I didn’t have an answer to that, at the time, so I shelved the matter. In any case we had more urgent decisions to make. Although we had not had our results yet, we both knew we had done well in our Highers, and could have gone straight to the University the following September. This would have deferred our National Service until after graduation. Graduates could sign up for officer training. Most of our similarly successful classmates rejoiced at the opportunity to avoid the worst of the hardships and risks. Orr was adamant that we should not take it. It was a principle with him (and with the Front, and with the Young Communist League of which, unknown to me at the time, he was a clandestine member.)
“It’s a blatant class privilege,” he said. “Every working-class laddie has tae go as soon as he turns eighteen. Why should we be allowed tae dodge the column for four mair years? What gies us the right tae a cushy number? And think about it — when we’ve done our stint that’ll be over, we can get on wi university wi none o that growing worry about what’s at the end o it, and in the meantime we’ll hae learned to use a rifle and we can look every young worker in the eye, because we’ll hae been through the same shit as he has.”
“But,” I said, “suppose we find ourselves shooting at the freedom fighters?”
Or shot by them was what was really worrying me.
“Cannae be helped,” said Orr. He laughed. “I’m told it seldom comes tae that anyway. It’s no like in the comics.”
My mother objected, my father took a more fatalistic approach. There was a scene, but I got my way.
We spent the summer working to earn some spending money and hopefully put some in our National Savings Accounts. In the permanent war economy it was easy enough to walk into a job. Orr, ironically enough, became a hospital porter for a couple of months, while I became a general laborer in the Thompson yard. We joked that we were working for each other’s fathers.
The shipyard astounded me, in its gargantuan scale, its danger and din, and its peculiar combination of urgent pace and trivial delay. The unions were strong, management was complacent, work practices were restrictive, and work processes were primitive. Parts of it looked like an Arab souk, with scores of men tapping copper pipes and sheets with little hammers over braziers. My accent had me marked instantly as a teuchter, a Highlander, which though humiliating was at least better than being written off as middle class. The older men had difficulty understanding me — I thought at first that this was an accent or language problem, and tried to conform to the Clydeside usage to ridiculous effect, until I realized that they were in fact partially deaf and I took to shouting in Standard English, like an ignorant tourist.
The Party branch at the yard must have known I was in the Front, but made no effort to approach me: I think there was a policy, at the time, of keeping students and workers out of each other’s way. This back fired rather because it enabled me to encounter my first real live Trotskyist, who rather disappointingly was a second-year student working there for the summer. We had a lot of arguments. I have nothing more to say about that.
Most days after work I’d catch the bus to Nelson Street, slog up through the West End to our house, have a bath, and sleep for half an hour before a late tea. If I had any energy left I would go out, ostensibly for a pint or two but more usually for activity for the Front. The next stage in its escalating campaign, after having begun to make its presence both felt and overestimated, was to discourage collaboration. This included all forms of fraternization with American service personnel.
Port Glasgow is to the east of Greenock, Gourock to the west. The latter town combines a douce middle-class residential area and a louche seafront playground. Its biggest dance-hall, the Cragburn, a landmark piece of ’30s architecture with a famously spring-loaded dance floor, draws people from miles around.
Orr and I met in the Ashton Cafe one Friday night in July. Best suits, Brylcreemed hair; scarves in our pockets. Hip-flask swig and gasper puff on the way along the front. The Firth was in one of its Mediterranean moments, gay-spotted with yachts and dinghies, grey-speckled with warships. Pound notes at the door. A popular beat combo, then a swing band.
We chose our target carefully and followed her at distance after the dance. Long black hair down her back. She kissed her American sailor good-bye at the pier, waved to him as the liberty-boat pulled away. We caught up with her at a dark stretch on Shore Street, in the vinegar smell of chip-shops. Scarves over our noses and mouths, my hand over her mouth. Bundled her into an alley, up against the wall. We didn’t need the masks, not really. She couldn’t look away from Orr’s open razor.
“Listen, slag,” he said. “Youse are no tae go out wi anybody but yir ain folk frae now on. Get it? Otherwise we’ll cut ye.”
Tears glittered on her thick mascara. She attempted a nod.
“Something tae remind ye,” Orr said. “And tae explain tae yir friends.”
He clutched her hair and cut it off with the razor, as close to the scalp as he could get. He threw the glistening hank at her feet, and we ran before she could get out her first sob.
I threw up on the way home.
Three days later I overheard two lassies at the bus-stop. They were discussing the incident, or one like it. There had been several such, over the weekend, all the work of the Front.
“Looks like you’re in deid trouble fae now on,” one of them concluded, “if ye go out wi coons.”
Call-up papers arrived in August, an unwelcome eighteenth-birthday present. After nine-weeks’ basic training I was sent to Northern Ireland, where I spent the rest of my two-year stint guarding barracks, munitions dumps and coastal installations. Belfast, Londonderry, South Armagh: the most peaceful and friendly parts of the British Empire.
Orr was sent to Rhodesia. His grave is in the Imperial War Cemetery in Salisbury.
I was demobilized in September 1974, and went to Glasgow University. My fellow first-year students were all two years younger than me, including those in the Front. The Party line had changed. Young men were being urged to resist the war, to refuse conscription, to take any deferral available, to burn their call-up papers if necessary, to fill the jails. This was not because the Party had become pacifist. It was because the Party, and the Front, now had enough men with military experience for the next step up Lin Piao’s ladder.
People’s War.
It is necessary to understand the situation at the time. By 1974 the United States, Britain, and the white Dominions of Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium were almost the only countries in the world without a raging guerrilla war. Although nominally on the Allied side, the governments of France and Italy were paralyzed, large tracts of both countries ungovernable or already governed by the Resistance movements. Every colony had its armed independence movement, and every former socialist country had its reliberated territory and provisional government, even if driven literally underground by round-the-clock bombing.
“The peoples of the anti-imperialist camp long for peace every day,” wrote Lin Piao. “Why do the peoples of the imperialist camp not long for peace? Unfortunately it is because they have no idea of what horrors are being suffered by the majority of the peoples of the world. It is necessary to bring the real state of affairs sharply to their attention. In order for the masses to irresistibly demand that the troops be brought home, it is necessary for the people’s vanguard to bring home the war.”
That later came to be called the Lin Piao “Left” Deviation. At the time it was called the line. I swallowed it whole.
I lodged in a bed-sitting-room in Glasgow, near the University, and took my laundry home on the weekends. During my National Service I had only been able to visit occasionally, and had followed the Front’s advice to keep my head down and my mouth shut about politics, on duty or off. It was a habit that I found agreeable, and I kept it. My parents assumed that my National Service had knocked all that nonsense out of me.
Greenock had changed. The younger and tougher and more numerous successors of the likes of
Orr and I had shifted their attacks from the sailors” girlfriends to the sailors and the soldiers. They never attacked British servicemen, or even the police. At least a dozen Americans had been fatally stabbed and two shot. Relations between the Americans and the town’s population, hitherto friendly, had become characterized by suspicion on one side and resentment on the other. The cycle was self-reinforcing. Before long Americans were being attacked in quite non-political brawls, and off-duty Marines were picking fights with surly teenagers. The teenagers’ angry parents would seek revenge. Other relatives would be drawn in. Before long an American serviceman couldn’t be sure that any sweet-looking lass or little old lady wasn’t an enemy.
Armed shore patrols in jeeps became a much more common sight. In the tougher areas, kids would throw stones at them. None of this was covered in the national press, and the Greenock Telegraph buried such accounts in brief reports of the proceedings of the Sheriff Court, but the Daily Worker reported similar events around US bases right across Britain.
I did not get involved in them. The first petrol-bombing, in January 1975, happened when I was in Glasgow. The first return fire from a group of US naval officers trapped in a stalled and surrounded staff car on the coast road — they’d started going further afield, to the quieter, smaller resort of Largs — took place in February, also mid-week, when I was definitely not in Greenock. I read a brief report of it in the Glasgow Herald.
What was going on in Glasgow was political stuff, anti-war agitation, leafleting, and picketing, that sort of thing. We took a hundred people from Glasgow to the big autumn demo in London. A hundred thousand or so converged on Grosvenor Square, with a militant contingent of ten thousand people chanting “We shall fight! We shall win!” (we all agreed on that) and the Front’s hotheads following it up with “Joe! Joe! Joe Sta-lin!” or “Long live Chairman Lin!” and the Trots trying to drown us out with a roar of “London! Paris! Rome! Berlin!”
It was fun. I was serious. I knuckled down to the study of chemistry and physics (at Glasgow they still called the latter “Natural Philosophy”) which had always fascinated me. The Officer Training Corps would have been a risky proposition for me — even my very limited public political activity would have exposed me to endless hassles and security checks — but I joined the university’s rifle club, which shared a shooting range and an armory with the OTC. And I was still, of course, in the Reserves. Following the Front’s advice, I kept out of trouble and bided my time.
I had seen the diagram a hundred times and its physical manifestation, the iron filings forming furry field-lines on a sheet of paper with a magnet under it, in my first-year physics class at High School. I had balanced magnets on top of each other, my fingers preventing them from flicking around and clicking together, and had felt the uncanny invisible spring pushing them apart. It was late one night in February 1975 when I was alone in my room, propping my head over an open physics textbook, that I first connected that sensation with my childhood chance observation of the curiously unstable motion of an antigravity bomber close to the ground, and with the magnetic field lines.
Was it possible, I wondered, that anti-gravity was a polar opposite of gravity, that keeping it stable was like balancing two magnets one upon the other, and that the field generated by the ship had the same shape as that of a magnet? If so, any missile approaching an AHAB bomber from above or below would be deflected, whereas one directed precisely at its edge, where the two poles of the field balanced, might well get through. The crippled bomber I’d seen had taken a hit edge-on, if that distant memory was reliable. The chance of that happening accidentally, even in a long war, might be slim enough for to have happened only once. Yet the consequences of doing it deliberately were so awesome that this very possibility might well be the secret that the dark-suited security men had been so anxious to maintain. It seemed much more significant than the minor, if grim, detail that the pilots were children or dwarfs.
It was an interesting thought, and I considered whether it might be possible to pass it upward through the Front and thence across to the revolutionary air forces. Come to think of it, to pass on all I knew and all I’d seen at Aird — the thought made me shiver. I could not get away from the idea, so firmly instilled by my parents, that anything I might say along those lines would be traced back to me, and to them.
The Allied states, and Britain in particular, had at the time a sharp discontinuity in tolerance — their liberal and democratic self-definition almost forced them to put up with radical opposition and to treat violent opposition as civil disorder rather treason; while at the same time the necessities of the long war inclined them to totalitarian methods of maintaining military and state secrecy. A Front supporter could preach defeatism openly, and would receive, at the worst, police harassment and mob violence. A spy, or anyone under suspicion of materially aiding the enemy, would disappear and never be heard of again, or be summarily tried and executed. Rumors of torture cells and concentration camps proliferated. To what extent these were true was hard to judge, but irrelevant to their effect.
So I kept my theory to myself, and sought confirmation or refutation of it in war memoirs. Most from the Red side were stilted and turgid. Those from former Allied soldiers were usually better written, even if sensationalized. If these accounts were reliable at all, the AHAB bombers were occasionally used for close air support and even medevac in situations where (as my careful cross-checking made clear) there was little actual fighting in the vicinity and the weather was too violent for helicopters or other conventional aircraft.
I put my ideas about that on the back burner and got on with my work, until the Front had work for me. I left my studies without regret. It was like another call-up, and another calling.
Davey stopped screaming when the morphine jab kicked in. Blood was still soaking from his trouser-leg all over the back seat of the stolen getaway car. He’d taken a high-velocity bullet just below the knee. Whatever was holding his shin on, it wasn’t bone. In the yellow back-street sodium light all our faces looked sick and strange, but his was white. He sprawled, head and trunk in the rear footwell, legs on the back seat. I crouched beside him, holding the tourniquet, only slowing down the blood loss.
Andy, in the driver’s seat, looked back over his shoulder.
“Take him tae the hospital?”
It was just up the road — we were parked, engine idling, in a back lane by the sugarhouse. The molasses smell was heavy, the fog damp and smoky.
“We could dump him and run,” Gordon added pointedly, looking out and not looking back.
Save his leg and maybe his life for prison or an internment camp. No chance. But the Front’s clandestine field hospitals were already overloaded tonight — we knew that from the news on the car radio alone.
“West End,” I said. “Top of South Street.”
Andy slid the car into gear and we slewed the corner, drove up past the hospital and the West Station and around the roundabout at a legal speed that had me seething, even though I knew it was necessary. No Army patrols in this part of town, but there was no point in getting pulled by the cops for a traffic offense.
We stopped in a dark spot around the corner from my parents’ house. Andy drove off to dump the car and Gordon and I lugged Davey through a door in a wall, past the backs of a couple of gardens, over a fence, and into the back porch. I still had the keys. It had been two years since I’d last used them.
Balaclava off, rifle left behind the doorway, into the kitchen, light on. Somebody was already moving upstairs. I heard the sound of a shotgun breech closing.
“Malcolm!” I shouted, past the living-room door. “It’s just me!”
He made some soothing sounds, then said something firmer and padded downstairs and appeared in the living-room doorway, still knotting his dressing-gown. His face looked drawn in pencil, all grey lines. Charcoal shadows under the eyes. He started towards me.
“You’re hurt!”
“It’s not my blood,”
I said.
His mouth thinned. “I see,” he said. “Bring him in. Kitchen floor.”
Gordon and I laid Davey out on the tiles, under the single fluorescent tube. The venetian blind in the window was already closed. My father reappeared, with his black bag. He washed his hands at the sink and stepped aside.
“Kettle,” he said.
I filled it and switched it on. He was scissoring the trouser-leg.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Get this man to a hospital. I’m not a surgeon.”
“No can do,” I said. “Do what you can.”
“I can stop him going into shock, and I can clean up and bandage.” He looked up at me. “Top left cupboard. Saline bag, tube, needle.”
I held the saline drip while he inserted the needle. The kettle boiled. He sterilized a scalpel and forceps, tore open a bag of sterile swabs, and got to work quickly. After about five minutes he had Davey’s wound cleaned and bandaged, the damaged leg splinted and both legs up on cushions on the floor. A dose of straight heroin topped up the morphine.
“Right,” Malcolm said. “He’ll live. If you want to save the leg, he must get to surgery right away.”
He glared at us. “Don’t you bastards have field hospitals?”
“Overloaded,” I said.
His nose wrinkled. “Busy night, huh?”
Davey was coming to.
“Take me in,” he said. “I’ll no talk.”
My father looked down at him.
“You’ll talk,” he said; then, after a deep breath that pained him somehow: “But I won’t. I’ll take him to the Royal, swear I saw him caught in crossfire.” He looked out at the rifles in the back porch and frowned at me. “Any powder on him?”
I shook my head, miserably.
“We didn’t even get a shot in ourselves.”
“Too bad,” he said dryly. “Right, you come with me, and you, mister,” he told Gordon, “get yourself and your guns out of here before I see you or them.”
Gordon glanced at me. I nodded.
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