The Litten Path

by James Clarke

  TV crews were also arranged throughout the tophill. Postings of focus aimed cameras at the miners. One crew carried their equipment down the lines, filming until they arrived at a blimp of a man with his top off, holding a placard. The camera focused, rotate and pivot. It was the first time Lawrence had seen a TV crew.

  A cheer went up as the camera was struck by a football. One of the crew picked the ball up and tried to remonstrate in the direction it had come from, but his voice was overwhelmed by the profuse hacking laughter of working blokes in a pack.

  One of the crew kicked the ball into the air. Arcing, the white sphere was camouflaged against the delicate cloud before re-appearing, thud, upon the grass.

  Boiling. Loads of people had their tops off. Tough blokes with broad shoulders, sinew. Soft blokes with round shoulders, belly. Plenty of folk were sunbathing, chatting. There were women here and the odd youngster, too; it was pretty convivial, actually. Union men patrolled the field’s limits, directing picketers. And there was a megaphone, it must be Arthur Scargill’s. You couldn’t hear a word he was saying. It was like he was shouting into his hands while someone pinched his nostrils.

  “Is my dad here, Het?” asked Lawrence, but Het and Bob were chatting and Darren Roach was ahead, smoking a cigarette. Lawrence scanned the crowd for people still wearing their tops, because his dad never took his shirt off. Arthur was embarrassed about the tattoos he’d had done when he was younger. A domino on the left shoulder. The huge march hare illustrating his back.

  The crowd edged forward, front lines of police and picket drawing closer to one another. Although it wasn’t time for the lorries yet, Lawrence felt nervous. He twitched his toes. A stone lay temptingly in the grass.

  As if the police forces had read his mind, a cry went up, the emergence of the thunderhead.

  “What was that?” Lawrence said, coughing to disguise the nervy way his voice teetered.

  “Reinforcements,” Bob replied, staring ahead, his neck mizzled hideously with sweat.

  A clutch of police officers bedecked in riot gear arrived, the jogging phalanx sending a charge through the crowd. There was cursing and defiance as the main bobbies in uniform stepped back to form second and third rows, and the armoured squad took their place up front.

  “What’s that lot doing here?” Het said.

  Replied Bob, “Fucked if I know.”

  Bob leant against Lawrence’s ear, his damp breath warm on both lobe and neck. He said “This is where they give it the Zulu, son.”

  No time to question what he meant. The new riot police began to hammer their large rectangular shields with their batons. They yelled and pounded them, and the noise of it drowned everything out. Terror squad. Intimidator. It was like when two trains pass one another in a tunnel.

  Missiles were the pickets’ response. Bottles and rocks were hurled from disparate parts of the crowd, projectiles searing overhead and landing near the police huddle some forty yards away. The picket seemed to swell. Yawning, it covered most of the field. Lawrence was also being pushed forward. The current was sending the canoe towards the precipice.

  Het reached out and grabbed him. Lawrence tried to shrug him off, but this only increased the strength of his uncle’s grip.

  “Come here. We’ll not get dragged in. We’re just here to persuade them flaming lorries to stop.”

  “How can we do that if we can’t speak to ’em?”

  “That’s police’s line of thinking.”

  “Are they allowed to just block the way like that?”

  “No, but they do it anyway.”

  Chanting. The words were no doubt meant to inspire, but the way they were sung, Lawrence supposed it was the venom of it. A sentiment pitched somewhere around the defiant mark was emerging in more dangerous terrain.

  We’re miners, united. We’ll never be defeated.

  We’re miners, united. We’ll never be defeated.

  It was hard not to think that in the middle of more conflict that this is how it would always be. It had been a year of bleached bones, where every day had been reduced to what felt like varying stages of confrontation, relationships boiled down to nothing. Lawrence washed daily in the shower. He drank the searing water that rained into his mouth.

  The lorries must be coming – this didn’t feel real. Het’s scarred lower lip moved as he chanted quietly along with the rest of the picket. This squaddie-looking interloper had necked Lawrence’s mother with that mouth. Maybe it was gravity Shell saw in Het, because you strove for what you didn’t have as much as for what you couldn’t. Even at sixteen, Lawrence understood that much.

  Everyone was pushing towards the gates, blocked by that dense wave of policemen. A merry here we go, football chant repeated, over and again. Lawrence began to chant, too. Words could boil up in him, even if he didn’t know whether he meant them or not.

  “I didn’t think there’d be so many,” Het said. He looked worried, apologetic. “Stay close, lad. We’ll stay where we are, keep hung back.”

  “You must’ve told me that five times now.”

  “Aye, well take another look at them gates, they’ve directed the whole picket to this field. We’ve to be careful.”

  His arm slipped over Lawrence’s shoulder, across the chest. Holding his tongue, Lawrence went on tip-toes, staggering as even Het was barged forward by the picket’s urgency.

  Ahead was the grime-coated edifice of mighty Orgreave. Darren Roach piled into the crowd and was swallowed up. A hundred men must have been in that section alone; a younger set in their twenties and thirties. Darren and this lot aimed for the riot police, who were a short way beyond, brandishing shields. This force stretched lengthwise as far as Lawrence could see, deeper still. A plastic horizon. Tasked domes winking in the sun.

  Now Het and Bob had their voices raised. It felt safer here amongst the second or third division of the picket. Het even smiled, perhaps not sensing what Lawrence could: the untethering visible on people’s faces, those faces topped with callow-looking hair.

  “Lorries are yet to arrive. Five minutes I make it,” Het said.

  “Where they coming from?”

  “Behind all that lot, then back out the same way. Down the road up side of the plant.”

  “Never seen this many police.”

  “Nor this many picket. This is it, Lawrence. This is how much we care about one another.”

  When Lawrence didn’t nod, Het gave him a big, important nod and said “Can you not see now who you are?”

  Lawrence wanted to shake his head. He disliked, could never handle direct questions like that. Though thankfully Het wasn’t waiting for an answer.

  “You’re a part of this community. Working folk, fighting to make a living.”

  That arm was searching again – Lawrence swerved out of its way. He found it pathetic, absorbing your job until it became all there was about you, your every virtue bound in it.

  “Pits aren’t just a career,” Het said. “They’re a sense of self and that alone is worth its tonnage. A man defines himself by what he does. Show us one person on our side of this field not proud of his job, his history and where he comes from.”

  “Me.”

  “This is what makes them them,” Het said. He was getting animated now, casting an eye over the crowd. “They think we can’t see it. Think they can say a multi-million pound industry’s past it. Selby super-pit’s most modern in t’world, and they’ve just spent a fortune at Gascoigne Wood. This is about us, lad. They can’t stand us.”

  Blunderbuss though he was, Het might have a point. Why should Lawrence resist this ready-made life? Sixteen and going on sixty, he had never worked in the pit or ever wanted to, but he couldn’t deny his roots or who his people were. In a sense their voice was his voice, and in a sense it had been waiting for him to listen to it his whole life. Its shades had fought through before.
Defensive things said in heated moments that felt at the time as if they’d come from the mouth of some other person, words Lawrence recognised later as his own, deeply his, his duty to say all along, feelings that might have been making their way towards him for centuries. Maybe some words were yours before you ever thought to say them. Maybe finding your way towards them was what growing up was. Lawrence shut his eyes and sought the sun. Because maybe everyone had a role to fill and it was best to waste no time filling it, because sooner or later it would end up filling you.

  “Lorry push,” said Bob. “Give it what for, lad. Here they come.”

  The convoy was inaudible above the crowd. Lawrence saw it, the armed escort. Each fabled truck was empty, heavy in a motorcade with not a scratch on it. The mobile pickets en-route must have failed, or perhaps they hadn’t bothered to stop the trucks at all. Rather they were here now. It seemed as if every miner in the country was here today. Lawrence could see the front driver wearing protective goggles. And as the grille of the man’s truck revealed itself in all its glorious detail, the entire tophill of Orgreave went fucking mad.

  Scab! Scab! Scab! Scab! Scab! Scab! Scab!

  The glaze of that first windshield, those cute round headlights, were lost in the crowd’s tide. Lawrence went with the push. Impossible not to. The picket hit the police. Here we go. There had never been a crush like it. Crack. Men butted against police shields, the whole picket at work. Lawrence struggled to breathe. Even this far back it was tough. So many people. So many at it.

  Maggie Maggie Maggie! Out out out! Maggie Maggie Maggie! Out out out!

  Lawrence tried to stay upright, he tried to think. There was so much noise. So many bodies. Stink and din, thrill of it. Adrenaline zoned his focus. He managed to pick Het out, turning the air blue. His fucking uncle who never swore.

  Lawrence gave it some, too, and that felt good.

  The police line held steadfast in spite of the picket’s numbers. Kicked-up summer dust, smack of fear and spray of spit. Shouting, shouting, shouting. Then some curious shapes appeared, an enormity that surged above the lock-hold up front. An unnatural movement drawing into view as if storm clouds had gathered above the human landscape.

  “Hoss,” Uncle Het said, eyes as wide as 50ps.

  “Hoss!”

  The police line split, and from it, as if emerging from the surface of a lake, burst the muzzles and powerful haunches of many horses, tons of mounted force entering the morning and making its charge into the protest.

  People started running. Oh God. Horses chased the crowd. Oh shit.

  They were destriers. Their riders wore white helmets. They carried sticks and transparent shields. Het was calling; Lawrence tried to get there. He and Bob retreated back the way they’d come, neither able to go faster than those in front would allow.

  Each horse was huge and Bob was too slow. Lawrence grabbed his arm. It felt like burger meat. Bob was telling him he was a good lad. Thanks for helping. Wheezing away.

  “Het!”

  His uncle turned back. Het must have been the only one going that direction. Horses gunned at people. Officers struck people, herding whatever came into their path.

  Het arrived to help Lawrence and Bob through the crowd, which had thinned now in retreat. They were no longer the pursued. The cantering had slowed as the horses began to return to the cokeworks. Black tarmac became yellow grass. A sweat runnel creased down Lawrence’s face.

  “I’m getting you home,” Het was saying, “Stuff this.” He was sweating and Bob had his cap off and his hands on his knees.

  “Did you not see that?” said Lawrence. “Did you not see what they did?”

  “I’m not blind, lad. We need to get going.”

  Lawrence followed, looking back the way they’d come. He was old enough and he could take it. Evie would be so impressed when she heard about this.

  He shaded his eyes, wanting, in a weird way, to laugh. Marauding picketers were attacking the police. The horses had retreated and Lawrence couldn’t see where the trucks were. Perhaps they’d made it into the compound already.

  A small man in uniform with a Clark Gable moustache appeared at the front of the police line, holding a megaphone.

  “Clements,” said Bob. “Assistant Chief Clements.”

  That made Het turn.

  Chief Clements spoke clearly into his megaphone. He warned everyone that if the picket did not disperse itself it would be dispersed by force. It was a little late for that. Lawrence broke into the laugh that had been threatening him and turned to his uncle for approval, but didn’t get it. Typical. Het was nothing but a big man with a stone face and such an unwillingness to acknowledge life’s absurdities that he had become absurd himself.

  Het began to clap. “Wi’out fear or favour,” he shouted. “Wi’out fear or favour, Tony. Lest we forget.”

  Stones fell. So did many of the nuggets of coal people had brought with them as an ironic statement. Lawrence kept missing where they went. He found himself urged closer towards the front lines. A lot more police on horseback now contained the field, as did the dogs, the barking dogs. It was back or forwards only. The picketers had been rounded up, penned here and then attacked, and Lawrence saw the heat as a living, sentient thing, a palpable screen through which the clamour of the hounds chasing him into the trees might be heard, their merry jaggeds tearing his shins and the fleshy beanbags of his calves.

  Close now. Close enough to see the detail. More megaphone. More Zulu. The noise was horrible. We will hurt you if you try it. We will put our boot on your windpipe and increase the pressure.

  Lawrence was to the side of the main ruck, set apart from Bob and Het, who appeared to have forgotten all about their plan to leave, so caught up were they by shouting at the horde of police officers.

  Then it was happening.

  The horses came again.

  People screamed. Lawrence did too, he couldn’t help it. An armoured rider came at him, massive astride its saddle, twelve-foot tall and lit by a sun halo, baton raised, using it to scare the picketers away from Orgreave cokeworks.

  Back home you saw beasts like these. They came plodding for their feed, docile heads hanging over drystone walls, fluid lips and fringes that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a character from Dallas. It was so easy to take for granted their power, so easy to forget what they might look like bearing down on you. This one rippled with sheer weight. You don’t hang around for that. The horse was a velvety, dark chocolate colour and had a pale kite of felt midway up its muzzle. Its mounted officer wore a clear visor and a black coat, zipped up to the chin, implacable as he cantered by to urge on the picket, only Bob was too slow; he turned at the wrong time and took a baton to the face.

  Blood flecked Lawrence, or was it sweat? The police horse reared, making that squealing noise you heard on Westerns, and that was all it took. Lawrence ran. He ran the contents of his veins to water. It was enough. More than enough. Up the field he ran, swinging a left in a full-on panic. A TV crew were getting everything. At least that was something, he thought.

  He reached the end of the field. They’d agreed to meet at The Plough pub, down the Catcliffe end, if they were split up, but Lawrence had no idea where that was anymore. Without Het he’d be stuck. He’d have to go back. He was not the man he’d thought he was. He was just a boy.

  He retraced his tracks. Past the fighting elements he went, past the milling groups and those cowering in huddles, returning to where he’d been. The picket was getting into the police here, a smaller group who’d become bottle-necked. It was nasty stuff that took reinforcements to break up. The offending picketers were being beaten, dragged away. The season’s heat, 1984. All that’s solid melts into air.

  There was a slight incline. Enough hill to stand on and search for Het. Lawrence could see horses. He could hear their hooves clattering in the turf, rucking clods of grass up
and leaving behind rutted channels of roiled sod. He moved on. At his feet were the indentations the hooves made. Impacted U-shapes that would have collected glassy pools of water if it was raining. He finally spotted Het, the green shirt, the black cords, the soles of his Doc Martens on display as he knelt next to the dazed Bob.

  Relieved, wild, Lawrence skidded over. ‘It’s me,’ he began to say, but stopped. Because over Het’s shoulder he could see police emerging from outside the factory. A lot more police and they were coming this way.

  It was a mass of officers holding circular shields. These men carried long batons and marched in protective gear. Behind them was a battalion of yet more bobbies in their helmets and their caps, spread across the vaulted diameter of the tophill. The front shield patrol wore round helmets with the same clear visors as the men on horseback. They wore dark gloves, too, in which they gripped their weapons and the transparent shields that stated: POLICE. As if they were in some way unrecognisable. As if anyone could forget the sight of them in woollen sweaters and smart ties, coming to mop this protest from the field.

  Uncle Het followed Lawrence’s line of sight, and what he saw made him force Bob Roach on to his feet. The older man had a huge bump on his forehead. He was bleeding, asking for his son. Darren was nowhere.

  “Where did you go?” Het grabbed Lawrence. “I said to stay close!”

  “I thought you said to Gran there’d be no trouble!”

  They commenced their escape. The police advance was forcing the picketers away from the cokeworks towards the bottom end of the field. Depth charges of action took place everywhere. Squads of officers barrelled at random to seize people from the crowd and carry them to the command post. One agent tended to do the selecting. Red shirt, go. Bald head, grab him.

  Whack.

  Of course there were missiles. These served to wind the police up even more. Most of their detainees resisted arrest; it was taking several officers to bring a picketer down, and they weren’t doing it gently. In some instances the arrestee would be aided by the picket. Lawrence saw one man dragged down by four officers, only to be freed by a gang of picketers. Men punching policeman. Lawrence had never seen that. He had never thought that he would.