The house dissolved in uproar. Police had to be brought in to protect Laing from the outraged violence of some of his hearers. But when he made his appearance in the members’ bar a few hours later, there were others happy to shake him by the hand and talk with him far into the night.
The debate was resumed. The house would not approve the prime minister’s plans for scrapping the social security system. The pound fell and fell on the foreign exchange markets. The government lost a vote of confidence. A general election was called. It was late summer.
The flags were out in Seyer Street. From every window of the double row of terraces, the FAMILY emblem hung: a gold hand, stitched to an oily green backcloth. It was a female hand with neat nails and a wedding-ring; in the better reproductions it was full of character. It had wrinkles, tiny muscles, even hints of honest dirt. It was a working hand. It was a hand that could be tender, it could beckon or admonish, make love or smack. No one knew who the model was for the patterns that FAMILY Headquarters sent out in thousands to its sewing circles; but FAMILY hands appeared as badges, on mugs, T-shirts and posters; they were flyposted on walls and scrawled in public lavatories. They had even been poached by manufacturers of washing powders until FAMILY clamped down with a writ.
Most of the Seyer Street houses were on their last legs. Tiles were off, walls split, and there were open wounds in some of the roofs (covered in winter by sheets of plastic) where chimneys had fallen in. Some of the proud banners hid gaping window-holes, the frames too rotten to hold glass. Everything shone in the sun, silent and still, as Isabel Travers stepped forward to greet the knot of journalists who had accepted the invitation to visit. Her skin was soft and white; she wore a pale green frock of Family Fabric (a better grade of Olex that the organisation imported in bulk for its members). She was flanked by her husband, by Mrs Patel in a dark green robe, and by David Laing.
‘Welcome to the press preview of the Seyer Street exhibition. It is one of fifty such displays being mounted over the next few days around the country. It is, of course, pure coincidence, that they are happening a week before the election. They were planned a year ago to replace our processions, which were becoming, in some ways, too successful.’
The only woman in the party of reporters, early middle-aged with red hair, said, ‘You mean the time the youth contingent went berserk and stoned a claimant’s home?’
Mrs Travers twinkled. ‘If you have any proof of that allegation, may I advise you to lay it before the police? What I was referring to was our tendency to stop traffic the length and breadth of the land. Why, it’s Mrs Byers ... isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And which publication are you representing, my dear?’
‘I’m freelance.’
‘Of course ... and you’re just here, what do you call it, “on spec.” Well, I admire that. And I admire the way you find the time to keep on working, especially with your poor little daughter needing so much of your care. How is she?’
All the spirit seemed to drain from Lynn Byers’ face. She flushed and mumbled, ‘All right, thanks.' The other reporters looked at her curiously. Most were young enough to be her sons, pink cub reporters from local papers. This was a straightforward public-relations job, an easy assignment for beginners. It wasn’t done to say anything contentious about FAMILY.
Mrs Travers led the party down the street, feet clattering over its broken stone surface. She stopped outside one of the more solid-looking houses. A sign proclaimed, ‘Photograph Exhibition.’ Mrs Patel ventured to speak. ‘You all have background information sheets, but Mrs Travers will make a few comments about the history of Seyer Street before you go in.’
The reporters glanced briefly through the sheets, each individually typed by a girl in a YFT (Young Families of Tomorrow) typing class. They told of how Seyer Street had been a poor but spirited community in the nineteenth century, but malaise had set in with the coming of the twentieth. Mrs Patel’s contribution appeared complete; Mrs Travers resumed.
‘By some anomaly of planning law,’ she explained, ‘Seyer Street missed two waves of slum clearance and is now something of a museum piece. Technically it is a slum.’ She seemed to have developed a tic in her neck. ‘And by rights and by conventional wisdom, it ought to have been flattened long ago, and replaced ...’ Mrs Travers’ head was twitching as if it was being pulled in a direction it did not want to go, ‘replaced by something like that.’ And she turned to glare at Collindeane Tower, leaning towards her, crumbling (it seemed) before her very eyes, gashed down the side by a great meandering crack with tributaries and estuaries and deltas that reached every comer. The slogan in the windows made clear what it was (if anyone did not know): a two-generation community of feminists, some of the early settlers now having had children. The large letters in the windows spelled out: ‘FAMILY ENSLAVES WOMEN.’
Mrs Travers stared, smiled sadly, shook her head, began to say something, stopped herself, turned, and led the party into the photograph exhibition. The interior was dark after the bright sunlight, and smelled damp. The rooms were painted green and the gold hand emblem gleamed in each one. Photographs plastered every surface.
‘Seyer Street at the turn of the century.' Browning pictures of girls in smocks, boys with huge caps, sheepishly grinning with hoops, kites and marbles. ‘Seyer Street in victory.’ A forlorn youth in battle dress turns the corner into a street full of women waving flags. ‘Hard times in Seyer Street.’ A gaunt thirties mother feeds soup to her children. ‘Seyer Street reconstructs.’ Bare-handed men, women and children repair bomb damage.
And then a change of tone.
‘Seyer Street and the “welfare” state.’ Depressed men queueing for dole. ‘Seyer Street never has it so good.’ An old woman staggers with a crutch and a bursting plastic shopping bag. ‘Seyer Street women’s liberation.’ Toddlers crawl in the street; a car approaches.
‘Just a minute.’
‘Mrs Byers?’
‘Are those pictures genuine?’
‘One or two are reconstructions.’ Mrs Travers gave a pained smile to the pink cubs. ‘How sceptical you are, Mrs Byersl Perhaps a word or two from the — shall we say — horse’s mouth, will resolve the doubts you so transparently feel?’ Like a conjuror she produced a girl of about thirteen with her finger in her mouth. Her floppy frock was clean and her plaits stretched the skin on her forehead. She was flushed with nerves over her ill-fed pallor, and she had the red scrubbed hands of a lifetime of domestic work. Despite the scrubbing she looked grubby, and dead-eyed, and malleable.
‘This is Patsy Hindley,’ said Mrs Travers, pushing the child forward with a deft shove to her shoulders, after which she discreetly wiped her fingers on a lace hanky.
‘I am Patsy Hindley and I have lived here all my life.’ The child’s voice was husky with shyness. ‘My mum and dad would be honoured if you would visit us.’
The Hindley house was the worst in the street. Holes in the walls showed daylight and not a window was intact. Doors hung drunkenly on their hinges, hardly coinciding at all with the shapes of the frames; and the press party walked gingerly over the rotten, creaking, uneven floorboards, trying not to take advantage of the views afforded of the house’s uncertain foundations.
The smell of paint that hung in the air did not quite mask the rot, and the glossy greens and greys had not fully covered the great swamps of damp on the insides of walls worn away by water from broken drains.
But the Hindleys seemed determined to prove that family life could thrive under the most arduous conditions.
In the only soft armchair in the cramped front room sat Mr Hindley, serious in his role as paterfamilias. A squat, bald, plump man, he looked so clean that if you ran your finger over him he would surely squeak. His face was pink and grazed with close shaving. His hand was poised halfway to his mouth with an empty pipe.
At his feet, five-year-old twins were playing a game with toy oil-tankers.
Opposite him sat his wife, awkward in h
er hard-back chair, as if she were unused to sitting. Her pasty face was smeared with orange make-up, and she clutched a grubby hanky and a needle that had lost its thread. She was quite slim, but her skin hung loose and grey, as if she had shed weight by having it sheared off her.
Hindley children in their multitudes were arranged round the room, neatly and symmetrically by size, posed stiffly in attitudes of sibling conversation. If they moved as their home filled up with spectators, it was only to flick a fly or control a sheepish grin.
Patsy said, ‘We are a large and happy family. My mum is a very motherly woman. My mum regards, thinks, looking after her family is the height of a woman’s voc- voc- vocation, and she teaches us daughters the same. Don’t you, mum? Don't you, mum?' At the second asking, Mrs Hindley’s head nodded up and down, up and down, till Mrs Travers gave her a prod. ‘My dad has no skilled trade and he used to get more on social security than going to work, but you was ... were ... demoralised, wasn’t you, dad? But FAMILY found him a job, and now at least he has his self-respect.’
‘Yeah,’ said Mr Hindley, ‘that I do have.’
‘What work do you do, sir?’ a pink cub asked deferentially.
‘I measure washing machines.’
‘He means the wires,’ said Mrs Hindley.
‘They mustn’t be too long, see,’ said Mr Hindley.
‘It’s for exports,’ Patsy explained.
‘And Mrs Hindley,’ Mrs Travers intervened in the silence, ‘You’re finding it easier to keep a nice home now, aren’t you? We had to be a bit hard on you at first — our people coming in morning, noon and night.’
‘Morning, noon and night.’
‘And they helped you with your slimming?’
‘Helped me with my slimming, ooh I hate food now.’
‘And got Mr Hindley his vasectomy?’
‘Yeh, they got him done.’
‘And we still pop round, don’t we?’
‘Oh yes.’ The trace of a sigh escaped from the sagging, orange face.
‘And now,’ said Mrs Travers to the reporters, seeming satisfied, ‘I’m going to show you our little school. Those of you who are parents —’ she looked straight at Lynn ‘— will not be surprised to know that in recent years the parents of Seyer Street had simply stopped sending their children to school, so horrified were they by the subversion and immorality taught there. Is it any wonder that the parents of Seyer Street thought “why bother?” But it is FAMILY’s job to bother.’ They crossed the road into a stuffy prefab on the site of a Seyer Street house that had faced reality and fallen down. Flies buzzed. Children sat motionless on benches, their hair combed, their fingernails spotless. They sprang to attention. ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.’ Around the walls, bright posters showed men in fields and factories, women at home.
Mrs Travers’ fingers touched a little girl’s cheek.
‘And what are we studying today?’
‘Family values!’
‘Indeed! And what are the values that make for happy family life?’
‘Self-sacrifice, and authority, and — and —’
‘Whose authority?’
‘The man, the head of the house.’
‘Goodness. That seems a bit hard on the wife.’
‘The true woman has her own authority.’
And again Mrs Travers’ eyes met and held those of Lynn Byers. She moved on to the next child.
‘Self-reliance!’ it piped.
‘Self-reliance,’ exclaimed Mrs Travers, ‘Does that mean we all look out for number one?’
‘No!’ cried the class in delight, ‘it means we all look out for each other in the family and don’t expect to be spoonfed by the government!’
Then the party saw a four-roomed house where eight old women lived, all of them discharged recently from hospitals that were closing. There was nothing much wrong with them, Mrs Travers explained, apart from a general slowing up of bodily functions which one could expect with old age. The Seyer Street wives took turns to clean them and feed them and watch over the ones that went for walks. Today the old women sat in the disinfectant-smelling rooms, each room equipped only with two beds and two boxes of possessions, and smiled at the visitors.
The party was taken to look at a plump pink-cheeked mother and her two similar sons. She sat in a bare, steamy cellar and threaded wires into plugs. She was very quick and expert but her fingernails were worn away. Mrs Travers explained that the girl used to be a prostitute. Lynn Byers glanced at the wires and plugs. ‘What do you get for doing that?’
The girl told her.
‘Not much, is it?’ said Lynn.
‘But at least I have my self-respect.’
Finally, in the open street, Mrs Travers asked the reporters if there was anything further she could tell them. One of them turned even pinker and asked apologetically, ‘Some people might say — er, what would your answer be to the accusation, not that I’m making it myself, that you’re using these people —’
‘Were any of them manacled to the floor, that you noticed?’
The cub’s question subsided as quickly as it had come. Lynn Byers took it up.
‘What would you say to a suggestion that you are a women’s auxiliary for the far right?’
Mrs Travers patted Mrs Patel’s shoulder. ‘You can see we’re not racialist.’
That wasn’t what I asked.’
‘Oh Mrs Byers! Right wing, left wing — you know that women belong to all wings and none! If it is right wing to want to reward effort, we are right wing. If it is left wing to want the poor uplifted, we are left wing.’
‘But is it true that you support government plans to abolish unemployment pay?’
‘Let me say this about that. It would make no difference whatever to this street because nobody is drawing any.’
Looking slightly hurt, David Laing stepped forward to appropriate the question. ‘Only as part of a package —’ he began.
A controlled but angry Asian voice said, ‘There is not complete agreement on this within the organisation.’ Mrs Patel held herself erect, trembling slightly.
‘Close ranks, Mrs Patel,’ whispered Mrs Travers, before explaining, ‘There is ongoing discussion within the party as to the extent that there should be financial and other disincentives to anti-social behaviour.’
‘Other disincentives?’ Lynn queried.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I want to know how you did this. I know this street. I used to live here. Your tale of the thriving community that went to the bad isn’t quite the whole truth, is it?’ She lifted her voice for the cubs to hear. ‘This street was a dumping ground for people whose problems were too expensive for the social services to solve, and you know that as well as I do, David, pardon me, Mr Laing MP. So what did you do with the ones who wouldn’t fall into line?’
‘It’s not a question of falling into line, Mrs Byers. By a process of education and support —’
‘And was there no one — no one at all — who would not accept your education and support?’
Mrs Travers began a reply, but Mrs Patel cut in again. ‘It would be ridiculous to pretend that there were no difficulties. There were two young men squatting in one of the empty houses. They were living in an unnatural manner. The street decided they should leave.’
‘It was one of their first collective decisions,’ said Mrs Travers.
Polling day was uneventful, a bit of an anticlimax after FAMILY’s marches and festivals and the midnight rally that swamped the West End in torchlight; not to mention the less photogenic efforts of the primmer but somewhat rattled major parties. With the results there followed a week of confusion, of thick newspapers and extended bulletins. Grey men with graphs explained that the new voting system had produced a very interesting left-right deadlock situation, with the meteoric Family Party’s thirty members holding the balance and refusing, for the moment, to make a pact with either side. Blurred film showed furtive car-dashes to Buckingham Palace,
and at last the Government of National Regeneration was formed, a coalition of patriots that would set aside party dogma and lead the nation towards the winking mirage of the technological paradise that the third millenium — now just ten years away — promised to be.
Fears that the Family Party might abuse its position were assuaged after the brief row over the Home Secretaryship. It emerged that what had happened was this. During the few days when it seemed no government could be formed, MPs from left and right had met with David Laing and Alan Travers and heard that the price of their joining an all-party group was that Travers got the Home Office and Laing a new welfare ministry.
This seemed a lot for an upstart party to ask; on the other hand, no one else seemed particularly keen to take on welfare. Travers’ ambitions earned him suspicion and were sacrificed; Laing obtained his new ministry, which he named the Department for Family Welfare.
‘Let us build a generation worthy of the world it will inherit,’ he exhorted in his victory oration. His appointment had been controversial within FAMILY. His ‘Wrong Rats’ speech had raised heckles in immigrant groups, and Rashida Patel in particular took a lot of convincing that no racial slur was intended. She made him say it in public: ‘We are in the business of rewarding responsible motherhood, not selective breeding based on arbitrary and outdated notions of race.’ And when the details of Benefit were announced, it was there, plain enough.
All mothers, regardless of race, marital state or domestic competence would be eligible for the weekly payment, so long as they stayed at home and looked after children under 16. In calling the payment simply Benefit, no risk was run of confusing it with other benefits, for these were all abolished. They were unnecessary. The explosion of job opportunities that would result from the economic upturn and women leaving work, would ensure that no man need be unemployed; Benefit mothers would not need social security or income supplements; and, as for sickness and old age, people who wished to be insured could make private arrangements. Motherhood, on the other hand, was not a misfortune to be insured against; it was a national service to be paid for.
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