The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  Sean shouted, “Come in!”

  It was Ives. It was five to three, he was out of breath, and he had beneath his arm a carrier bag from Vincent’s, a classical record shop in central Birmingham.

  “Well? Did you get it?”

  “Yes. It was 20p more than you said it was going to be.”

  “Never mind that.”

  He opened the bag and inspected its contents with a cry of satisfaction. It was another record of Vaughan Williams orchestral pieces. This one included the tone poems “In the Fen Country” and “Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1.”

  “You’ve got to hear this, Ben,” he said, cutting “Dives and Lazarus” off in mid-stream and slipping the record on to the turntable. “I couldn’t believe they didn’t have this one in the library. It’ll blow you away.” Ives was still loitering in the doorway. “Run away, little boy,” Sean chanted, waving him off impatiently. “Don’t worry about the money. I’ll pay you later.”

  “Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1” began with a thin, misty shimmer of strings, over which a solo clarinet scattered plaintive fragments of melody. Then, as the other instruments started to add their voices, a theme slowly emerged: a long, wandering tune, impossibly noble, impossibly sad. It felt like a melody Benjamin had known all his life, even though it had until now been kept secret, locked in some hidden, innermost chamber of the heart.

  “Oh,” he sighed, and found only these insufficient words: “That’s nice.”

  “It’s a folk tune,” said Sean. “He found it in King’s Lynn.” As the music continued, he sat down opposite Benjamin and began to explain, animatedly: “Picture it. It’s 1905. He’s spending day after day cycling round these Norfolk villages. Whenever he can he goes into a pub and he gets talking to people, and after a while he asks them to sing for him. Old people, especially. This guy in King’s Lynn was seventy. A seventy-year-old fisherman! Just imagine. Vaughan Williams buys him pint after pint. Maybe he slips him a shilling or two as well. And then after a couple of hours—just before closing time, say—he starts to sing. And this, this is what he comes out with! Did you ever hear a tune like it?”

  “Does it have a name?”

  “ ‘The Captain’s Apprentice.’ Vaughan Williams loved this tune. He used it again and again. And do you know what the words are about? It’s about a bloke who’s lying in prison. He’s lying in prison on a charge of murder. He was a sea-captain and this fatherless boy was bound apprentice to him, and one day the boy annoys him somehow—the captain doesn’t say how, he disobeys him or something, I suppose—so do you know what the captain does? He ties him up to the mast, and he gags him, and he beats him to death with a piece of rope. He spends the whole day on it. The whole bloody day beating this poor little kid to a pulp. And now he’s lying in prison saying how sorry he is about the whole thing.”

  Benjamin listened to the song’s dying fall, and felt a shiver run through him. “Wow. But it’s so beautiful, and so . . . English.”

  “Have you ever been to Norfolk?” Sean asked.

  “No.”

  “You should. It’s an incredible place. Parts of it are like the end of the earth.” Reverently, he allowed the music to fade away into absolute silence, then he raised the stylus. “The English are a very violent people,” he said as he did this, talking half to himself. “People don’t realize it, but we are. We repent afterwards, which is why we’re so melancholy. But first of all we do . . . whatever has to be done.”

  Benjamin pondered these words as he walked slowly down to the bus stop a few minutes later. Violence and melancholy . . . They were both in the air that day. Philip telephoned in the evening to let him know the Sports Day results, and Benjamin shuddered to think of the anger that must have burned in Culpepper’s breast when Steve was crowned Victor Ludorum. As for Steve himself—what had he felt when he accepted the trophy? Only triumph, or was it tinged, as well, with sadness, and the wish that it was Valerie’s lost love-token that he was kissing and raising high above the cheering crowds?

  18

  Benjamin’s conversation with Harding may have revealed that they shared some musical enthusiasms, but otherwise, the consequences were disappointing. It didn’t lead to any significant renewal of their friendship. The summer holidays intervened too quickly. By the time of the new term, with rumours circulating that his father had left home and returned to Ireland, Harding seemed to have become even more solitary and difficult. His jokes continued; or at least, whenever any particularly outlandish incident disturbed the regular flow of school life, Harding was given credit for it. Culpepper, for instance, passed his driving test and began driving into school, and one afternoon in October he unlocked his car only to find that there was a heavily sedated goat stretched out on the back seat. But Harding never admitted to any involvement in the event, and no one could ever explain where he might have obtained the goat.

  Philip gave up on his musical ambitions, sold his guitar through the school notice board and used the money to add to his growing library of volumes about “hidden” Birmingham, its history and architecture. Benjamin saw little of Cicely. The police sent a letter to Claire’s father saying that the file was still open on his daughter’s disappearance, but no further progress had been made. Claire and Doug went on three or four dates but then called it a day. Life, in other words, continued.

  This had been a stagnant summer. Issues were left unresolved, narratives failed to reach their conclusion. The Grunwick workers’ strike and the affair between Mrs. Chase and Miles Plumb had started almost at the same time, in the late summer of 1976. Now, more than a year later, neither was showing any sign of coming to an end. In both cases, there had been long periods of deadlock and sudden flurries of activity; there had been negotiation, followed by breakdowns in communication; the judgement of external advisers had been sought. But even after all this time, the Grunwick employers still refused to acknowledge their workers’ right to join a union, and Miles Plumb could not recognize or accept the integrity of Barbara’s marriage to Sam. The difficulties remained intractable.

  On November 7th, 1977, the Grunwick strikers called for a new mass picket of the factory, and among those being bussed in to offer support from around the country was a British Leyland delegation led by Bill Anderton. They hired a coach from a local firm, and the driver turned out to be Sam Chase. He spent most of the three-hour journey to London thinking vengeful thoughts about Miles Plumb and nearly drove the coach right off the hard shoulder on the M1 just past Northampton.

  They stopped for breakfast at Watford services. Sam settled into his driver’s seat and told them not to be more than twenty minutes.

  “Are you not coming with us, then?” Bill asked.

  “No, thanks. I’d rather just sit here with a good book. Bring us a cup of tea, if you can.”

  As it happened, he had two good books with him: Twenty-five Magic Steps to Word Power, by Dr. Wilfred Funk, and a battered American paperback called Change Your Life with the Power of Words, picked up last July at a local jumble sale. He had read these books again and again over the last few weeks. He had learned passages by heart and made whole exercise-books’-full of notes. But still he felt that his life had not been fully transformed by them. Still he was convinced they must have further mysteries to yield.

  He opened one of the books at a well-thumbed page and began by reciting what had recently become his personal mantra:

  “My words are daily dynamite.”

  “My words are easy energizers.”

  “My words are helpful friends.”

  “My words are confidence-builders.”

  “My words are the new me.”

  Then he turned to the contents page.

  You Can Choose The Way You Speak.

  Learn To Correct Your Verbal Responses and You’ll Be Calm In Any Situation.

  Energize Yourself With Verbal Vitamins.

  Power-Packed Speech Means Power-Packed Experiences.

  Command Your Speech and You’ll Hear Your “
Enemies” Surrender.

  Positive Words Are Elevators. Are You Going Up?

  Bill Anderton arrived with his cup of tea.

  “Here you are, Sam, get it down you.”

  Sam looked at the grey concoction being handed to him in a plastic cup. A mottled, particularly unappetizing film of some sort had already formed on the surface.

  “Thanks, Bill,” he said; then added, by way of experiment, “The fervour of my gratitude is well-nigh inexpressible.”

  Bill gave him a worried look and went back inside.

  The coach arrived in Willesden, north-west London, at about half-past seven. As Sam drove carefully down Dudden Hill Lane, he found that he couldn’t turn into Chapter Road, where the main gates to the Grunwick factory were located. His way was blocked not by pickets but by police. There seemed to be many hundreds of them.

  “I’m going to have to leave you here,” he told Bill. “There’s no way that lot are going to let me through.”

  The seventy-odd Leyland workers filed off the bus, and Sam watched as Bill Anderton negotiated with one of the policemen for access to the Chapter Road entrance. Beyond the heavy cordon of police, standing five or six deep, Sam could see an even bigger but more ragged crowd of pickets awaiting the arrival of the bus which had been chartered to bring in those Grunwick workers who had chosen to break the strike. He watched as the police drew back, very slightly and with obvious reluctance, to allow Bill and his men to pass through and join the picket. Then he drove the coach another hundred yards up Dudden Hill Lane and parked it by the kerb.

  “It’s time you became a word-collector!” he read. “As some people collect stamps or match-boxes of all nations, you should systematically add to your store of words.

  “The word-collector must train himself to be a careful observer, able to ignore the common specimens, but to be instantly alert for new and unusual words. And as the butterfly-collector mounts his captures on card and knows them all, the word-collector must write his new specimens in a small notebook and memorize them.”

  He turned to today’s exercise.

  “V is for VARIETY. Try your hand at the meanings of these twenty words, all beginning with the letter ‘V.’ Then look at the answers on page 108 for the measure of your success.”

  Viscous

  Vicarious

  Vainglorious

  Venerate

  Venal

  Venial

  Veracious

  Voracious

  Vixen

  Votive

  Vortex

  Volition

  Versatile

  Vigil

  Viand

  Vernal

  Vernacular

  Verify

  Verbatim

  Vacuity

  Sam did the test and found that he scored four out of twenty. Yesterday, on “U is for UNUSUAL” he had scored six, and the day before, on “T is for TABLE-TALK,” a confidenceboosting eleven. And now four! It was incredible! He was getting worse!

  When he saw the ranks of pickets gathered outside the factory gates and spread throughout the surrounding roads, Bill felt intensely proud. The object was not to prevent the strikebreakers’ bus from getting into the factory—it would probably make for the back entrance, anyway—but to provide a show of support for Grunwick’s beleaguered strikers, who had not wavered in their resolve for fifteen months now, despite many setbacks in the Appeal Court and at best equivocal encouragement from the TUC. Bill was to learn on the news that evening that eight thousand pickets had travelled from all over the country to be at the factory. It was an extraordinary display of faith and goodwill and solidarity: just what the British labour movement needed at the moment. His own men, a week earlier, had voted against his wishes to accept a new centralized bargaining arrangement from the managers. He had been disheartened by this, and he didn’t trust the plans of British Leyland’s new Chairman, Michael Edwardes, whose appointment had been announced on November 1st. These were bad times to be a socialist, he thought. He could feel the old certainties slipping away. But this morning seemed to contradict all that. This morning was going to be remembered as a great day in the history of the workers’ struggle.

  Word got around from the other end of the factory that a bus had indeed managed to squeeze through the picket lines, and the company’s handful of loyal workers were safely inside. Then a scattered cheer warmed the frosty air as Jayaben Desai climbed on to a makeshift wooden platform and prepared to make a brief speech to her supporters. She had run into Bill in the crowd a few minutes earlier and they had exchanged friendly greetings. Looking at her now, Bill again felt ashamed of the way he had automatically responded to so many women in recent years, that tired reflex, that deadening habit of seeing nothing but a quick sexual possibility. It was impossible to watch Jayaben without feeling . . . well, more than impressed. His admiration for her bordered on awe. She seemed tiny, on that platform—she was less than five feet tall—but somehow she could make of herself an amazingly charismatic focus of attention. Perhaps it was the brightly coloured sari, in a black sea of overalls and donkey jackets. But Bill thought it was more than that. It was her hurried eloquence and still determination and restless, inquisitive, laughing eyes. It was the mantle of authority the long months of this dispute had draped on her.

  The speeches were over, and it was time to leave. Police cordons were blocking both exits from the road, making it impossible, at the moment, either to enter the tube station at Dollis Hill or to reach Dudden Hill Lane where the coaches were parked. The pickets were confused, but patient. Soon enough the police would draw back and let them through. The men stood in groups, laughing, swapping jokes and cigarettes, waiting for movement. The police ignored them, keeping rank and staring fixedly ahead, unreadable, impassive.

  Where did the order come from? How was it passed along so quickly? Bill was never able to work it out. All he knew was that suddenly, there was a mighty rush of feet and a surge forward and the pickets were under attack. The police charged into them and set to work with fists and truncheons.

  He had no coherent memory of the assault but some images lodged in his mind.

  A teenager being lifted by two policemen and smashed head first into the bonnet of a car.

  A press photographer having his camera seized and stamped to pieces.

  An elderly West Indian being rammed up against a low garden wall and then levered over it, his legs contorting as he landed in a twisted heap.

  Jayaben Desai being dragged by her hair through the flinching and bewildered crowd.

  A middle-aged white woman seized by the neck and forced to the ground.

  A black worker in his thirties, one of Bill’s coach party, pinned to the road and repeatedly kicked in the neck and face by two young officers.

  Screaming and shouting and swearing all around him, cries of distress, eyes flaring to life with fear and hostility, faces caked with blood, blood on the pavement and driveways too, torn clothing, the crashing of glass, shop windows, car windows, windscreens, all splintering into chaos, and then the last thing of all, a young policeman, no more than a boy, nineteen or twenty maybe, young enough to be his son, his lips curled in a meaningless parody of hatred, something spilling out of his mouth that was halfway between a swearword and a primal scream, his truncheon upraised. Bill could remember lifting up a feeble arm and feeling it jolted aside with a horrible crack and then the truncheon must have come down and he was well and truly out of it.

  Later that afternoon, the coach was parked at Watford services again. Bill stayed on board with Sam this time. His head was bandaged up and his arm was in a sling but he felt OK. Other people had suffered worse. There’d been about two hundred and fifty pickets treated for injuries that day. MPs were already pressing for an inquiry that would never materialize and a crowd had been demonstrating outside Willesden Green police station for most of the afternoon. It had turned out to be a historic day, all right, but not quite in the way he’d envisaged. “What ar
e you reading?” he asked.

  Sam had been absorbed in a book for the last five minutes. Now he held it up for Bill’s inspection.

  “Twenty-five Magic Steps to Word Power,” Bill read, and chuckled. “Trying to improve yourself, are you?”

  “Language is very important,” said Sam.

  “That’s true.”

  “It says here—” (Sam flicked back through the pages to the author’s introduction) “—Listen to this, it says: The leaders of the world through the ages have recognized the miracle of words.”

  “Also true.”

  “The English statesman, John Selden, said three centuries ago that ‘Syllables govern the world.’ ”

  “I’d go along with that.”

  “When a Hitler, a Mussolini or a Peron takes over, his first act is to commandeer words—the press, the radio, and books.”

  “Very well put.”

  “Even in a democracy words are magic instruments. He who governs, or wants to govern, must be skilled in the science of employing words. Man is more influenced by language than the facts of surrounding reality.”

  “That guy knows what he’s talking about.”

  “In truth,” Sam concluded, “a word can cut deeper than a sword.”

  Bill laid an exploratory hand on his bandaged head, and winced. “Still,” he said, “a crack on the skull with a truncheon can get your message across, too. D’you know what I’m saying?”

  Sam smiled, and put the book aside thoughtfully.

  19

  THE BILL BOARD

  Thursday, 15 December, 1977

  EDITORIAL: Disband the Praetorian Guard

  Here’s a question for all KW’s go-getting Oxbridge candidates, the much-vaunted crème de la crème of Birmingham’s intelligentsia: what links the mass picket at the Grunwick processing factory, as shown on our television screens last month, with something you see in Big School every day at morning assembly?

  Stumped? Well, think of that scary image from the Grunwick protest: row upon row of hatchet-faced policemen, truncheons at the ready, all lined up to protect the interests of the managers. And now think of the row of prefects standing in front of the stage in Big School every morning, forming a protective barrier between us lot (the mob) and our esteemed Chief Master as he stands there dispensing his nuggets of homely wisdom.