Miss R is asking about ‘daily life’ in old Wapping. While she adjusts the line between her skirt and blouse, she sounds like a teacher preparing a history lesson for a class of low academic ability, less politics and power, more sandwiches and soft drinks.
‘What did you use to do on sunny days? Did you stay behind your windowless brick? Did you walk within the walls like zoo animals? Did you eat at your desks from trays or outside on camping tables?’
She has heard that, even when the siege of Wapping was over, we still behaved as though the barbarians were at our gate, like prisoners whose guards have fled but who have become accustomed to their cells. There is some truth in that.
‘Yes, I almost always ate in my office from a tray, often from the canteen’s peculiarly thin trays. Who else have you been talking to?’
‘We never reveal our sources. You should know why.’
‘Yes, that triangle of grass was one of the few places in the sun where we could eat or sit or walk with anything but concrete beneath our feet. In 1987 it was a little larger than it is today. It was also much, much brighter, a chemically fuelled green place, the only kind of lawn that could survive. On a Wapping lunchtime dozens of newspaper people used to sit there.’
She scribbles a note.
‘It was hardly a pleasure park’, I insist. ‘Once the eating time was over, hardly anyone ever sat there for long. It was not just the garden-centre smell of fertiliser. This was a lawn much too exposed for most pleasure, or even leisure, the closest thing that we had to a stage, useless for hiding, useful only for wanting to be seen when few of us did want to be seen.’
‘When do you last remember sitting on that lawn?’
I tell her. ‘It was a few weeks later, in the middle of a hot afternoon. Colin Haycraft had said that he might drop by. He had books to promote to me, payback for his Gibbon invitation, and I had one that I hoped to promote to him. Ronnie wanted to talk more about David’s Heartbreak House weekend.’
‘It was Ronnie I was waiting for most anxiously. I did not mind being conspicuous. I wanted to be seen. I did not want to miss him. I wanted to intercept him before he met anyone else. I was being careful, respectful I hoped, keen to ensure that he bore no grudges – and not just about our afternoon in the Garden of Peace. My story of election rage was still a bit of an issue between us. There had been other stories too in other papers, “follow-ups”, the same events seen through different eyes with aims of different advantage. I knew that he was displeased.’
‘I also felt slightly sick. It was a day like today, fumes steaming from the water that we could not see. I needed whatever fresh air I could find. I was working while I waited. I held the draft of a difficult leader for The Times on property tax reform, the product of an angry morning on the Mezzanine.’
‘Property, rates, the Poll Tax’, she spins out each word one by one.
‘Yes, the Poll Tax. It may seem ridiculous but taxing houses is often awkward, often worse than awkward, and at this time in 1987 especially so. The colour of the grass, even the chemicals that made it green, were welcome distractions from the PT, the initial letters of the words that no one wanted to say, the policy that within three years would bring Margaret Thatcher down.’
Miss R stands up and splays her feet in a position for attack. She has the expression she wears when she suspects I am going to tell her what she already knows, the same one as when she thinks I am going to talk about sex. But she does not stop me. She still has her notebook open.
And then she sits and begins to talk, first in halting half phrases, then in a stream of words. I listen and I keep listening. This is the point where everything here changes.
Suddenly she has her own ‘first time’. There is no rise in her voice, no questioning, no sharpness, no certainty. She is dressed today as she was when she arrived in April: blue skirt ruffled shorter over her left thigh than the right, flat black shoes, a black clasp in her bobbed black hair. Only her shoulders seem narrower, not so padded for power, a different jacket.
Her tone is flat like a mobile phone voice overheard, personal but with no listener in view. I try hard to hear but in wondering why she has changed I miss some of what she is actually saying.
When I recover, her subject is ‘the horses’. She repeats the words and shifts her position on her chair as though posing for a portrait photograph, stiff and still before moving her right hand above her knee and turning her head ten degrees towards the window, each change distinct from the other. She lifts her eyes away from the muddied grass and out past the brick walls of Mr Breezer, the painted A, B and C on his warehouse, as far as the clanking traffic of the Highway.
‘There were metal bars’, she says. Her voice rises very slightly. I assume she is asking a question because questioning is all that she has ever done here.
I begin to answer. ‘Yes, there were still metal barriers beside the road in 1987, no longer strung out in an iron wall but stacked in piles, in case the pickets were to return.’
She is not listening. ‘When a metal bar meets the thigh of a horse’, she continues softly, ‘there is the softest thud before the squeal.’ This time there is no rise in her voice. She is neither listening nor asking now. She is remembering.
Miss R says that she remembers directly the Poll Tax. That is not, of course, the payment of it (she was too young) but the riots against the tax which took her to London ‘for the first time’. She moves her head a further ten degrees away from our line of sight. This is the first time she has used her favourite phrase about herself.
‘There were galloping grey horses. A “gallop” is only what horses do in stories until its direction is towards you. There were straps around their riders’ necks and fists.’
I must be looking sceptical. ‘Are you sure you’re remembering?’
‘I remember what my mother told me but also what I saw, the hooves, the iron bars, the traffic cones like hats for Noddy (or was it Big Ears?), the burning cars and broken glass.’
‘The battles of the Highway here were nothing beside the battles of Trafalgar Square’, she adds, returning to her academic stance.
‘David Hart used to say the same’, I reply, encouraging before pausing. ‘Were you really there? You could have been no more than six years old.’
‘Yes and when I first heard the words Poll and Tax I thought the subject was a pole for prodding police horses.’
‘So that’s my PT story. How was it for you then?’ She breaks out from her distant stare, asking the question as though seeking reassurance about a film or a fillet steak or a partner’s position beyond the range of the Renaissance erotica that lie around her feet.
‘Embarrassing’, I reply. ‘Treacherous. Worse than any other dispute we had.’ She nods in an attempt at agreement. For the first time it seems that we might be speaking on equal terms of giving and receiving.
‘Snap’, she says. ‘Snap! Snap!’ She means that she knows exactly what I mean. Another first, I say in silence. It is years since I have heard anyone cry ‘snap’ to signify similarity, the matching of clothes and cards, a red tie, an Ace of Clubs, not maybe since I heard my mother use it last at home.
‘The troubles of The Times’, she says, ‘can hardly have been worse than those of the places where I spent my own last Thatcher years. Sometimes I was by the sea with my grandfather, a fervent Margaret man, mostly with my mother, an even fiercer Poll Tax opponent. That was why I was on the march.’ She is almost whispering now.
‘The only concession by my mother was that we should choose the route from Kent, re-enacting the first Poll Tax march in 1381, rather than the more convenient road from Essex. This was for my greater education. But all that I have ever remembered was the sound of metal on horseflesh. My mother and my grandfather did not speak for a decade after the battle and the tax were over.’
Miss R checks herself. She brushes her skirt down as though it has been temporarily occupied by an intruder. She gives a long sigh.
‘C
hronology, chronology, chronology’, she whispers. That march was 1990, the year she fell. You must stay for me in 1987 when Thatcher still felt that she could do anything she liked and that people like you and your Senecans would happily follow wherever she led.’
‘Not very happily, not at all’, I counter.
‘All of you on the triangle, what did you think of the Poll Tax?’
She pauses, as though challenging me to object to her change of tone.
‘Grandad was a bit of a Senecan himself’, she adds as though an afterthought. O yes, he knew a bit of Latin. He was a very self-styled man of virtue, a hypocrite to everyone else, not, unfortunately, very rich, indeed not rich at all. Not stupid either though.’ Her words are now staccato, strained, almost strangled from her throat.
I am readjusting my place in this interview now. If I had a different chair I would sit in it. But there are still only two chairs, still stuck on the same small pieces of bare carpet, still with the same view down to the chemical lawn, surrounded, if that were possible, by yet more piles of letters, books, erotica, politics and personal tat. Miss R juts out her jaw, posing as though to match a photograph.
I am hopelessly thinking back, stuck with the question she has asked in words. What did we all think of the Poll Tax? Not the same thing. That is certain. Disagreement among the Senecans was by 1987 almost guaranteed.
I start with the easiest answer. ‘David Hart did not care about the taxation of “domestic property”, as he called it, distinguishing this from taxes on office blocks and stately homes. So yes, he said: in an unimportant way it was unfair that, before the Poll Tax, four salaried teachers in one side of a semi-detached house would pay the same rates bill as a single pensioner on the other side. A new tax on every head seemed fairer. But this was not the kind of fairness he cared much about.’
‘Seneca, he reminded us, was particularly sound on orders of importance. Rates reform, the switch from payment by house to payment by individual, was down in the fifth order, well behind Gorbachev and Star Wars, Marxist trade unionists and meddlers in Brussels, maybe even lower. David had long admired Margaret’s “thinking of the unthinkable” but, if this had been reduced to “reform of the rates” it was further proof that she was finished.’
‘And Ronnie Millar?’
‘Ronnie did not agree with David. What mattered to Margaret must necessarily matter to him, and to all of us if we were as loyal as we ought to be. As Seneca would have seen it, there were issues on which the Emperor has to have his will. This was one of them. The Poll Tax was a promise from her heart. It was also opposed by all those ministers who, in their deepest and dirtiest hearts, had opposed her on almost everything else.’
‘Lord Wyatt?’
‘Woodrow agreed with Ronnie although he understood the problem rather better. His best case for the Poll Tax was that most of the money for local councils, for schools and police and refuse collection, came from local businesses which, unless their owners lived where they worked, could not vote on how their money was spent. Councillors, for example, had no incentive to control their trade unions (or be economical in any way) since they were elected by voters who paid almost none of the bills. The Poll Tax restored a fundamental principle of taxation and representation. Margaret was right to insist upon it.’
Miss R is listening patiently to the answers she has asked for.
‘Yes’, she says, ‘but under the Poll Tax the Duke would have paid the same as the dustman, the David Hart the same as the man on the Essex council estate where Peter Stothard used to live.’
She has a photograph of herself with a ‘Duke and Dustman’ placard. She pushes her right foot through a pile of my own old photographs which merely show examples of ill-fitting suits.
She waits for me to say more. I have no wish to do so. The last few minutes have been like a leader writers’ morning on the Mezzanine. The words are hard even to type any more.
In front of me, however, is now a very different Miss R from the one who appeared here four months ago. Her chronology has reached the time of her own life. Seneca and the Senecans have left history.
‘It was Frank’, I tell her, ‘who first called it the PT. As usual, he liked to think he had a more sophisticated understanding than the rest of us. This PT, dear boy, was a proper case of applying classical principles.’
‘I can still hear him saying those words, down there where we found the books in the skip. As well as “dear” and “boy” he spoke of great men of reason. The Poll Tax came from All Souls, Oxford, and a Rothschild Bank. It made a logical sense.’
Miss R nods.
‘Every user of public services, Frank said, should pay the same single tax because the available services were the same for everyone. He called this the “benefits received principle” of taxation and derived it as far as he could from ancient models.’
‘Was he right?’, she asks.
‘No. But the relationship of the Poll Tax to the Romans, however attractive to Frank’s mind (remember: he was a comic fantasist by trade), was the least of its difficulties.’
‘Even at the age of six, you were right and he was wrong. The PT defied the common kind of sense, the kind of the losers, the many, the young, the surprised, the angry mothers of girls with placards. To almost every politician apart from the philosophers who had conceived it, the ‘fairness principle’ that the rich should pay more than the poor, while in some sense less classical, took a priority that was self-evident.’
Miss R frowns.
‘So, the Poll Tax was difficult for all the Senecans but particularly for the two of us at The Times. It was a test not of tax policy but of loyalty. Frank’s notes for a leader, the one I held in my hand that day on the chemical lawn, pretended to argue that the rating system was undemocratic as well as inefficient; that there were principles at stake and surely I should approve of principle. It praised the wise men of Oxford who had invented the Community Charge, as the Poll Tax was known to its friends, a radical way of restoring lost simplicity. It was surely very Roman, easy to collect, equally burdensome on all. Seneca would have approved.’
Miss R crosses her legs and smiles.
‘But Frank, of course, did not care at all about logic and the rates. Any principle was only a pretence. He could hardly say the words “rateable value” without polishing his wit. He cared solely about tests for supporting Margaret Thatcher. Would I pass or would I fail? Anyone, he said, could support her when she was popular, when she was doing what she had done before. The true virtue was to support her when she was being radical, taking risks, risking unpopularity for a purpose.’
‘This argument continued for months, even as far as the unloved “senior staff Christmas dinner” at the Savoy that year. We were back in the Mikado Room with no Prime Minister present to keep us in order, still less sycophantic. The prescribed entertainment was that each of us should tell the table how we got our first “big break”. I told my dull, true story about Industrial Democracy, New Society and Harold Evans. I was forgiven only because I was chosen to go first and had no time to prepare a story of sex and alcohol of the kind that everyone else seemed to have.’
‘Frank, uncharacteristically, told a story about a woman in Nottingham called Muriel whom he once had shared with another colleague at the table. He told me beforehand that he would be sober all evening so that he could include our “senior staff embarrassments” in his next book, his Times Diary. In fact, he remained only partly sober. He was unsure, he said, how I would come out in his literary estimation. Loyalist or traitor, Seneca or survivor? Much might depend on the PT that he cared about so little.’
Miss R turns a page and draws two of her horizontal blue lines. She is expecting some sort of new start.
30.7.14
The destruction is closer today. If a window could be opened in a modern office I would smell the collapse of steel and glass, hear it and taste the dust. A new front wall of black-and-grey squares, each the equal-sized shape of equal-statu
s offices, forms a vertical chess board beyond the pit and the gate.
Meanwhile, there are books and papers to be packed, some of them that I once thought valuable, some that I do not want to be packed by anyone else. My newly acquired Illinois edition of I Modi, for all its scholarly apparatus, chronology and context, might be misunderstood. The plant is falling fast. Our exit is approaching fast.
Miss R is helping, asking questions like a remover not a researcher.
‘Where are these for?’
‘These are the books that the Senecans read about Seneca the artist, the bureaucrat, brave man and coward, Stoic and playwright, pioneer portrayer of the interiors of other minds. Woodrow liked the one which described “probably the richest writer to have ever lived, at least the richest great writer”. That was no small thing. Lord Wyatt would love to have been as rich and great a writer but, given the choice, he would have chosen to be rich.’
‘Ronnie had his own favourites and his own reasons for reading about Seneca. He always tried to find something good in a playwright, even one whose plays he found quite impossible to stage: “Medea? M’dear, it used to drive us mad”, he used to say, recalling some failed attempt in some faraway theatre.’
‘And yet Seneca was more than a fellow dramatist to him. He was a man peculiarly fit, he argued, for the “believing age”, his name for the character of the age in which we then lived, in which he most wanted to live. It was Ronnie who understood Seneca best.’
Miss R smiles her next question. ‘What did he mean? Was he right?’
‘Yes, in a way. Or so it seemed to me soon afterwards. This “believing age” of the 1980s was no sort of Golden Age. Only the most crazy have ever called it that. There were some bad believers, But it was an age in which Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman Prime Minister and the most successful at winning elections for almost 200 years, did espouse belief as a virtue – and not just her own beliefs. She expected others, her friends, advisers, courtiers, even her opponents, to be comfortable in the territory of the believers too.’
The Senecans Page 16