Children of the Revolution

by Peter Robinson

  ‘How did he react?’

  ‘He turned pale, then he just started shaking his head in horror and backing away, Finally, he turned tail and ran.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I went back to Eastvale and got pissed. I bottled it. Don’t you see? I had my chance, and I bottled it.’

  The allotments were bordered on one side by a railway line on a raised embankment beside a canal, and on the other three by an old estate of weathered redbrick terraces and semis. Though it had originally been a council estate, most of the houses, at least the best of them, had been privately owned since Thatcher put them up for grabs in 1980. Whether Joe Jarvis believed in private property and owned one, Banks didn’t know. He probably thought it made more sense than the local council owning it.

  As Banks approached via a ginnel between the ends of two terraces, a diesel train rattled along the railway track. Banks could see the passengers looking up from their newspapers and books as they passed by. He saw the little parcels of land in front of him and noticed that most of them were waterlogged. Here, on their small patches of earth, the locals grew root vegetables, the occasional herb bush, even tomatoes and marrows, but there were none in sight at the moment. Nothing seemed to be growing. The place seemed blighted and barren, as if suffering the effects of some biblical curse. Rain was all well and good for growing things, Banks thought, but not this deluge. Surely Noah was somewhere around shepherding pairs of animals on to his ark. Still, Banks thought as he followed the path Mrs Jarvis had said would take him to her husband’s allotment, it wasn’t raining today, and for small mercies like that he must be grateful.

  Even the cindered path between the allotments was muddy, and Banks wished he had put on his wellies instead of his slipons. He approached the small hut, where he became aware of a shadowy, still figure sitting on a chair in the open doorway. ‘Mr Jarvis?’ he said, approaching.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  Banks held out his warrant card. The man examined it and grunted. ‘I should’ve known.’

  ‘Can I talk to you?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Ronnie Bellamy.’

  The man’s expression didn’t change, but Banks could sense a flurry of confused emotions running through him. He was frail, hollow-chested, his skin like paper, face furrowed with wrinkles, his dark eyes sunk deep in their sockets, the whites a greyish-yellow colour, with a wide gap between the bottom of the iris and the lower eyelid. Sanpaku. Banks remembered the term from an old John Lennon song. He’d had to look it up. It was Japanese for ‘three whites’ and rumoured in some branches of alternative medicine to indicate serious illness in a person.

  ‘Now there’s a blast from the past,’ Jarvis whispered. ‘She’s all right, isn’t she? Nothing’s happened to her? You haven’t come to bring me bad news?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ said Banks. ‘Well, more or less. May I sit down?’

  Jarvis contemplated him for a moment, then he grunted, got up unsteadily and disappeared into the small shed. When he came out he was carrying a blue-and-white striped fold-up chair, which he handed to Banks. There wasn’t room for the two of them in the doorway, and Jarvis clearly wasn’t budging from his spot, so Banks set up opposite him, careful to avoid sinking the legs in the mud. The last thing he wanted was to go arse over heel in the middle of an interview, unofficial as it was. Sometimes he thought he had a career death wish, breaking all the rules in the book. If Jarvis came out with anything important, anything useable in court, the CPS would be down on Banks like a ton of bricks for not conducting the interview under the proscribed conditions. Not to mention AC Gervaise and ACC McLaughlin.

  ‘Why do you want to talk to me about Ronnie?’ Jarvis asked once they were settled. He pulled an unfiltered Senior Service from a battered packet of ten and lit it with a match. The first drag set him off coughing, but he soon recovered. ‘And before you ask,’ he said. ‘I’ve been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I stopped smoking for nigh on twenty years, but I always vowed I’d start again if it didn’t matter any more. Now it doesn’t. Death’s not far away. I can smell it coming.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Banks.

  ‘Oh, I don’t want your pity. I’ve made my peace, what there was to make, and I regret nothing. I’m not afraid. I just want you to know you’re talking to a dying man. There’s nothing you lot can do to me any more.’

  ‘I don’t want to do anything to you,’ said Banks, ‘except talk.’

  ‘Then you must excuse me. My past experience with the police has been quite different.’

  ‘So I understand,’ said Banks. ‘If it’s of any interest to you, my father tried his damnedest to argue me out of joining the force. You’re a hero of his. He was a sheet metal worker, but he never forgot the miners’ strikes of the seventies and eighties, and the way the police taunted the pickets, flashing their overtime pay.’

  Banks could have sworn a little smile crossed Jarvis’s features, but it was gone as soon as it started. ‘Have you ever been down a mine, Mr Banks?’

  ‘I took the kids to the National Coal Mining Museum in Wakefield once. We had a tour.’

  Jarvis waved his cigarette dismissively. ‘If you had, you’d wonder why we fought so bloody hard to keep the infernal places open. Awful dark dangerous frightening holes, they are. Every time that lift gate closed on me, I felt panic, a constriction in my throat, a tightness in my chest.’ He tapped his chest and coughed again. ‘Then the heat, the darkness, the smell, the coal dust, the noise. But they were the lifeblood of the community. That’s why we fought to keep them open. The men who worked there were heroes. And they’d die for each other. To the private owners, then to the NCB after nationalisation, we were nothing but slaves. Worthless menials. Poor pay, no pithead facilities, no proper ventilation, dangerous working conditions. I ask you, Mr Banks, is that any way to treat your heroes? It was like what happens to some of those young men coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan after enduring the most dreadful and dangerous conditions for their country. They’re shunned. It’s as if people are suddenly ashamed or afraid of them. Of what they’ve done. Of what they’ve had to do to defend their country. Our communities were closed down. Our members lost their jobs, their livelihoods. And nobody cared. What could we do but fight for them, fight for ourselves and our communities? We gave everything.’ He trod out his cigarette. ‘My grandfather used to come home from his shift or from the pub, and he was so exhausted it was all he could do to sit at the table, drink his John Smith’s Magnet ale, and chain-smoke Woodbines. I don’t remember him ever saying a word to me. He could never get rid of the coal dust from the lines in his face and hands. Never get it from under his nails or out of his hair. He was untouchable. He was remote. He was a miner. He was a hero. Dead at fifty-nine from silicosis. And you have to understand all that to understand why it was something that we fought so hard for, as hard and dangerous a living as it was, as filthy, like living in hell. But it was all we had.’

  Jarvis went through another coughing fit. Banks wanted to bring the topic around to Veronica Chalmers, but he felt it best to let Jarvis get the vitriol out of his system, if he ever could. Perhaps it was the years of public speaking and stirring up the mob, but Jarvis did seem both eloquent and long-winded, as if he were constantly addressing an audience. ‘I understand what you’re saying, Mr Jarvis. It’s not a life I could ever have lived. But I’d like to talk about the early days, the ‘72 strike. The University of Essex.

  ‘Oh, I know you don’t want to hear it,’ Jarvis said. His eyes twinkled for a moment. ‘But nobody gets away without the lecture. It’s my stock-in-trade. Essex, you say? It was Essex that politicised me, and a lot of that was down to Ronnie, believe it or not. Before then, I was just a hungry, angry miner after better pay and better working conditions. Afterwards, I was committed to the creation of a workers’ state. We used to take the piss out of students all the time, and believe me, most of them deserved it. They were an idle bunch of drug-tak
ing long-haired wastrels with their heads up their arses. But some of them … well, some of them knew what they were talking about, and they did it with a passion and commitment that couldn’t fail to move you.’

  ‘And Ronnie Bellamy was one of those?’

  ‘Ronnie was … oh, aye,’ he said. ‘But it was more than that. Can you understand what it was like for me, a young lad from the South Yorkshire mines with little education worth speaking of, and there I was, with all those young brainy sods, who not only seemed to understand and sympathise with our plight, but could put it in a broader context. The thing was, they hadn’t a clue what to do about it. It was us who showed them how to organise. The flying pickets, the tactics, and all the rest. They got an inside view of what the strategy of a strike was about, and I like to think it changed their way of thinking a bit. Not about the cause, mind you, but what to do about it.’

  ‘And you? The strike changed you?’

  ‘Oh, aye. I realised the value of education, for a start, and I took practical steps, took courses, read books. History, politics, economics, poetry, novels, the lot. Books opened up a whole new world for me. I’m still no intellectual, but I can hold my head up in any academic gathering. I’m not afraid of the intellectuals any more. There’s a price, mind you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Aye. Have you ever read Tony Harrison?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s a poet from Leeds. Read him. He understands it best. When someone like me, coming from where I come from, gets educated, he loses touch with his roots, he gets educated out of his class, and he leaves his culture behind. Abandons it for another, you might say, and he ends up in a kind of limbo. He can’t go back to what he left behind, and he isn’t accepted anywhere else.’

  ‘That happened to you?’

  ‘To some extent, aye. I fought against it, but even after Essex, when the process had barely begun, going home just wasn’t the same again. It felt like a wrench. I was restless, eager for more. Not money, but knowledge. And the more I got, the less I had in common with most of the people around me, the people I grew up with. Read Tony Harrison. You’re the son of a sheet metal worker, yourself, but you seem educated. You should understand.’

  Banks did understand. Certainly being a policeman separated him from the rest of society, but even before that, his college diploma and experience of the academic life in the London of the late sixties and early seventies had also singled him out as different. It always felt jarring when he went back home to Peterborough and found his old friends doing the same things they had done before, stuck in the same old dead-end jobs, saving up for the new house, another baby on the way, a new car. Most of them would never move more than a mile from where they were born. Oh, they would travel; there would be exotic holidays – Costa Del Sol, Crete, Tunisia, Sharm-el Sheikh, even Goa, Acapulco and Orlando – but their minds would never move far from the semi in Peterborough. They took the piss out of him mercilessly for the clothes he wore, the way he talked and the thoughts and ideas he expressed. It had all happened to him, too, later, of course – wife, family, mortgage, car – and no matter how badly that had ended, he wouldn’t have had it any different for the world. But he had never stopped learning, and he knew what Joe Jarvis meant when he said education cuts you off from your class and from your roots. Perhaps it makes you free, too, but freedom can be a frightening and dangerous thing when you feel so alone. Another diesel rattled by, this one almost empty. ‘About Ronnie Bellamy,’ he said again.

  Jarvis smiled, showing uneven but healthy teeth. ‘You must forgive me. I do tend to ramble sometimes. I see it as an old man’s prerogative. Especially one who doesn’t have long left.’

  ‘Old?’

  ‘I’m sixty-five. And dying, remember?’

  ‘You had a fling with Ronnie Bellamy at Essex during the time they put you up there in the student residence, didn’t you?’

  ‘How did you find out about that?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. Is it true?’

  Jarvis stared at him, then he got up and disappeared in the shed, returning with a half bottle of Famous Grouse and two tea mugs. ‘You’ll join me?’

  Banks thought it wise to agree. Besides, he liked Famous Grouse.

  Jarvis poured them each a generous measure and sat down again. ‘I don’t know what you’d call it. A fling? Maybe. A brief romance, perhaps? Whatever it was, it was all new to me. The excitement of the strike, the travel, these students with their generosity and their idealistic notions. New to them, too. They’d never seen the likes of us before. We were the reality. The true face of the working class they’d just talked about in their meetings. We swore, we farted, we sang rugby songs. We smoked, we drank, we fought. We thought Les Dawson and Bernard Manning were funny. We were what it was all about, what they’d been reading about, and here we were, in with them, ready to give the ruling classes a good working over. Suddenly the revolution was real, the workers’ state a real possibility.’

  ‘And Ronnie was a part of that?’

  ‘For me, yes. Ronnie was special. I felt some sort of spark with her the first time we met. I loved her passion, commitment and fierce intelligence, and her grasp of ideology, her ability to explain it, even to a thickie like me. I’d never even thought about most of the things we discussed. Class war, means of production, and all the rest of the Marxist dialectic. She taught me to think. And she was just a lost little rich girl trying to find herself in the world. Way out of my league, of course, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter very much. She was posh, but she never talked down. And she was a proper bobby-dazzler, as they used to say. That sweet smile, those big green eyes. Believe it or not, I was a handsome, strapping young lad back then. I suppose I was a bit of rough for her, and she was a taste of caviar and champagne for me. Yes, we did have a passionate romance. A fling, I suppose you’d have to call it, really. I don’t know if there was much real love involved, but there was certainly a powerful infatuation. Nature took its course, and for a while I was living in another world. The colliery didn’t exist. The pit. South Yorkshire didn’t exist. My life was in that bedroom, or out on the picket line, or just sitting talking in the student pub. With Ronnie. A far cry from Mexborough, I can tell you. I suppose I was dazzled by it all.’

  ‘I’m not here to judge your action, Mr Jarvis,’ Banks said.

  ‘Then why are you here, if you’re not after something and Ronnie is fine?’

  ‘It’s a difficult case. Sensitive. A man called Gavin Miller was found dead near Eastvale, where I work. He’s been murdered.’

  ‘Surely Ronnie isn’t a suspect? Believe me, she couldn’t harm anyone.’

  ‘Not even in the service of the revolution?’

  ‘We’re not all heartless murderers, Mr Banks.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. We discovered that she knew him when they were both at the University of Essex in the period we’re talking about, and that they’d also been in contact recently. Were you and Ronnie inseparable during your time at Essex?’

  ‘Yes. Pretty much. Two weeks it lasted. Two weeks. I can remember it all as if it were yesterday. Have you talked to her lately? Have you seen her? How does she look? I’ve seen photos in the paper, of course, I know she’s famous now, but …’

  ‘She’s still beautiful, Mr Jarvis. You’d swear she wasn’t a day over forty.’

  He nodded. ‘I knew she would be. That sort of beauty never fades.’ He paused, lost in memories. ‘She’d have a hell of a shock if she could see me now, wouldn’t she?’ He coughed again. Banks watched a barge passing slowly by on the canal and wondered if it was carrying coal.

  ‘How many people knew about the relationship?’ Banks asked.

  Jarvis cleared his throat. ‘Nobody. Well, there’s Ronnie and me, of course, and maybe one or two of the other MS – Marxist Society – members. It’s impossible to keep something like that a complete secret, but we were discreet for the most part. And it’s not as if we were the only ones who’d paired up. It
was happening all over the campus.’

  ‘What about her boyfriend, Gavin Miller?’

  ‘That’s the one who got killed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t know his name, but he obviously knew. I mean, we were stark bollock naked when he barged in once. There’s not much mistaking what’s happening in a situation like that, is there?’

  Banks couldn’t help but smile. ‘I suppose not. Was anything ever said about it?’

  ‘No. He buggered off as soon as he saw what was what. No heroics. Ronnie told me she was finished with him, anyway. He was just still mooning after her, writing poems and whatnot. I got the impression he was becoming a bit of a nuisance, but we never really mentioned him again. I can’t believe he’d still be getting in touch with her after all these years.’

  ‘We think it’s possible that somebody, maybe Miller, might have been blackmailing Ronnie, and that it could have been over her affair with you. However discreet you were, it’s pretty obvious that Gavin Miller knew about it, and he’d have been easily able to follow your career over the years.’

  ‘But what interest would that possibly hold for anyone?’

  ‘She’s Lady Chalmers now.’

  ‘I know. But they’re not going to take that away from her just because she had a fling with a striking miner forty years ago, are they?’

  ‘Well,’ said Banks, ‘think about it. She was a rich girl, and you, as you say, were a striking miner. It makes an interesting story. And with her nephew Oliver Litton about to become Home Secretary, or so the pundits would have us believe, and your history of Russian connections, communism, backroom deals, trips to Moscow and the like, any journalist worth his salt could easily make something out of it.’