Now I Know (7 page)

Arthur Green watched him go, then hurried to his workshop, two buildings along from Fred Callowell's hut.

†

The day after Nik visited the vicar of St James's, he read a notice in the local rag, headlined:

CHRISTIAN CND

PEACE RALLY

Demonstrators were invited to form up in Field Road, near the maternity hospital (how the new mums would love that), at three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, before marching through town (how the shopkeepers would love that) to Stratford Park (how the bowls players would love that) for the inevitable speeches from local and (minor) national notables.

A good chance for Christian-watching. Besides, he approved of the cause if not the method. Crowds and slogans never succeeded in convincing him of anything except that they were likely to be wrong.

Nik stationed himself in the park well before time on high ground in front of a large lean-comfortable tree, from where he would have a good view of the proceedings. When he arrived few other people were there. Six or seven young men and women wearing armbands printed with M (for Marshal) were busy being important around a scaffold platform draped with Christian and CND posters. An older man in a baggy suit was giving them orders from the platform, calling everyone ‘Brother' or ‘Sister' in a way that, Nik thought, gave Christianity a bad name and mixed it up with loony trade unionists. A knot of policemen and one policewoman stood to one side, trying to look dispassionate, and muttering jokes to each other, which, from their side-glances, Nik could tell were about Baggy-suit.

Five minutes before the demonstration arrived, a blaring out-of-tune brass band heralding its coming, the already grey and overcast sky started pouring rain as if to douse a fire. This settled, after its first enthusiasm, into a steady, drizzling fret. Under his tree, and dressed in his usual, though dishevelled, ex-army combat jacket, Nik was bearably protected. The police, ever prepared for the worst, donned waterproofs snatched from their van. The marshals, exercising Christian fortitude, made no concessions but laughed a lot and moved about even more busily.

Baggy-suit tested the microphone, tapping and blowing on it, saying, ‘One, two, three . . .' and then intoning, ‘He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.'

‘Matthew five, forty-five,' shouted one of the marshals from the ground and the others cheered.

He at the microphone said, ‘Hallelujah, brother. The Lord reigneth; let the people tremble.'

His aeolytes groaned, mocking his pun.

‘Psalm ninety-nine,' yelled back he of the memory.

‘Brother,' Baggy-suit called, waving at Nik, ‘can you hear me up there?'

Cupping his hands to his mouth, Nik shouted, ‘Mark four, nine,' this happening to be one of the few quotations that had stuck in his memory from all his recent reading.

‘What did he say?' he at the microphone asked aside of a marshal.

Marshal of the memory shouted, ‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.'

Baggy-suit coughed. ‘Thank you, brother,' he said and climbed down.

JULIE
:   All that rain! And me holding up that silly poster someone had pushed into my hands while we were forming up. Rain was running off the handle straight down my arm. My hair was soaked and streaked in rat tails all over my face so that I could hardly see, and water was streaming down my neck. I remember you telling me afterwards that I was beaming great smiles and you thought I must be alight with the vision of God or something. But really it was only the rain trickling between my boobs and making me nearly giggle. Nothing holy.

NIK
'
S NOTEBOOK
:   Carrying a poster

Made me laugh. Saw her straight off, even before she was near enough to see her face or even tell that she was a girl. A kind of energy or something. Don't know. Also, most of the others were playing at being demonstrators, looking around with a kind of pretend humility, but at the same time saying: Look at me, I'm protesting. As if protesting made them better than the people who weren't.

Note for history essay
: If you're protesting something – a belief or an opinion or an injustice, or anything – does your protest only ‘work' if there are a lot of other non-protesting people to see you? Suppose it depends a bit on this, or who's to know? But it oughtn't to. And if protesting only depends on the publicity value, and isn't worth anything
in itself,
is it worth anything at all?

But this girl wasn't being anything but herself. You could tell she
meant
it. Felt it. Her thoughts were her own. I mean were part of her.

Seems to me most people don't/can't think. They only think other people's thoughts. People who enjoy being in crowds are mostly like that. They like speeches and demos because they are told what to think. And because they are with a lot of other people the same as themselves, which makes them think they're thinking for themselves and doing something about what they think. But they aren't. It's all a trick, a con. What they're really doing is giving themselves up to somebody else who is just using them.

Selah.

This girl. Couldn't take my eyes off her. She was so
her.
But she was taking part in this demo. How could she? She wasn't just a goggle to look at. There was more to her than that. Why was she there at all?

She was dressed in a floppy blue sweater that was too big and jeans you could see, even from the odd glimpse of them I got, had been worn by a male (or else she was hermaphrodite). As the sweater got wetter and wetter it hung heavier and heavier on her, and clung to her, showing her top half was indisputably female. She kept brushing the hair out of her face, and looking round with this slightly silly grin, as if she was observing what was happening as much as she was taking part. And what she saw was amusing her.

Even before the trouble started I was thinking maybe I'd try and talk to her afterwards.

The trouble Nik mentions started five minutes into the first speech. A couple of hundred demonstrators were crammed together in front of the platform. On the platform nine or ten people were trying to look godly and peaceful. Two press photographers were darting about like sheepdogs herding a flock. The police, about twenty by now, were scattered around the edge of the crowd like blue fence posts, listening and watching with professional poker faces. Nik, under his tree uphill from them all, had a view of the whole scene and, by panning right, of the road from the park entrance.

He was paying little heed to the speech, being too busy watching the girl. She stood in the middle of the crowd, her back to him. But even this hedged back view fascinated him. He willed her to move just for the pleasure of seeing it. Most of all, he willed her to turn and see him, and be as eager for him as he was for her. He wondered about tracking through the crush till, standing beside her, he could see her close up and be ready to speak.

And would have done had he not been distracted by the sudden appearance along the road from the entrance of an open truck driving fast and festooned with Union flags and flapping posters bearing such messages as:

NF

KEEP BRITAIN SAFE

BRITAIN FOR THE BRITISH

Paraded on the back was a rampant squad of jeering, stamping men, late teens and early twenties, geared in bower boots and black leathers, bullet heads shaven close, fist-pumping arms tattooed and harnessed in studded bands. The rain gave them an armoured glaze and spumed in their wake.

What happened next happened very fast, of course, and took everyone by surprise, as it was meant to, which also added to the confusion, causing people to behave irrationally, against their convictions and even against their natures.

Some of the nearest police and demonstrators, hearing the truck's approach, turned to look. One policeman walked towards it, his arms spread wide, flagging it down. The truck skidded to a halt in front of him at the edge of the crowd. As it stopped five or six of its squad jumped down from the side nearest the crowd and advanced, jeering, towards the approaching policeman.

This, however, was a blind. From his vantage, Nik observed six or seven more squaddies jump down from the other side, split into two groups, and sprint round the crowd, one group heading one way and one the other.

Before anybody had quite grasped what was going on, the leading squaddy had reached the platform, leapt onto it, snatched the microphone from the speaker, and was shouting into it himself:

‘This demonstration is another communist-inspired attempt to undermine the will of the British people to protect itself against foreign aggressors and against those who have no right to live here . . .' Et cetera, ad lib.

Julie at first thought this was part of the demo, some kind of stunt arranged by the organizers to help liven up the meeting and make their point in a dramatically ironic way. So she laughed and booed and mocked, thinking she was joining in the fun. Others around her must have thought so too because they reacted with similar amusement. But very soon, several events happening at the same time forced everyone to realize this was no stunt but was brutally real.

Before the invader had said much more than is quoted above some of the platform party surrounded him, shouting objections, and trying to wrest the microphone from his grasp. This brought two more squaddies leaping up in support of their man. Their intervention turned the disagreement into a scuffle and finally into a brawl with fists as well as words being thrown. (Thus in minutes providing a graphic demo of how wars begin: provocation; angry objection; resort to physical violence; and so to battle.)

Just as soon as his leader was interfered with, a squaddy stationed at the side of the platform for this very purpose grabbed the wires trailing from the mike and cut them with clippers.

Meantime (mean time indeed) the gang of squaddies who had jumped down on the side of the truck facing the crowd were approached by three or four of the nearest police, coming to the aid of their mate who had flagged the truck down. The squaddies let the police reach them then dodged away in all directions, bulldozing through the crowd and snatching at banners, which they flailed above their heads, thus turning posters for peace into weapons of war (and demonstrating the neutrality of matter). As they bludgeoned swathes through the protesters, people scattered, shouting, stumbling, falling, ducking away, the squaddies yelling and whooping, and raising Cain by way of yet another demonstration that all men are not brothers.

During this riving diversion the oldest (he was forty if he was a day), biggest, most fiercely and expensively leathered squaddy of all, who had so far sat watching from the truck's cab, climbed onto the back, and from there, using a bull-horn, continued the speech begun by his platform henchman.

A couple of police, hearing this, detached themselves from the keystone kops pursuit now in progress against the crowd busters, and turned their attention instead to the silencing of the truculent orator. Only to find, as they ran towards it, that the truck moved off just fast enough to prevent them reaching it, circling skilfully, zigging, zagging, curling along the edge of the disintegrating crowd, thereby leaving the bill behind, sloshing about in the mud churned up by its wheels, and causing further mayhem among the protesters now fleeing outwards from the mêlée.

NIK
'
S NOTEBOOK
:   Planned. All of it worked out before-hand and executed like a military op.

She was trapped. And stood her ground, still holding up that gormless banner. Others near her scattered. But not her.

One of the black leather boys came right at her, shoulder charging. She went flying, arms spread-eagled, legs kicking. Her banner rocketed out of her hands. He caught it in mid air, swung it, and batted her across the buttocks like she was a shuttlecock, sending her pancaking flat-faced, into the mud.

That did it. Observer turned activist. Pacifist turned belligerent.

I've never felt anything like it. Me, I'm a watcher, not a doer. The world is splitting at the seams with doers. People who think they know best, who want to be in charge, want to be the ones who make the running for the rest of us. Mighty Mice dressed up as Supermen.

One of the reasons I like history is that it tells about the doers. And it seems to me the bigger the doer becomes the more he/she turns into a murderous, power-hungry, hypocritical, self-righteous, arrogant prig. While ordinary non-big-doers like me and Grandad and all the tellywatchers of the world, who want only to live our lives unmolested, are supposed to be thankful, and admire these Big-Doer creeps, who always pretend they're doing what they're doing for the sake of the rest of us, when they're really only doing it for themselves. And they pay ad-people (who are no better) to make ads and TV programmes presenting them as heroes.