by David Lodge
“All these kids,” says Marjorie disapprovingly. “Wagging it, I suppose.”
“On the dole, more likely,” says Sandra, suppressing a yawn, and checking her appearance in the mirrored wall behind her mother’s back.
…
Robyn arranges her notes on the lectern, waiting for latecomers to settle in their seats. The lecture theatre resonates like a drum with the chatter of a hundred-odd students, all talking at once, as if they have just been released from solitary confinement. She taps on the desk with an inverted pencil and clears her throat. A sudden hush falls, and a hundred faces tilt towards her—curious, expectant, sullen, apathetic—like empty dishes waiting to be filled. The face of Marion Russell is absent, and Robyn cannot suppress a tiny, ignoble twinge of resentment at this ungrateful desertion.
…
“I’ve been looking at your expense account, Brian,” says Vic, turning over a small pile of bills and receipts.
“Yes?” Brian Everthorpe stiffens slightly.
“It’s very modest.”
Everthorpe relaxes. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”
Everthorpe looks puzzled. “Sorry?”
“I’d expect the Marketing Director of a firm this size to claim twice as much for overnight stays.”
“Ah, well, you see, Beryl doesn’t like being on her own in the house at night.”
“But she has your kids with her.”
“Not during term, old man. We send them away to school—have to, living in the depths of the country. So I prefer to drive back home after a meeting, no matter how far it is.”
“Your mileage is pretty modest, too, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Brian Everthorpe, beginning to get the message, stiffens again.
…
“In the 1840s and 1850s,” says Robyn, “a number of novels were published in England which have a certain family resemblance. Raymond Williams has called them ‘Industrial Novels’ because they dealt with social and economic problems arising out of the Industrial Revolution, and in some cases described the nature of factory work. In their own time they were often called ‘Condition of England Novels,’ because they addressed themselves directly to the state of the nation. They are novels in which the main characters debate topical social and economic issues as well as fall in and out of love, marry and have children, pursue careers, make or lose their fortunes, and do all the other things that characters do in more conventional novels. The Industrial Novel contributed a distinctive strain to English fiction which persists into the modern period—it can be traced in the work of Lawrence and Forster, for instance. But it is not surprising that it first arose in what history has called ‘the Hungry ’Forties.’
“By the fifth decade of the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution had completely dislocated the traditional structure of English society, bringing riches to a few and misery to the many. The agricultural working class, deprived of a subsistence on the land by the enclosures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thronged to the cities of the Midlands and the North where the economics of laissez-faire forced them to work long hours in wretched conditions for miserable wages, and threw them out of employment altogether as soon as there was a downturn in the market.
“The workers’ attempt to defend their interests by forming trades unions was bitterly resisted by the employers. The working class met even stiffer resistance when they tried to secure political representation through the Chartist Movement.”
Robyn glances up from her notes and sweeps the audience with her eyes. Some are busily scribbling down every word she utters, others are watching her quizzically, chewing the ends of their ballpoints, and those who looked bored at the outset are now staring vacantly out of the window or diligently chiselling their initials into the lecture-room furniture.
“The People’s Charter called for universal male suffrage. Not even those far-out radicals could apparently contemplate the possibility of universal female suffrage.”
All the students, even those who have been staring out of the window, react to this. They smile and nod or, in a friendly sort of way, groan and hiss. It is what they expect from Robyn Penrose, and even the rugby-playing boys in the back row would be mildly disappointed if she didn’t produce this kind of observation from time to time.
…
Vic Wilcox asks Brian Everthorpe to stay for a meeting he has arranged with his technical and production managers. They file into the office and sit round the long oak table, slightly in awe of Vic, serious men in chain-store suits, with pens and pencils sticking out of their breast pockets. Brian Everthorpe takes a chair at the far end of the table, slightly withdrawn as if to mark his difference from the engineers. Vic sits at the head of the table, in his shirtsleeves, half a cup of cold coffee at his right hand. He unfolds a sheet of computer printout.
“Does anybody know,” he says, “how many different products this firm made last year?” Silence. “Nine hundred and thirty-seven. That’s about nine hundred too many, in my opinion.”
“You mean different specs, don’t you? Not products,” says the technical manager, rather boldly.
“All right, different specs. But every new specification means that we have to stop production, retool or reset the machines, stop a flow line, or whatever. That costs time, and time is money. Then the operatives are more likely to make mistakes when set-ups are constantly changing, and that leads to increased wastage. Am I right?”
…
“There were two climactic moments in the history of the Chartist Movement. One was the submission of a petition, with millions of signatures, to Parliament in 1839. Its rejection led to a series of industrial strikes, demonstrations, and repressive measures by the Government. This is the background to Mrs. Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton and Disraeli’s Sybil. The second was the submission of another monster petition in 1848, which forms the background to Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke. 1848 was a year of revolution throughout Europe, and many people in England feared that Chartism would bring revolution, and perhaps a Terror, to England. Any kind of working-class militancy tends to be presented in the fiction of the period as a threat to social order. This is also true of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849). Though set at the time of the Napoleonic wars, its treatment of the Luddite riots is clearly an oblique comment on more topical events.”
…
Three black youths with huge, multicoloured knitted caps pulled over their dreadlocks like tea-cosies lean against the plateglass window of the shopping-precinct café, drumming a reggae beat on it with their finger-tips until shooed away by the manageress.
“I hear there was more trouble in Angleside at the weekend,” says Marjorie, wiping the milky foam of the cappuccino from her lips with a dainty tissue.
Angleside is the black ghetto of Rummidge, where youth unemployment is 80 per cent, and rioting endemic. There are long queues in the Angleside Social Security office this morning, as every morning. The only job vacancies in Angleside are for interviewers in the Social Security office, where the furniture is screwed to the floor in case the clients should try to assault the interviewers with it.
“Or maybe oyster,” says Sandra dreamily. “To go with my pink trousers.”
…
“My point is simply this,” says Vic. “We’re producing too many different things in short runs, meeting small orders. We must rationalise. Offer a small range of standard products at competitive prices. Encourage our customers to design their systems around our products.”
“Why should they?” says Brian Everthorpe, tipping his chair back on its rear legs and hooking his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets.
“Because the product will be cheap, reliable and available at short notice,” says Vic. “If they want something manufactured to their own spec, OK, but we insist on a thumping great order or a high price.”
“And if they won’t play?” says Brian Everthorpe.
“Then let the
m go elsewhere.”
“I don’t like it,” says Brian Everthorpe. “The small orders bring in the big ones.”
The heads of the other men present have been swivelling from side to side, like spectators at a tennis match, during this argument. They look fascinated but slightly frightened.
“I don’t believe that, Brian,” says Vic. “Why should anybody order long when they can order short and keep their inventory down?”
“I’m talking about goodwill,” says Brian Everthorpe. “Pringle’s has a slogan—”
“Yes, I know, Brian,” says Vic Wilcox. “If it can be made, Pringle’s will make it. Well, I’m proposing a new slogan. If it’s profitable, Pringle’s will make it.”
…
“Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times embodies the spirit of industrial capitalism as Dickens saw it. His philosophy is utilitarian. He despises emotion and the imagination, and believes only in Facts. The novel shows, among other things, the disastrous effects of this philosophy on Mr. Gradgrind’s own children, Tom, who becomes a thief, and Louisa, who nearly becomes an adulteress, and on the lives of working people in the city of Coketown which is made in his image, a dreary place containing:
several streets all very like one another, and many more streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
“Opposed to this alienated, repetitive way of life, is the circus—a community of spontaneity, generosity and creative imagination. ‘You mutht have us, Thquire,’ says the lisping circus master, Mr. Sleary, to Gradgrind. ‘People mutht be amuthed.’ It is Cissie, the despised horserider’s daughter adopted by Gradgrind, who proves the redemptive force in his life. The message of the novel is clear: the alienation of work under industrial capitalism can be overcome by an infusion of loving kindness and imaginative play, represented by Cissie and the circus.”
Robyn pauses, to allow the racing pens to catch up with her discourse, and to give emphasis to her next sentence: “Of course, such a reading is totally inadequate. Dickens’ own ideological position is riddled with contradiction.”
The students who have been writing everything down now look up and smile wryly at Robyn Penrose, like victims of a successful hoax. They lay down their pens and flex their fingers, as she pauses and shuffles her notes preparatory to the next stage of her exposition.
…
In Avondale Road, the Wilcox boys have risen from their beds at last and are making the most of their unsupervised occupancy of the house. Gary is eating a heaped bowl of cornflakes in the kitchen, while reading Home Computer propped up against the milk bottle and listening via the hall and two open doors to a record by UB40 playing at maximum volume on the music centre in the lounge. In his bedroom Raymond is torturing his electric guitar, which is plugged into an amplifier as big as an upended coffin, grinning fiendishly as he produces howls and wails of feedback. The whole house vibrates like a sounding-box. Ornaments tremble on shelves and glassware tinkles in sideboards. A tradesman who has been ringing at the front door for several minutes gives up and goes away.
…
“It is interesting how many of the industrial novels were written by women. In their work, the ideological contradictions of the middle-class liberal humanist attitude to the Industrial Revolution take on a specifically sexual character.”
At the mention of the word “sexual,” a little ripple of interest stirs the rows of silent listeners. Those who have been daydreaming or carving their initials into the desktops sit up. Those who have been taking notes continue to do so with even greater assiduousness. People cease to cough or sniff or shuffle their feet. As Robyn continues, the only interference with the sound of her voice is the occasional ripping noise of a filled-up page of A4 being hurriedly detached from its parent pad.
“It hardly needs to be pointed out that industrial capitalism is phallocentric. The inventors, the engineers, the factory owners and bankers who fuelled it and maintained it, were all men. The most commonplace metonymic index of industry—the factory chimney—is also metaphorically a phallic symbol. The characteristic imagery of the industrial landscape or townscape in nineteenth-century literature—tall chimneys thrusting into the sky, spewing ribbons of black smoke, buildings shaking with the rhythmic pounding of mighty engines, the railway train rushing irresistibly through the passive countryside—all this is saturated with male sexuality of a dominating and destructive kind.
“For women novelists, therefore, industry had a complex fascination. On the conscious level it was the Other, the alien, the male world of work, in which they had no place. I am, of course, talking about middle-class women, for all women novelists at this period were by definition middle-class. On the subconscious level it was what they desired to heal their own castration, their own sense of lack.”
Some of the students look up at the word “castration,” admiring the cool poise with which Robyn pronounces it, as one might admire a barber’s expert manipulation of a cut-throat razor.
“We see this illustrated very clearly in Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South. In this novel, the genteel young heroine from the south of England, Margaret, is compelled by her father’s reduced circumstances to take up residence in a city called Milton, closely based on Manchester, and comes into social contact with a local mill-owner called Thornton. He is a very pure kind of capitalist who believes fanatically in the laws of supply and demand. He has no compassion for the workers when times are bad and wages low, and does not ask for pity when he himself faces ruin. Margaret is at first repelled by Thornton’s harsh business ethic, but when a strike of workers turns violent, she acts impulsively to save his life, thus revealing her unconscious attraction to him, as well as her instinctive class allegiance. Margaret befriends some of the workers and shows compassion for their sufferings, but when the crunch comes she is on the side of the master. The interest Margaret takes in factory life and the processes of manufacturing—which her mother finds sordid and repellent—is a displaced manifestation of her unacknowledged erotic feelings for Thornton. This comes out very clearly in a conversation between Margaret and her mother, who complains that Margaret is beginning to use factory slang in her speech. She retorts:
“‘And if I live in a factory town, I must speak factory language when I want it. Why, Mamma, I could astonish you with a great many words you never heard in your life. I don’t believe you know what a knobstick is.”
“Not I, child. I only know it has a very vulgar sound; and I don’t want to hear you using it.’”
Robyn looks up from the copy of North and South from which she has been reading this passage, and surveys her audience with her cool, grey-green eyes. “I think we all know what a knobstick is, metaphorically.”
The audience chuckles gleefully, and the ballpoints speed across the pages of A4 faster than ever.
…
“Any more questions?” says Vic Wilcox, looking at his watch.
“Just one point, Vic,” says Bert Braddock, the Works Manager. “If we rationalise production like you say, will that mean redundancies?”
“No,” says Vic, looking Bert Braddock straight in the eye. “Rationalisation will mean growth in sales. Eventually we’ll need more men, not fewer.” Eventually perhaps, if everything goes according to plan, but Braddock knows as well as Vic that some redundancies are inevitable in the short term. The exchange is purely ritual in function, authorising Bert Braddock to reassure anxious shop stewards if they start asking awkward questions.
Vic dismisses the meeting and, as the men file out, stands up and stretches. He goes to the window, and fiddles with the angle of the louvred blinds. Staring out across the car park, where silent, empty cars wait for their owners like patient pets, he ponders the success of the meeting. The telephone console on his desk buzzes.
“It’s Roy Mackintosh, Wragcast,” says Shirley.
“Put him on.”
Roy Mackintosh is MD of a local foundry that has been supplying Pringle’s with castings for many years. He has just heard that Pringle’s is not reordering, and has phoned to enquire the reason.
“I suppose someone is undercutting us,” he says.
“No, Roy,” says Vic. “We’re supplying ourselves now.”
“From that old foundry of yours?”
“We’ve made improvements.”
“You must have…” Roy Mackintosh sounds suspicious. After a certain amount of small talk, he says casually. “Perhaps I might drop by some time. I’d like to have a look at this foundry of yours.”
“Sure.” Vic does not welcome this proposal, but protocol demands a positive response. “Tell your secretary to fix it with mine.”
Vic goes into Shirley’s office, shrugging on the jacket of his suit. Brian Everthorpe, who is hanging over Shirley’s desk, straightens up guiltily. Griping about the boss, no doubt.
“Hallo, Brian. Still here?”
“Just off.” Smiling blandly, he tugs the points of his waistcoat down over his paunch and sidles out of the office.
“Roy Mackintosh wants to look round the foundry. When his secretary rings, put him off as long as you decently can. Don’t want the whole world knowing about the KW.”
“OK,” says Shirley, making a note.
“I’m just going over there now, to see Tom Rigby. I’ll drop into the machine shop on my way.”
“Right,” says Shirley, with a knowing smile. Vic’s frequent but unpredictable visits to the shop floor are notorious.
…
Robyn’s student, Marion Russell, wearing a long, shapeless black overcoat and carrying a plastic holdall, hurriedly enters a large building in the commerical centre of Rummidge and asks the security man at the desk for directions. The man asks to see inside her bag and grins at the contents. He motions her towards the lift. She takes the lift to the seventh floor and walks along a carpeted corridor until she comes to a room whose door is slightly ajar. The noises of men talking and laughing and the sound of champagne corks popping filter out into the corridor. Marion Russell stands at the threshold and peeps cautiously round the edge of the door, surveying the arrangement of people and furniture as a thief might case a property for ease of entry and swiftness of escape. Satisfied, she retraces her steps until she comes to a Ladies’ cloakroom. In the mirror over the washbasins she applies pancake makeup, lipstick and eyeliner, and combs her hair. Then she locks herself in one of the cubicles, puts her bag on the toilet seat, and takes out the tools of her trade: a red satin basque with suspenders attached, a pair of black lace panties, black fishnet stockings and shiny highheeled shoes.