A Summer in the Twenties

by Peter Dickinson

‘Sorry about that,’ said Tom. ‘She wasn’t pleased. I still don’t see what else I could have done, but I couldn’t make her understand.’

  ‘I hear she turned you out of the house,’ said Dick, who had come to the dance as a Bolshevik but was making no serious effort to play the part beyond brandishing a round object with a short piece of cord attached to the top. The thing was labelled “Bomb”, but from time to time he unscrewed the fuse and took swig from its contents. He was already fairly tight, and beginning to look convincingly haggard and wild-eyed.

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ said Tom. ‘I was leaving in any case, but she was perfectly polite and said I could stay on if I wanted to, but she let me see that she was extremely angry.’

  ‘Would that we had been present to witness the interview,’ said Bertie. ‘Both for the sight of Mistress Tarrant enraged, and for the hearing of Master Thomas endeavouring to expound a moral principle to her. Mistress Tarrant is a woman of many virtues, but the Creator in His wisdom omitted from her gifts all capacity for abstract speculation. Oh, dash it, I can’t go on like this. I spend so much time thinking how to say things that I don’t get anything said, and I’ve got the next dance down with that wench of Teddy’s. Tell me your version of what happened, Tom. I must say, I wish you’d sent me a wire—I’d have come beetling back. Start at the beginning. Last I know was asking you to nose around in Hull and see if you could find one of the fellows you’d seen loading that Bolshie rag onto your train. Off I go to France, conscious that the future of the nation is now in steady hands, and the next thing I hear is a letter from Helen Tarrant saying that you have been siding with a mob of Bolshie-led strikers and impeding the police in the course of their duty—and worse than all that, infuriating little Judy’s Mama. Tom, Tom, is there more in this than meets the eye?’

  ‘Less, I think,’ said Tom, only just restraining himself from tugging at his collar. The uniform in which Grandfather had sat with Lord Raglan on the ridge and watched the Balaclava charge was a great stand-by for fancy dress and fitted Tom perfectly, but by this stage in the evening it tended to feel as though it had been deliberately cut to allow the wearer as little movement as possible. How Grandfather had saluted, let alone brandished his sabre, was a military mystery.

  ‘I don’t think there’s time to tell you all the details,’ he said. ‘I’ll just give you the outline. I wasn’t getting anywhere with looking for the men I’d seen, but I managed to get into the first big strike-meeting. The ship-owners were planning to reduce some of the men’s rates because of their losses from the coal strike, and the other dockers were going to strike to prevent it. The meeting was quite peaceful until some men who had been planted in the crowd started throwing earth at one of the speakers. Naturally scuffling broke out, and a man fired a shot, giving the police an excuse to charge in and arrest the strike-leaders. I just happened . . .’

  ‘Half a mo,’ said Bertie. ‘You are implying that all this was arranged for the benefit of the ship-owners. Why should they want to do that?’

  ‘Two things. The most important is that the dock-workers at Hull are only about half union men, and there are several unions. That makes it very difficult to keep a strike solid, especially when it’s only for the benefit of one section of the men, the ones who handle the coal. If you can break up the leadership by arresting them and getting some of them sent to prison, you increase your chances that the strike won’t hold. I only worked this out afterwards, of course. I was absolutely bewildered by what happened. The other point is that strikes aren’t all that popular with the general public just now, and the owners would have much more sympathy on their side if they could show that this one began with a violent riot.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Dick in a mock-shocked voice, ‘even Punch had a go at the mine-owners last week. I felt as though I’d been stabbed in the back by the parish magazine!’

  The interruption steadied Tom. He caught a flash of the peculiar glint in Bertie’s eyes even as Charles II let himself erupt in regal laughter. He remembered to think of Bertie’s ease and friendliness as external, almost in the same style as his wig and ruffles. In fact Tom had been as angry with Mrs. Tarrant as she with him, startled and finally furious at her moral intransigence. If he could use Bertie to appease her a little, that would at least make Judy’s life easier.

  ‘I see,’ said Bertie. ‘Your argument is coherent, Tom, but not utterly convincing. One thing I’ve been learning about our Bolshie friends is that they are in favour of mayhem of any kind, provided it helps them set the workers against the bosses. What is there to show that they didn’t lay the whole fracas on with that in mind? Get a shot fired, start a riot, blame it on the bosses and inflame the strikers to violence?’

  ‘Oh, they’re capable of it,’ said Tom. ‘Some of them, anyway. But I happened to be near the man who fired the shot. I saw the dock police actually help him get away when one of the dockers tried to detain him. Then I got laid out and arrested, and when I told the regular Chief Superintendent what I‘d seen he pretty well admitted that it was the dock police who had really started things.’

  ‘That still doesn’t explain why Mrs. Tarrant is so shirty with you.’

  ‘Well, I insisted on his letting all the men he’d arrested go. I told him that I was going to write to the Lord Lieutenant and tell him what I’d seen and ask for a full enquiry.’

  ‘Dear Uncle Nobby, some of your policemen have been perfectly horrid to me.’

  Bertie’s tone was so light that it took Tom a second to register that Bertie not only remembered Lord Foxhaven was his godfather, but also knew the family name for him.

  ‘A little more formal,’ said Tom. ‘In fact I haven’t written. It was a sort of understanding that if they let the men go . . . At first they simply wanted me to slink away while they charged all the others. That’s what I found so difficult to get Mrs. Tarrant to understand.’

  ‘Honest Master Tom,’ said Bertie. ‘You really are a creature out of the past, you know, but that uniform’s too effete for you. It struck me when we found you engaging in fisticuffs in Drewton Cutting, you know. It was like a chapter in one of those awful novels. In which our hero stakes 1ife and honour upon an encounter with a notorious pugilist, and so on. Am I doomed to go on rescuing you from imbroglios in which your old-fashioned honesty has landed you? I suppose you expect me to appease Helen Tarrant, whom you have affronted by your overweening honesty.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘You must fight against these impulses, young man. Every time you feel an honest urge rising within you, you must say to yourself, “I am above that sort of thing.”’

  ‘Seriously, Bertie . . .’

  ‘Seriously, Tom, I will do what I can. Tell me, what did your friends the dockers think of your efforts on their behalf?’

  ‘They don’t say much, actually, but they’ve begun to behave as though I wasn’t quite the man from Mars they thought I was at first.’

  ‘Do I take it that your efforts have extended beyond the week you originally said you’d do?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘That’s very gratifying. So you’ve changed your mind?’

  ‘I suppose so. Mr. Hutton started it really. He agrees with you that the Reds in Hull are a genuine menace, and it’s worth trying to find them. Since I’d made a start, I thought I might as well carry on.’

  Bertie nodded, watching him half sideways under the beetling wig. Tom would have liked to tell him about the mysterious Ricardo, but had promised not to. On the other hand, there would have been no point in attempting to explain the attraction of his new relationship with the strikers. Bertie would take that either for soft-headedness or outright treachery—just as he would take the pleasure of Kate’s companionship for something other than Tom felt it to be. It was best to hurry on.

  ‘I’ve taken a room behind the docks,’ he said. ‘I stay there a couple of nights a week and help an old fellow I met run a makeshift gym.’

  ‘Do you now? That’s
rather ingenious. The fellow who was supposed to be fixing you up the fight with Whatsisname?’

  ‘Donovan. He won’t play. But yes, that’s the man.’

  ‘So you are getting somewhere in the hunt for our Red pamphleteers?’

  Tom felt an honest urge rising within him but took Bertie’s advice and fought it down.

  ‘I’m making progress of a sort,’ he said, ‘but not quite like that. I have to be pretty careful because as soon as I start asking questions they shut right up. But I happened to have been reading Karl Marx and I said so to one of them, and last week at a meeting a chap I didn’t know came up and started talking about alienation. I got the impression it was a try-out.’

  ‘They let you come to the meetings?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’m a sort of mascot, I suppose, but in theory they put up with me because they think the police will be more careful if I’m around.’

  ‘And is that the case?’

  ‘Things have been pretty peaceful, really. I did get attacked on my way home from the gym one evening.’

  ‘Oh come, You aren’t saying Helen Tarrant and her colleagues . . .’

  ‘Of course not. Things aren’t like that. What you get is a group of roughs brought in by the companies as strike-breakers. It isn’t a vast conspiracy. These men act pretty much on their own initiative—they’re much less organised than the strikers. In fact I doubt if any of the company officials actually knew what was planned at the original strike meeting—I expect the roughs and some of the dock police fixed it up among themselves.’

  ‘Not very intelligent.’

  ‘There’s not a lot of intelligence around.’

  ‘No. Did you get hurt when you were attacked?’

  ‘Not at all. They’d chosen a stupid place, not fifty yards from the gym. My boys came out before it had really begun and came legging along to help me and the men had to run for their lives. They caught one of them and threw him in the river.’

  ‘Lucky old Tom,’ said Dick, bored and disdainful.

  ‘True word,’ said Bertie. ‘I’m a great believer in luck. In spite of appearances you seem to be getting on extremely well, Tom. And you’ve learnt quite a bit, by the sound of it.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘How long will this strike last, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. The mood’s getting pretty grim, really. The dockers believe that the board are determined to break them, and they’re determined not to be broken . . . Hull has been a militant town for years. During the General Strike they burnt trams.’

  Suddenly Dick straightened from his slouch and made a sweeping gesture with his bomb.

  ‘You pierce my soul!’ he cried. ‘What poetry! What insight! What stark realism in those three syllables! They burnt trams! The flaming omnibus! That is the symbol of the future! Why didn’t Woffles throw a tram-burning party instead of this effete bourgeois frippery?’

  He reached over and tugged at the nearest locks of Bertie’s wig, as if at a bell-pull. The wig and the wide plumed hat came clean away, leaving that square puritanical head protruding from the finery of lace and braid. With the black unreal moustache and the shiny black hair slicked back so hard that it looked like the painted locks of Shem in a Noah’s Ark set, the effect was theatrically sudden and revealing—as though Bertie had carelessly allowed his real self to protrude inside the camouflage of fancy dress and Dick’s ambush had trapped it there before he had time to withdraw it inside the familiar disguise of skin. The revelation lasted only a second, and then Bertie was shrugging tolerantly as Dick paraded off between the supper tables, preaching bloody revolution to Pierrot and Columbine, to Zulu warrior and Little Bo-Peep, brandishing his bomb in one hand and his royal scalp in the other.

  ‘I mean what I say about luck,’ said Bertie very quietly. ‘I believe in it. I have a feeling that you are my luck, so I’m not going to let you down. I’ll have a word with Helen Tarrant—I’m seeing her next Monday. I’ll tell her you’ve saved her bacon. If those men had been charged and sentenced, Bolshies or not, she’d have been put publicly in the wrong. That’s not the sort of thing you can keep quiet for ever. And what you’ve been up to since then has been spot right . . . I take it you aren’t planning to spend the rest of your days in Hull, though?’

  ‘Not really. I can spare another month or so. Then . . .’

  ‘Right. Now I want you to carry on as you’ve been doing, but I also want you start looking for a different kind of chap, somebody who’ll play for us.’

  ‘That won’t be easy.’

  ‘When I say “Play for us” I am talking about a professional.’

  ‘You’re proposing to pay this man?’

  ‘Quite well, so he must like money. That’s a prime consideration. Reasonably intelligent, of course, and young, so that it won’t look rummy if he suddenly takes it into his head to become a Bolshie. One of the lads who comes to your gym, eh? Give him time to grow into the part. I mightn’t want to make use of him for several years, so by then he’ll have had time to work his way up the organisation. You follow?’

  ‘You want me to find you a spy.’

  ‘A secret agent. It sounds less brutal, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Excellent. I will continue to trust in your luck, young Tom. I have a feeling that you will go far. I shall take care to tell Helen Tarrant that you have a great future before you . . .’

  ‘Poppycock,’ said Dick.

  Tom looked over his shoulder and saw him swaying, outlined against the intricate plaster nodules of the library ceiling.

  ‘Tom won’t go anywhere,’ said Dick, his high spirits now transmuted into aggression. ‘He has a tiny future before him. Poor Tom. Handsome, brainy, grand old family, but . . . You know, we had a house don at Winchester who took pleasure in flogging small boys. He liked it best when they blubbed, because then he could produce his bon mot. “You’ll never be Prime Minister, boy,” he’d say. “Ambition should he made with tougher . . .”’

  Before he could finish Bertie had risen to his feet and tried to snatch his hat and wig back. Tom got the impression that at the same moment some kind of minor violence, a kick on the shin or a stamp on the toes, had taken place around floor-level. As if to underline the drama of the instant there came from somewhere beyond the Library door a great, cymbal-like clash, the tinkle of glass, and feminine cries of mingled excitement and alarm. Dick, with the amazed look of a drunk who has not noticed how drunk he is until he walks into a door-post, stepped back from the apparent onslaught, a movement which took the hat and wig out of Bertie’s reach. Bertie reached further, grabbed and tugged. Dick resisted teasingly, but something gave and Dick was left holding only the curling ostrich plume. Bertie laughed with no geniality at all, clapped Tom on the shoulder and strolled away.

  ‘What was that about?’ said Dick.

  ‘Bertie was at a beating house,’ said Tom. ‘I believe they almost killed a boy once, but that was before I got to Eton. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Bertie had a pretty bad time of it when he was a fag.’

  Dick appeared not to have heard. He was studying the objects he held with rapt amazement, like a stage mime drawing attention to his props. Carefully he put his bomb on the table, opened its top and stuck the feather in it, then sat heavily into Bertie’s chair and reached for one of the menu cards.

  ‘The world is coming to an end,’ he said sombrely. ‘I shall now make my will, and I advise you to do the same.’

  He took the plume from the bomb and made writing motions on the card, apparently absorbed. Tom rose and headed for the ballroom. A dance had just ended and a stream of couples were coming into the Library for supper, so he had to thread his way against the current.

  Suddenly he felt peculiarly sour. Until Bertie had collared him for what he called a palaver, all Tom’s evening had been concerned with Judy’s game, and he had thoroughly enjoyed the process of working from an apparently hopeless posit
ion to one of real promise. During his occasional brief encounters with her he had sensed that she was playing the game along the same lines. She was looking marvellous, in theory dressed as a male Chicago gangster but in fact, and despite the wide Fedora, producing an effect much more like a Paris gamine. The chief obstacles in the game arose from the fact that Judy was one of the party actually staying at Rokesley, whereas Tom had been assigned to dine and come over with the notorious five-daughter Gorringes, a likeable brood of large weather-beaten girls who made no bones about hating dances but whose mother insisted on their going and therefore on partners being supplied for them. They had come in perfunctory peasant dress, which in fact suited their style much better than more elaborate costumes might have, and dancing with them had turned out to be less of a penance than Tom had imagined. They took their dances as no doubt they took their fences, with dash if nothing else. Steering one of them round the floor had something in common with driving a train—you had masses of power at your command but had as far as possible to move in straight lines and allow a lot of space for braking. He danced with all five of them and then, mysteriously, they disappeared. They were perhaps missed from the dance-floor, but not regretted.

  Their Cinderella-style vanishing left Tom free, provided he avoided Lady Belford’s vigilant concern to attach spare males to lonely and neglected females. His two dances with Judy were booked for late in the night. (She had made a great show of finding space on her card and crossing off some other man’s name, hut it had probably been mere tease.) He had been lurking, ready to see if he could detach her from her party when the next dance ended, when Bertie had insisted on the palaver. Until that moment he had experienced a growing enjoyment, a promise of exhilaration.

  Now all that had gone flat. As soon as Bertie had described the ‘spy’ he wanted Tom to find a particular face had flashed into mind—eager, lively, slightly pocked with acne, snub nose, heavy dark brows, and eyes—eyes that seemed to belong to a quite different face, withdrawn behind a layer of apparent dullness, but occasionally glancing sideways and then seeming not dull at all—Ernie Doyle, Uncle Ned’s prize welterweight. Bertie might almost have been thinking of him as he spoke.