The Storytellers (21 page)

“Will there be strikes ahead?” Mona asked.

“When Arthur thinks the time is right.”

“When will that be?” she asked.

“When he's got the membership behind him. People are not riled up enough yet. As soon as the government starts closing pits. That'll do it.”

“Then what?”

“Then we bring down this fascist government.”

“That sounds exciting,” she purred, moving closer.

“Another drink?” he asked, “or shall we go upstairs?”

It was always a tense moment in a man's life when he revealed his intentions. That was when courtship was over and rejection hovered overhead like an ugly bird, ready to pounce. But Mona had no intention of rejecting him. She had a job to do.

“I thought you'd never ask,” she said.

Upstairs Mona slipped into the bathroom only to come out and find the organizer perched on the side of the bed in his underwear
with tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Heavens, what's the matter?”

“Sorry,” he said, his earlier bravado having melted like an early dusting of autumn snow. “I just don't know what I'm doing.”

“I rather hoped you were doing me,” she said sitting next to him and reaching down to find some life, but he pushed her hand away.

“You're just tired,” she told him while stroking the back of his head. “You're doing great things. You know you are.”

“Am I?” he protested and she marvelled at how easily grown men could become little boys.

“How many of your talks have you given lately?” she asked.

“Twenty-eight in the last seven days,” he told her. “It's as if I'm running for office.”

“Well there you are,” she comforted. “That would be enough to tire any man.”

“I was so certain once,” he rambled on. “Provided I spoke eloquently enough, the workers would see sense. They had to. They would withhold their labour, the government would collapse and a new order would rise from the ashes. But instead of that it's all being broken up, shrunk and sold off. Workers strike, here and there, but it's all random and usually for money. And then that woman goes and fights a pointless war thousands of miles away and the country loves her again. It wasn't supposed to be that way.”

“It never is,” whispered Mona into his ear as she massaged the back of his neck. “Now, let's get under the covers and forget all that.”

“I've done things. I don't think I can,” he responded mournfully, at which she sunk her teeth into his earlobe.

“Ow! That hurt. Why did you do that?”

She studied his angry face, dug her fingernails hard into his flesh and grinned.

“Damn!” he protested again and nature offered up her answer. Looking down Mona could see that it was still somewhat tentative,
but it would do.

Later the following day, after Jack Pugh had returned to Longbridge a reinvigorated man, Mona called Stacy and told her that she didn't think strike action was imminent.

“It will probably take a pit closure before King Arthur feels he can risk it.”

C
HAPTER

A
S THE TRUCK approached Longannet Power Station on the north bank of the River Forth, the early morning sun lit up its tall chimney and bathed its four cooling chambers with a soft orange light. The largest coal-fired station in Europe, it devoured 4.5 million tons of the stuff every year. The crushed coal was conveyed into its four boilers which heated water into a steam that drove four turbines linked to two powerful electricity generators. The charged particles these emitted were fed into a network of conducting wires that carried their energy to every household, factory and appliance bound to them. The steam was then passed across pipes carrying cool water from the Forth to make it condense so that it could be used again and again and again.

Harry greeted the gateman and entered the yard to empty his load. Something of an armchair physicist, he could see a poetry in the place others couldn't. He imagined energy from the sun, that incandescent hydrogen bomb at the centre of our lives, once worshipped, without which we would not exist, being absorbed by plants eventually compressed into coal dug out by men and burned so that the sun's energy could be converted into steam and then into
the electricity his wife needed to boil her kettle. The wonder of it!

“The yard's filling up, Bert,” he said to the gateman as he headed out.

“The government's no wanting te get cot oot this time, I wouldna' think.”

“How much can you hold in here?” Harry asked.

“Twa million ton, gi or tak,” Bert informed him. “Guid fi four month or so, depending on the time o' year.”

“So you think there will be trouble?”

“Aye, I de. That woman's no' forgiven the miners. She's jest biding her time. McGahey had her number back in eighty-one.”

“You're not a Scargill fan then?”

“He talks wiel, he does that. But does he ken what he'll be taking on? I rither doot it.” As he said that he nodded towards the deep piles of coal now filling the giant yard like veiled monsters from the dark side.

“I'll see you in the new year then,” Harry called out as he pulled away.

“Aye, nay doot,” Bert called after him.

From West Thurrock in the South to Willington in the Midlands and Wakefield in the North of England, the yards beside Britain's coal-fired power stations were filling up. Those that could be converted were being adapted to burn oil as well as coal and here and there, extra land was being purchased to provide additional space for deliveries.

* * *

Inside Whitehall, a secret committee had been established to plan for the inevitable confrontation with the miners and had begun its work in the run-up to the general election in June. By the start of 1984, its plans were largely in place, but as the battle approached,
there was an air of heightened tension in the government about what lay ahead.

“So you think it should begin in March, Ian?”

“I do. We know the pits we want to close. In fact, the board knew that in eighty-one but the government was not ready for a confrontation. March gives us the full summer to see this through, while power demand is light.”

“What's your intelligence, Peter?”

“The NUM President will call a strike as soon as the first closures are announced. Yorkshire will be solid and Scotland too, we think. But the Nottinghamshire miners are paid well and know they have modern pits, so they won't be so keen. But the miners' sense of solidarity is strong. They know they have whole communities behind them.”

“Nigel, can we withstand a strike economically?”

“The worst of the recession seems to be behind us, but as you know, unemployment is still close to twelve percent. That's some three million people and if we have a long strike those numbers are not going to get any better.”

“But what's it going to do to our GDP?”

“If the strike is contained, perhaps knock it back by anything from half a percent to one percent. But if it spills over to other parts of the economy, that could hurt us badly and affect sterling. At that point, we might be forced to negotiate.”

“That is not going to happen. Norman, what pressure could we bring to bear on the strikers?”

“You mean withholding benefits?”

“Yes. The longer this goes on the worse it will be for everyone. We need to bring it to a swift conclusion.”

“I'll look into that.”

“Is there anything we could do in respect of union assets, Quintin?”

“I rather doubt it. Although, should the NUM not follow its own rules or even act illegally then perhaps their assets could be frozen for a time.”

“We should look into that too. And the position in Scotland?”

“That would be a question for the Scottish courts to decide.”

“I take it the Secretary of State for Energy is satisfied we have done all we can to maintain power supplies?”

“I believe we now have enough coal stored to cover a six-month strike. But if it goes on for longer that will be difficult, especially if the NUM pickets the power stations. The drivers are unlikely to cross the picket lines.”

“Robert, what scale of deliveries might we be talking about?”

“We estimate that moving half a million tons of coal a week from the pitheads to the power stations will involve between four and five thousand lorry journeys a day.”

“Can the police stop the drivers being intimidated, Leon? Can we contain the strikers?”

“Our strategy is to use the Metropolitan police where needed. They will not have ties to the local communities and can be relied on to take a firm stand. But we have only around twenty-seven thousand police officers in the Met and the Yorkshire NUM alone has a membership of over sixty thousand, so we need to target our resources carefully.”

“Could we use troops to make deliveries, Michael?”

“It is possible and we have made contingency plans, but soldiers are not paid to be strike-breakers or delivery drivers. It is certainly not an optimum solution. And heaven forbid if it should coincide with something they are paid to do.”

“Quite.”

Everyone round the table had been made aware that this was a confrontation that could not be lost. The Prime Minister had won a war and was not about to be defeated by a strike.

“If I can emphasize one thing?”

“Yes, Home Secretary.”

“It seems to me essential that the miners do not win public support. This has to be a battle fought as effectively in the media as it is on the ground.”

The chairman of the meeting nodded and fixed on the editor of
The Sentinel
with an unforgiving stare.

“That's you, George.”

“Not entirely me, Prime Minister,” the editor responded, “but I think we know what is expected of us.”

“Good, gentlemen. Then to battle.”

* * *

On 5th March, the Coal Board announced the closure of five pits, including those at Cortonwood in Yorkshire and Polmaise in Scotland. The battle had begun.

C
HAPTER

I
T WAS ONLY a small article tucked inside
The Sentinel
, but it caught his eye immediately.
Ancient Family Estate Sold
, ran the headline above a piece informing the reader that Graham Castle in the Highlands, together with its land, had been sold to a Scottish transport magnate who had made a fortune buying up deregulated bus companies and welding them together into a successful business. The article explained that the estate's former owner, David Graham, had a number of financial interests which had not yet come to fruition at the time of his death, forcing his executors to crystallize debts that might otherwise have been cleared over time. Harvey looked for mention of Frances Graham but other than recording that she had been David Graham's wife, the report did not elaborate.

He collared the author of the piece who admitted he had lifted most of it from a local newspaper in Inverness and so knew little himself of the background. But with his help, Harvey tracked down Robbie McEwen, the reporter with the
Inverness News
who had broken the story. However, Robbie knew little more than what he had written. He did tell Harvey that it had been a big shock to the local community and that Frances Graham had been well liked, but where
she had moved to he ‘couldnae rightly say'. Someone had mentioned that she owned a house in London, he thought, but that was hearsay.

* * *

Following the Coal Board's announcement of pit closures, the NUM President had called the miners out on strike. As a result, the jungle telegraph that fed the pressrooms was in overload and Harvey had to put Frances Graham out of his head. George Gilder was firing off instructions to his reporters like a machine gun:

“Find out if the NUM has followed procedures. Get a handle on how popular this strike will be amongst mineworkers and amongst the wider public. I want human interest. I want to know who this strike will hurt. I want you to dig deep and find out how much of the mineworkers' pay is being subsidized by the taxpayer.”

Harvey discovered that Arthur Scargill had called the miners out without a national ballot, leaving it to the members in each area ‘to defend their jobs as they saw fit'. A precedent had been set, it seemed, by his predecessor, Joe Gormley, in 1982 when the then president allowed the area committees to decide on a scheme to tie wages to area productivity, with or without a regional, let alone a national, vote – a move Scargill considered divisive and opposed, but which the High Court had upheld. And divisive it certainly seemed to be. Harvey's sources told him that the Nottinghamshire miners, who were amongst the best paid in the industry, were the least enthusiastic about a national strike, particularly as none of their highly productive mines were slated for closure.

* * *

On 6th March, the NUM President and his delegation went to the Coal Board's London headquarters for a consultative meeting. There
the union was informed by the Coal Board Chairman that not just five, but twenty mines were scheduled for closure over the course of the year, with the probable loss of 20,000 jobs.

The union delegates departed empty-handed and angry, especially as the Coal Board Chairman had taunted them with the observation that ‘even some American pits employing females were more productive than several of the pits in Britain. Capacity had to be cut,' he told them. ‘Supply must match demand.'

Scargill and his vice-president, Mick McGahey, escaped this bruising encounter certain that they were in a fight to the finish. If the Coal Board Chairman won, there would be no United Kingdom coal mining industry left. The stakes were that high.

* * *

Stacy had admitted to John Preston that when the two had first met, she had been employed to keep an eye on him but had quit the job as soon as the two had become close. She shaved the truth in not telling him that she had been working for the Service as a fully-trained operative. Now that John was one himself and Stacy had been re-engaged with an oversight role ‘on his recommendation', the past – at least as it impinged upon their relationship – seemed to have been laid to rest.

As a general rule, Peter Betsworth did not like running couples. The risk of emotional cross-currents getting in the way of the job at hand was just too great. But in this instance, he judged the benefits to be greater than the risks. For a start, Stacy was very good at what she did. Better educated than John Preston, it seemed likely that she would continue to keep part of herself outside the relationship. It was also clear that John Preston admired her, quite apart from finding her physically attractive. And he was becoming increasingly pleased with ‘Marx'. While some might have branded the young man a traitor
to his class, what Peter Betsworth saw was an individual with a deep dislike of the collectivist mentality and a growing sense that a lot of good men were being led astray by a warped brand of self-serving, political mumbo-jumbo. He looked at his watch. They were late.

* * *

The café near Waterloo Bridge seemed a strange place to meet, but in light of the cold sodden day, both thought it preferable to one of the parks. They had not met with Peter Betsworth together before and felt nervous. Both wondered if this aspect of their clandestine lives would be compatible when brought face-to-face.

The coffee shop was busy. Peter Betsworth was seated in a corner and looked down at his watch as soon as he saw them. OK, so they were a little overdue, but this was London on a rainy day when every taxi seemed to be occupied and the underground choked with damp bodies.

“Sorry we're late, Peter,” Stacy said, sensibly offering no explanation.

“Coffee for you?” he invited, and both said yes, pleased to be out of the rain and about to get something warm inside them.

“Well, the start'n pistol's been foired now,” John advanced as he emptied several packets of sugar into his brew.

“You've a sweet tooth,” remarked Peter.

“Just trained frum birth not ter pass up anythen' free.”

“What a shocking day,” the intelligence officer then announced, confirming the English obsession with the weather and fondness for stating the obvious about it. “Is there anything new from your end Stacy?”

“It's all a bit chaotic, frankly. Without a national vote, each area has to decide, but they do seem to be coming out.”

“Did King Arthur think he'd lose a national vote?”

“I'm not sure. At least my source is not sure. There is a lot of confidence, apparently, but I'm being told that the NUM executive didn't want to broadcast any divisions. Going area by area, with those most in favour, like Yorkshire, South Wales and Scotland coming out in support of a national stoppage right away, puts pressure on the less convinced to fall into line. The Nottinghamshire miners are their big worry.”

“We need to keep working on that,” Peter Betsworth said, looking pensive. “I think we'll have something there for you, John.”

“Marx” had been retired for the moment.

“So what's the strategy?” John asked, keen to get to the meat of the matter.

“I'll come to that, but first, Stacy, I need to know how tight we are with the organizer.”

She smiled to herself. It wasn't ‘we' who had to sleep with him but Mona Dexter.

“Very tight is my estimation. I think we caught him at just the right moment.”

“Probably what you were sayen' abart me a while back,” John muttered, but the other two ignored him.

“The key thing now is how close is he to the decision-makers?”

“He thinks highly of himself without a doubt, and I don't imagine he's much liked. But he's useful, works hard and is good at what he does, even if he's the only one who knows what he's talking about half the time.”

“John, you know this man as well as anyone. What do you make of him? Is he trusted?”

Peter had told neither of them about Jack Pugh's brief fall from ideological grace.

“Well I sure as hell wouldn' trus' him,” John declared. “But I fink he's trus'ed. He definitely seems ter be a believer. I'm not se sure he trus' me that much.”

“OK, strategy,” Peter announced, like a drill sergeant calling his troops to order. “It's not complicated: attrition, division, intelligence, force, propaganda and no outcome save unconditional surrender.”

“Sounds loike a farmer's address ter his turkeys in the run-up ter Christmas,” John observed drily.

“If it were that easy, Peter, we'd never have got into the mess we're in now,” Stacy declared.

“No, of course not,” agreed Peter, backtracking from his overly robust statement. “Those are the things we
must
do and not one of them is straightforward. Attrition: we think we have prepared for a six-month strike. If it goes beyond that, we could be in trouble. Division: traditionally, the miners have been a cohesive group. If we can, we must try to prise the Nottinghamshire pits away from the others. But it doesn't stop there. Secondary picketing can do great damage to the economy. There are our ports, our power stations and our steel mills. If any of these is prevented from functioning, the effect on the economy could be substantial.

“Also, there is a little-known group we must win over, or at least neutralize: they go by the grand name of the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shortfirers. Essentially, they oversee mine safety. By law, no pit can function without their say-so. If they come out, even the Nottinghamshire mines will be halted. This brings us to intelligence: the more we know about the intentions and state of mind of the NUM leadership, the better able we will be to defeat them. Force: we will have to use force to prevent the worst effects of secondary picketing. And finally, propaganda: the miners must be made to feel utterly alone in their struggle, so we don't want to go around stirring up sympathy for them. It might surprise you to know that even a good few at the top in the Trades Union Congress would like to see King Arthur get his comeuppance.

“This is a battle about how our country is run. The choice is between an open economy able to compete because businesses vie for
customers on the basis of excellence and a closed economy in which everyone's current position is protected, even as the rest of the world moves on. The first thrives on change, the second abhors it. And don't forget, every one of these mining communities evolved spontaneously because there was a need for coal. Since the nationalization of the industry in 1947, the tendency has been to resist change at every turn. Instead of helping the coal-mining communities to adapt over these last thirty-five years, governments of all stripes have pandered to them because coal had a lock on the country's energy, and without energy our economy could not function.

“If the miners are allowed to win this battle it means they are running the country not the government. And if our communist friends in the unions imagine that the statist regime, or
people's party
they talk about endlessly, would make their lives lovely, they should talk to some folk inside the Soviet Union who have experienced it for real. That is why the only outcome our prime minister will accept is their unconditional surrender. Many innocent people will be hurt. It will not be pretty. I just hope her cohorts will be as steely as she. This is one battle we must not lose. And for those who like to apportion blame, blame everyone – in government, in the unions, in management, in the electorate – who has refused to face reality since the last war and who chose instead the seemingly easy option of the status quo.”

John and Stacy were both struck dumb. Neither had heard Peter Betsworth speak with such passion before.

It was John who eventually broke the silence.

“What a roit roar'n fuck-up!”