Agnes Owens (15 page)

‘They don't get the rain the same as us, but there's an icy wind blawin' a' the time that wid shrivel yer balls.'

‘If ye had ony,' Mick interrupted.

‘And that's whit makes them sae mean an' dour. Forget it son. Stay wi' yer ain kind. They're aye the best. That right Mick?'

‘It's the very truth.'

Maybe they were right. You could say Mick and Baldy were the true gentlemen of the west. Generous, treacherous, vicious and kindly with no admiration for the rich and successful. Yet the difference between them and me was that I liked working. My body was used to it. I preferred to earn my drink and hand in a few pounds to my mother. Their philosophy was all right for them, but not for me, not yet.

‘Ye're very likely right,' I said.

I decided it was time to go and leave them while there was still some wine in the bottle. They had given me enough.

‘I'll have tae get back hame. Ma mother will have the dinner ready.'

They looked sad as I arose from the stone. ‘Cheerio son, be seein' ye.'

‘Come roon tae the Drive later,' Baldy shouted after me. ‘We'll gie ye a good drink.'

‘I might at that. Keep a place warm for me.'

As I gave them a last glance I wondered if I would ever see them again.

‘Have ye got a case or a bag o' some kind?' I asked my mother. ‘I've made up ma mind. I'm gaun up north tomorrow.'

She looked confused and rubbed her cheek. ‘Dae ye think ye should?'

‘I'll have tae gie it a try. This hingin' aboot the hoose is nae use. I'll end up doin' somethin' stupid.' I thought I'd better lay it on a bit. ‘Look how I got intae bother at Hogmanay. Ye know how it is. When ye've nothin' tae dae ye get intae trouble, even if ye're no' lookin' for it. Ye widny like that.'

She became indignant. ‘I got a right showin' up that time the polis came tae the door, an' then yer name in the paper and everythin'. I didny go oot for a week.'

‘Well, if I'm aff much longer it might get intae the
News of the World
. It's better that I go an' get work somewhere.'

‘I suppose so,' she conceded. ‘I'll see if Mrs Smith has somethin' tae put yer clathes in. But how will ye manage the fare? I've hardly any money.'

‘Jist lend me two pounds and ye can keep the broo money.'

She brightened and said, ‘That's too much.'

I waved this aside. ‘I'll manage. As soon as I get a wage I'll send ye somethin'. An' when I make the big money I'll send ye enough tae get a coloured telly.'

Her eyes moistened. To prevent any sentiment I said, ‘Hurry up wi' the dinner, I'm starvin'.'

Afterwards I went to my room to collect my gear. It wasn't impressive. Surprising how little you own when you are faced with the total sum. I wouldn't even have got a balloon from Duds the ragman for the lot. I packed a pullover, two tee-shirts, a pair of pants, two pair of socks, a pair of denims and a pair of boots into Mrs Smith's shabby holdall, and was all set. I looked at my watch. It was only six o'clock. The pubs would be open. A tempting thought to get a couple of pints, but I decided against it, because I might blow the lot and that would be easy. Tonight I would keep my mother company with the telly viewing and please her for once. I counted my notes. Eight in all. Hardly a fortune but folk had set out with less – and starved to death.

I was up early next morning and made myself a cup of tea. No sense in wakening my mother any sooner than necessary. Everything was ready all too quickly. I hung around a bit playing for time. Then I went into her room. She sat up wide awake. ‘Ye should have got me up,' she accused, ‘I would have made ye somethin' tae eat.'

‘That's OK. I've had somethin'.'

She faced me in her dowdy petticoat, or whatever it's called. She was shaking and seemed to be searching for words. ‘I'll miss you,' was all she said.

‘I'll miss you as well.' It was the truth. Right then I felt I would genuinely miss her. After all we had been together for twenty-two
years. I put my arm round her cold shoulder, ‘Don't worry, I'll be OK.'

I kissed her then left before it got any worse. She knocked on the window as I passed. God, what now. She opened the window. ‘Mind and write.'

‘I will,' I assured her. I didn't look back but I knew she would stay there watching until I was out of sight.

As I headed for the bus-stop I began to feel better. It was a bright cold morning with a hint of spring in the air, just enough to make me feel optimistic – and even happy. As I waited at the stop I could pick out the landmarks of my life. Facing me – the Paxton Arms. On the hill behind – the building site. Over the river in front – the derelict Drive. Behind the Drive – the cemetery wherein lay the nameless grave of Paddy McDonald. But that was all finished. It was, goodbye everybody. I was on my way to better things. I was on my way to adventure.

Y
ou will not have read as far as this unless you enjoyed the foregoing tale, so you are probably relieved that Mac has had the sense and energy to step out of the trap his world had become, and leave us with a convincingly hopeful end. This may be the place for someone who has read the novel more than once to explain why he values it, and I will approach my explanation through some remarks about other writing. Readers who dislike windy summaries should read only the last three paragraphs.

There are many reasons why there are few good fictions about folk with low incomes. Great poverty is so disgusting that even the poor hate to be reminded of it, and modest incomes which allow some spare-time pleasure and independence – the incomes which Burns called ‘honest poverty' – are usually earned by work which feels like slavery. It is a horribly ordinary truth that our imaginations reject most of the living we do, so from the earliest days of recorded wealth we have lifted up our eyes to the wealthy. Wealth is enchanting, even at a distance. It bestows freedom, or a convincing illusion of it. Love, friendship, loss and pain are the materials of every life, but the rich wear their materials with distinction. Lord Marchmain can choose to die in a Queen Anne four-poster set up in the Chinese drawing room by the estate carpenters. Getting and spending has not laid waste
his
powers. Which is why (says D. H. Lawrence in his study of Thomas Hardy) artists have an inborn taste for aristocrats. Other classes exist by making things and making money, but unearned wealth allows people to make
themselves
, to develop their distinct individualities. This is what every flower that grows does, and what we all ought to do, says D. H. Lawrence. Maybe Lawrence was influenced by his marriage to the daughter of a German baron, but he was also pointing to a fact. Not just writers but the mass of the public like to imagine they are Gods, owners of great lands and houses, highly paid man-killers, monarchs, priests, politicians and gifted youngsters Making It to the Top. This cast list contains the main characters in fairy stories, the Old Testament, Homer, Shakespeare, all history books until recently, and most of today's newspapers.

But heroes and heroines need servants to help them, buffoons to amuse them, criminals and rabbles to bring out, by contrast, their distinct individualities. Folk with low incomes are not wholly excluded from history and the daily news, and in nearly all the world's great fictions – yes, even in that Homer who most celebrates the courage and cunning of the mighty – a truculent commonsense voice declares that heroic grandeur is not worth the cost of its upkeep, that all but some selfish winners are degraded by it. And a Shakespearian prince tells a band of artists the aim of their profession in language which must have inspired Brecht. ‘Your job,' he says, ‘is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.' The nature mentioned here is human nature, of course, with whatever in land and climate influences it; but to show the whole age and body of a time
to
a time – to reflect the constitution and abuses of a whole commonwealth – is an enormous undertaking. Langland, Chaucer and Sir David Lindsay tackled it. Shakespeare partly tackled it in the history plays. His princes of the church and state, rustic squires and horde of normally unemployable ruffians are drawn into social union by an imperial plundering raid on France. Fluellen and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Prince Hal and Falstaff are of equal dramatic and historical weight. That war needed all of them.

But not until the nineteenth century did a lot of geniuses deliberately describe, with an attempt at equal sympathy, most of the sorts of people who made their nations: Scott first, then at least twelve others in France, England, Russia and America. The French and industrial revolutions had shown that history was what everyone did. A Clydeside engineer, a Corsican corporal, a club of Marseilles republicans, the Lancashire stocking-weavers had changed the world faster than any king or house of lords. In Britain
shake-up
would have been a better word than revolution. None of the mighty had been brought low, but it was now possible to sell books without flattering the aristocracy. It had been joined by whole classes of newly prosperous people with intense curiosity about how wealth and status were acquired and how the less lucky were living. The less lucky had also become literate. Of the three best English authors after 1850 one had been a child-labourer in a blacking factory, one the kept woman of a London editor, one had earned money as a fiddler in country pubs. Through journalism, translating and a builder's drawing-office they had become popular novelists. They were qualified to show the struggles by which self-respect and money were gained, or barely kept, or wholly lost. While Karl Marx in the British Museum investigated the matter statistically, Dickens, George Eliot and Hardy described dependencies between makers of wealth in workshop, colony and farm, and users of it in the bit of society which called itself Society.

In 1895
Jude the Obscure
was published. The critics condemned it, and Hardy decided to devote himself to poetry. After that, with few exceptions, there were no writers with the talent and experience to create lowly paid people with considerable viewpoints. Lawrence is the great exception, but in the twenties he deliberately ‘washed his hands of England'. In the mining town where he grew up he had known a community: people who accepted each other for what they had in common as workmates, neighbours, chapel-goers. His mother wanted her children
not
to be common, but professional and moneyed. By his talents he became these things,
and found that the professional, talented, wealthy folk he now mixed with, though good friends who recognised his uniqueness, had no community beyond cliques based on love-affairs and conversations about art and ideas. So he went searching through Australia, New Mexico and Italy for a working community like the Eastwood of his childhood, but not based on wage-slavery, and with room for a free spirit like his own.

He left behind a literature almost completely class-bound, and bound to the propertied classes. Galsworthy, Forster, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Bowen are dissimilar writers, yet all describe people so detached from their source of wealth in land, trade or industry that they can ignore it, because it is handled by their bankers. The sensitive among them think this unjust. Forster's Miss Schlegels feel that they stand on an island of golden coins in a wide ocean. Their finely tuned existence consumes the coins, but the sea-waves keep casting more at their feet. The ocean is
people
. The hydraulic pressure which howks the money up from the human depths and casts it on the lucky island is depicted in
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
and
A Scots Quair
, exceptional novels which show the pressures being resisted by working men's defiance and organisation. In other fiction, highbrow or popular, the lowly paid have become what they were in Homer's fictions: servants, helpful or truculent eccentrics, a rabble jostling in the street. When authors attempt a larger view of them the usual angle of vision presents something like beetles crawling on each other at the bottom of a tank. There is no suggestion that such people can initiate anything of value, or
be
much, even to themselves.

When I spoke of people looking like beetles crawling in a tank I was not thinking of Greenwood's
Love on the Dole
but of a shallower book called
No Mean City
set in depression Glasgow. Then the image reminded me of some stage plays by Pinter, Orton and Bond. Why did the war with Hitler not change Britain's literary sense of itself ? ‘The only good government' (says Gulley Jimson
in
The Horse's Mouth
) ‘is a bad government in a fright.' Perhaps. The National Coalition which saw Britain through the war was a right-wing body, but it would have been destroyed if it had not mobilised the nation. It froze profits, took control of industry, imposed rationing, fixed wages and prices. It got the unions on its side and ensured that nobody starved or was unduly exploited. It had spokesmen who said the post-war Britain would
not
return to the poverty and unemployment of the inter-war years. To some extent that promise was honoured. Attlee's government set up a welfare state. Macmillan's government did not propose to dismantle it. Butler enlarged the education grants, and in 1954 Somerset Maugham was regretting, C. P. Snow applauding, what they agreed was the first literary fruit of the newly educated proletariat:
Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis. Then came
Room at the Top
by Braine,
Look Back in Anger
by Osborne, and reviewers said that a social revolution had discovered its voice. Yet these authors had depicted no working-class experiences whatsoever! Jim Dixon's bumbling irreverence toward authority is not different in kind from Bertie Wooster's. Jimmy Porter's contempt for Britain where ‘all the good old causes have been won' (he means full employment and some welfare services) was voiced at that time by many aristocratic people, frequently in the press. Joe Lampton thoroughly enjoyed the lives of the affluent who accepted him. The most working-class thing about these men is the sound of their names. They and their authors are examples of a very commonplace shake-up. Like Lawrence they entered an affluent part of England through the educational system. Unlike Lawrence they enjoyed it and stayed. Nor, in getting there, did they feel they left anything worthwhile behind. Their reputation as messengers of social change came from a temporary failure of nerve by a rich conservative (Maugham) followed by a rich socialist's premature faith that a just nation had at last been founded (Snow). Not the book but the critics showed the state of society, but nobody noticed this.