Coasting (38 page)

Yet unemployment in the 1930s had yielded a shaming and memorable collection of dramatic images. Even in the heads of people far too young to remember the Depression, there is a stock of black-and-white or sepia photographs of hunger marches, dole queues, ragged men with their hands in their pockets loafing sadly at street corners, of Victorian terraces with strings of washing hanging between the windows and young men idling the day away in chairs outside their houses. The Depression was picturesque. For photographers and filmmakers from Walker Evans to Humphrey Jennings it was a magnificent subject, full of human color
and evocative squalor. The pictures they made of it were powerful enough to frighten governments.

There was nothing very dramatic or picturesque about unemployment in Blyth in 1982. In the fifty years between recessions, English society had gone indoors. People no longer lived in warrens where the toilet was outside and the street was a communal living room. They couldn’t stand about in conspicuous knots all day, since the streets had been taken over by cars. They were not affectingly ragged, since synthetic fibers had blurred the visible distinctions between the clothes of rich and poor.

Unemployment had been a public event; it was now a private misery, to be borne alone, behind the curtains. It was identifiable not by things you could photograph and write heartstring-tugging reports about, but by gaps and absences. It was in the sound of a single car backfiring in a street where there should have been a continuous surflike wash of traffic. It was in the shops that weren’t there, in the eerie feeling that the population had shrunk inside its walls, leaving a surfeit of unoccupied air.

If you wanted an image of unemployment in the 1980s, you’d have to go inward—to a room, decently furnished in nylon upholstery, where a man and his wife sit in the middle of an afternoon watching one of last year’s movies on the rented video machine. Compared with a Walker Evans picture of Alabama sharecroppers on the porch of their ruinous one-room shack, it is not much of an image. It wouldn’t frighten anyone, or make one want to pass the hat. Yet the quantity of
depression
in the image is no less great—the waste of life, the solitude, the resignation to circumstances.

What is most poignantly absent from the image is the likelihood that either the man or the woman will leave their chairs to join all the other men and women who are watching videos in curtained rooms. As long as unemployment means something so docile, so unsocialized, so quietly embarrassed, it is a commodity that any government can afford to have a lot of. It’s only when the video gets switched off and the people head for the street that it will turn into a problem of social order—when ministers and heads of state will reach for “extreme measures” to “deal” with it.

On the way home to the boat, I stopped at Ridley Park, ten trim acres of well-pruned trees and razored civic turf set between the docks and the council houses. On a raised level of lawn there was a bowling green, where a dozen old men in flat caps and unbuttoned waistcoasts were lost in a game as ceremonially ordered as a service of Holy Communion. Pipes clenched in the corners of their mouths, they ambled nimbly up to the line and delivered the ball with a sudden final twist of the wrist. The balls took forever to arrive. They came curving in out of the coal-tinged sea fret toward the jack.
Plock
. The old men clapped. The next ball swung abruptly off-target, as if allergic, and landed up among the wallflowers; the next drifted to a stop, like Philip Larkin’s car, ten yards short of the jack. The face of each man was serene. Three feet up from the rest of the world on their grassy stage, they were out of the argument. They looked like the happiest people in all of Blyth.

In the bar of the lightship that evening, I heard how the town was clinging to life by its fingertips. Everyone had heard rumors that the National Coal Board wanted to close Bates’s Colliery because its seams were geologically difficult to mine. Twenty percent of the coal shipped from the docks came from the colliery. Of the men who still had jobs, one in four was directly employed by Bates’s. But the pit was “uneconomic.”

“If the N.C.B. does close it, what will it mean?” I said.

The Northumbrian businessman with whom I was talking shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. The end of Blyth, I suppose. But what does
that
mean?”

All through the summer of 1984, the news on television looked as if it were being beamed from somewhere far abroad. The sky was too blue for England and the events too bloody. In a rolling landscape of little hills, like the background of a Florentine painting, ranks of uniformed men crouched behind their glittering riot shields while another army, of people dressed in pastel holiday clothes, pelted them with rocks. Cavalry charges, on handsome chestnut horses, were mounted out of coppices of trees, and
packs of Alsatian dogs were set loose by their handlers, to go snarling round the heels of the retreating rioters.

If this was really England, it looked at first as if it must be some kind of historical reconstruction put on by the Tourist Authority: the Roman legions in conflict with the Saxon hordes, perhaps. If the cameras tracked back, they might reveal an applauding crowd of onlookers, checking the illustrated program to see who was supposed to be on Hadrian’s side and who on Athelwulf’s. At the end of the day, everybody, combatants and tourists alike, might sit down to a traditional banquet of roast ox, syllabub and mead, with musicians plucking at harps and blowing hautboys.

The National Coal Board had announced a major reorganization of the coal industry. The “uneconomic” pits were to be closed, and several thousand miners were to be put out of work. The closure plans unveiled by the Coal Board chairman, an American industrialist, were in line with the Conservative government’s larger plan for a new, slimmer, more efficient and cost-effective Britain. These were received by the miners and their leaders with rage and fear.

Arthur Scargill, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, saw the plans as part of “a concerted attack by the ruling class,” not just on the miners but on manual workers everywhere in Britain. We were living under “the most ruthless government seen in our lifetime,” which was heartlessly bent on turning “our people” into “industrial gypsies, wandering from coalfield to coalfield, pit to pit, searching for work.”

“We are involved in a class war,” Scargill said:

Miners arrested by the police on the picket lines were labeled as “political prisoners,” and Scargill claimed “the battles of Orgreave, Ravenscraig and Llanwern” as heroic feats
of class warfare, to be set beside Mrs. Thatcher’s famous victories at Goose Green, Teal Inlet and Port Stanley.

In her turn, Mrs. Thatcher used her triumph in the Falklands as a metaphor for the struggle between the government and the striking miners. Again Britain was faced by an impertinent invasion, this time of foreign ideas. The miners’ leaders, speaking in the language of European Marxism, were hardly less alien to us than Galtieri and his Junta. They would be defeated, as Galtieri had been defeated, by patient resolution, by another tot of Falklands Spirit.

As the pitched battles were fought out in the sunshine on television, the most curious aspect of the whole affair was the intense family resemblance between Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher. Both had the same upstanding quiff of wiry fair hair and looked as if they were attended by the same coiffeuse. Both had their roots in pious working-class Methodism, Scargill in Yorkshire, Thatcher in the adjoining county of Lincolnshire. When interviewed, their air of truculent intransigence was exactly the same. Neither would give away a rhetorical inch, or admit, at least in public, that any argument, other than their own narrowly ideological one, was worth even listening to. Both were admired by their supporters for their toughness and firmness, that English heart-of-oak quality which so often looked to outsiders like mere pigheadedness. And their supporters themselves were very nearly the same people. Thatcher was loved by the sturdy, chapel-bred English working class, who respected her for being a plain speaker in their own mold. She wasn’t toffee-nosed, wasn’t a havering, on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other Conservative aristocrat, she didn’t own land; she talked in the language of the corner shop, and made you see England simply, as an enlarged version of Roberts the Grocer, the shop in Grantham (next door but one to the Primitive Methodist Chapel, 1886) where she had grown up.

This was Scargill’s constituency too—the constituency of the chapel, of self-help, of prickly independence and forthright blunt talk. The miners saw themselves as the proud elite of the northern working class; had they been born a
few miles south, away from their hereditary loyalty to the Pit and The Union, they would have been exactly the sort of untraditional Conservative voters who had brought Mrs. Thatcher and her untraditional Tory government to power in 1979.

For nearly ten months I watched the televised war from an incredulous distance. The violent scenes were taking place in The North, more than a hundred and twenty miles away, and therefore beyond the imaginative range of anyone from southern England. Like the bombs and assassinations of Ulster, the miners’ strike was foreign rather than domestic news. When, late in the day, I arranged to join a “flying picket,” friends in London regarded me much as if I’d said that I was packing my bags for El Salvador.

The arrangements had to be made in secret, as for a real war. Miners and police both had intelligence services spying on each other’s plans and movements, and there were Fifth Columnists on each side. I was checked out, vouched for, and passed on the telephone from “Nottinghamshire George” to “Yorkshire George,” who gave me a number I could call at eleven o’clock at night for details of the pickets’ rendezvous in the small hours of the next morning.

Early in December 1984, I arrived in Sheffield, two hours up the motorway from London, another world. The city was full of signs of the strike. In the concrete shopping precinct in the town center, frozen miners in parkas and donkey jackets stood by clothes-drying racks to which they’d clipped sheets of colored Christmas wrapping paper for sale at 25 pence each. Others were selling Strike greeting cards—linocuts of Davey lamps and winding gear saying “Merry Christmas, Peace and Solidarity, Keep the Lamp Lights Burning.”

In the middle-class suburbs, there were men up ladders everywhere. For the teaching and lecturing classes, the Miners’ Strike had brought an unexpected bonus: you could support the cause by getting your house redecorated by a striking miner at the windfall labor rate of £2 an hour. In the house where I stayed, a miner was wallpapering the hall
and stairwell between spells on the picket line; next door, a miner was repointing the brickwork and putting up new guttering.

“You have to have a miner working for you here, otherwise your neighbors start putting it about that you’re a closet Thatcherite.” I had heard all sorts of funny claims made by people trying to argue the case for having servants, but this one was new to me.

At eleven o’clock I made my call and was told to report at 0230 at a pithead between Sheffield and Doncaster.

“Is that where we’ll be picketing?”

“No.”

Awakened after an hour’s sleep, I drove off into the icy dark, along empty ring roads rimmed with rags of dirty snow. There were untimely lights on in the windows of the squat pit villages—a party-time air, confirmed by the firelit scene on the square of snowy mud outside the colliery at Kilnhurst. Forty-five men were gathered round the oil-drum brazier, and, as I raked the group with my car headlights, I was puzzled by the fact that half of them were in fancy dress. One wore a guacamole-green cloak with silver buttons and a tyrolean hat; another had on a pair of baggy trousers, far too long for him, in an outrageous, Evelyn Waugh check. There were huge multicolored scarves, fun-fur overcoats and a few bright red ski suits. The general impression was not of a band of determined men with revolutionary designs on the social fabric of England; the pickets looked like a stranded circus. Two clowns, one short, one tall, in ludicrously ill-fitting get-ups, were playing at being Flanagan and Allen. They had linked arms and were singing “Underneath the Arches.”

My contact, Yorkshire George, was a little embarrassed about the appearance of his men. The previous day, a truckload of clothes donated by the Italian miners’ union had been distributed by the local Women’s Support Group.

“Very generous of the Italians,” Yorkshire George said, “but it’s not quite what our lads were looking forward to. Still, they’re nice and warm, and it’s that bitter, they’ll wear anything they can get.”

He had the latest reports from the miners’ intelligence organization. At 0327, six “contractors,” members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, were to be bused into one pit; at 0430, eight “working miners” were to be smuggled through the gates of another. And so on. The forty-five men around the brazier were assigned to separate cars and a tight schedule of pithead pickets, each lasting just five or six minutes, as the “scabs” were swept to work behind the police lines.

The phrase “flying picket” was a romantic misnomer. We did not fly, we trundled in overloaded Ford Cortinas, sagging on their springs, through the dark and slippery lanes from one pithead to the next. Each time we stopped, we had just time to leave the car, join the shadowy crowd at the gates of another colliery where policemen stood four deep in line backed up against the wall of their blue vans, and shout “Scabby bastards! Scabby bastards!” as the speeding bus went past in the foggy distance.

By six in the morning, I’d lost count of the number of picket lines that I’d manned. It was cold, dark, anticlimactic work. The police defenses were so solid that one rarely saw the hated buses, and never the face of a working miner. At each pit it was the same: the resentful crowd, packed into a narrow brick gully, the policemen, pale under the arc lights, with, waiting behind them, the dog handlers and their animals, the emerging shapes of lift cages and winding gear in the slow and sunless dawn.