The Storytellers (25 page)

C
HAPTER

F
OLLOWING THE hunger strikes three years earlier, the Prime Minister had authorized one of her most senior civil servants to open secret discussions with his opposite number in the Irish Republic. A solution to the stand-off in Northern Ireland had to be found and the cabinet had approved her endeavour. Peter Betsworth was not directly involved, but had long been of the view that an understanding between the Irish and British Governments offered the only escape from the cul-de-sac the IRA and UK Government were in. An endless succession of tit-for-tat killings and the need for a permanent garrison of British soldiers to keep Republicans and Loyalists apart hardly seemed the mark of a civilized society. The sins of England's colonial fathers had certainly been visited on their sons' sons' sons – and some.

He often thought ‘intelligence' was too precise a term for the currency he and his kind traded in. His own focus was on the mainland in general and industrial relations in particular. With the miners' strike now in its sixth month, he had a clear objective: to do all in his power to bring it to an end before any concessions were forced on the state. That seemed clear. It was a war of attrition. But
like radio static, sounds came in from the field all the time and every night he wondered what he wasn't seeing.

* * *

Roy Walsh checked into The Grand, every inch a travelling salesman out to impress a client. The more customary boarding house just wouldn't do. This was going to be his deal of a lifetime. If it came off, he would be able to dine out on it for the rest of his days.

“We have a room for you on the sixth floor, Mr Walsh, as you requested,” the receptionist confirmed. “Do you need a morning call?”

Their guest said he did not and was invited to enjoy his stay.

He felt unusually alive in the elevator. His satchel was full and heavy, more so than the small suitcase the porter insisted on carrying. There followed the customary tour of the room and lesson in how to work the controls of the airflow system, sufficient to warrant the practised pause and collection of whatever small change a guest could locate. Mr Walsh was feeling generous and the porter appeared happy knowing that he had escorted a man of means up to room 629.

“Will you be wanting any company this evening?” he asked before leaving. The girl who paid him a small retainer had been complaining about the return on her investment lately. What he needed was a doctor's convention. Members of the medical profession invariably required his extra services. He put it down to the stresses of the job and to the fact that they had the money.

But Mr Walsh was not playing.

“Well, if you should change your mind, sir…”

Having got rid of the porter, Roy inspected his quarters. They were a good size with a spacious bathroom and after slipping the catch across the door, he emptied the contents of his satchel onto the washstand. Taking the screwdriver, he removed the access panel from
the side of the bath. He could see no leaks. It wouldn't do at all if one of the maintenance crew was called upon to fix something.

The gelignite was well wrapped in cellophane to prevent its smell alerting one of the specially-trained dogs the police used to detect drugs and explosives. Only the detonator wires poked through and these had been sealed with resin. How to control detonation was always the problem and where particular skill was needed. In this case, timing was crucial. The device had to come alive on 12th October, four weeks hence, in the early hours of the morning. Parts of a video recorder had been used and he'd been advised by their best technician that it would work.

‘Get it into a confined space near a load-bearing wall,' the technician assured him, ‘and that hotel will collapse.'

After placing the bomb hard into a corner beyond the bath pipes and checking that the timer was running, Roy screwed back the panel. He then washed his hands, combed his hair and took the elevator down to the lobby. In the adjoining bar, he ordered himself a double whisky. The question kept circulating in his head: ‘What if the bloody thing goes off with me still in the hotel?'

Revived, he walked the streets for as long as he could, ate in an Indian restaurant and walked some more before finally retuning to The Grand. Two more double whiskies in the bar followed. He was tempted by a smile from a woman three stools away and thought briefly about being blown to kingdom come while enjoying an act of passion – surely a reasonable down payment for his impending martyrdom? – but resisted in case he blurted out an indiscretion.

Up in his room he tried to sleep. But the thought of what lay just a few feet away, ready to release its fury as soon as an alarmingly simple technology told it to, kept him tossing and turning and wondering if he shouldn't have invited the woman up after all. And why were sex and violent death so often related? That their natural by-product was life seemed perverse. Were we not better than salmon bent on one
last burst of egg-laying and fertilizing before exhaustion turned our flesh over to parasites? No, we were worse, he concluded. Not only did we know what we were doing, we had interfered with nature in order to subvert its consequences. The words of his Sunday-school teacher, Miss Lafferty, came flooding back to him along with his desire for Miss Lafferty herself. Who would be a Catholic!

He struggled over to the mini-bar and poured everything he could find – whisky, gin, vodka, the lot – into a plastic cup and gulped it down. Back on the bed, reality started to dissolve and alter and fade and reappear like Marvel Comic shapeshifters, a kaleidoscope of memories: his mother, Miss Lafferty, Belfast. Suddenly he was inside the Maze Prison staring at the youthful face of Bobby Sands. If vengeance was the Lord's, as he'd been taught, then surely he must have become His instrument.

* * *

Not long after 7.00 a.m., Roy Walsh sat bolt upright on the bed. He was still fully clothed. There was no pounding head. There were no distorted memories. There was only complete clarity. He'd come to do a job and now needed to get out of the place. He inspected the room, looked at the bath panel, gathered up his satchel, seized his case and checked out of the hotel. Yes, he'd enjoyed his stay and would be back, he said, knowing full well that he wouldn't.

C
HAPTER

‘O
UT OF THE fucking question!' Jack Pugh almost screeched when John Preston informed him that some of the Nottinghamshire miners were thinking of setting up a breakaway union. ‘They cannot be allowed to do that. You must stop it.'

“Per'aps you could speak ter 'em,” John suggested.

“Nottinghamshire is already letting more coal through than was agreed,” Jack fumed. “Enough coal has been delivered to hospitals, care homes and schools under the NUM exemption to feed a bloody power station. Arthur is mad as hell about it.”

“So 'd you cum an' address 'em?' John asked again.

“That's your damn job.”

“It needs yer authority, Jack. They'll listun ter you,” John urged, playing on the organizer's oversized vanity.

“I've got a lot on,” Jack grumbled, wary of having to address an unappreciative audience. “Set something up and I'll try to fit it in.”

“When?”

Jack looked uncomfortable and John could see him twisting inside like an eel on a hook.

“Make it a week Thursday, say six o'clock,” he said eventually.
“I've another meeting at eight. That's the best I can do.” He was planning on taking Mona to a hotel for dinner that night and there was sure to be something suitable in Nottingham. It was her birthday.

“Good. I'll see what I can fix up then.”

* * *

Stacy and Mona huddled together at the back. Advised about the meeting by Peter Betsworth, the deputy editor of
The Sentinel
sat off to one side. ‘Not all miners are created equal,' the intelligence officer had stated. ‘You might want to alert your readers to this.'

John and Jack graced the podium on either side of the NUM area representative who looked distinctly ill at ease. His president's fiery intransigence did not go down well in Nottinghamshire. Worse than that, the room was half empty.

Following a less than fulsome introduction, the organizer rose nervously to his feet.

“Brothers!” he began, but his trademark greeting bounced aimlessly around the room like a ping-pong ball hit into an empty cathedral.

“We are winning!” he attempted to enthuse, but his second volley sounded more like air escaping from a tyre and Mona registered a twinge of compassion as she watched Jack deflate in front of their eyes.

“Your brothers and sisters – and I say sisters because this affects the wives as much as their menfolk – have been holding solid for five months now, at considerable hardship to themselves. If we have you with us this government will be forced to negotiate.”

“Negotiate what?” someone called out.

Jack was not used to being heckled and momentarily lost his footing.

“Wages, pit closures, for Christ's sake!” he blurted out as if the
question had been nonsensical.

“Pay's good here and pits aren't closing, so what's there to negotiate?” someone else in the audience asserted loudly.

Jack pulled himself together and had a run at class solidarity but when he fumbled his way into the concept of false consciousness, the Marxist idea that the proletariat's subservient position could be hidden from it by unrealistic aspirations propagated by the ruling class, a handful of miners decided they'd heard enough. One muttered that ‘if pay's right we work, if it's not, we don't – that's reality enough fer uz', while another said that if he had to listen to anything more about false consciousness he'd bloody well lose consciousness.

As laughter at the departing men's wisecracks rippled around his depleted gathering, Jack lost his temper completely.

“You are ignorant, plain ignorant and have no idea of what's good for you,” he all but shouted. “Capitalism will crush you, utterly crush you and you know, I actually hope it does. Comrade Lenin was always sceptical about the ability of the working class to see where its best interests lay. It was he who understood that global capital, in its quest to maximize profit, would drive down wages. You tell me why you are not vulnerable to the importation of cheap foreign coal extracted from the ground by men driven deep into the darkness in order to survive; men who are little more than slave labour. In fact, comrades, you too are slaves. You just don't know it.”

As Jack accelerated into his rant, men started to leave. Not one amongst them considered himself a slave or anything close. They were men who worked hard for a good wage; men who supported their families and paid their way. But Jack ploughed on, oblivious to the sound of sliding chairs.

“Comrade Lenin did not accept the argument, which Marx advanced, based upon his theory of scientific determinism, that the bourgeoisie had to revolt against the strictures of capitalism, as they inevitably would, before the proletariat could be roused to
action. No, that was not how he saw it and he proved his point. By appealing directly to the working masses, over the heads of the timid bourgeoisie, he brought down the Russian state. You,” he thundered, “have joined the bourgeoisie. You are traitors to your class, creatures of the rich. And when our great president brings communism to this blighted land, as he surely will, you, brothers, will feel ashamed!”

Mona was starting to enjoy the energy in Jack's words, but she was almost alone. Apart from Stacy and the deputy editor of
The Sentinel
, the room was all but empty. Only one man in a wheelchair remained, and he was waiting for someone, anyone, to help him.

“Don't worry, son,” the man said, when Jack finally ground to a halt. “This is the land of Robin Hood. We know well enough how to take from the rich and give to the poor.”

Jack stared at him blankly, uncertain how to reconcile his own erudite, twentieth-century knowledge with the man's fifteenth-century English folklore. Instead, he turned to John Preston with undisguised fury. Mona realized she had a tough night ahead.

* * *

After the organizer had stormed from the hall with Mona in pursuit, Harvey walked across to John and Stacy.

“Quite a spectacle!” he said, introducing himself, blind to the fact they had Peter Betsworth in common. “Could I offer you both a drink?”

John and Stacy looked at each other and shrugged.

“Yes, I don't see why not,” John said. “But per'aps sumwheres outta t'way.
The Sentinel
i'n't widely read in these parts.”

It was hard to know what constituted ‘out of the way' and they opted for a café near the station because Harvey needed to catch a train to London later. As a journalist with a working-class background himself, he was curious to know how a scouser machinist-come-
union-organizer had hitched up with an educated young lady from the Home Counties.

“It's a long story,” proffered John without any further attempt at elaboration.

“John came to a hotel I was working in,” Stacy added, “and it just happened.”

“Yea, it juss 'appened,” confirmed John.

That was the wonder of university, Harvey thought, reflecting on his own situation: it was a leveller. But this couple was running against the odds. Stacy did not strike him as someone determined to make a statement of her love life in order to piss off some pompous parents. The journalist in him smelt a story, but it would have to wait for another day.

“So what happened this evening then?” he asked. “I've listened to Jack Pugh address audiences before, and they usually lap him up. He's one of Arthur's inside men, is he not?”

“Likes to think so,” confirmed John. “But King Arthur's none too popular in these parts.”

“This talk of a breakaway union then: is it for real?”

“How's you get wind o' that?” John asked.

“So it's true?”

“I've heard talk o' it,” John acknowledged, playing down the fact that his handler wished him to do all in his power to bring it about. “There's a good few round 'ere who aren't that stuck on NUM, that's fer sure.”

“If the Nottinghamshire mines are not solid behind the strike, the strike will fail, surely? They can't want to be responsible for that?”

“They'll mak' supportive noises from time t' time, but the men 'ere want t' work. Simple as that. It's NACODS you want to worry about. If they come out, the government's finished.”

“That's the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers?” Harvey asked, still finding his way around the often
byzantine structure of the country's unions.

“Quite a mouthful, i'n't it? No mine can function without their oversight. That's the law. It's a safety issue. In Yorkshire, NACODS members are refusing t' cross picket lines, but not elsewhere.”

“Might that change?” Harvey asked.

“There's pressure fr'm a' sides,” John told him. “Ah wouldn't mind be'n be'ind those close' doors when that deal gets done, ah can tell you!”

“Have you heard anything lately, John?” Stacy asked, concerned that she might have missed something.

“Only that 'ere most miners want tha' pits kept open. We'll jess' 'ave t' see.”

“Have you always been a union man, John?” Harvey asked.

“Me dad was, an' a communist too. Still is, I dare say. But British Leylan' laid him off a while back an' since then ee an' me mother 'ave been doen what they can fer the miners. I'm wary of collectives meself, 'specially those that tek awoy yous liberty.”

Harvey suspected John Preston and his mother would have got on.

“Have you family?” he asked.

“An older bruv, Billy, who med it ter Texas woy back but is on the rigs up in Aberdeen at the moment, an' a younger 'un, Joe, who's a chef in London: an' a pretty sound 'un by all accounts.”

“Aberdeen's about the only place in the country that's doing well right now,” Harvey told them. “We've moved from coal to oil.”

“And that's what most of these miners don't see. You'd yav thought men ood be chuffed ter escape t' pits. Our Billy 'as a roight aud loife if 'is letters am ter goo by.”

“It's the mining communities, the families that haven't moved, who are suffering,” Harvey said.

“Suppose so,” agreed John, “but sticking we' head in t' sand is hardly the smart thing, at leus as I see it. NUM can't see beyond coal.”

“What do you make of it all, Stacy?”

“I hate seeing all this energy spent so unproductively,” John's partner answered. “The sheer cost of it, too,” she added. “I know change isn't always easy, but there has to be a better way than this.”

“Roight boys' pissing contest, is what it is.”

John Preston's succinct summary said it all. They talked for a while about other things – about how a Berlin court had cleared the Beatle Paul McCartney in a paternity suit and the Prince and Princess of Wales's second son was to be called Henry (‘A champion good nem 'arry,' John thought) – until Harvey had to leave for his train.

* * *

The deputy editor discussed his day with George Gilder who advised him to leave NACODS well alone.

“We don't want to go stirring that one up, Harvey, not right now.”

He then filed his piece under the heading,
Is the National Union of Miners Losing Its Grip?
He thought it a good article, by and large: measured, not too triumphalist, just pointing out that there were miners largely content with their lot who wanted to work and had little interest in toppling a government. But it ended up deep inside
The Sentinel
because the paper's front page that morning sailed forth under the banner:
High Court Rules Miners' Strike Illegal
.

This judgment exposed NUM funds to sequestration. The screws were being turned.

* * *

Up in Yorkshire, Arthur Scargill was seething, although the judgment had not been entirely unexpected. The NUM President had even managed to place some union funds out of reach, but that put them out of the union's reach as well. He instructed Jack to make
contact with ‘our friends overseas' and ask for financial support. Transporting pickets around the country cost money and there were union salaries to cover.