A Future Arrived

by Phillip Rock

  Colin helped Dulcie and the elderly maid in the kitchen, shelling peas and peeling potatoes for dinner. The maid had a married daughter living in California. “Long Beach,” she said. “My Daphne is always after my comin’ over and livin’ there.”

  “You should go, Agnes,” Dulcie said, sprinkling a leg of lamb with rosemary.

  “A terrible way it is that.”

  “You’d like it,” Colin said. “Sunny almost all year round.”

  “Sun is it? I’m not a flower. I can do without sun. I was born in these hills. I’ll not have me bones laid to rest in Long Beach.”

  After dinner they took the dogs for a run, walking slowly up the long grassy hill behind the house, the dogs coursing off, chasing rabbits in the fading light. He found Dulcie easy to talk to, receptive, and understanding. He expressed his doubts about entering Cambridge, and he told her about Kate Wood-Lacy, her infatuation for him and that evening in the car after the dance.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “Growing up is a terrible process, filled with awesome peaks and valleys. But one must be firm and plow ahead. Of course you must go to college … and of course you mustn’t let Kate become too enamored. You’re both at the age, you see. Hormones boil through the blood and quite upset rational thinking. You did the proper thing in putting on the brakes, as it were. Getting carried away is not an idle phrase, I’m sorry to say. The number of girls impregnated in these hills on warm summer nights would astonish you as much as it dismays me. Many of them run off in their shame to Manchester or London—others marry their boys. Of the two groups it’s hard to say which is the more tragic. Although I would choose the latter. At least there are well-funded societies in England for the care of unwed mothers. There’s something so terribly sad in seeing young people burdened with four or five kids and trying to feed them and themselves on thirty bob a week from the dole.”

  “Is that one of your causes?”

  “I belong to the Margaret Sanger Society, yes. It’s certainly not a popular undertaking. Lecturing on birth control rarely is, but I feel it’s necessary.”

  “I’ll say one thing for you, you’ve got plenty of moxie.”

  “Moxie?”

  “Guts … nerve.”

  “Oh.” One of the Irish setters brought back a stick in place of a rabbit and dropped it at her feet. She picked it up and tossed it as far as she could. “It’s not guts it takes, Colin, but patience. It’s quite frustrating and boring most of the time. I’ll be taking a day’s swing through some of the towns on Thursday. Would you like to come with me? I give a lecture and pass out pamphlets and samples.”

  He cleared his throat and stared at his feet. “Well … I don’t know …”

  Her laughter rang like a bell. “Oh, dear Colin, I think you’re blushing. A lecture on nutrition and personal hygiene! You’ll help me give out vitamin charts and toothbrushes.”

  “Sure,” he said. “That I can handle.”

  IT WAS A side of England that he had never seen and only vaguely knew existed. There was, Dulcie said as they drove through the dales, the England of the southern counties with its middle-class prosperity, and the England of the north. No prosperity here, only padlocked factory gates and pinch-faced men standing about on street corners. The England of the dole and the dreaded Means Test. The England where hope and promise had long fled and only apathy remained.

  Bowsby-on-Tree was a typical small town in the district, Dulcie explained as they drove slowly across an ancient stone bridge and into the High Street. It had been a sleepy village until the mid-nineteenth century when a Manchester textile king had built a cotton mill there, using the driving force of the swift little river to run the machinery. The sprawling, ugly mill buildings dominated the town, rising above it with all the grim arrogance of a medieval castle. Housing had been spawned by its existence—rows of ugly brick houses lining narrow, cobblestoned streets. There had been a time when the sound of the mill machinery could be heard from one end of the town to the other, twelve hours a day, six days a week, year in and year out. A haze of lint had drifted through the streets like finely powdered snow. But that was no more. It was silent now and the air was clean. The mill had been shut down since 1930.

  “No one who worked there loved the place,” Dulcie said. “God knows they didn’t, but the mill meant a pay envelope every Saturday afternoon and a joint or roast chicken on the table for Sunday dinner. But a pay packet meant more than just food and clothing—they had a pride in their jobs. They were union people, paying their way, holding their heads up with the best of them.”

  Men, old and young, walked slowly through the silent streets in groups, or stood in patient lines outside the labor exchange. It was a daily ritual. There was no work. There were only women and children inside the union hall, listening in apathetic boredom to Dulcie’s lecture on vitamins. An occasional flare of anger and resentment …

  “I’d ‘ate to see what my Tom’d do if I give ’im raw cabbage an’ spuds t’ eat.”

  “Not raw, dear. Boiled gently until just fork tender and then chopped together with a bit of marge. Boiling vegetables for hours destroys the vitamins.”

  “Boiled down proper is ’ow my Tom likes it.”

  “Yes, dear, perhaps he does, but I’m sure you can see how much more nutritious …”

  It was all quite hopeless. Their mothers had boiled vegetables into watery shreds, and their mothers before them. And her demonstration—in a frying pan over a Primus stove—of how to sauté a sheep’s liver so as to retain all the goodness of the meat fell on stone ears and, slice by succulent slice, into reluctant mouths. Liver they tossed into smoking fat and fried until it could have been nailed to the sole of a boot.

  “It must be very discouraging,” Colin said after the women had left.

  “Oh, I’m used to being ignored. When I was in college I joined a Communist group for a while. That was in nineteen twenty and we were pressing for diplomatic recognition of Lenin’s government. We spoke on street corners and in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons, but no one paid the slightest attention to us.”

  As they were leaving, an elderly, portly man wearing a neat but threadbare suit and a plaid wool cap came into the meeting room. Dulcie introduced him to Colin as Harry King, a union steward. “Well, Dulcie,” he said. “Still at it, eh?”

  “Still trying, Harry.”

  “Oh, aye, aren’t we all. You hear about the march yet?”

  “What march?”

  “News travels slow through the dales, I take it. It’s come Saturday week. As many good lads as we can got a hold of. All the Board of bloody Trade rogues are meetin’ in Manchester, includin’ Lord Don’t-give-a-damn. We’re goin’ to beard the boogers with the petition before takin’ it down to Westminster. I spotted your car as I come oop High Street and figured you’d not be wantin’ to be left out.”

  “And right you are, Harry. Thank you. I’ll be there.”

  “It’s not a long march, just enough to attract the press. The plan is to start off from here on Wednesday and be at Manchester Town Hall Saturday afternoon. The way I figure it, should be well over a thousand of us … skilled men from all the trades.”

  “That’s fine, as broad a spectrum of journeymen as possible.”

  “Oh, aye, that should make them sit oop and take notice. Smudger Smith’s bringing a couple hundred machinists from Sheffield and Rotherham. Should be a right smart showin’ I figure.”

  “It should indeed. I’m looking forward to it.”

  Colin carried all the gear back to the car and checked the ice chest to make sure there was enough ice left to keep the liver from spoiling. “Where to now?”

  Dulcie got into the car and sat for a moment behind the wheel looking thoughtful. “I think I’ll forget about the other towns today, Colin. Presenting the petition to the Board of Trade in Manchester is a good idea, but I can’t trust Harry King to alert the press about it. His idea of press coverage would be the Barnsley Weekly Advocate. We need the Londo
n papers. I’ll get home and start making some phone calls.”

  “What petition are you talking about?”

  “Twenty-five thousand people in three counties signed one calling for the government to give contracts for rearmament work so that more factories can open. Take this mill. Among other things, they wove khaki cloth for the army since the Boer War.”

  “Gee, Dulcie, I always thought you were an ardent pacifist.”

  “I was,” she said flatly, starting the car. “Hitler changed my mind.”

  THEY CAME FROM the mills and the factories, the great “works” of South Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Derby. Quiet men in neatly patched clothing with the unmistakable air about them of the undernourished and the unemployed. There were a scant thousand in all, mostly men, but a few mill girls among them, banded together in a group and looking forward to the march. Harry King was disappointed at the turnout, but there had been so many marches in the past few years, all of them coming to nothing, that many had stayed away out of apathy. This one began on Wednesday morning from the football field outside Bowsby-on-Tree. A breakfast of tea and cheese sandwiches was provided by private citizens and the town council, and then the cavalcade started out on the long, meandering route to Manchester. Dulcie and Colin trailed the marchers in a Ford estate wagon carrying first-aid supplies. When the marchers reached the town of Haddlesfield in the late afternoon, two medical students from the University of Manchester joined them and set up shop in the back of the wagon.

  “Foot inspection,” one of them explained to Colin. “Very important to nip any problems in the bud. We’ve been on marches before. Went all the way to London last year with three thousand from Leeds and not so much as an inflamed bunion among the lot of them.”

  The press was waiting in Haddlesfield as well, a small group of bored men who had covered protest marches many times. The only novelty in this one was that it was heading for Manchester and not London. Snaring the Board of Trade chiefs in the provinces was a new wrinkle. Lord Runcy and his colleagues might just be foolish enough to try to avoid confrontation by canceling their meeting with the Mayor of Manchester and going back to their inner sanctum in Whitehall. That would make a delicious headline … Lord Runcy flees wrath of idle factory hands. It was worth sticking around to see what developed.

  The reporters found Dulcie quickly enough. “Well, well,” one of them said. “Might have known you’d be here.”

  “Hello, Sam. Thought Beaverbrook sacked you years ago.”

  “He’s kind to dumb animals.”

  Another reporter, a florid-faced, overweight man from Foto-Mail named Archer, eyed Dulcie as something of a curiosity. “You’re Will Greville’s wife?”

  She smiled as sweetly as possible. “As if you didn’t know. You did a piece on me three years ago.”

  “Not me. I just joined. Nasty bit, was it?”

  “Not exactly kind.”

  “Sorry. Perhaps we can do better for you this time. I’m rather fond of your husband. Won a hundred quid on one of his nags at Goodwood.”

  “Some nag,” she said dryly.

  “A wee slip of a red filly. A fair description of you, Mrs. Greville, come to think of it.” He spotted Colin leaning against the car, watching. “Hello, what have we here? A Wild West show come to Haddlesfield?”

  Colin ambled over, hands thrust in the back pockets of his jeans. “The name’s Ross, Colin Mackendric Ross. I’m just tagging along with my aunt.”

  The reporter gave Dulcie a glance. “Your side of the family or the Grevilles’?”

  “Does it matter?” she said.

  “Not to me, but my readers might be interested.” He eyed Colin’s boots. “Fancy bit of leather that. What is it?”

  “Lizard.”

  “Ruddy big one. Hate to meet him in the dark. You’re American I take it. Where from?”

  “La Jolla … near San Diego. California.”

  “I know San Diego … Coronado Hotel. I was there once when the Prince of Wales was on a world tour. Nice place to be from. Tell you what, Colin. I’d be interested in your views of all this … from the American perspective. Might be interesting, don’t you think? Mind if my lad Garth takes a few pictures first?”

  “No.”

  He motioned to a young man with a Speed Graphic. “Get the road in the background, Garth.” He turned back to Dulcie as the photographer began shooting. “We just came up from London. They’re starting to dig slit trenches in Hyde Park and set up antiaircraft guns. Chamberlain’s flying off tomorrow to see Hitler in Berchtesgaden. We’re on the brink, lass. You people should be praying, not marching.”

  Dulcie only smiled. “If the armament factories had been opened two years ago, Hitler would be flying to London to see Chamberlain.”

  “Well, that’s one way of looking at it. It’s what makes horse racing … a nice, healthy difference of opinion.”

  Archer did his interview with Colin, low key and pleasant, and then walked down the street and into the White Hart Inn where he had taken a room for the night before driving up to Manchester. He had five hours to deadline and phoned his editor in London to tell him that the motorcycle messenger was on his way with Garth’s plates. “Not much of a march” he said, “but the timing is interesting with the P.M. going off to meet Hitler. We can get some play out of it … the country crying for peace while the trade unions march for rearmament and war, that kind of slant. And have the morgue call me. I want whatever they have on Lord Stanmore’s daughter … Alexandra Greville. Married James Ross of Ross-Patterson Aircraft over in the States. A bell rings on that union from a long time back … when I was with the Express. Might give me a wrinkle. God knows I could use a bit of spice.”

  THE WEATHER STAYED glorious through Thursday and Friday and the demonstration took on all the aspects of a holiday stroll through the countryside. It gathered in numbers as they went along, unemployed men from Liverpool and the ring of factory towns around Manchester coming down to join them. At least a dozen men had brought accordions and there were scores of mouth organs. There were tunes as they marched, and singing—“Tipperary” and all the old soldier songs that half of the men had once sung along the dusty roads of Flanders. Dulcie slept at night on an air mattress in the back of the Ford, but Colin and the two medical students joined other young men and some of the mill girls and slept in haystacks or barns after sitting up half the night around a campfire, shooting the breeze and sharing bottles of beer.

  “You seem to be having fun,” Dulcie said as Colin cheerfully prepared breakfast on the Primus stove.

  “Best time I’ve had since coming to England. One egg or two?”

  Up and down the City Road,

  in and out the Eagle,

  that’s the way the money goes …

  POP goes the weasel!

  A thousand or more voices sent the song rollicking through the streets of Manchester on the morning of the last day. The long column, marching no more than three abreast by order of the police, serpentined its way to the town hall in a light rain to await the arrival of Lord Runcy, due at noon for the ceremonial luncheon with the Lord Mayor. All of the London papers were at the newsstands and copies were soon being circulated among the crowd. As each newspaper reflected the political thinking of its owner, the headlines ran a gamut of views. The prime minister’s dramatic departure for Germany dominated the front pages of all the papers, but the march to Manchester received its modest share of coverage—little of it sympathetic except from Jacob Golden’s Daily Post and one or two other liberal dailies.

  “They could have said more about us,” Colin muttered.

  “Not with Chamberlain in the lion’s den,” Dulcie said.

  Foto-Mail was widely passed about. A lurid tabloid, its circulation was second only to the Daily Post. Its headline reflected its point of view of the crisis.

  TELL MR HITLER WE WANT PEACE

  Neither moral nor historical grounds bind England to Czecho-Slovakia. The Sudeten Germans have the right
to self-determination and their wishes should not be …

  Colin skipped the pages.

  TRADE UNIONS MARCH FOR GUNS NOT BUTTER

  There was a photo of the marchers streaming into Huddlesfield on the afternoon of that first day. The editor had artfully chosen a shot of the minuscule Communist Party group holding up a hammer-and-sickle flag. That set the tone for the article which Colin merely glanced at. What held his attention was his picture on the opposite page. It was a good one, worth sending to his mother. He was pictured standing by the Ford, smiling at the camera, one foot resting on the bumper so as to show off his lizard-skin boots. There were men walking along a road in the background, but there was something odd about it. They were different men on a road other than the one in Haddlesfield. These men weren’t jaunty. They were shabby, cold-pinched, bitter-faced wraiths. Men starving on a strike, perhaps, in some bleak coal town in Wales. The heading gave him a twinge in the gut.

  EARL’S YANKEE GRANDSON NOBLESSE OBLIGING

  He read Dalbert T. Archer’s caption in growing fury.

  … Americans may well smile, their homeland being three thousand miles away from any possibility of being bombed by Herr Hitler’s awesome Luftwaffe. Young Master Colin Ross of San Diego, California, is the grandson of the Earl of Stanmore and finds the current crisis amusing—or so it would appear. Colin, 18, and entering swank Pembroke College, Cambridge, in October, reveals his love for the common man by following the marchers to Manchester in a spiffy Ford estate wagon with gleamingly varnished wood body. Perhaps his love for the “lower classes” is inherited. His mother, Lady Alexandra, showed her noblesse oblige by marrying her father’s chauffeur in 1922 and dashing off to live in our late, but hardly lamented colonies.

  “You son-of-a-bitch.” He crumpled the paper in an angry fist.

  Dulcie, reading it beside him, touched him gently. “Don’t pay the slightest bit of attention, Colin. It’s only a rag and not worth getting upset about.”

  “That bastard pulled a fast one on me, Dulcie. He lied.”