A Summer in the Twenties

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Harry Struther? He’s all right. There wasn’t any work for him today so he spent his dinner boozing. He’ll be crawling with shame tomorrow, poor lad . . . if he remembers what happened at all. I’ll tell Mrs. Struther he passed out with the beer and we put him in the church.’

  ‘He’ll have a bruise on his jaw.’

  ‘Fell against a pew end . . . My, that was a peach of a punch, Mr. Hankey!’

  Embarrassed Tom flexed his hand. It seemed tender all down to the wrist.

  ‘Oh well . . .’ he said. ‘Tell me, how did you hear about the Donovan business?’

  ‘Uncle Ned was full of it. Scuse me.’

  They had walked down the street with the chapel in it, round the corner that led to the docks, but then up the next street and so back in the direction they had come from. Now she slipped her arm from his and strode down the path between two of the facing sets of glum little houses. In the garden of the third one along two urchins were fighting while a fourteen-year-old girl, large-eyed and hollow-cheeked, leaned against the doorpost and watched them apathetically. She smiled at Miss Barnes, who spoke to her briefly and then screeched through the door towards the innards of the house. A vague croak answered her and she came back grinning. Tom realised that he had been wrong about her being no beauty.

  She had none of the assets of beauty, apart from a complexion of rustic-seeming pink and white, but even that was coarse-grained in a way that suggested that in a very few years it would begin to raddle. Her beauty lay in the energy that seemed to flow from her, not merely from her quick and brilliant glance, but energy—intellectual, moral, sensual—borne in an aura round her. Despite her square shoulders, apparent physical strength and stumping stride she was not at all mannish—much less so than Judy could in some moods be, for instance. It struck him that he knew now why Harry Hackby and his friends referred to their engines as ‘she’. With them, too, the beauty lay in energy and in the mode of its expression.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ she said as she took his arm again and motioned to return the way they had come.

  ‘Oh, nothing. But I’d like to meet your Uncle Ned. He’s keen on boxing?’

  ‘Why, he can tell you fights, round by round, that happened before his father was born. He was cursing his luck not being there when you fought Donovan.’

  ‘He sounds the very chap I’m looking for!’

  ‘That’s as may be. Tell me what you’re doing down in dockland, Mr. Hankey. We don’t see many of your sort.’

  ‘It’s a bit difficult to explain without sounding stupid. Did you hear how the fight stopped?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I didn’t like it either.’

  ‘Do you know who those men in the hoods were?’

  ‘I’ve a pretty good idea about one or two of them, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Will you tell me the names?’

  ‘No.’

  She nodded, as though that was a perfectly satisfactory answer—the one she had hoped for, even.

  ‘Go on about the fight then,’ she said.

  ‘As l say, I didn’t want it to end like that. It wasn’t . . . Fair’s a silly word but it’s roughly what I mean. I was glad to get my train through, of course. You knew I was driving the train?’

  ‘To think of me, Red Kate Barnes, walking arm in arm with a blackleg!’

  Teasingly she pulled him a little closer, as if contact with so strange a monster gave her an exotic thrill. It was clear that she considered him a complete joke.

  ‘You have to learn what’s right and wrong by doing it, sometimes. I think I’d do that again, but not quite in the same spirit . . . Anyway, I thought I’d like to finish the fight with Donovan, in a proper ring with gloves . . .’

  ‘He’s not a Hull man.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I started on the railways, of course, but they’re all scared stiff. They took up a rail, you see, and blocked the other line with trees. They could go to prison for that. The railwaymen I’ve talked to swore Donovan was in bed all that week, and I bet they’ll have the same sort of story about the chap who was my second. I didn’t get anywhere with them, so I thought I’d come and look for the man I met in the Hull goods yard, because he said he knew Donovan and sounded interested enough to help me. All I knew about him was that his name was Ned. I just guessed he must be a docker.’

  ‘Not much chance looking for Uncle Ned in Chapel! He’s a through-and-through atheist.’

  ‘Oh, I just went in to have a look round. I was getting pretty depressed. It wasn’t just not finding your uncle—it was the way no one would even talk to me.’

  ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘We’re close with strangers, close as a coal-shed door, sometimes.’

  She had slipped back into dialect. For the past few minutes her voice—quiet and low but not throaty—had been modulating itself into more neutral tones, without any affectation of gentility. By now they had reached the Hedon Road and were moving east, with the high wall of the Alexandra Dock on their right and on their left irregular blocks of old warehouses and shipping offices, a pub or two, very few shops and no houses. Rails crossed the cobbled road at frequent intervals, and sometimes ran along it for a while before swinging between huge gates—closed now—in the blank wall of the dock. They had not been alone for some time. Groups of men were moving with them, very likely the same men that Tom had spied on earlier, now walking in the other direction, silent and earnest. The setting sun gave the backs of their coats a goldish tinge, and all the dusty urban air was still and golden too. One could smell but not see the muddy Humber beyond the wall.

  ‘Tell me, Mr. Hankey,’ said Miss Barnes suddenly. ‘Do you know anything about our lives? You can’t have lived like us, I know, but have you, for instance heard of Karl Marx?’

  ‘I’m trying to read Das Kapital, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Are you now! And what do you mean, trying?’

  ‘Well, I had a look at a couple of English translations and they seemed to me pretty awful, so I’m giving it a go in German. I learnt German to do Kant and Hegel, but it’s still fairly heavy going. As a matter of fact Marx’s German is a lot livelier than either of theirs, but that doesn’t mean I can read it any faster.’

  She loosened her hold on his arm and moved a pace away.

  ‘You’ve been deceiving me, Mr. Hankey,’ she said in tones so prim that they parodied their own note of woman betrayed.

  He laughed, perfectly understanding what she meant. Though she seemed several years older than him, about twenty-seven, perhaps, he felt as though he were back at Oxford and walking to a lecture with some friend exactly in tune with his own mental processes.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘I admit what I’ve been doing in Hull sounds pretty idiotic, but I’m not brainless all through. I don’t think anybody is. But quite brainy people can be pretty stupid, and other people—ones who are useless by any academic standards—can still be full of good sense.’

  ‘You should meet my Aunt Tess,’ she said.

  ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘I must look in my etiquette book,’ she said. ‘“Say hello to Mr. Hankey, Auntie. I met him punching of Harry Struther in t’ Chapel.”’

  ‘Will your Uncle Ned be at the meeting?’

  ‘Aye. You want to stay for the meeting?’

  ‘I’d be very interested. But I particularly want to meet your uncle.’

  She looked at him half sideways for several seconds, her lips puckering as if she was having difficulty keeping a straight face, but all she said was ‘I’ll have to ask.’ Then she fell silent.

  Tom became aware that the men they walked among, more of them now, glanced at him from time to time. He saw a newcomer from one of the side-streets fall into step with a group and almost at once give a querying jerk of the head in Tom’s direction; he was answered by shrugs and murmurs. Miss Barnes paid no attention, indeed she seemed to have fallen into some kind of trance, striding along unaware of the crowd, and Tom, and the bronzy reeking ai
r. Her broad lips moved in silent mutters and some of the colour seemed to have gone out of her cheeks. Tom did not deceive himself that by being in the crowd and moving with it he had in any way become accepted as part of it, but for the first time all week he felt as though it might actually become possible to make the necessary contact. He had not enjoyed lying to Miss Barnes, but the necessity had not much troubled him.

  The dock wall curved away towards the river. A patch of open ground appeared on the right, crossed by a few railway tracks. It was a dreary flatland of several acres, through which the old Holderness Drain oozed from the north between steep straight banks. Two signal boxes and a number of other sheds punctuated the expanse, but mostly it was waste, covered with ragwort and willow-herb and tufted grass, their growth and sappiness already coarsening with the weariness of summer. Some of the sheds were in disrepair, and brambles twined through discarded parts of what might once have been cranes. A long ridge of scrap-iron still blocked out the river to the south, and further along the bank rose the wall of the new King George Dock.

  This wasteland was fenced from the road, but the wires had parted in a number of places, and through these the men pushed. Once inside they did not gather to a centre but stood around in inward-turned groups talking in low voices but with jerky and emphatic gestures. There were only a hundred or so of them there when Tom arrived but they continued to pour through the fence and either to join themselves to the existing groups or form fresh ones. Miss Barnes went up to a man who was standing near one of the gaps, watching the rest stream in. He stared at Tom and said something. She answered briefly and asked a question. He gestured with his head towards the middle of the arena. She came back and led Tom in that direction, past groups some of whom called cheerfully to her. She waved back or answered with a grin. Most of the men glanced at Tom, then quickly away.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Miss Barnes. ‘If anyone tries to throw you out, say you’re with me.’

  She strode on and joined herself to a group some thirty yards away. Newcomers wandered past in increasing numbers, but between the moving men Tom caught glimpses of her, clearly involved in an argument and putting her case with passion. The man she was mainly talking to was turned away from him, but from his stance and the wild black hair Tom was fairly sure it was the one who had been in charge when the pamphlets were loaded—conceivably therefore the mysterious Ricardo. Something was settled. Next time he could see her she had moved a little apart from the group and was peering in his direction. He waved an arm, but still she seemed not to notice. For a moment he lurched back into the half-mad sense of actually not existing in these other people’s world, but then a small man on the left of the group answered his wave and came across at a pace so eager that it was almost a trot. Still the taller man did not look round, but moved away taking Miss Barnes with him.

  The small man was older than most of the rest, and his head under its cloth cap was cocked in bird-like interest. If Tom had not been concentrating on his Ricardo-suspect he would have recognised him at once. Where had he been all these five days? As soon as he was near enough the man started making little signals of greeting. Tom held out his hand.

  ‘How do you do,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you again. Are you Miss Barnes’s Uncle Ned?’

  ‘Aye, Ned Barnes. And you’re the Honourable Thomas Hankey.’

  ‘Tom Hankey.’

  ‘I like to get things straight first.’

  Before releasing Tom’s hand Mr. Barnes turned it sideways and inspected the knuckles. He nodded.

  ‘You’ve been looking for me, I hear tell,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right. Am I allowed to stay for the meeting?’

  ‘Aye, you may. Others didn’t like it, but our Kate talked them over. It’s difficult, don’t you see, more than half the men not being in the unions. The companies will always try and sneak some of their own men in, to mess a meeting up, like, see as we don’t reach a clear-cut democratic decision. So you’ll pardon us being suspicious of strangers.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What come to Harry Struther, Mr. Hankey?’

  ‘The chap who was supposed to bring Miss Barnes to the meeting? I’m afraid he’d been drinking, and he passed out. Miss . . .’

  ‘That’s not how Kate told it us.’

  ‘It’s what she’s going to tell Mrs. Struther, though.’

  ‘You’ve been fighting again, Mr. Hankey.’

  It was neither a question nor an accusation. The words were spoken with a slow, meditative satisfaction, while the brown, lop-sided face peered up at Tom, pale eyes bulging with eager joy. Tom realised that he was dealing with an obsession, comparable in a way with Father’s. Mr. Barnes collected boxers.

  ‘I don’t think you can count it,’ said Tom. ‘It wasn’t under rules for a start, and if it had been we’d both have been disqualified in round one.’

  Mr. Barnes nodded, accepting the argument but not amused by it.

  ‘Where did you learn to fight, Mr. Hankey?’

  ‘Oh, school, and then Oxford. Really it was a way of getting out of playing football. I kept it up because I got into the school team, and so on.’

  ‘Eton College, that would be?’

  ‘Yes. How did you . . .’

  ‘Day you fought Donovan, we met, remember. You shook my hand and told me your name. I like to get things straight in my mind, I tell you, so while you’ve been asking about me, I’ve been doing the same for you.’

  ‘People seem to have been more willing to answer your questions than they were mine.’

  ‘Aye . . . Did you ever sec Pat O’Keefe fight, Mr. Hankey?’

  ‘Only photographs.’

  ‘You’ve a look of him, if you don’t mind me saying. Now, I saw Pat fight Billy Wells at Bradford, nineteen thirteen, when he was nobbut starting. There was a fight, now. A young ’un and quick against an old ’un and crafty. Wells weighed in . . .’

  Mr. Barnes recounted the preliminaries of the fight with a scholarly aridity that would have done credit to old Atherton, but as soon as the actual encounter started he changed his style, acting the bout as much as telling it, becoming each fighter in turn and differentiating clearly between them. In fact he moved remarkably little, adopting a pose and staying rigid as a sculptor’s model, freezing the flow of instants until he sprang into the next pose. His must have been a well-known and well-liked performance, because about twenty men detached themselves from the discussion groups all round and formed a ring to watch, silent and absorbed. The imaginary fight was interrupted in the middle of round four by a noise from across the wasteland, a curious, rhythmic, throaty whooping from many mouths. Mr. Barnes dropped his posture of defence and smiled with sudden shyness, as if apologizing for having been carried away. The other men were already moving towards the noise and adding their own voices to it, close enough for Tom to hear that they were repeating two words over and over, like a war-cry. ‘Git gangun. Git gangun. Git gangun.’ Even Mr. Barnes had joined the chorus.

  ‘What does it mean?’ asked Tom.

  Mr. Barnes, moving now with the rest of the crowd, repeated the phrase three or four times more before breaking off to explain.

  ‘Ah, just our way of calling the lads together, like. There was an old fellow before the war, Sammy Dudlow, always impatient for the meetings to begin, used to go round among the men shouting like that, and of course we took it up, to chivvy him, like. Then he fell off Number Two Quay in the Alexandra, nineteen twelve it would have been, and the tender swung in and crushed him against the quay. That’s how Sammy Dudlow died. Next meeting some of the lads started the cry and the rest of us took it up, out of respect to old Sam, and that’s how we’ve done it ever since. In the old days we rang a bell to start proceedings, only now we ring it to stop the shouting. Git gangun. Git gangun . . .’

  The explanation was logical and even pleasing, in that it seemed to emphasise how a gathering such as this, organised by Bolsheviks with the ultimate aim of destroying all accep
ted codes, could still be affected by the curious tendency of the English to invent customs and keep them going. Tom could imagine a group of Lower Boys, waiting in November drizzle for a Field Game to begin out on one of the remote grounds beyond Agar’s Plough, setting up some such chant because their predecessors had done so. That was not an Eton custom, but it easily might have been.

  The calling did not last for more than a minute or two. As soon as a solid nucleus had formed in the crowd, and while the other fringes were still gathering towards it, a man climbed onto some kind of platform and swung a handbell vigorously to and fro above his head. The shouting stopped at once. The man climbed down and another took his place, elderly and grey-faced, wearing not the normal cloth cap but a bowler of ancient design. The men cheered.

  ‘Charlie Pottinger,’ muttered Mr. Barnes. ‘Transport and General. Don’t want a strike, but don’t want to lose his members either. He’ll blow hot and cold.’

  Mr. Pottinger had taken off his hat, revealing a curiously pointed bald head. Over this he slipped a strange apparatus. For a moment Tom thought he was taking nip from a metal flask, but when he lowered his hands there was a small speaking trumpet attached to his face by a couple of straps round the back of his head. He put his hat back on and raised his arms for silence.

  ‘Brothers,’ he began, ‘the first thing I have to say is this. Let’s have a nice orderly meeting. Let’s not have any of the papers saying . . .’

  ‘Who owns the bloody papers?’ shouted a voice from the crowd.

  ‘We all know who owns the newspapers, ‘answered the speaker. ‘So let’s not have them saying we gave any cause for trouble. If there’s company men here . . .’

  He paused, evidently expecting a growl from the crowd, and got it.

  ‘If there’s company men here, let them take note this is a peaceful meeting. Our friends the police . . .’

  This time the growl seemed unexpected, but came.