How I Killed Margaret Thatcher (4 page)

At break-times me, Ronnie, Jermaine and Paul stand on the edge of the big boys' football game behind the goal. If the ball comes onto our playground we chase it and fetch it for the bigger boys and try to pass it back to them, with the inside of our foot to show what good players we are and that they should ask us to come and play.

Loads of kids are already on holiday. The car works and some of the factories connected to them all shut down for two weeks so some of the school go off on holiday before the six weeks' break. It's good because we can't really do proper lessons, we do project work and find things out for ourselves. It's the cricket season. A set of stumps is painted on the wall and we borrow a milk crate for the other end, but football has carried on right into July and the older boys are always a few short.

Rodney James calls us on from behind the goal to play for his team against Michael Campbell's. Rodney's a good footballer but Michael's the cock of the school, so his team usually wins. Michael is Michelle's older brother. If I say anything to Michelle or pull at the bobbles in her hair she says she's fetching Michael.

It's great. The four of us don't touch the ball much but we chase around after the older boys. The score is
5
–
5
and it's nearly the end of break. I'm dying to get a proper touch so instead of racing around like the others I stand still for a minute. Michael Campbell is running with the ball with all the other kids bouncing off him, but I see that he knocks it too far in front of him so I run in to tackle him. Usually, if you try to tackle Michael Campbell, he bangs you over but my legs are strong from standing up all the time and my dad and uncle Johnny have shown me how to tackle when we play at home. I get my foot to the ball and step through it, all my weight moving forward. I feel Michael's foot behind the ball on the other side but then it gives way. He crashes into my shoulder and then down onto the playground. All the other kids come racing towards the ball so I turn my body so they can't get to it, like I've seen players do on the telly, and wait, wait, wait, because I know Jermaine will run for the ball somewhere. Then there he is, in the corner of my eye, and I pass the ball with the inside of my foot, instead of booting it, and even though it's a bit flat, it rolls, rolls, evenly down the slope in the direction of Top Church and the brewery, and into Jermaine's path. Jermaine knocks it towards Rodney near the goal but I've taken off again and am chasing to get level with him. Rodney tries to flick it in, he's already scored five goals, but their keeper, Mani Singh, stretches out a leg and pokes the ball out to where I'm running. I keep going and hit it full pelt through the posts and into the fir trees that stop the ball going into the road. Mani trips me up after I shoot and I tumble over and tear the knees of my trousers and everyone shouts Goal! Goal! Goal! All my team huddle in front of the goal. The bell goes for the end of break. Michael Campbell is still lying in the middle of the playground like he's dead. He gets up slowly as the classes get into lines and starts to walk towards me.

He's gonna kill yer, Paul and Jermaine say.

We can have him, Ronnie says and takes off his glasses.

Michael doesn't want to fight, though. He stretches out his hand to shake mine and says, Played.

I can see Michelle watching from the girls' line.

Yow lot play again at dinner, Rodney shouts over to us. We do a little dance to celebrate and get told off by Miss Wright.

I remember standing in the class line and looking down at my ragged trousers and closing my eyes and thinking about that feeling when the ball came to me and I banged it in the goal. I still think of it sometimes. When I opened my eyes Michelle was looking over and smiling.

Well, this is just more work in less time, ay it? My grandad studies a piece of paper with my dad at the kitchen table while my nan makes them a cup of tea.

My dad shrugs.

Greater efficiency? Some of the words they use, I ask yer. More work in less time. Next thing ull be more work in less time, for less money, with fewer blokes.

My grandad is laughing but I can tell he doesn't think anything is very funny.

They must think we was all born yesterday.

There ay much yer can do about it, my dad says and shrugs again.

My grandad looks at him over the paper, looks into him. He doesn't say anything. There is something in my grandad's voice, like he knows about who my dad voted for, that makes me worry.

Continental working practices, my grandad reads from the piece of paper.

At least it means there's work, my dad says.

Oh, there's work, there's work.

My grandad leans forward across the kitchen table, over the letter, with his reading glasses in his hand, like he is weighing something up, reckoning.

Well, we cor stop mekkin steel, cor stop mekkin things altogether. We'll be in a mess then. They said anything else at yower place?

Short-time, some on em.

Not yow?

All hours, me. My dad grins. They wanna keep the machines running.

Yow wanna get em payin yer by the hour, our kid, I tell yer.

They are back to normal now. I know what they're talking about. My grandad gets paid every week, with his money in an envelope, with a piece of paper that tells him how much work he's done and how much he's been paid for it. My dad gets paid every month. He gets paid the same no matter how often the machines break down. That's why my nan and grandad pay rent and we pay a mortgage. We used to pay rent, when my dad got paid every week in an envelope. This is how it works. If you get paid monthly you have to start paying money to buy a house. That's why we live in Elm Drive.

There ay much we can do about it, is there? Keep working, I suppose, my dad says.

They'll keep us working, yer can be sure of that. My grandad is looking at him again, working something out, reckoning, I can see.

My nan puts the tea down on the table.

Continental working practices, my grandad says to her.

He looks at the piece of paper again and then up at my dad. My dad leans back in the chair, his eyes closing. He always falls asleep when he comes back from work.

More work in less time, my grandad said. Thass all that is. He screws the paper up and dips a ginger biscuit in his tea.

More work in less time for less money next. Yow watch. Yow watch what happens. Yow watch what's coming.

I don't think Thatcher knew fully what was coming, from what I understand now, lurching from crisis to crisis in that first year or so, seeing all those
Don't Blame Me, I Voted Labour
stickers, looking like she didn't know what she was doing. There was no plan. Not then. They made a plan up as they went along when they realized we were weaker than they'd imagined. It was opportunistic. All I know is that my grandad could see trouble coming better than anyone else. He knew trouble was coming and he knew there was nothing he could do about it. He knew how weak we were.

But what is a revolution, though?

Johnny explains things to me. He wants there to be a revolution. He tells me about it at the park. I am hanging from the climbing frame, practising for a game we play where we all hold on, legs dangling and hands burning. The winner is whoever lasts the longest. You have to be hard to win. Michelle is the champion. I want to beat her. I am watching a train being shunted in the freight yard down the hill below us.

Well, the way things am shared out ay right.

What dyer mean?

Johnny is sitting with his back to me on the bench. He isn't looking down at the train, he's looking across to the castle and the zoo and is drawing the cable-cars. In his picture the cable-cars hang across to Kates Hill and up the High Street to Top Church and down Castle Hill to Dudley Port station. Imagine, riding around everywhere by cable-car. The patterns the cables make on the page are the same pattern as the cobwebs; that's how Johnny got the idea.

Well, say me, my dad and your dad, we work in factories but the stuff we make is for other people and we don't own the factories, someone else does, well in a way we own Cinderheath, we all do, the people, but it's complicated, so we do all this stuff for someone else who doesn't have to do any of the work.

You get paid.

We do get paid but we don't decide how much pay we get. Someone else decides. If the people who worked in the factories were in charge of them they could work for each other, share things out equally. The way we've got it now, the rich will get richer and the poor will stay poor.

What am we?

What?

Rich or poor?

Well, we'm the workers, the poor, if yer like. We have to rise up and free ourselves.

I'm not sure that we are poor. My grandad is doing loads of overtime at Cinderheath. I can see the works from the climbing frame, over the other side of the railway tracks, the long factory buildings and the gantry that looks like a giant climbing frame above it. Overtime makes you rich. My mum and dad bought our house with his wages and my dad is always at work and sometimes he has to go on the phone or to work even in the middle of the night to tell the people there what to do, how to fix a machine or set it up to cut the steel into shapes. Then there is the business of buying a new house further away from here that I'm not meant to know about. There are poor people but they're not us, I don't think. We've got cars and telephones and we're going to the caravans three times this year. My nan gives money to the poor people in Africa and the Philippines in an envelope that she keeps by the door ready for Sister Marie Antoinette. She shows me pictures of the little children on the envelope and says how we're very lucky. Johnny doesn't make much sense to me, saying we're poor.

This was the first time he explained it to me. Afterwards, I came to see what he meant. We weren't poor, though. Not then, anyway. If you ask me now, I'd say there are lots of ways of making people poor. It's not only about money. Thinking life is only about money is another way of being poor, a way of thinking you might arrive at by counting your coppers in your mean and draughty grocer's shop, looking across the flat Lincolnshire land towards the hills and hating us.

Doh talk so saft. Yome bloody yampy, my grandad says when Johnny starts telling him about the workers and the revolution.

It'll never happen here, son. We get just enough crumbs from the bosses' tables, doh yow worry about that. Just enough. And we'm grateful.

I can't tell if my grandad's joking or not. He looks a bit like he did when punched Uncle Eric.

Johnny blows his cheeks out.

Mind you, my grandad says, there's one or two round here I wouldn't mind being lined up against that wall and shot, when yer get started, like. Yer bloody uncle Eric, for one. He says this last bit quietly so my nan can't hear.

There yer go then!

But it woh, happen, Johnny. People am happy enough as they am. Yer doh know yome born, really, when yer talk about folks having it really bad. It day happen in the twenties or thirties, when my dad went hungry, hungry. If it day happen in the twenties or thirties it ay gonna happen now. And times afower that. It woh happen now.

It ay about me. Iss about the system.

What system? We've got a welfare state, a National Health Service. We own the bloody steelworks and the mines. They'm nationalized industries. Who am these bosses who'm ripping us off? Weselves?

In a way. The system's wrong.

Well, the world's unfair, son, I know that much. A revolution woh change that. The system we've got now is a lot fairer than we have had, believe me.

Watch what happens. Just watch.

Then my mum and dad come in from looking for our new house. But I'm not meant to know about it, so we talk about the Wolves while they have a cup of tea.

They liked watching cowboy films, my dad and grandad. They'd watch one together sometimes, say on a Sunday afternoon:
My Darling Clementine
,
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
,
Shane
. I remember one time, when I was really young, I pretended we were out in Indian territory looking for that girl;
The Searchers
was one of my favourite films. We were over at Kinver or Enville, somewhere like that. I gave everyone parts as we walked along.

Who's Johnny gonna be? my mum asked.

One of the bloody Indians, my grandad said. I remember they'd had an argument about another cowboy film a few weeks before.

Thass all right, is it? Shooting all these people? Johnny had said.

What? They'm the baddies.

It ay right though, is it?

What ay right? I'm trying to watch this.

Well, just killing em all. That's what really happened. It was their country and then the white men came and killed em all and took the land for theerselves.

Way of the world, son.

So that's all right then, is it, killing women and children?

It's a film.

It really happened.

Let him enjoy the film, Johnny, please, my mum said. Stop worrying about it. It's only a film.

Yer doh understand, Johnny said.

Everyone ignored him and the cavalry charged. I had some plastic cowboys and Indians that I played with Little Ronnie sometimes. I used to make him have the Indians.

Propaganda, Johnny said.

Jesus Christ, iss just a film, son.

The Indians fired arrows through the circled wagons and whooped with delight.

What about
Zulu
? Yer support the Zulus, yer want them to win in that.

Thass different. I doh like Michael Caine.

Or the British Empire. You told me that.

They'm films, son.

You tell me all this stuff, how not to believe what yer see or hear, and then when I repeat it back to yer, yer tell me I'm wrong.

Ah well, maybe it's me yer shouldn't listen to, then.

They still go on like this at times, watching the news. My grandad is almost ninety; Johnny is in his fifties.

My dad liked Clint Eastwood, too. I remember him staying up to watch
A Fistful of Dollars
and drink a bottle of beer. This was before video or anything like that. He had that same straight face where you didn't know if he was joking or angry or what.

The other night, after clearing up in the bar, I poured a glass of the good rum that Michael had brought back from Jamaica for me, flicked through the channels. There he was, suddenly, on the big screen: Clint Eastwood, walking through the desert, looking smaller and smaller as the empty plains stretched out around him. I changed channel, tried to think of something else.

When I first bought the pub there were kids selling gear out of the back room, where the pool table was. They were in one Tuesday afternoon, there was never anybody else in, a few weeks after I'd taken it on. I knew I had to do something. I got Michael to sit at the end of the bar then I walked in there with a hammer. I said they could leave now by the side door and never come back or go out the front in an ambulance. They looked at me and then at Michael, the infamous Michael Campbell, and left.

Michelle wasn't very pleased with me. Yow think yome bloody Clint Eastwood, she said. Except he day have his brother-in-law out on bail, ready to back him up.

Me brother-in-law?

Yer know what I mean.

So you want to marry me, then?