They already had most of the depots sewn up round here. Just a thin line of half a dozen pickets stamping their feet, the police guarding the gates. The first few days, one or two lorries would rumble on through the gates, the pickets jumping aside at the last moment, still jeering as they stumbled, but within a week it was hard to find a place that bothered to try to keep its gates open. And the coke mountains, once as high as the cooling towers the police told me, were now trifling hillocks which had to be kept back for agreed emergency services such as hospital generators. Out in these desolate sites a strange testy intimacy grew up between the police and the pickets and the few others involved, journalists, miners’ wives, support demos, mostly only a handful out here. After the fun was over, I would drive back into town and ring the usual numbers to gather information from around the area, balancing the plastic coffee cup and the receiver in one hand as I jotted down figures with the other. Then I would ring Hilary.
‘No violent incidents to report?’
‘None,’ I said.
‘Excellent. That seems to be the picture everywhere. I assured Ministers that it seemed unlikely there would be any repetition of Saltley. Comrade Arthur’s playing it by the book this time.’
‘So far anyway.’
‘Good, good. Well, the election will clear the air, and then we can move forward.’
‘How?’
‘What?’
‘How will it clear the air?’
‘Well, there will be a new situation. The government will have a fresh mandate.’
‘A mandate to do what?’
‘A mandate to reach a settlement on the common ground that has already been established.’
‘If it’s already been established, can’t they reach a settlement without an election then? I mean it doesn’t seem to make much difference whether they surrender before or after the election.’
‘Gus, I have better things to do than argue the toss over the phone about matters which are in any case out of our hands. And I don’t want any talk of surrender. Would you dictate the rest of your report to Diana? I must fly to Misc 93.’
He put the phone down, and I could see him shrugging on his jacket over his broad shoulders and clasping his big notebook to his chest as he sailed along the dimpled drugget towards the Cabinet Office. Across the stone floor, medieval in parts, heels clanging – men with a future in the Service often had metal crescents on the heels of their shoes, like horses – then down the long passage with the three right-angled bends, through the door with the winking light above it, green if all was well, and on into the ultimate bunker, Conference Room H, or J, or K, airless, windowless, impervious to terrorist blast or the changing of the seasons. There the feedback from around the nation would be liaised until it was whipped into a smooth verbal mayonnaise, stiff enough to keep its shape, yet yielding to the slightest pressure from an anxious minister. Good luck to them, or good hunting as Riley-Jones swore he had heard Hilary say after the final meeting of the committee to review the presentational aspects of the introduction of decimal coinage.
‘How do you make this spinach tart, Brendan, has it got cheese in it?’ I enquired, looking up from Moby-Dick as Brendan cleared my plate.
‘You just grate a little parmesan over it at the last minute. Sue got the idea from First Slice Your Cookbook. Excuse me, sir, but have you been to Woden Heath yet, the coke works? It’s just round the corner from our home and there was trouble there this morning. I know you said you were looking for trouble, like the song’ – and he sketched out the Presley number in an adenoidal drone.
‘Well, not exactly looking for it, but thanks for the tip.’
To be honest, which I wasn’t, even my few years in the Service having taught me never to confess ignorance unless forced to, and preferably not even then – a lesson people seem to find useful in all departments of life – I had not heard of Woden Heath. But there it was in the briefing notes: small Gas Board coking plant, stocks at 3/1/74 17,000 tons, normal traffic estd 20 lorries per day, reserved loads to Woden District Infirmary only.
Next morning, the streets seemed darker than ever (perhaps they were, didn’t daylight go on dawning later well into January, to crush your hopes?). Darker and longer. I felt my way round the west of the city, stopping now and then to look at the map by the light of the torch which had turned out to be essential for these early-morning jaunts. The odd passer-by peered at me, suspicious rather than helpful. Did he think I was a burglar who couldn’t find his way home? Finally, I hit the big avenue out to the north-west but soon I had to leave it and peel off into a potholed road which led into broken heathy land, not quite country though once or twice the smell of wet fir trees came to me through the smells of diesel and tar and anthracite and another sharp stinging pungent kind of smell I couldn’t pin down. Then more fir trees and the fog drifting through them in thick swathes and oncoming headlights swinging at me through the twists of the road. A sheep, or was it a shaggy goat, suddenly floodlit on a damp tussock, and the fog catching the back of my throat, because the de-mister had packed up and the window had to be kept open. Still hellish dark when I came into a small town, or was it only a straggling continuation of the city? No one about, but a peeling big blue sign the size of a hoarding directed me to Woden Heath Plant – Energy for the Heart of England. Down a bumpy muddy side-road there was the usual array of police vans and, as the night at last began to lift, grey shapes against a black wooded hill beyond. This was the end of every line I could imagine. Beyond here there could be no beyond, and nobody in their right mind would bother to search for one.
But Brendan was right, Woden Heath looked promising. As well as the usual half-dozen pickets there was a knot of people, about twenty of them, standing by the fence but a little apart from the pickets.
‘Who are that mob?’ I asked the policeman after flashing my ID (always one of the high points of these excursions).
‘Come from London. Funny lot, dunno who sent them. We had a bit of bother yesterday, but I reckon we’ve got them sorted this morning.’
I nodded, as though this was the kind of information that was only to be expected, and walked over to them. They were chanting ‘The miners united will never be defeated’ in a cheerful but slightly provisional-sounding way, as though this was a chant to fill in time until they received the real message.
A small woman in a bobble hat came forward.
‘We’ve got permission to stand here,’ she said.
‘No, what –’
‘God, it’s you. I thought you were a policeman.’
‘How on earth did you get here?’
‘The union sent us, they’re spreading support groups all over the area.’
‘No, I mean, how . . . we only just got back.’
‘Oh, Bobs, well, recruited me, I suppose is the word.’
‘Bobs.’ I gasped the word, but it had to turn into a greeting as the familiar figure, barely taller than she was, detached himself from the group and stood beside her.
‘Gus,’ he ejaculated back, ‘I didn’t know you were coming. This is great.’
‘Wake up,’ she said to him. ‘He’s not with us, he’s working for the government.’
‘Oh. Yes, of course he is. Bobs does it again.’
And he slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand, his usual gesture of self-humiliation. But as the hand had a grey woollen mitten on it, the gesture looked like a ritual, a knight in armour swearing fealty, and indeed he didn’t seem much fazed.
‘What are you doing here then exactly? Counting the sheep?’
As he said it, it sounded like a self-mocking description of his own group but the sweep of his mittened hand pointed to a remarkable sight opening out in front of us as the mist cleared the hillside beyond the dark wood and revealed a huge rolling tussocky heathland behind the coke works, with sheep grazing in the patches of wet grass between the withered bracken. Here and there I could see the disturbances of old mine-workings, black and overgrow
n. At the end of the hill where the fog began again there was a broken-down chimney and the crumbled walls of some ancient kiln. It was a scene of abandonment, as wild as anything I could think of in England, a place for gypsies and corpses down mineshafts and the odd out-of-town coven.
‘Counting you lot, I suppose,’ was all the lame response I could make.
‘We were told not to bring any more,’ Bobs said. ‘It’s a bit of a sideshow here really. They only tried to take a couple of lorries in yesterday because they’re so desperate. There’s not much coke left here, you see, only enough for the hospital. That’s what the branch secretary tells us. Our orders are not to join the pickets, so they can keep the numbers down to six, then we can’t be accused of intimidation.’
He then lapsed into silence, which was unlike him because normally he went on yapping to fill the gap. In fact, his voice was suited to delivering this sort of crisp sitrep. If you hadn’t known, you would have put him down as a professional organiser of such rallies. Perhaps he was, had been for ages. That was the awesome thought. If even Bobs could deploy such unsuspected competences, entertain such hidden allegiances, lead what could only be called a secret life, then how could anyone know anything about anyone else?
The second shock of the morning had followed so instantaneously upon the first that there had been no time to reflect how extraordinary it was to see Helen here. Until – how long ago was it – three, four weeks, no more – her interests in mining had been rather different. The annoying thing was that I could see her following my still only half-awake train of thought and a titchy smile beginning to form on her lips.
‘All right then, I am surprised,’ I said. ‘Come and have a drink and explain it all when you come off duty or whatever you call it.’
‘Sorry. We really ought to stay with the group. We’ve only just come, so I don’t think we should be seen – consorting with the enemy, is that the phrase?’
‘Great to see you, though,’ Bobs added.
‘And you,’ I replied mechanically. I debated briefly whether it might be fun to embarrass her by trying a fraternal kiss, decided that the embarrassment would end up on my side, and stepped away, towards the police lines where I belonged.
As I sidled between two large policemen, there was a cheer. The six pickets were standing in a line with their hands linked high above their heads. The rusty spiked gates were being drawn to, then locked with a clang. The support group scampered up to join the pickets and form part of the line with their hands held high. Another chorus, this time jubilant, of ‘The miners united’.
‘Bit of a pantomime, if you ask me,’ one of the policemen said. ‘They were only expecting the two loads for the Cottage Hospital and those went off an hour back.’
But still, they had closed the gates.
There was no denying that seeing the two of them there had shaken me up. Helen, it was clear enough, was pleased that I had found her at Woden Heath, in fact she was almost radiant and didn’t seem to mind at all that she was under Bobs’s wing. At least that was what she appeared to be. He might even be the leader of the support group, from the authoritative way he spoke, and that was a surprise too, because I had never heard him utter political views in that direction, but then nor had I heard him spout the conventional Tory views you might hear in the Clutch Club. True, he was a great one for exploring other people’s obsessions and associations. But this wasn’t just an exploration, this was a commitment, and even ‘commitment’ might be too lukewarm a word for the force that had brought them into the wilds of the Black Country at seven a.m. on a January morning. The correct word was ‘conversion’, or ‘conversion experience’, as the phrase was now which was superfluous because the essence, the whole excitement of conversion must be the experience, the actual moment of turning, feeling this one throbbing irresistible impulse, compared to which all previous life was muddy error. That truly authentic moment was something to be envied, nothing else in life came close to it. And envy it I did, without beginning to feel that their cause was just or sensible or any of the things I minded about.
At least so I told myself when I stopped in a layby on the way back into the city and wrote down what the police inspector had told me.
Yet that was not the whole truth. What I felt was not simply envy of their moment of surrender to a moral passion. No, the malaise went deeper and burrowed under the confidence every public servant must have, that, whatever the twists and turns of official policy, basically the whole enterprise is well intentioned and decent people may honourably be engaged in it. But what if it wasn’t well intentioned? What if there was something mean-spirited lying deep at the core of it, something poisonous seeping into the well, something which couldn’t be got rid of except by a great movement of the heart?
Not all of that came to me at once. Quite often I just thought that Helen had been badly treated by a brutal older man and she was looking for the quickest way of taking it out on society and that Bobs was a birdbrain. But then again, as I lay half-asleep between the strangely waxy sheets of the Beech Lawn Hotel, they would whisper to me, Helen and Bobs: Come on in, these moments pass by once and once only and if you let them pass, what’s the rest of it worth? All this going through the motions, keeping the show on the road . . . how about one sweet sip of the authentic for once?
Authenticity, Scrannel once mused, making me feel each one of the five syllables in turn, a swallow of disgust on the ‘auth’, a prolonged, exaggerated dental ‘ent’ and a trilled run on the ‘i-city’ – authenticity is an odd notion and the pursuit of it is a curious activity, like the pursuit of certainty in the sense that it comes to obsess those who have an insistent cast of mind, but not at all like it in other ways. For one thing, certainty is a destination. If you managed to reach it you would never need to budge again, and your only nagging fear would be that you might not have reached it, that someone else more inspired or simply better informed, God for example, might be able to point out that your situation wasn’t certain at all but only contingent, provisional, even transitional, that the piece of rock you were so proudly perched on was fatally porous, or liable to shift or crumble at any moment.
But if you are in pursuit of the authentic, he himself pursued (ignoring, if I remember rightly, that he had only chanced to hear the word used in passing by a prissy young art historian in a bow tie who had come to tea and was in any case using the word in a much more modest sense to apply to a disputed Parmigianino in the Ashmolean), then, Scrannel said, you must be eternally on the wing, you can never stay to prolong the experience, because the moment you linger like the princess in the fairy-story you are turned to stone. What fairy-story? interjected Mrs Scrannel, raising her blue eyes from her tapestry, more to show that she was listening, not uncritically, she herself being a trained philosopher (though, as her husband liked to remark on bringing up this fact – in fact, that was why he brought it up – a trained philosopher is a contradiction in terms, since the purpose of doing philosophy, if it has a purpose, is to untrain). Turned to stone, he repeated, or, perhaps better, to sludge. Ecstasy must be fleeting or it is not ecstasy, because you are no longer standing outside the dreary workaday world but have chosen to settle in a new world which must itself become just as dreary and workaday.
‘They closed the gates up at Woden this morning,’ Brendan said.
‘Yes, I saw them. How did you hear?’
‘My brother-in-law’s in the force. Handy being out at Woden Heath, he can nip up our place for something to eat after work, and my sister can take the baby to Mum for the day. Says she’s never seen so much of them until this strike started. I’d have the Sole Colbert if I were you, Sue’s got the mashed really fluffy today. What did you think of the pilaff yesterday? A bit grainy it seemed to me.’
‘I would have preferred it softer myself.’
One of the features of the Catering Department was the way customers, waiters and cooks all took part in a continuous exercise in criticism and self-criticism. Per
haps because they were so young, there was not much chef’s vanity around. They didn’t talk a lot about the strike, although like Brendan many of them must have had friends or relations caught up in it. The Catering Department was, by some unspoken rule, a sanctuary from the ruder world outside, an impression reinforced by the gothic brick façade and whitewashed walls of the former infants’ school in which it was housed. And when my mind wanders back to those tumultuous days in which the nation seemed to totter, it is often only to think of those conversations with Brendan about the texture of the terrine and the restrained murmur of the other customers, women come in from Kidderminster to top up their shopping, lecturers from the university bitching about their colleagues, strange single men reading newspapers.
‘No lunch tomorrow, you remember, sir. It’s an off-day, but Mrs Pocock says this is a good opportunity to hone our sandwich-making skills, so if you don’t mind a b.l.t. by candlelight, come along one-ish.’
‘How will you cook the b?’
‘On the primus. Mrs P’s switching over to gas when this is all over.’
And it was all over soon enough, the election, the settlement of the strike, my return to London and that general feeling of – what – failure, sourness, bewilderment. Not a good time for anyone, perhaps not even for the winners. Or perhaps I am projecting my own exhaustion upon the whole nation. I can’t remember being so tired before or since.
‘Our masters are looking to move the debate on. The view is that it would be helpful to draw a line and enter a new phase.’
Hilary Puttock’s neck was still damp although he had showered after cycling in from Dulwich, or perhaps it was the shower he was damp from. His forearms surged out of his half-rolled shirt-sleeves. He brushed aside my mumbled congratulations on his C.B.
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