1985

by Anthony Burgess

  'This is nonsense and you know it.' said Bev with calm.

  'You know bloody well what I mean,' shouted Devlin. 'An archaic and essentially bourgeois ladder of values made it dangerous to let the miners strike too long and freeze the arses of the consumers, but what were called inessentials and marginal goods and luxury products could go to hell and the confectionery workers with them. Well, it's all over now, me boyo. When we go on strike the bakers go on strike with us. No response to a reasonable wage increase demand among the chocolate boys and the populace gets no bread. And there's no stupid reactionary bitch who can say let them eat cake, because if you can't have one you can't have the other. And the time's coming, and it won't be long, it may well be before 1990, when every strike will be a general strike. When a toothbrush maker can withdraw his labour in a just demand for a living wage and do so in the confidence that the lights will go off and people will shiver and the trains won't be running and the schools will close. That's what we're moving to, brother. Holistic syndicalism, as Pettigrew calls it with his love of big words. And you have the effrontery and nerve and stupidity and reactionary evil-mindedness to talk about freedom.' He panted hard and fiercely lighted himself another cigarette. Bev spoke mildly. He said:

  'I ask only for the rescission of the closed shop. I demand, as a free human being, the right to work without being forced into membership of a union. Isn't that reasonable? People like me, who oppose the closed shop on moral principle -'

  'It's not moral principle, and you damned well know it. It's not thought or conviction, it's rage, and I'm not blaming you for the rage, I wouldn't blame any man, but I am blaming you for converting the rage into what you think is a belief. What I say is: give it till after Christmas. Get drunk, stuff yourself with turkey, nurse your hangover, then go back to dropping little bits of hazelnut on to your chocolate creams or whatever they are -'

  'My rage,' said Bev, 'as you rightly term it, is the mere emotional culmination of a long-growing belief that the closed shop is evil, that it's unjust to force men into being mere cells in a gross fat body that combines the torpid and the predatory, that a man has a right to work if he wants to work without having to jump at the shop steward's whistle, and that, given certain circumstances, a man has a duty to work. A duty to put out a fire, if that's his trade. A duty to -' He was going to say: drop nuts on chocolate creams, but he saw the absurdity of it. And then he did not see the absurdity of it. A child dying and wanting only one thing: a box of Penn's Assorted. And everybody on strike and not a box left in the world, and the defiant worker, braving the threats and the blows, going to his machine - No, it wouldn't work. Principle, principle was the thing.

  Devlin got up and walked over to his watercooler. His office was very rational, with flimsy basic furniture in primary colours, and it was very dry and warm. On the wall was a framed poster - the original Bill the Symbolic Worker, not just the first pull but the coloured drawing itself, done by a man called Tilson. Bill was a handsome, tough, intelligent-looking, sharp-eyed generic operative in a cloth cap with curly hair escaping from it, blue-overalled, an indeterminate tool like a wrench in hand. Bev saw, as Devlin stood in the light of the window, drinking water from a paper cup, that Bill might well have been modelled on Devlin when he was, say, thirty years younger. He said: 'Is that you?' Devlin looked sharply and, it seemed, balefully at Bev. He said:

  'That? This? Bill? Not quite me. My son.' There was something in his tone that made Bev able to say:

  'Dead?'

  'Dead to me. With his bloody ballet-dancing and his pansified pretty ways.'

  'Homosexual?'

  'He might well be for all I know. The bastards he got in with are brown-hatters, bugger them.' Devlin saw he had gone beyond his immediate terms of communication with this bloody-minded one here, who was now grinning rather nastily and saying:

  'That must make for a terrible conflict inside you, Brother Devlin - knowing that the prettily pansified are as tightly corseted in their unions as the boilermen and the truckdrivers. Male models, I mean, and dancers, and even the Gaypros.'

  'The gay what?'

  'The homosexual prostitutes. Minimum rates and so on. I'm old-fashioned enough to get a certain ironic pleasure out of knowing that Bill the Worker there is probably handling a spanner or whatever it is for the first time in his life. What a world you've made.'

  'I think this has gone on long enough,' Devlin said. He went back to his desk and picked up the report delivered by Bev's shop steward. 'You tore up your union card in full view of your brothers. You loudly proclaimed your disaffection with the system. Your brothers were tolerant, knowing that you were not your normal self. I don't think, in the circumstances, disciplinary action is called for -'

  'What kind of disciplinary action?'

  'Read the regulations. Clause 15 section d subsection 12. A fine not less than double and not more than five times your annual subscription. We let that pass. The tearing of the card is nothing. It's like in the old Christian days when people got baptized. Tear up your baptizmal certificate and it doesn't make you unbaptized. You're a union member, and that's it.'

  'Until I start to go my own way and not hop to the whistle.'

  'You're a union member and you can't unmake it. The records say so and the records are like the tablets of the Mosaic law. But -' And he looked at Bev sternly, a bald man with a tired and fleshy grey face, droll eyes despite the sternness, a mobile mouth that briefly chewed air or some tiny residue of breakfast cached by a hollow tooth and now released by it. Bill the Symbolic Worker smiled down at Bev with gentle encouragement.

  'But,' Bev completed what in effect was meaningful enough, 'when I next neglect to participate in industrial action -'

  'There's a strike of the millers on Christmas Eve,' said Devlin. 'I hope you'll have got over this nonsense by then. If not, you can call that the shooting of your bolt.'

  'You'll see,' said Bev, getting up.

  'It's you that's bloody well going to see, brother,' Devlin said.

  Bev left the office of the general secretary of his union, or former union, and took the lift from the twenty-third floor to the foyer, which still had the look of the old Hilton hotel that this building, New Transport House, had formerly been. There was not a single union in the syndicalist network of the whole country that was not represented here, from chimney-sweeps to composers of electronic music for films. A great plaque above the reception desk said THE TRADES UNION CONGRESS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. Beneath it was a logogram - a simplified map of the country with the simple inscription TUK = TUC. This was why Great Britain had been christened, by a jocular columnist in The Times, Tucland. It was a nomenclature seriously and gratefully seized by the great union chiefs, or their copywriters, and it featured in the Anthem of the Workers:

  Muscles as tough as leather,

  Hearts proofed against the weather,

  Marching in friendly tether,

  Cradle to grave,

  Scorn we a heaven hereafter -

  Build it with love and laughter

  Here, firm from floor to rafter -

  Tucland the brave.

  Needless to say, few of the workers knew the words. Outside, a warm drizzle just beginning, Bev looked up at the towering stained stucco to the flag flapping at the top - a silver cogwheel on a blood-red background, a hammer and sickle no longer implying a world union of workers but standing for the Advanced Socialists who, in the sacred name of labour, sought to build, or had already in Europe long built, repressive state systems which denied syndicalism. Aneurin Bevan, probably the primary namesake of Bev, since Bev was a son of Wales, as Bevan had been, had once said, though never in public, wise words: 'Syndicalism is not Socialism.' Meaning that when the workers were their own employers there was no one to fight against. In Tucland the ancient division of capital and labour continued to subsist, and would probably do so for ever, whether the capitalist was the private boss (a fast-disappearing figure) or the State.

  Bev c
ouldn't help smiling as he strained his neck, still looking upward at the flying wheel, remembering that ownership was incompatible with the philosophy of labour, and that the TUC rented this building from the Arabs. Where would Tucland be without the Arabs? The oil, at a price ever more exorbitant, flowed in from Islam and kept Tucland's industries going. And Islam was not only the hot desert but also the cold ocean, for North Sea oil had been mortgaged to the Arabs for a government loan when the International Monetary Fund had closed its cashboxes to Britain for the last time, and the loan had been called in and the mortgage foreclosed, and the crescent moon banners waved from the chilly derricks. The Arabs were in Britain to stay. They owned Al-Dorchester, Al-Klaridges, Al-Browns, various Al-Hiltons and Al-Idayinns, with soft drinks in the bars and no bacon for breakfast. They owned things that people did not even know they owned, including distilleries and breweries. And, in Great Smith Street, soon would stand the symbol of their strength - the Masjid-ul-Haram or Great Mosque of London. To remind Britain that Islam was not just a faith for the rich, plenty of hard-working Pakistanis and East African Muslims flowed in without hindrance, for the adjustment of the immigration laws (which had had too-stringent quota clauses) in favour of the Islamic peoples was a necessary political consequence of Arab financial patronage. Yet the workers who had forgotten their Christianity were supposed to sing, 'Scorn we a heaven hereafter'. They ought, thought Bev in a flash of insight, to be more fearful than they were of a people that believed in a heaven hereafter.

  3 You was on the telly

  Like good Muslims, the British millers who produced what Britain called flour - a fine white dust with carcinogens but little nutritive content - struck at sunset, not at dawn. At dawn on Christmas Eve there was no bread, for the bakers locked the doors on their flour-stocks and also went on strike. The confectionery workers went on strike too. Housewives, who were not yet unionized, grew angry when they found no loaves or cakes around and rioted in the High Streets. The Wages Board responded at three in the afternoon by promising favourable consideration of the millers' demands for triple-time pay for night-work, and the strikes were ended half an hour before the Christmas holidays were due to start for regular day workers, so that all could toast the festive season in the boss's time. There was still no bread for Christmas.

  Bev, shoulders straight, chest out, legs like water, reported for duty as usual at eight in the morning at Penn's Chocolate Works. There was a picket waiting for him. There were policemen, chewing their straps. The police, though reluctantly, grabbed a man who threw a small stone at Bev, even though he missed.

  'Whose side are you bloody rozzers on?' went the shout.

  'You know the law as well as what I do,' said the sergeant unhappily. A van from Thames Television drew up. Bev waited. His act would have no validity unless available for the world to witness. This was the new way. It's Really Real when it's Seen on the Screen. Jeff Fairclough got out, hands deep in smart burberry, red hair waving in the breeze. A man with a hand-held camera and a recordist with a Stellavox followed. Fairclough and Bev nodded to each other. He had telephoned Fairclough the previous evening. Fairclough had once been a colleague, a teacher of English until the advent of the new WE syllabus. ('Usage is the only law. You was is the form used by eighty-five per cent of the British population. You was is therefore correct. The pedantic may reflect that this was the regular form used by pedants like Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth century.') Bev and the team marched through the open gateway. The strikers put on a great act of snarling and cursing for the camera. The sound recordist didn't record. They could get the bloodying and buggering from stock. Bev led the way to the executive wing. Young Mr Penn, very nervous, came forth to meet them. The Stellavox man put his headphones on, switched on, gave a thumbs up to Fairclough, who said: 'Action.'

  'Good morning, Mr Penn. I'm reporting for work as usual.'

  'You can't, you know it, we're closed. There's a strike on.'

  'I'm not striking, Mr Penn. I claim my rights as a free man. I'm here to work.'

  'You can't. You damn well know you can't. Be reasonable.'

  'Are you denying me my basic right as a worker?'

  'Don't be so bloody stupid. You know bloody well what the position is.'

  'Are you a Quaker, Mr Penn - a member of the Society of Friends?'

  'I don't see what the hell that's got to do with anything. Now bugger off.'

  'You're dismissing me, Mr Penn? On what grounds? Redundancy? Inefficiency? Insubordination?'

  'I'm not dismissing you. I'm giving you the day off.'

  'You deny one of the basic tenets of the Quaker chocolate manufacturers - an employee's right to work, his total immunity from any exterior coercion that persuades him not to?'

  'You know the position as well as I do. You're in a closed shop. You can do nothing about it and neither can I. Can't you at least go through the motions, man?'

  'I'll go through the motions with pleasure. Open up and let me get to my machine.'

  'But the power's off. Oh, go away.' Mr Penn was in deep distress.

  'You think this is just?' said Bev. 'You think you're being just in the way your ancestral co-religionists were just?'

  'It's not the point, I tell you. This is the modern age.'

  'You and I, Mr Penn, have entered into contractual relations. As employer and employee. Do you propose breaking that contract?'

  'Right,' said Mr Penn grimly. 'Come with me.' And he led the way (the cameraman ahead, walking backwards) to the works. Soon Bev stood by his cold machine among other cold machines, being interviewed by Jeff Fairclough.

  'So this, Mr Jones, is your way of denouncing the principle of strike action. Don't you consider you're being rather old fashioned?'

  'Is justice old fashioned? Is compassion? Is duty? If the modern way approves the burning to death of innocent people with firemen standing by and claiming their workers' rights, then I'm glad to be old fashioned.'

  'You realize, Mr Jones, that you're inviting your dismissal from your job? That, moreover, no other job can possibly be available to you? That the closed shop is a fact of life and applies to every single gainful activity?'

  'The individual worker has the right to decide whether or not to withhold his labour. My curse on syndicalism.'

  'You've just condemned yourself to permanent unemployment.'

  'So be it.'

  The camera stopped whirring. The recordist switched off and packed up. 'Was I all right?' asked Bev.

  'You was fine,' grinned Fairclough. 'But God help you.'

  They left. The picket, held back by unhappy police, jeered and threatened. Bev was given a lift by Thames Television to his bank, where he drew out PS150, noting that he now had a credit balance of PS11.50. He went to do the Christmas shopping. Poor motherless Bessie must not be deprived of her right to seasonal stuffing. She knew what Christmas was about. Her class teacher, Mrs Abdul-bakar, had told them the whole story. Nabi Isa, last of the great prophets before Mohammed (may his name be blessed), whom it was in order for the Peoples of the Scripture to call Jesus, had been born to tell the world of the goodness and justice of Allah Most High. Therefore you had to stuff and make yourself sick.

  Bev was in the kitchen drinking Christmas Eve whisky when he heard Bessie call: 'Dad, dad, there's this man that looks like you.' He went in and saw himself on the news, but he did not hear himself. The appropriate teleworkers' union would have been at work there, threatening strike action if heresy were allowed to be spoken to the world. He saw himself with Mr Penn and at his cold machine for about ten seconds as a brief pendant to the regional news, and he heard the flippant newsreader say something about here's one man that we can wish a merry Christmas to but not a happy New Year, and then, to the tune of Chopin's Funeral March on wa-wa trumpets, they cut to a chalk-scrawled hanged man on a wall. And that's the end of the local news. Bessie said: 'He's like you, dad.' Bev said:

  'He has to be, girl. He is me.' Bessie looked at her father with an awe
she had never before shown: my dad on the telly.

  'Why was you on the telly then?'

  Bev sighed and wondered whether to tell her all. No, let it wait. Let her have her Christmas stuffing, poor kid. So they sat together that evening chewing dates and cracking walnuts, her eyes glued to the screen, his restless, sometimes closing unhappily, and they saw White Christmas with Saint Bing and Rosemary Clooney, and when Arab Hour came on they switched over to a new musical version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, in which Ebenezer Scrooge was not reformed into a model paternalistic employer but, scared by his ghostly visitants, saw what the bloody power of the workers was going to be bloody well like, mate, and celebrated Boxing Day by being cowed by the new Clerical Workers' Union under its leader, Bob Cratchit. Then Bev served them both, on the floor in front of the telly, with the electric fire glowing away, a nice big cold Christmas Eve meal of ham and mixed pickles followed by sherry trifle he'd made with old dry sponge cakes and eggless custard, and they drank Australian sherry (Beware of Foreign Imitations) and big mugs of sweet tea. There was a late late movie called The Bells of St Mary's, with Saint Bing again as a straw-hatted RC priest and Ingrid Bergman as a nun, but it was so cut about as not to make much sense, and then Bessie went to her squalid bed (Bev had neglected the laundry) and woke her father up at four in the morning screaming about a man with claws and three heads. She had wetted the bed in her fright, and Bev in some unease let her come into his, his and poor dead Ellen's. The poor girl was naked, having soaked her already soiled night-dress, and this made Bev very uneasy. When she had got the nightmare out of her head (there were other details than the three-headed man, such as horrid white snakes and hands clutching out of dirty pools of water) she grew calm and said: