Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (34 page)

So I did what I could, short of coming to grips; staring at the river, or playing billiards, and waiting. Writing, destroying, confident of time, wandering the heath, not particularly troubled; or picking up servant girls from the last great houses, gnawing at the chicken-wings they brought me, lying taut among the bushes in the broken lamplight and fancying myself with grander loves.

But mostly I wandered, seeking the spacious exhaustion of brooding energies going to waste. Sometimes, on a day off, I’d walk into the City, along the Embankment and up the Strand, pausing at the Victorian chop-houses to sniff the red sides of beef hanging on hooks in the steaming windows. To me such food was like a mountain of Sundays, or the hot gravied kiss of Mammon, strictly reserved for plump brokers and bankers – it never occurred to me that / might eat it.

The City itself, with its courtyards and passages, was familiar, like odd corners of Stroud – faded brass plates nailed to flaking doorways, ancient messengers in mould-green coats, tottering porters carrying coal to stuffy clerk-filled attics, an air of wet biscuits and crumbling parchment. But hooded, cramped, and slyly unrecognizable as the counting-house of the treasuries of the world. And not at all what I expected. It made me uneasy. I always expected to run into my father.

After these trips to the City I’d try a change of style, and turn back into Charing Cross Road, then round off the evening in a Soho cafe smoking coal-black Mexican cigars. Here, darkly international in my crumpled raincoat, and surrounded by soft-tongued Greeks, I’d open the
Heraldo de Madrid,
which I couldn’t read, and order Turkish coffee, which I couldn’t drink…

Half my time, of course, was spent on the buildings, submerged by its mindless, invigorating routine. For almost a year, every weekday morning, I put on my lime-caked clothes, walked up Putney Hill, left my lunch with the tea-boy, and climbed into the windswept scaffolding. I was one of a gang of wheelbarrow-pushers, supplying newly-mixed cement for the floors, rhythmically shuttling to and fro across the springing duckboards and slowly rising as the buildings grew.

For eleven hard months, on the site of that elegant mansion, we raised three unbeautiful blocks of flats – squat, complacent, with mean leaded windows, bogus balconies, and imitation baronials. They were the only things I ever had a hand in building, and I still think of them with some affection, and return there occasionally, even today, to stare amazed at their cramped pretensions.

As builders’ labourers, we were the villeins of industry and came at the bottom of the hierarchy of the workers. Unskilled, insecure, poorly paid, often dangerous, the job recruited what it could get; and many of my mates were the kind of city-bred dwarf who must have been the result of centuries of thin blood and compression. The type is rarer now, but can still be seen sometimes, perhaps in a Battersea or Wandsworth pub, crouching chin to table with a diminutive wife, feet barely touching the floor. In my day such men were the millstones of labour, ground small by its wasting demands. Yet they were tough, uncomplaining, almost fatalistic, and ageless in look and manner. Physically cramped and hard, with squashed-up limbs, crop-headed and muffler-choked, they spat Cockney from mouths like ruined quarries, and were the natural users of rhyming slang.

This slang seemed still to be the underworld
argot,
a secretive and evasive language, and had not, at that time, been selfconsciously elevated into a saloon-bar affectation. When slang was not used, my mates seemed to suffer a curious inhibition, a reluctance to name people and things. “Ere, what’s-yer-name, mate. Chuck us over that what-d’ya-call-it, will yer? Got to make a what’s-it fer this thingummy-jig.’ I don’t think it was laziness or lack of vocabulary, but rather an instinctive concealment which giving names might betray.

At least half of us, certainly, had been recruited from the underworld, apparently a normal practice of the times – we had old lags and con-men temporarily defeated by crime, skilled cracksmen lying low between jobs, and others who had confessed, under pressure, to a wish to reform and seemed to be required to push barrows to prove it. I found myself working with men straight from the Moor, with its gangrenous pallor still on them, and who moved with that head-down shuffle, passive and blind, as though their world was still a walled-in circle. Most of them were natives of Wandsworth and Fulham, reticent but nostalgic men, who would sometimes loosen up with tales of crime and punishment as though ruminating about the war.

In my gang, I remember, we had a little of everything: safe-breakers, cat-men, dopers, a forger ruined by rheumatism, a bigamist past his prime, and a specialist who picked locks with his celluloid shirt collar. On the fringe there was also a sad little clerk who’d served time for raping his daughter, and who no one forgave but condemned to the perpetual torment of sadistic practical jokes. But it was clear that crime had fattened none of them; they were shrivelled by years of attrition, by the staleness of poverty, doubt and suspicion, and by the diminishing returns of jail.

Yet on the whole there was a natural comradeship; there were no cliques and no self-pity. We were in this together and parcelled the job among us, sharing its profit and loss. We covered up for each other if one of our members was ill, or when the foreman was looking for blood. When it rained, we hid, and played pitch-and-toss in the cellars; when fine, we worked by turns, spinning out illusionary jobs in a mime of activity so that no one should be thought redundant. During the lunch-hour we gathered in an old tin shed, ate our scrappy grub off our knees, rolled cigarettes for each other, worked up a fug, and gambled at crown-and-anchor. Gambling was religion, our wages were mortgaged, and piles of notes changed hands, but though some of us flourished, honour was strictly observed, and it was doubtful if anyone cheated. The old lags particularly were the guardians of honour, implacable as Indian chiefs, their black teeth clamped round their tiny pipes, merciless to any back-sliding.

Off the job, walking home, we appeared to be natural targets for old ladies and local policemen. The police always treated us with truculent aggression: the old ladies gave us pennies and crusts. It may have been an instinctive reaction to our caps and mufflers, a hangover from the pages of
Punch.
Anyway, we accepted it, both the kicks and the charity, as part of the traditional perks of our trade. Certainly we were habitual pilferers – though on a job like ours there was little of value that was portable. I, myself, got the habit of carrying off little bits of copper tubing, which I hid down the legs of my trousers. They were smooth, well-turned, and prettily burnished; but I never knew what to do with them.

On the job, as I said, we labourers were the goons, the untouchable fetchers and carriers. Between us and the craftsmen there existed a gulf of caste almost as extreme as anything in India. The bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers and plumbers treated us with the casual contempt of Brahmins, and even at lunchtime they sat by themselves, rigidly wrapped in their status skills. Consequently we hardened ourselves into a compact little group, even more exclusive and cagey than theirs. The use of solidarity was the only skill we had, and I think we would have slain for each other.

There were two exceptions, however, two lonely outsiders who, though labourers, we never admitted. One was the middle-aged rapist, our haltered scapegoat, who we reserved for special torment. The other was the old head-gardener, whose garden had disappeared with the house, but who had been allowed to stay on by sufferance, and who was now ending his life tipping barrows of cement over the roots of his ruined roses.

Then in early spring, with the flats half-finished, something happened which threw us all together; something ordinary in itself, but for me an occasion which had much of the punitive, rasping air of the Thirties.

It began one morning with the discovery that some non-union men had been smuggled on to the job by the manager – provocation enough to lower for a moment, at least, the sacred barriers between the trades. Someone sounded the alarm by beating on an iron triangle, and everyone immediately stopped work. Cement mixers coughed and came to a halt; the men swarmed off the rooftops and scrambled down the scaffolding as though abandoning a stricken battleship.

We massed in the open outside the manager’s office, our tempers suddenly transformed – over five hundred men huddled in the raw cold wind, waiting for our ranks to throw up a leader. At first we were lost; sporadic meetings broke out, voices shouted against each other. ‘Brothers! – Comrades! – We got to stand solid on this – Chuck ‘em out – Put our demands to the bosses.’ The loaded phrases touched off little bush-fires of anger which flickered across the crowd, then died. Finally the manager sent a message ordering us to return to work. He’d discuss nothing. We could take it or leave it.

Just then a tall stoop-backed labourer pushed his way to the front and climbed up on to a pile of timber, and as soon as he turned to address us we knew that he’d do, and that the vacuum was filled.

This man was later to become one of the legends of the Thirties, part of its myth of class struggle and protest – a lean powerful figure with dangling arms, big fists, and a square bitter face. His face, in fact, was almost the perfect prototype of the worker-hero of early Soviet posters – proud, passionate, merciless, and fanatic, yet deeply scarred by hardship. He was still in his twenties but already had a history, he’d been jailed after a naval mutiny, and now as he towered above us, his voice mangled and eloquent, his finger stabbing the cold spring air, he stood enlarged on a screen that seemed giant-sized, a figure straight out of
Potemkin.

He spoke briefly, with savage almost contemptuous dignity, and the other gabblers round the ground fell silent. With a few iron words he raised the level of our grievance to the heights of cosmic revolution. We had been vague and wavering; now we had no doubts. We voted for immediate strike.

The manager had been listening at the door of his office, smirking, and playing with his trilby. When he heard our decision he went pink with rage and began to bounce up and down like a baby.

‘Outside!’ he screamed. ‘Everyone out this instant! Outside – or I’ll have you arrested for trespassing!’

We filed through the gates and sat down on the Heath, five hundred men in the rain, and watched as the gates were locked behind us, and a little later, the police arrived. The half-finished buildings stood wet and empty, with a look of sudden death. An hour ago we’d been in there, swarming all over them, now a row of black-caped cops stood between us. Such a narrow gap between consent and dispute. We were outlaws now all right. When we approached the police, expecting a bit of traditional banter, they seemed just as livid as the manager.

The strike lasted two weeks – a fortnight of back-street agitation during which I tasted the first sweet whiff of revolution. Without work or status, we lived an underground existence, cut off from the rule of law, meeting in cafes and basements, drawing up manifestoes, planning demonstrations, painting placards and posters. In this hazy ghetto of ideological struggle it was easy to lose our dimensions, and the immediate aims of the strike became so blurred that we felt ready to take on the world. It was then, for the first time, that I experienced hallucinations of communism, naive and innocent as water, a physical sensation rather than an intellectual one, like a weekend at a holiday camp. I began to see visions of the day when the workers would triumph, and we would be running with flags through the streets, the bosses in flight, the temples of privilege falling, other workers waiting to join us, to inherit a scrubbed new world of open-necked shirts, bare arms flexed in common labour, with perhaps a hint of free love shared with our prettier comrades, and communal nurseries crammed with our gold-haired offspring.

Then, suddenly, the strike was over, closed by a grudging agreement, and we were back at work again; back at dodging the foreman and gambling in corners, unchanged except for two weeks’ hunger.

Now I’d been nearly a year in London, and had little to show for it except calloused hands and one printed poem. Life at Mrs Flynn’s was a little odder, but as comfortable as ever, and she had a new boy-friend who increased the amenities.

One of these was Clara, an orphan from Battersea, who he’d hired to help with the cleaning – a thin rakey child of about fifteen who never spoke when grown-ups were around. She would gossip and play with little Patsy, but otherwise she worked in silence, a fugitive figure of fits and starts in constant agony of being noticed. I never knew Clara, but she seemed to have her private consolations, and also ways of making herself known. Sometimes I’d come home at night and turn on the switch in my room to find that she’d removed all the electric light-bulbs. ‘Is that you, Laurie?’ shrieked Mrs Flynn from the basement. ‘Don’t worry, the poor love can’t ‘elp it.’ Then I’d find the electric bulbs in my bed, arranged like a nest of eggs, with one of her shoes or perhaps an old doll of Patsy’s.

Patsy herself had grown more torrid with the months and had begun to practise with paint and lipstick, appearing suddenly at my door with scarified mouth and cheeks like Shakespeare’s apparition of a bloody child. Shadowy Beth continued to pamper me, and to feed me on large late suppers, hovering with a tight tired smile to see that I had all I wanted, or to explain that Patsy was growing up. Mrs Flynn, more valiantly blonde then ever, and temporarily airborne by social success, regularly returned half my rent with gifts of beer and tobacco, and kept insisting that no one get married. In fact I was pampered by all of them, wrapped in a deep cushioned groove and guarded like some exotic lemur. There seemed to be no good reason why I shouldn’t make a life of it here, except that I didn’t want to end up in the attic, like Mr Willow.