The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  Everyone, that is, apart from the policemen. The town had been full of policemen, standing around on street corners like old women nattering; they’d been there to stop people like Stig and Tim, but Stig and Tim had got through. Down here by the coke works, there were lines of them by the gate. They hadn’t been allowed to take off their shirts and jackets; they were red-faced with the heat already at nine thirty in the morning. They looked good-humoured, and were even swapping caustic comments with the groups of miners down there, some kind of tense banter, you could see. Behind them, the police vans; spilling out of them, like a mound of winged insect carcasses, the riot shields, the helmets, that might be needed later.

  Tim started to look around him, now that they were settled and somehow absorbed in the group, a little less the object of curiosity. There were small islands of miners here and there, some reclining like them or sitting, others squatting or standing, their characteristic bow legs apart, their hands up to their eyes, shading them. They were gossiping, swapping stories, in high good humour. Some of the men were going from group to group, bearing information, instructions. He couldn’t imagine what this could be, until one passed them, and, looking at them with only a touch of scepticism, said, “The scabs’ coach, it’s set off now.” At the top of the hill, there was a phone box, and men were crowding round it. That, clearly, was the nerve centre of the operation, the place where information spread from, a field telephone in a red box with broken glass windows. Tim looked back, towards his nearer neighbours, and the lad in the group next to him, reclining just like them, gave him a frank grin and, with a disclosing gesture, lifted up the edge of his screwed-up T-shirt on the ground. It was covering half a brick. Tim grinned back, self-consciously. He wished he’d thought of that. Give them something to do with the riot shields.

  “There he is,” Stig said, in a voice that said he’d been expecting this all along. Tim looked and he was right: it was Arthur there, visiting the men, striding from group to group with a little entourage. He was dressed more like your dad on a weekend, and his hair, complicated in arrangement but perfectly held, glistened in the sun like a badge of distinction.

  “Who’s that with him?” Tim said.

  “You’re kidding,” Stig said.

  “No,” Tim said. “How the hell did he manage that?”

  Because at the back of the little entourage, there was Vikram, of all people. He didn’t seem to be with any of the others from their gang, and it was pretty clear from the way Scargill’s temporary friends and associates were looking at him that they didn’t know who he was, and didn’t think he should be around. He must have found himself in the midst of the Scargill entourage, and taken the opportunity to tag along, but if he had any sense he’d peel off soon. Tim restrained the urge to wave; anyway, Vikram was looking directly towards them without making any gesture of recognition.

  Time passed; it was quite pleasant sitting there. You almost wished you’d brought something to eat, a picnic. The policemen went on chatting; the miners wandered from group to group, and it looked, as the half-hour succeeded the hour, much more like social exchanges than the dissemination of strategy or tactics. It occurred to Tim that this might, in the end, turn out to be nothing much, that their information was wrong. They’d sit in the sun for a few hours, and drive home with burnt red face and arms. He’d put some factor sixteen on before he left home, slightly embarrassed about it; but he did burn, and it was painful when it happened. If they were there for more than three or four hours, he’d burn anyway.

  “I reckon they’ve lost their nerve,” Tim said in confidential tones to Stig.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t reckon they’re coming at all,” Tim said. “I reckon they’re avoiding the confrontation, sending the scabs off somewhere else.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Stig said. “There’s got to be a confrontation sooner or later, unless they’re admitting defeat already. They’re not about to do that just yet.”

  And as if in confirmation, the police—it might have been at a signal—seemed to break off their edgily cosy exchanges with the miners and, with not so much as a polite nod of farewell, drained away in one blue movement towards the gates and their heavy-sided vans. It was like the draining of a mass of water, the retreat of a sea before a tidal wave, and the miners, as if in shock and offence at the social affront, began to stand. First the miners at the front, the ones the police had been talking to, and then the whole crowd stood, rippling up the hill towards the back in a single wavelike movement. They all stood there, on the hill, a mass of disparate men in their uncertain groups, and for the first time, Tim noticed a huddle of Yorkshire Television people, journalists with notebooks, photographers at the main road, all standing together in fear or safety. What are they frightened of? he thought, but then remembered it hadn’t started yet. It was just starting.

  The police had withdrawn to arm themselves, and when the first of the insect battalions turned about, their surfaces reduced to blank geometries that blazed under the Yorkshire sun, the miners made a noise: an angry, offended noise, a murmur that turned into a grumble and a roar and a shout within a couple of seconds. It was this noise that seemed to coagulate the mass of men into order, turn them from a rabble on a hill standing around into a crowd, a rank, a battalion.

  The police stand there, facing them in silence, and the men roar, and go on roaring; their weapons, if they have thought to acquire them, now in their hands: half-bricks, stones, bottles, even a park railing like a javelin. They brandish them openly, and the police raise their hard plastic shields, each with a slash of sun reflected on it like a blazon.

  And the roar proves an incantation because it summons the police, calls them into their places, their orders of battle; it calls up something else, too, the thing the miners have been waiting for. The roar falls, just for a moment, and there in the gap is the noise of an old diesel-fuelled charabanc, put-putting away, just over the hill, accompanied by some remote and more human noises—off-stage shouting, something being thrown—and the roar on the hillside rises again, as everyone compresses, forms themselves into a mass, and their noise seems to call up an apparition, a noonday ghost, a terrible vision. Now, like the chariots of the dead, like tumbrils of pure evil, the scabs’ vans come into sight. They are a morbid green, splashed, too, with paint, not thrown, but an attempt to obliterate the windows, so that the scabs cannot be seen. There is no point in it: people know. From here, the outline is blurred; the coaches are almost entirely encased in wire cages.

  They need to be. The hurling of rocks and bricks starts immediately, and even from Tim’s position the yelling, the thudding of bricks against the coaches is deafening; inside it must be terrifying. He catches himself, thinks again, yells louder. “Scabs! Scabs! Scabs!” The police are moving forward, in their regimented way, pushing back the miners who are rushing forward to the vans; but the pressure is too much, the police are being pushed back themselves into the path of the coaches, which slow. There is a redoubling of rage, fallen rocks and bricks being picked up and hurled again, and now the miners are at the sides of the vans, and starting to push and rock. In the hail of stones and rocks, Tim is pushed and pushes, the stink of—incredibly—the mineral stink of deodorant from a miner’s armpit in his nose, and all the time yelling in his ear. He is a few inches taller than most, and there are only three or four miners between him and the van’s side. All at once he sees, through perhaps a scratched-away patch of paint, a face—no, really just an eye, and one with clear terror deep in it. Good, Tim thinks, serve the—serve the—“Scabs!” he yells.

  Something hard descends, there, to his right, and the sound of bone being struck very heavily. Stig has disappeared, somewhere in the mob. The van has stopped, and a thunderous banging on the sides and doors; it is beginning to rock, pushed by the men on the other side. They will turn it over, and open it up, and then, Tim thinks, they’ll kill them, they’ll kill the scabs—there is a rise in the thrill in his
throat at that. He turns, yelling, feeling himself at the head of this violence, this uprising, leading it, but everyone is yelling, everyone is calling out instructions. Everyone is calling, “Kill the scabs,” and they will; but there, next to him, a man, he has been struck with something, and there is blood running down from his bald head, through his eyes and features, making him unrecognizable. He could be anyone.

  He looks again, and there, from behind—how?—pressing behind him, there are the police. What had descended a moment ago descends again, hard, and hits the bleeding man; it is a police truncheon. All at once, a gap opens up, away from the police and their hard shields, their truncheons, and, half stumbling, Tim steps sideways, running and tripping over himself as he goes. He is heading up the hill towards a bunch of stone-throwers; now they are throwing not just at the vans but into the united front of the police squadrons, unified and tight as a Roman battalion behind their contemptuously transparent shields. There are some direct hits; you can hear the thunder of the bricks on shields and, as Tim stumbles directly up the hill into the path of the throwers, he ducks and finds his hand, as he falls on to the earth, closing on a rock—no, a heavy lump of coal. He has no time to pause for the irony of this, if there is any irony, if it isn’t just what the coke works deals in, what the earth here gives up; he turns and he throws it as hard as he can, into the police lines, the lump of coal describing a perfect parabola, curving just over the edge of the shield, hitting a hot and frightened policeman on his shoulder, inflicting some grave injury. Or so he thinks: his rock just disappears in a hail of stones, and could have gone anywhere. All at once a policeman is hurtling up the hill towards him, having seen him throw a rock, the copper’s truncheon out, and Tim is legging it.

  The violence ebbs away, in flourishes and bursts, and after a time, the men are sitting again on the grass, now torn and scattered with rocks and bricks; quite a lot of them are now nursing bleeding heads and bandaging themselves with handkerchiefs, whatever comes to hand. Tim is looking for Stig: he has the pamphlets to hand out. At these moments—Lenin said something along these lines—class consciousness falls away in the liberations of violence and the revolutionary spirit prevails. Lenin said that. Or he said something like that. So Tim looks for Stig with his rucksack of information, but he can’t find him. He is just wondering how, really, he is going to get home, since he doesn’t know where anyone is or where the car is and he doesn’t think there’s going to be much in the way of public transport running to Orgreave today, when a fine thing happens. The great man himself has been present all through today’s events, leonine, magnificent. Tim has seen him from a distance, stirring up the troops, inspiring them. And then, all at once, at the end of the day, Tim stumbles into a group of miners, and one turns round and it is Arthur. He looks directly into Tim’s face, and Tim looks into his—bruised and broken, heroic and bleeding. He seems to be expecting Tim to say something, inspecting him knowingly.

  “The people, united—” Tim says. He can’t think of anything to say, and it sounds, all of a sudden, completely stupid. But the great man has more of a sense of history than Tim does. He has more of a sense of the moment than his lieutenants, who are eyeing Tim with a sense of ludicrous wonderment.

  “The people, united,” Arthur says, seizing his hands, “will never be defeated.”

  Timothy, stirred, turns away to look for Trudy and Stig or Vikram, anyone who might have a bit of space in the back of their car to give him a ride to Rayfield Avenue or Sheffield town centre at a pinch, with a sense that here he has been at the cutting edge of history, and has the innocent blood spilt on his turn-ups to prove it. Scabs.

  It had been hers, the idea of an outing. Daniel thought it marked a particular step in going-out-together when she started suggesting “an outing” of a Saturday. It would be the first time they’d met during the day. Daniel drew on his experience of women, and concluded that it might even mean dropping in on her parents—girls, Daniel knew, liked to show him off. Helen was more sensible than that, and it wasn’t completely clear that they were, in fact, going out together. But it might mean dropping in on her parents, and he bore that in mind when he got dressed that Saturday morning.

  Daniel also thought that the yellow Cortina might not do. Helen, when she arrived, came immediately to the same conclusion. “Are we going out in that?” she said, poking at the gap where the back bumper was held on with duct tape.

  “It looks a lot worse than it really is,” Daniel said.

  “If it looked any worse,” Helen said illogically, “it’d be lying in the road in pieces. It couldn’t look much worse, Daniel.”

  “The fact is,” Daniel said, and went on to tell her, as they stood in the street outside his flat on a Saturday morning, looking at the sad failure of his yellow Cortina, that two days earlier, he’d been driving into the car park on top of Gateway, where the turns in the ramps were sharper than you expected, and someone had been coming down who obviously didn’t think there was anyone coming up in the other direction, and they’d had a glancing but catastrophic collision. The chap had given a cheery wave, which Daniel assumed meant “Carry on up to the next level as best you can, park, and I’ll be up in a second to swap insurance details.” But in fact it meant “I’m off as fast as I can, pal, before you can take my number.”

  “You are an idiot, Daniel,” Helen said. “It looks terrible. Doesn’t it?” she went on, appealing to a passer-by.

  “I’ve seen worse,” the passer-by said, a brown man in a hat and a pipe, a festively bounding King Charles spaniel at his dour crimplene ankles. “But not many.”

  She’d be asking the views of the old sod on the ground floor of Daniel’s house next, who was peering out from between his net curtains with undisguised enjoyment of the scene. He hadn’t thought it worth the bother of putting his teeth in. “I thought you liked my car,” Daniel said to Helen, ignoring the old sod’s horrible expression. “You said it was the one thing about me that made you think I wasn’t a gormless twat.”

  The passer-by gave a sage nod, and walked on, as if something he’d thought had just been confirmed. “I must have been drunk,” Helen said. “Or it can’t have been daylight. Or it must have been held together by something other than parcel tape. One of the three. Do you think it’ll get us there?”

  “Oh, aye,” Daniel said, dropping a bit further into Sheffield, as Helen so often made him do. “Get you all the way to Rotherham, that. And back again, probably. Where are we going, anyway?”

  “We’re going on a little outing,” Helen said. “I thought we’d go to Tinstone.”

  “That’s on the other side of Rotherham,” Daniel said.

  “Well done,” Helen said. “I thought you never went further in that direction than the Hole in the Road.”

  “I’ve been to Rotherham,” Daniel said, always fearful that Helen thought him a bit of a snob.

  “We’ll take our chances with the car,” Helen said.

  “Tinstone, that’s a terrible rough sort of place to be going for an outing, though,” Daniel said. “That’s a mining town. Why are we going there?”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “No,” Daniel said. “Just to Rotherham. I’ve never had any reason to go to Tinstone.”

  “Well, you’ve a reason to now,” Helen said, in her most practical voice, her bed-bath voice to an unwilling patient. “I thought you might like to go there to see where I grew up, as a matter of fact. And, by the way, my father’s a miner, before you start saying anything else about terrible rough towns like Tinstone.”

  Daniel subsided, fairly amicably, and got into the car. He leant over and opened the door on Helen’s side, and she got in, putting her bag on her lap. “It’ll start in a moment,” he said, after it had failed to do so twice, with the straining sound of an unsatisfied but deeply resounding cough. “It’s just that it’s been parked on the hill. There’s nothing wrong with the engine, as far as I know.”

  “Is that a new shirt you�
��ve got on?”

  “Fairly new,” Daniel said, pleased that she’d noticed. The engine caught at last, and Daniel lifted off the handbrake with relief.

  He hoped the car would make it there and back—it wasn’t just the duct-tape, he was a bit worried about the little whinnying noises the engine had started to make. He didn’t know how far Tinstone was or, really, where it was. “You’re going to have to guide me there,” he said to Helen, who was already chattering about that week’s most amusing sick cases.

  “You just head down to the Wicker,” Helen said. “Now, that’s a terrible rough part of town. I once had a disgusting curry down there, and someone hit me on the head with a poppadom.”

  “That’ll have been me, last week, in the Kashmir,” Daniel said. “Did you get the bits out of your hair?”

  “Not while Thursday,” Helen said. “The whole ward was at it, picking bits out. It were the mango chutney that were the bugger.” And by the time they got down to the Wicker, she was explaining the connection of every tenth building to herself, or her friends, or her family, starting with her aunty Muriel’s pork stall in the Castle Market.

  “That was the first job I had, after leaving school,” she said. “There, in there, in British Steel. It was an office job. I hated it. I were just sixteen, and my dad asked a friend of his in the Latin if he could suggest anything for me, and he worked at British Steel, so there you go.”

  “How do you mean, in the Latin?” Daniel said, thinking of the amo amas amat they did up the road at King George V, going on as if they were still a grammar school. They didn’t do it at Flint.