a few yards from the scuffle, and the next he was clear of Jim and lashing out at the third constable with his umbrella.
Jim, horrified, darted forward with the intention of catching and somehow extricating the old man from the mêlée, but by this time the main body of miners had surged to the rescue, and the scuffle had become general, men going down on all sides, with fists and batons flailing.
A burly miner beside Jim darted forward and seized the leg of the struggling inspector, tearing him from his saddle. The banner-pole snapped off short, and the little man who was holding it began using it as a club. Police helmets began to tumble off, and Jim caught a last glimpse of Sokolski, about three yards away, wielding his umbrella by its end, and screaming something at the group of police who had converged on the prostrate inspector. Then a salvo of silver-starred rockets exploded in Jim's face, and he fell beside the riderless horse.
3
When he opened his eyes the first thing he noticed was an enclosed electric bulb, wired into the ceiling. He blinked at it, conscious only of the brightness of the bulb, and of an agonising throbbing at the right side of his head. He put up his hand to rub it, and touched congealed blood. His hair was matted with blood, and he felt violently sick.
He lay still for a moment until the nausea passed. Then he noticed that he was lying on a hard floor, and that round about him was a great deal of confused noise, and several pairs of legs. Gradually the noise resolved itself into the rise and fall of men's voices, using an unfamiliar accent, and it was the accent that gave him the clue, and caused him to remember the scuffle, the flailing batons, and the blinding flash that had brought the curtain down on the fight.
He sat up unsteadily, and discovered that he was sharing a plain, white-washed room with about a dozen other men. They were all so crowded together that they found difficulty in moving without treading on him. He looked slowly round, recognising no one. Then his jaw dropped, for sitting on the closet lid, not a yard away from him, was Jacob Sokolski, hatless, his overcoat lapel ripped and hanging, his shirt torn open, and a large patch of dried mud adhering to his seamed cheek.
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