She left them to it then, Ellen and Jock, and Ellen sat on a chair beside the bed and talked about Kirsty, whom he’d seen once, when she was about three, and now she was at the big school and thriving, and Robin, whom he’d never met, was fine, and life was fine and she was getting plenty of work, so much that she was turning some down, she had articles every week in the papers and was working on another book so, aye, everything was fine. Jock listened and she held his hand and sometimes she could tell his mind went away for a moment to cope with the pain.
‘Is it sair, Dad?’ she said.
‘Aye, but it’s better than working.’ As if even dying was a bit of a skive.
She said, ‘Dae ye mind all those stories ye used tae tell me?’
‘What stories?’
‘From the hydro schemes. A guy called the Marble Arch, and enormous midges and everything.’
‘Oh aye, them.’
‘I used tae think they were true,’ she said.
He hauled himself an inch off the pillow. ‘What dae ye mean? They were true.’ And she laughed but he wouldn’t give way. ‘It was hard, hard labour, lass, in hard, hard weather. Oh aye. But I stuck it oot. Sent the wages hame every week. I did it aw for you, d’ye ken that? And look at ye, ye’re thriving. But I’ll tell ye something, Ellen.’ He had another bout of coughing and needed more water before he could continue. ‘I’ll tell ye something. I’m glad I never went oot there.’
With a bony finger he pointed at the window.
‘Where?’ she said.
‘Oot there. The rigs. I ken there was big money tae be made but ye’d never catch me sitting on a Meccano set in the middle o the bloody North Sea. Nae chance. Maks me seasick just thinking aboot it. And onywey, forbye the danger there wouldna hae been enough places tae hide frae the gaffer. And noo this Piper Alpha thing. Horrible, horrible. Jump or burn, that’s what I heard. It was jump or burn. Jesus, I canna imagine it.’
But clearly he could. He fell silent imagining it and then he said, ‘Aw the things I’ve seen and done in my working life, I never saw onything like that. And I’m grateful for it, I’ll tell ye.’
He was quiet again, but only for a minute. ‘I did it aw for you, lass,’ he said, as if he’d got stuck in a kind of loop. ‘But I never would hae gane oot there.’ He closed his eyes, and she moved from the chair to the edge of the bed and said, ‘Dad?’ but he was asleep. And she watched him, a wee fledgling, skeletal, with a soft, downy growth of beard on his sunken, papery cheeks and his hand on the duvet so fragile and fleshless she was afraid to take it in case it broke. But she did take it, and she held it as his breath rasped in and out, ten long minutes watching her father ebbing away, and then she let go and went through to the kitchen where Mary was waiting for her.
When Ellen repeated what Jock had said, about doing it all for her and sending his wages home, Mary gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘Believe that and ye’ll believe in fairies,’ she said. She sounded hard and she looked hard but there was something else, a softness seldom revealed but Ellen had known it was there as long as she could remember.
‘I don’t know where you get your strength from,’ Ellen said.
Mary looked at her. ‘Aye ye dae,’ she said. ‘Ye ken fine.’
§
After the miners’ strike many Conservatives thought they were invincible. Nothing could stand in their way. This was an illusion, of course, but an intoxicating one. It took the poll tax to shatter it.
The poll tax – or community charge, as it was officially known – was born of the Scottish rates revaluation of the early 1980s. When property owners saw what their new bills were likely to be, they howled, and the Scottish Tories, anxious to appease their own natural supporters, badgered the government to come up with something – anything – with which to replace the rates. It happened that a group of radical right-wing intellectuals, who had first coalesced around the University of St Andrews and later developed their ideas in think-tanks named after luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, had a solution. They had dreamed up a scheme whereby almost every adult, regardless of circumstances, would pay the same amount for local services: a levy per head of population, or poll tax. This was an offering of such pure simplicity that nobody bothered to consider whether it would actually work. It was seized upon as the answer to the Scottish rates crisis. Margaret Thatcher and others in her government enthusiastically endorsed it, and decided it could be implemented in England and Wales too.
Because the problem and the panacea both emanated from Scotland, it made sense, if you accepted the logic of the tax, to introduce it there a year ahead of everywhere else. But what if you thought the whole idea unjust and unworkable, the tax regressive and grossly unfair? What if you didn’t believe the Conservatives had a mandate to govern Scotland anyway? And what if, after an election in which the proposed tax had been a key issue and the Tories had lost half their Scottish seats, the government nevertheless insisted on imposing it? You might, as Mike did, think that your country was being used as a guinea pig for a massively unpopular tax. You might, as Mike did, recall M. Lucas’s call for resistance. The question was, how to resist?
As with devolution ten years before, there were two opposition camps: there was a non-payment camp, inhabited by the hard left, anarchists, Nationalists and many others of no particular political affiliation; and there was a camp that held that non-payment would be counter-productive, resulting in reduced income for local government. This second camp was dominated by Labour politicians in the tricky position of having to administer both the poll tax and the services it paid for. They believed they had to behave ‘responsibly’. The first camp thought that the second camp would be doing the Conservatives’ dirty work for them by administering and collecting the tax. The second camp thought that the first camp would be doing the Conservatives’ dirty work by forcing cuts in local services. Together, the two camps might have stopped the poll tax in its tracks. Apart, and fragmented even within themselves, they could only disrupt its implementation.
In the end, the political resistance at council level, the non-compliance with registration, the letters of objection, the refusals to pay, the poindings and fights between protestors and sheriff officers – all these things, so long as they were happening only in Scotland, damaged and delayed but did not destroy the poll tax. What destroyed it was when it came into force in England, and the Conservatives there saw how hated it was.
§
Root & Branch came to an end, but the movement it was part of continued to grow. The Campaign for a Scottish Assembly, which had struggled to survive at the start of the 1980s, was now paid increasing attention. Despite the CSA’s own name, people were talking less about an assembly and more about a parliament. Folk whose names and faces meant nothing to the general public worked heroically in what Gavin Shaw had called ‘the cause’ – spending countless hours in meetings, brokering discussions between politicians who deeply mistrusted each other, steering negotiations around treacherous constitutional reefs, arguing tactical details and strategic principles, and drafting and redrafting documents so that as many key figures as possible could be persuaded to sign up to them. They built alliances across parties, local authorities, churches, trade unions, small businesses and cultural organisations – across that very society that Mrs Thatcher had declared did not exist. Out of the CSA came a committee, out of the committee came a document, the Claim of Right, out of the document came the Constitutional Convention, and out of the Convention came the blueprint for a Scottish parliament. There were still many hurdles to leap – not least the refusal of the government to countenance any form of devolution – and plenty of doubters, especially in the Labour Party. But at the end of 1988 the SNP dropped a timely bombshell in the form of another astonishing by-election win in Govan. The victor was Labour’s old-time Nat-basher-in-chief, Jim Sillars, who had transformed himself into an extremely effective Unionist-basher, and who wiped out a huge Labour majority in the time-honoured fashion established
by Winnie Ewing and Margo MacDonald (who by now was Sillars’s wife). This concentrated minds in the Labour Party and it decided it had better participate in the Convention. Three months after Govan the SNP, in yet another fit of independence-and-nothing-less fever, decided that the Convention was ‘rigged’ and that they’d have nothing to do with it. Like the Tories, and in spite of dissent from the pragmatists in their ranks, including the new MP for Banff and Buchan, a certain Alex Salmond, the SNP were left carping and sniping from the wings. Labour couldn’t believe its luck. It took another year before the SNP pragmatists won back control of the party, with Salmond easily beating Margaret Ewing, daughter-in-law of the redoubtable Winnie, in a two-way contest for the leadership. But by that time the Convention was at work, and Labour was irrevocably committed to establishing a Scottish parliament if it ever won power again at Westminster.
§
When it came to the poll tax, Mike was firmly in the non-payment camp. Apart from the principle of the thing, he couldn’t afford to pay. Eric Hodge had married Moira and moved out of the Tollcross flat years before. He was a GP now, in a practice in Fife. A succession of temporary flatmates, mainly overseas students, occupied Eric’s old room. This created all kinds of problems for community charge registration, especially as Mike was designated the ‘responsible person’ – the member of each household required to provide information to the registration officer about everybody who stayed there. He was off the dole by then, but earning a precarious and intermittent income, and was constantly arguing with Lothian Regional Council about who lived in the flat, what he was due to pay and how much of a rebate he could claim. Every couple of weeks a new demand notice arrived and he wrote back disputing its accuracy. He enjoyed these exchanges: whether he was dealing with a human being or with a computer they seemed incapable of supplying accurate or even consistent information. He suspected that some of the staff were being deliberately incompetent and bloody-minded. This was heartening: when the administrators of any system start to sabotage it, then the system is doomed. At one point he was in receipt of three notices, issued on the same date, demanding significantly different amounts of money. It seemed quite possible, so long as the argument continued, that he would never pay any poll tax at all.
Meanwhile, he had an idea for a photographic project: he would make a pictorial record of the progress of the tax, and its effect on individual lives. He envisaged a series of images that would movingly and eloquently portray the despair and anger and financial pain it caused. On good days he fantasised about a book, or an exhibition, or an exhibition with accompanying book, and rave reviews in the Guardian and the recently launched Scotland on Sunday. He got some distance into this project before it ran out of steam. With help from a friend employed by the Regional Council he slipped into one of its buildings and photographed staff surrounded by mountains of registration forms; he photographed friends in shared flats arguing about who was going to be the ‘responsible person’; he photographed the chaos at a sheriff officers’ premises in Glasgow, where payers on their final warning went and, under the intimidating gaze of brawny men in black nylon jackets, chucked notes and coins into a plastic bucket and were given receipts in exchange; he photographed Tommy Sheridan and his Anti-Poll Tax Federation comrades mobbing other sheriff officers at a poinding until it was abandoned. This was the year of revolutions across Eastern Europe: the Berlin Wall came down, despotic regimes were overthrown by mass protests, the Ceaus¸ecus were deposed and executed. Was Mike recording a tiny, marginal part of that bigger story? Perhaps. And he was still gathering images – under what he thought was a nicely ironic working title, ‘Responsible Persons’ – when the Trafalgar Square riots of 31 March 1990 happened.
He had gone to Glasgow that day, to photograph an anti-poll tax demo due to take place there. It passed off peacefully enough, and he failed to take any satisfying pictures. It wasn’t till he got home and switched on the TV that he saw what had been going on in London. Just a few shots from those riots would have neatly concluded the narrative he had already built up. He found himself wishing there had been similar violence in Glasgow.
Adam had some other commitment that day. He came over in the evening. Things were strained between them. Like Mike he favoured mass non-payment of the poll tax as the best way of stopping it. But he was a councillor, and said he couldn’t in all conscience tell the people who’d elected him in Borlanslogie to get themselves into deeper financial trouble than they were already in. When coalmining had ended, three years before, the town still hadn’t recovered from the effects of the strike. Half of Borlanslogie’s men were unemployed. The week before, Mike had made a stupid remark: if they were unemployed they’d get a full rebate, so what did they have to lose? Adam had looked at him with undisguised contempt. ‘Aye, ye’re right, they’ve lost everything, absolutely everything. Dae ye hae ony idea what that feels like? But if they refuse tae register, or if they’re assessed as haein tae pay some o the poll tax and they dinna, or canna, they’ll hae their furniture taen aff them by the sheriff fucking officers. Am I supposed tae encourage them tae get intae that kind o mess? I canna dae it, Mike. They’re my ain people. But I don’t expect you tae understand that.’ So that night they sat and watched the news with mixed feelings, together yet separate, and avoided any discussion that might end up in an argument. They’d been doing that a lot of late.
The next day they were up early. Adam made some breakfast while Mike went for the papers. He was hardly back through the door when Adam announced that he would have to be getting away. He had a pile of work to do at home. Mike said that was a pity, and could he not have brought his work with him? Adam said no, and that it wasn’t a pity, because they probably both needed a bit of space, some time apart. Mike said he didn’t need that, but obviously Adam did. Adam said Mike made too many emotional demands on him. Mike said that was nonsense. Things became heated. Adam said he had to go. He went.
The current flatmate was away for the weekend: Mike was left with the place to himself. It felt very empty. Had their relationship just come to an end, or was it a temporary misunderstanding? He didn’t know, and what surprised him was his lack of anxiety about what the answer might be. Maybe Adam was right, and some time and space to himself would do no harm.
He slumped down on the sofa and started on the papers. The Observer had a big, wild picture of the riots on the front page. Inside was a further spread of photographs, but these had a different tone. Thoughtful, understated, offbeat, they focused on quiet, elderly demonstrators on the fringe, not window-smashing guys in balaclavas; they used humour instead of anger – a dog wearing a CAN’T PAY WON’T PAY coat, a beaming man in a REVOLTING PEASANT T-shirt spattered with red-ink gore; and in one the camera homed in not on confrontation but on conciliation, as a female goth bent to shield an injured policeman lying on the pavement. In their own peculiar way, they said things that were being lost in the general din. They were, of course, Angus’s work, and Mike’s first reaction was to deride him: he’d gone soft, sold out, missed the point. But the more he looked at the pictures, the more he was forced to admire them. Once again Angus had found his own angle. Once again he had beaten Mike at what was, quite obviously, nobody’s game but his own.
§
Lothian Regional Council and Mike reached an impasse in negotiations over his community charge liabilities. He was overdue a full year’s tax plus 10 per cent as a penalty for non-payment. Driven by a combination of principle and opportunism, he’d held out for as long as he could, but was about to be served with a summary warrant to recover the money. Because he wasn’t on benefit and wasn’t officially employed they couldn’t arrest his income through either of those channels. If he didn’t settle he could expect a visit from the sheriff officers. His photographic equipment would be the first items they would seize and sell, to make up what he owed. He decided to settle, and the council’s clerks and he, very amicably, agreed a programme of weekly instalments. But he had virtually no money. He
still did a few hours at the restaurant but the paid photography work was infrequent. It wasn’t enough.
There was a camera shop in Rose Street with the imaginative name of Rose Street Cameras. It was run by Jeremy Tait, a Yorkshireman who liked Mike’s pictures and with whom he’d often had long conversations on technical matters. The next time Mike was in he asked Jeremy if he needed a part-time shop assistant. No, Jeremy said, as a matter of fact he needed a full-time one. He was about to open another shop in Perth and one of his staff was moving up there to manage it. Half an hour later Mike had accepted Jeremy’s offer of work, five days a week, every fourth Saturday off, starting the following Monday.
He wandered home feeling elated but also rather shocked. The pay wasn’t great but it would mean a regular income, his immediate requirement. He told himself he didn’t have to do it for ever. But he’d had to act. He was in his mid-thirties, and was about to have what Eric Hodge would have called a ‘proper job’ for the first time in his life.
§
Maggie was gone! The lady who was not for turning had been turned out! Her refusal to backtrack on the poll tax, her hostility to Europe, the steady gaze that to some observers looked increasingly like the glint of insanity – suddenly she was an electoral liability, not an asset. A succession of friends and traitors, men of principle and men of self-preservation, queued up to give her their tuppenceworth. The rank and file of the party still adored her, but they couldn’t stop the assassination. David Eddelstane watched the whole thing unfold – her failure to win a large enough majority over Michael Heseltine in the first ballot of MPs, her decision not to stand in the second ballot, her tearful departure from Downing Street – with a mixture of anguish and dumb acceptance. Must she go? She had to go. Could they live without her? They must learn to do so. At least the arch-rival Heseltine’s ambitions were derailed. The bland John Major, a safe pair of hands apparently, took over. The party entered a strange period of celebratory mourning. Without her, they might just cling on to power.
And the Land Lay Still Page 67