A Season of Secrets (39 page)

He was being overly optimistic. The nearest they got was Piccadilly Circus.

She got off the bus into a packed crowd, clapping and cheering a column of exhausted men trudging beneath a banner emblazoned with the words: LANCASHIRE CONTINGENT MARCH TO LONDON.

‘They’ve tramped a long way!’ a woman nearby in the crush said admiringly. ‘Are they taking a collection as they march? I’d like to give them something.’

Leaving her to fumble with her purse, Thea continued to push her way forward, anxious to be at least on the periphery of the square by the time the speeches were being made.

She knew there would be lots of people that she counted as friends on whatever makeshift platform had been erected. As well as speakers from the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement,
there would be speakers from the Trades Union Congress and the Communist Party of Great Britain. Hal was too aware of his position as a journalist ever to mount a platform, but if his situation was
different, she could well imagine him on one. What the badge in his lapel would then be – a Communist Party of Great Britain badge or a Labour Party one – was, though, anyone’s
guess.

‘You’re going in the wrong direction!’ a policeman yelled at her. ‘There’s going to be trouble before too long. Best get clear while you can.’

Thea ignored him, and a gaunt-faced man pushing through the crowd shoulder-to-shoulder with her said with the flat vowels of a northerner, ‘That’s all starving men and their families
are, to the likes of ’im. Trouble. I’d give ’im trouble if I could, ’im and all the other smug buggers who don’t know what it’s like to go
’ungry.’

‘Where are you from?’ she asked, as over a sea of heads the corner at the bottom of the Haymarket came into view.

‘Doncaster – and I’ve walked every step o’ the way. It’s taken me three weeks and, apart from a couple o’ nights in what had once been workhouses, me and the
rest o’ the blokes in my contingent ’ave slept rough ever since we set out.’ He shot her a good hard look. ‘Don’t mind me saying so, but are you sure the bobby
weren’t right about you going in t’ wrong direction? You don’t look like someone who’s ever been on t’ dole or ’ad the means test leave you wi’ next to
nowt.’

‘I’m not, but I’m a socialist, and my blood boils at the miserable amount of relief being given – and at the way it’s given.’

‘Aye, I know all about the way it’s given,’ he said grimly. ‘Round ’e comes to my ’ouse, the means-test man. “Nah then, Ted Finch,” he says to me,
“it’s thirty bob a week for you, your wife and five children, but only after everything you ’ave – save for two beds, a table and four chairs – is carted off and
sold.” Round ’e went with a stick o’ chalk, marking up everything to be taken. My wife pleaded wi’ ’im to leave ’er the brass fire tongs which ’ad been
’er mother’s, but they got a chalk mark just like everything else. All we were left with at the end o’ it was what ’e’d said we’d be left wi’. Two beds, a
table and four chairs that I’d made missen.’

It was a story Thea was long familiar with, and every time she heard it rage roared through her veins.

A man who had overheard Ted shouted across to him, ‘What we need is a ruddy revolution like the one they had in Russia!’

From all around came similar opinions and then, as they finally edged around the corner and caught a glimpse of the square, the shout went up: ‘Watch yourselves! They’re bringing in
horses! Now we’ll never get any nearer.’

From past experience Thea knew how difficult – and dangerous – it was to be in a crowd being driven back by mounted policemen.

‘Lock arms wi’ me,’ Ted Finch said, ‘keep your ’ead down and keep ’eading for t’ square. I ’aven’t walked a ’undred and sixty miles to
be stopped by bobbies on ’orses.’

Thea did as he said. Tucking themselves behind a giant of a man carrying a poster on which was written in bright-red paint NO MORE STARVING IN SILENCE, she and Ted continued forging a way
forward. They were among the last of those in the Haymarket able to do so.

‘They’re sealing the street off,’ Ted said as mayhem broke out behind them. ‘Don’t waste time turning round to look, lass. Just keep going.’

They kept going and, as they did, Ted said, ‘Why would they do a thing like that? Seal a street off, when all folk want to do is exercise rights as old as Magna Carta? Because that’s
what me and my mates are ’ere to do today. At the end of t’ rally a deputation including representatives from every contingent will march from t’ square down Whitehall with a
petition calling for the abolition o’ the means test and the restoration of benefit cuts. It’s been signed by more than a million names and they’re going to present it at the Bar
of the House of Commons, just as anciently all petitions were presented. Then summat’ll ’ave to be done, won’t it? The government won’t be able to ignore us then, will
they?’

Not wanting to dent his optimism, Thea said, ‘I hope not, Ted.’

Privately she doubted if the police would allow any deputation within a hundred yards of the House of Commons. The Bar – a line marking the boundary between the House of Commons and the
House of Lords – may have been where public petitions were anciently presented, but she couldn’t see the practice being honoured where the Hunger Marchers were concerned.

They reached the square just as the stocky figure of Wal Hannington, head of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, bounded onto the platform in front of Nelson’s Column, a
megaphone in his hand.

‘
There are thirty million workless people in the world today!
’ Hannington thundered, not wasting time on preliminaries. ‘
And three million workless people in our own
country!
’

The din that erupted was deafening.

‘
For over fifty years, before the war, the average amount of unemployment in this country, year in and year out, was four per cent. Now it’s over twenty-two per
cent!
’

The square was a sea of waving banners. From where she was standing Thea could see the Worcester contingent’s banner, the Scottish contingent’s banner, a banner declaring NO TO THE
MEANS TEST and one demanding WORK OR FULL MAINTENANCE AT TRADE-UNION RATES OF PAY.

The size of the banners made scanning faces in the crowd difficult, and ever since she had entered the square Thea had been scanning the crowd for just one face: Hal’s.

She knew he’d be there, reporting on the rally for the
Evening News,
and that he’d be somewhere with a bird’s-eye view of things, which meant he’d be on the steps
leading down from the National Gallery on the square’s north side, or on the back of one of the square’s four monumental bronze lions.

Her problem was that, from where she was standing, she only had a clear view of three of the four lions, and Hal most definitely wasn’t among the dozens of people who had climbed their
plinths and clambered onto their backs.

‘
One worker out of every five is unemployed,
’ Wal Hannington bellowed.
‘Two out of every five miners. One out of every two iron and steel workers. One out of every
three workers in the engineering trades. Three out of every five shipbuilding workers. These men and their families are being reduced to destitution because of cuts to dole money that, even before
the cuts, was too paltry to live on. Today, Friends and Comrades, we are going to petition Parliament for change. Britain has the greatest empire the world has ever known – the least its
government can do is create jobs for the unemployed and pay an amount in relief money that will give men their dignity back!’

A deafening roar of approval went up from the crowd.

Ted cupped his hand to the side of his mouth and leaned towards her. ‘Can you see over to the roads left and right o’ the square?’ he shouted in her ear. ‘That’s a
fearsome amount o’ bobbies, don’t you think?’

Thea stopped trying to get a glimpse of Hal in the crowd and looked to her far left and far right. To the left, in Charing Cross Road and on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields church, where
she would have expected people who hadn’t been able to squeeze into the square to be standing, there was an unbroken line of helmeted, blue-uniformed police officers.

It was the same in the street running down the right-hand side of the square. There were no members of the public: only policemen.

‘They’ve blocked off all t’ roads around t’ square, not just the one.’ There was puzzlement in Ted’s voice. ‘D’you think they’ve done it so
that all eighteen contingents can march out in grand order when t’ rally’s over?’

To Thea, an old hand at protest rallies, the idea was so unlikely as to be derisory.

‘No,’ she shouted back as the roars of approval for Hannington went on and on. ‘I don’t. When that policeman told me I was going in the wrong direction and that there was
going to be trouble before too long, he wasn’t speaking of a probability. He
knew
there was going to be trouble – police-provoked trouble.’

Ted Finch, in London for the first time in his life, looked disbelieving.

Thea’s stomach muscles tightened. What trigger would give the police the excuse they needed to storm the square, break up the rally and make hundreds of arrests? So far the men who had
trudged to London on foot from all corners of the country – often taking weeks to do so – had done so without causing a civil disturbance. Not only that, and despite passions running
high, their march through London’s streets and their assembly in their thousands in Trafalgar Square had been orderly. No laws had been broken. Processions within a mile of the Houses of
Parliament were illegal, but deputations weren’t – and the planned walk with the petition would be a deputation. Whether the petition was accepted or whether it wasn’t, the act of
presenting it would be legal.

‘
This is our purpose!’
Thanks to the megaphone, every corner of the square resounded with Wal Hannington’s closing words.
‘To reverse the cut in the dole and
see the degrading and humiliating means test abolished! That is what we are fighting for! And it is a fight we are going to win!’

It was a gauntlet thrown down, and was all the excuse for action that the police needed. Batons in their hands, they closed in on the square from all four sides.

Thea and Ted Finch were near the speakers’ platform. All around them shouts went up: ‘Don’t let them arrest Wal!’, ‘Don’t let the bastards scupper the
deputation!’, ‘Form a wall and hit ’em where it hurts!’

In a matter of minutes what had been a peaceful rally descended into a bloody, brawling battlefield. Hitting the police where it hurt was no easy task for men who, apart from protest banners and
the occasional walking stick, were weaponless, but what they lacked in weapons they made up for in outrage and fury.

Thea was knocked to her knees as, only yards in front of her, the police finally laid hands on Hannington. She struggled to her feet, just in time to see Ted Finch go down under a rain of
blows.

Nothing she had ever experienced matched the sheer scale of what was taking place. All around her Hunger Marchers were being dragged, fighting and kicking, into Black Marias. Mounted police had
ridden in from Charing Cross Road and Whitehall. Wal Hannington was in the centre of a furious melee as police tried to manhandle him out of the square and into a Black Maria, and Hunger Marchers
tried to prevent them from doing so.

No one, neither police nor Hunger Marchers, was making any attempt to help Ted; not the police, because all their attention was on hauling Hannington away, and not the marchers, because all
their attention was on ensuring the police didn’t achieve their objective.

How Ted, lying sinisterly inert, hadn’t yet had the life trampled out of him, Thea didn’t know. A brick came whizzing past her head, not aimed at her, but at one of the score of
policemen fighting with marchers on the speakers’ platform. Sirens were going off. Police helmets were flying through the air. Women were screaming abuse and sometimes screaming because
they’d been hurt. Thea knew there was only one course of action she should be taking – and it wasn’t remaining where she was, in the thick of the fighting.

That was what she did, though, because Ted Finch wasn’t moving. His eyes were closed and his skin was grey. She hurled herself towards him, kneeling beside him on knees scraped bloody from
her fall.

As she heaved his shoulders from the ground, trying to shield him from the booted feet kicking and flailing all around them, a baton, aimed at a Hunger Marcher hanging grimly onto a board on
which was written WE WANT BREAD NOT CRUMBS, came down hard on her head.

With a scream of agony she keeled over Ted, blood flooding down her face. A helmet thudded into the middle of her back, rolling away into a sea of rampaging feet.

Only half-conscious, sick and giddy with pain, Thea knew she had to somehow get out of the square – and that she had to haul Ted with her. She tried to move and couldn’t and then, in
a moment so wonderful she thought for a moment she was hallucinating, she heard Hal shouting above the din, ‘Sweet Christ! Are you conscious, Thea love? Can you hear me?’

As he spoke he was tearing off his jacket, wrenching his shirt over his head.

She nodded, and as he pressed his shirt to the side of her head to soak up the blood, she took hold of the bunched-up linen herself, holding it in place.

‘Let’s get you out of here!’ He yanked his jacket back on over his singlet, his face contorted with rage and fear: rage at what had been done to her, and fear at how bad her
head wound might prove to be.

As he took hold of her, about to lift her into his arms so that he could carry her, she said thickly, ‘Not me, Hal. Ted’s unconscious. We have to get him out of here before
he’s trampled to death.’

Hal took one look at the man on the ground – at his closed eyes and deathly skin colour – and knew it wasn’t a time for argument.

With Thea unsteadily on her feet, her face a mask of blood, he hauled Ted Finch upright. Then, as the battle between policemen and Hunger Marchers continued all around them, Hal heaved Ted over
his shoulder so that Ted’s head, arms and upper body were hanging down his back. Gripping a tight hold of Ted’s legs, he put his free arm around Thea’s waist and, taking nearly
all of her weight and overcoming all obstacles, proceeded to make a beeline towards the top north-west corner of the square.