1985 (18 page)

‘I gave it up because of the Ministry directive,' Bev said. ‘It limited the content of history courses rather drastically. The history of the trade union movement was, I knew, not the whole of history nor even the most important part of it. But I kept my feelings to myself. I didn't make any public protest. I just said I wanted to better myself.'

‘Ruining children's stomachs,' grinned Devlin, ‘instead of improving their minds. That's what the value judgement boys would say.'

‘I
have
bettered myself,' said Bev. ‘I'm twenty pounds a week better off. And ought to be thirty pounds a week better off in the new year.'

‘Except,' said Devlin, ‘that you won't be working at Penn's Chocolate Factory in the new year, will you? Not if you persist with this this this atavism.'

‘I have to persist. Wouldn't
you
, knowing the filth of the whole bloody villainy that it's become? What started as self-protection has become an immoral power bloc. We dream through it all, and then we wake. It killed my wife, the blasted filthy immorality of it. Do you expect me to put up any longer with the slimy unquestioning sinfulness of it? I
saw
my wife turned into charred bones and scorched skin. And you ask me to support the filthy bloody fireman's immoral bloody strike?'

‘Nobody asks you to do anything,' said Devlin gently. He pushed a packet of cigarettes over. Bev shook his head. ‘I must give it up myself,' said Devlin, taking one, lighting one. ‘Who the hell can afford it any more?' The picture on the cigarette packet was a vivid, if small, representation of a lung eaten up by cancer. Orders of the Ministry of Health. Verbal warnings had never done much good. ‘The firemen go their own way. The army goes its own way. In principle we approve naturally. We approve of the strike weapon. But try and be reasonable. Don't blame your wife's death on a necessary device of syndicalist principle. Blame it on the wanton swine who burnt the hospital down.'

‘Oh, I do that,' said Bev. ‘But in doing it I attack the principle of evil. Because whoever did it, they were an evil lot of murdering bastards. If they were caught, they'd be made to suffer – no, not suffer, that's old-fashioned, isn't it? Reformed. But even if I could get them and kill them, and you know how I'd kill them –'

‘You'll get over that,' said Devlin, puffing away.

‘Even if I could watch them burning, screaming as my wife must have screamed, I'd feel impotent inside, unsatisfied, knowing that evil was responding to evil, that I'd added to the sum of evil, and that evil would still go on – illiquidable, indestructible, primal and final.'

‘That's not our province,' said Devlin. ‘That's theology, church stuff. You put that very well, very eloquent. Of course, that kind of thing is useful, always will be in a way. Used it myself in my early days, except that I'd say things like, “The evils of capitalism must be liquidated, destroyed,” Good metaphorical stuff, theological language. Sorry, I was interrupting.'

‘Let me put it this way,' said Bev. ‘A man is being abused on a public street – robbed, stripped, beaten, even sexually debauched. People stand
round, doing nothing about it. Don't you blame the non-interferers as much as the wrong-doers?'

‘Not as much as,' said Devlin. ‘They're not doing wrong, they're not doing anything. You blame people for doing things, not not doing them.'

‘Wrong,' said Bev. ‘You probably blame them more. Because the evil-doers are a permanent part of the human condition, proving that evil exists and can't be legislated or reformed or punished out of existence. But the others have a duty to stop evil being enacted. They're defined as human beings by possession of that duty. If they fail to do that duty, they have to be blamed. Blamed and punished.'

‘There's no such thing as duty any more,' said Devlin. ‘You know that. There are only rights. Commission for Human Rights – that makes sense. Commission for Human Duty – bloody nonsense, isn't it? It was always bloody nonsense, and you know it.'

‘Duty to family,' said Bev. ‘Duty to one's art or craft. Duty to one's country. Bloody nonsense. I see.'

‘Duty to see that one's rights are respected.' said Devlin. ‘I'll grant that. But if you say, “Right to see that one's rights etcetera,” well, it doesn't seem to mean anything different. No, I throw out your duty.'

‘So the firemen have the right to stand by,' said Bev very hotly, ‘when a hospital's burning down, to stand by and say: “Give us our rights and this won't happen again. Not till the next time, anyway.” I say it's a bigger evil than the other evil.'

‘Well, now,' said Devlin, stubbing out his fag end, ‘you may be interested to know that this fire business at Brentford has already started yielding positive results. The firemen are sitting down today with the Wages Board. Tomorrow the strike may be over. Think about that before you start raging about what you call evil. Nothing that improves the lot of the worker can be evil. Think about that. Write it in the flyleaf of your diary for 1985.'

‘Write this in your own diary,' said Bev. ‘Write:
MEN ARE FREE
. You people have forgotten what freedom is.'

‘Freedom to starve, freedom to be exploited,' said Devlin with an old, no longer pertinent, bitterness. ‘Freedoms I'm very pleased to see belong only to the course in history that you refused to teach. You're a bloody-minded individual, brother,' said Devlin, a growl entering his tone. ‘You're a bloody-minded reactionary, comrade. You're demanding
freedom and, by the dead or living or non-existent Christ, you're going to get it.' He waved at Bev the official note that Bev's shop steward had forwarded to him. ‘The old filthy free days are gone, me boyo,' he said, his Irish coming out, ‘except for you and reactionaries like you. You stopped teaching history and you've turned your back on history. Do you not wish to remember that only twenty years ago your union, my union, did not exist? It was struggling to be born, and, by Christ, it got itself born and born in pain but also born in triumph. Men tending the machines that produce chocolate bars and candy crunchies and creamy coconut whatevertheyare were in a worse bargaining position than the miners and railway-workers and foundrymen. Why? Because of reactionaries like you, with your value judgements.'

‘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.