1985 (24 page)

A brightly polished man stood up. Bev had thought him merely to be an idle frequenter of court-rooms; now he was revealed as a court officer of some sort. He was chubby, beautifully dressed, self-satisfied in the manner of a Welsh tenor singing
Comfort ye my people
. His accent was Welsh. He said: ‘Yes, your honour.' He smiled at Bev. He said: ‘Let us substitute for the term probation the more meaningful word rehabilitation. Have you heard of Crawford Manor?'

‘No,' said Bev, ‘I have not.'

‘
Sir
,' said Mr Hawkes, completing Bev's statement for him but with a kind of apologetic good humour. ‘Crawford Manor is a rehabilitation centre set up by the TUC and part-financed by the Treasury. You will be given an opportunity to reconsider your position. You will in no manner be coerced into a resumption of your former union status. Your course of rehabilitation will, it is trusted and, indeed, foreknown, present the nature of
rights
which you seem to regard as tyrannous impositions so cogently that you will, I have no possible doubt, be only too eager to be welcomed back into the comity of the nation's workers. Have you anything to say?'

‘I won't go,' said Bev.

The magistrate said: ‘I'm afraid you have no alternative.'

‘Your friend here,' said Bev, ‘said there would be no coercion.'

‘No coercion in the rehabilitation process,' smiled Mr Hawkes. ‘But I fear that enrolment is compulsory. After all, can you deny that you have broken the law?'

Bev considered that. He saw that there had to be dragging of some kind – a fine from his pocket, his body to a jail. You committed a crime, you accepted the dragging consequences if caught.

‘All right,' said old Ashthorn, ‘next case.'

The constables looked murderously at Bev as he left the box. Mr Hawkes smiled.

‘I go now?' said Bev sullenly.

‘You go in three hours time. You take the 13.20 from Charing Cross. Crawford Manor is just outside the village of Burwash, in East Sussex. There will be transport for you and the rest of the party from Etchingham station. Mr B –'

‘What a mess,' Bev interrupted, ‘there was a time when the powers were separated. Now you bastards control the judicature as well as the –'

‘Mr Boosey, as I was trying to say, awaits you outside this courtroom. He is your conducting officer.' Mr Hawkes suddenly changed his tone and his manner. He said in a low sibilant voice: ‘See sense,
wus
. You can't win, boy. Got you we have then and don't bloody forget it.'

‘Fuck you, shitbag,' said Bev.

‘Better that is, boy
bach
. Talking like a worker you are now. Go on,
bachgen
, take your non-unionized pong away.'

There were twenty-one of them on the train, including Mr Boosey, a man like a failed private detective who sat nursing a big mottled fist like a weapon he was dying to use. But, yawning and stretching on Charing Cross station, he had revealed, perhaps intentionally, a leather holster under his jacket. Most of the party doubted that there was a gun in it. This was England, where only criminals went armed.

Most of the twenty were men of education, few of them very young, some mild and hopeless, hanging on to principle like an expired credit card. But there were some religious fanatics, including a Scot with jutting brows who set himself to provoke Mr Boosey from Tonbridge on:

‘Sae, ye dullyeart horse-punckin, ye'd hae it that the Laird's worrrd is kilted in a tippit?' He waved his Bible at the Lord's creation beyond the window, mostly concealed as it was by broken factories and dirty smoke; ‘Eh, rawny banes?'

‘I dinna ken what you're jabbering aboot, Joke,' said Mr Boosey. ‘If it's a pee you want you'll have to wait till we get there.'

‘Ach,' the Scot sneered, ‘he's nocht but a quean's bycomes an' a drutlin' druntin' para-muddle.' He then turned to high-pitched Kelvinside English and said: ‘What I wish to convey, brother, is that you and your lot have decided that the Word of the Lord God is all washed up and if the Lord Jesus was alive today he'd be leading the carpenters out on strike.'

‘If you want to shout the odds about what's in the Bible, wait till you get where we're going. I'm just taking you there, right?'

A young half-starved-looking Midlander with great pale eyes began to sing
Onward Christian Soldiers
. Nobody joined in. He said, in a Black Country whine: ‘Throwing us to the lions. The twentieth-century martyrs.' Nobody said anything. Mr Boosey took out some throat tablets but did not offer them around. He began to suck. The Scot said:

‘Ach, yon thieveless sook-the-blood. Ye scaut-heid reid-een'd knedneuch mawkin'-flee.'

‘You watch your tongue, Jock,' sucked Mr Boosey.

The train stopped at Tunbridge Wells. A tall member of the party in a black raincoat stood up and said: ‘We change here, surely.'

‘Sit down,' said Mr Boosey. ‘I checked. We don't change.'

‘Are you ordering me to sit down?'

‘I'm telling you.'

“I think,' said the tall man, looking very coolly at Mr Boosey, ‘I'll get out just the same.'

‘Try it,' said Mr Boosey. ‘Go on, just try.' And then it was confirmed that the leather holster beneath his jacket was not just for show. Mr Boosey pointed at the tall man a black oiled Sougou .45. The man sat. All marvelled. Mr Boosey said:

‘You lot have got to remember that you're criminals.'

Bev said, marvelling: ‘I never thought it possible. Gun law. Tell me, Boosey, what kind of a hermaphrodite are you?'

‘Watch it,' said Mr Boosey. ‘I've got a handle to my name.'

‘Aye, that's guid. A scrat.'

‘I mean no sexual insult by the term,' said Bev. ‘Kipling used it of the Royal Marines, His Majesty's jollies, soldier and sailor too. You're an officer of the law and an officer of the TUC. A confirmation of achieved tyranny in a train going to Etchingham.'

‘Batemans,' said a man in dark glasses, ‘has been taken over. You'll see when we get to Burwash. The poet of empire's home is now a regional computer centre. May Puck of Pook's Hill split it with an electronic murrain.'

‘Look, you lot,' said Mr Boosey, with quiet ferocity. ‘I'm doing a job, get it?' He looked across the aisle to take in the rest of his party, even those who sat reading the
Free Briton
, good as gold. ‘A job, that's what I'm doing. A job.' He seemed to have nothing further to convey. A uniformed guard came down the aisle calling:

‘Everybody out. Train proceeds no further. We're on strike.'

The probationer criminals were interested in Mr Boosey's response to this. He should by rights have said, ‘Good, brother.' Apparently, the day of holistic syndicalism not having yet arrived, he was not expected himself to go out on strike with the rest of the Conducting Officers' Union or Guild or whatever it was. But he was surely not expected to frown in irritation.

‘Lead us,' said the tall man in the black raincoat, rising again. ‘Lead us, brother, whither thou wishest to take us.'

‘Look,' said Mr Boosey to the guard, ‘will the telephones be working?'

‘Working just now when the news came through from the
Transport Union, but if you want to phone you'd better put some jildy in it.'

‘Kipling,' said the dark man in glasses, ‘is not dead.'

‘But if it's a bus or something you're after,' said the guard, ‘you know the position as well as what I do.'

‘Jesus Christ,' said Mr Boosey.

‘That is not the tone of a believer,' said the boy from the Midlands.

‘You're right there, lad,' said the guard. ‘Come on, let's have you all out.'

Mr Boosey looked dangerous as he got his charges out on to the down-line platform of Tunbridge Wells Central. It began to rain. There was distant thunder. A swarthy squat man who had not previously spoken said:

‘Tonnerretruenotuonotrovaotunetdonnerdonder –'

‘Shut it, you,' snarled Mr Boosey, ‘do you hear?' The guard hovered, interested.

‘Foreigner, is he?' he said. And then: ‘You going up to the Manor, as they call it? Because if you are it looks as if you'll have to walk there. March them along the line, no law against it. Quickest distance between two points.'

A ruddy man with a very dirty raincoat and a copy of the
Free Briton
sticking out of its pocket said jocularly:

‘Get fell in, you horrible lot.'

Before Mr Boosey could take charge, the squad had gleefully gotten down on to the rails and started to march south. ‘Here, here, bugger you,' called Mr Boosey. The guard was amused.

They moved in double file. Bev's partner was the tall man in the black raincoat, a former county librarian, his name Mr Mifflin. It rained drearily. Mr Boosey cursed. At Stonegate the ruddy man said: ‘Five minutes break every hour. Army regulations.'

‘Keep going. You're not in the frigging army now.'

Near Etchingham Mr Mifflin said: ‘Shall we make a run for it?'

‘He has a gun.'

‘True. Let's see if it's loaded.
Now
.'

The gun was loaded. Bev felt something whistle past his ear. He and Mr Mifflin came back sheepishly from the green embankment they had attempted to mount. ‘Now you know,' sweated Mr Boosey. ‘Now you know that the time for your bleeding childish nonsense is over and done with. Now you know who's bloody well in charge.'

Mr Pettigrew stood near the blocked-up fireplace of what had once been called the Joshua Reynolds salon and surveyed his audience of 150. They all knew who he was: they could not, in spite of themselves, but feel flattered. The great TUC theorist, the permanent chairman of the TUC Presidium, lean, tow-haired with an equine forelock, younger-looking than his forty years, beamed at them and eyed them dimly while he polished his glasses on his tie (blood-red with gold flywheels). He put his glasses on and the eyes, clicking into focus, were seen to be sharp and of a terribly clear grey. Formidable eyes, thought Bev. Mr Pettigrew said, in a reedy donnish voice:

‘Brothers.' Then he smiled and shrugged with great grace. ‘I find it hard to use the term with the requisite sincerity. Sisters. No, it won't do, will it?' The seventy-odd women in the audience seemed to agree. Giggles, little chortles. To call a female fellow-worker
sister
seems to announce the preclusion of what our American friends call a meaningful relationship. There is room for many things in what is rather absurdly nicknamed Tucland, but I don't think incest is one of them.' Laughter. Careful, careful, said Bev to himself; don't laugh, don't be seduced by the charm, he's the enemy. ‘So I say: ladies and gentlemen. There are no officious shop stewards standing by the walls to rebuke me.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, you have been summoned here because you are exceptional people. You would call yourselves, perhaps, individualists who put the single human soul before that strange abstract group entity called the Workers' Collective. You have known struggle, you have known pain. The principle of the unique importance of the individual soul, the untrammelled free individual will, has led most of you to a state of desperate loneliness – the loneliness of the outcast, the criminal, the vagrant, the sane soul shrieking through the prison bars reared by the insane. I know, none better. You have faced every day and, more terribly, every night in the distortions of bad dreams, the intolerable human dilemma. I have faced it also, perhaps with less courage than you.

‘What is the nature of the dilemma? It is this. That humanity craves two values that are impossible of reconciliation. Man – or, to use the term recommended by the Women's Liberation Movement, Wo Man – desires to live on his, sorry, zer own terms and at the same time on the
terms imposed by society. There is an inner world and there is an outer world. The inner world feeds itself with dreams and visions, and one of these visions is called God, the enshriner of values, the goal of the striving single soul's endeavours. It is good, nay it is human, to cherish this inner, private, world: without it we are creatures of straw, unhappy, unfulfilled.
But
, and I must emphasize this
but
, the inner world must never be allowed to encroach on the outer world. History is full of the wretchedness, the tyranny, oppression, the pain occasioned by the imposition of an inner vision on the generality. It began, perhaps, with Moses, who had a vision of God in a burning bush, and, through it, initiated the long trial of the Israelites. St Paul sought to impose his idiosyncratic vision of the resurrected Christ on an entire world. So with Calvin, Luther, Savonarola – need I go on? And in the secular field, we have seen, or read of, the agony caused by the enforcing of some mystical conception of the State on millions in Europe, on untold millions in Asia.

‘Do I make myself at least a little clear? I have nothing against the inner vision so long as it is controlled by mer who holds it, kept sealed from the outer world, cherished behind locked doors. The outer world cannot accept the inner vision without pain, for the values of the outer world are of a substance so different from the inner one that they cannot meet – as phosphorus and water cannot meet –without dangerous conflagration. Now, you will ask, what are the values of the outer world? They are simple, and their simplicity is the inevitable attribute of a generality. They consist in what all Wo Men possess in common – the need to live, which means the need to work and to be paid for that work. When we speak of a Workers' State, a Workers' Collective, we would, if we could, expunge from the term the cynical political connotations which have been added to it by the Marxist oligarchs. By a Workers' State we mean no more than a system in which the basic human right is permitted to prevail – the right to work and to be adequately paid for that work. The very concept implies, perhaps, a contradiction. For if the State is the possession of the workers, then the worker's long struggle for justice has been won, since the means of effecting justice is in zer hands. But every day sees signs of the continuation of the struggle, and the struggle will go on for ever. The opposition between Employer and Employed is a basic tenet of our system. The State becomes increasingly the Employer, hence, by simple logic, what is theoretically for the worker
is in practice against mer. I repeat, this dichotomy is essential. Essential, because a dynamic is essential to sustain the progressive amelioration of the worker's lot, and only out of opposition can a dynamic be generated.