1985 (25 page)

‘It should be clear to you now, I think, that this simple philosophy of the worker's rights does not have to be identified with the philosophy of Socialism. It is true to state that Socialism favours the workers more than the happily defunct metaphysic of grab and capitalist privilege; indeed, the Socialist movement, as I need not remind you, is the movement of Labour, is based upon justice for the worker. But a movement is different from an enthroned system. A Socialist government, especially one that rules virtually, like our own, without opposition, has ceased to struggle. And yet, to sustain its dynamic, it is obliged to struggle. Thus, it struggles to increase the Gross National Product, to stem inflation, which means, in effect, to discipline the worker. Dedicated to Work, it has no especial trust in the Worker. On the other hand, a basic philosophy held in common by the Workers' Collective and the Socialist Executive ensures that the principle of simplification, of the consultation of the need to satisfy, through the machinery of government, certain fundamental requirements of the Worker, is more or less adequately fulfilled. I mean, of course, the provision of a national health service, an educational system that meets the general need but eschews the special ones of the inner world of individualists like, ladies and gentlemen, your good selves. And, of course, a social security network from which you, ladies and gentlemen, have – through your failure to set up a strongly policed frontier between the inner and outer worlds – wantonly cut yourselves off.'

He smiled, as though ironically citing an official view with which he did not necessarily agree. He continued to smile, somewhat dreamily now, as he said:

‘Soon, I have no doubt, gently, imperceptibly, with none of the smoke and noise of revolution (for revolutions are always bred in the inner world), we shall see a withering away of the unwritten political constitution which was always held to be one of Britain's instinctual masterpieces. A parliament has become a time-wasting formality, as you know. We need only an executive and a civil service. A political college is already in process of formation, wherein the executives of the future will be trained. This executive will require, for the mystical purposes of continuity, a permanent head. If you're thinking it will be Bill the Symbolic
Worker, you are, of course, mistaken. A monarchy suffices, an entity outside politics. The devotion of the British Worker to the British Royal Family is of long standing, and it expresses an instinctual sense of value of a nominal executive that is outside the sweaty world of the political professionals. Our fellow workers in America are already turning against the republican principle, seeing in the presidency a mere monstrous absolutism that is the ultimate fulfilment of the dirty struggle for political power. Who knows? – soon the Declaration of Independence may be repealed, and the English-speaking peoples of the world – or should I say the speakers of Workers' English? – reunited through a common purpose under a common head.

‘But this is for the future, and I apologize, ladies and gentlemen, for a digression that is not to our immediate purpose. What is our immediate purpose? What aim do we seek to encompass during your stay – alas, enforced; would that it could have been voluntary – at Crawford Manor? Primarily, we wish you to feel in your hearts what you are perhaps ready enough to accept with your reason. We wish you to feel equality in your pores. The equality of the outer world, in which there is no privilege and where the very notion of the exceptional man or woman – the Hitler, the Bonaparte, the Genghiz Khan – is an abomination. What of the exceptional artist, you may say, of the scientist or genius, the thinker whose new vision threatens to burn up the old? Such will not be strangled at birth, I assure you, as the principle of egalitarianism gains the strength which it still struggles to achieve. Art, thought, research belong to the inner world, the private sector of life. The exceptional genius thrusting into the outer world – heesh is not wanted, but that does not mean that heesh is not valued. But the value does not belong to the world of the workers, and the value must seek its own encouragement in that inner world which you, ladies and gentlemen, sought to confuse with the greater one which you thought to reject but which, you find, rejected you.'

He became suddenly stern and loud, and Bev knew that he was probably mad. Mr Pettigrew cried:

‘You have sinned. Sinned, yes. Sinned against equality, sinned against fraternity –'

‘But not against liberty.' Bev looked round, embarrassed, to see who had so rudely interrupted. He was astonished to find that it was himself. There was a murmur in the audience, and the murmur grew. It was hard
to know who the murmur was against. But Mr Pettigrew at once seized the word and drew all eyes and ears to his now large-eyed and gesticulating person.

‘Liberty,' shouted Mr Pettigrew. ‘You do not even know the meaning of the term. You have swallowed whole the triple shibboleth of a misguided foreign revolution. You have failed to see that two of its terms belong to the outer world, but that the other has no meaning except in the inner. Liberty – who denies you liberty? Liberty is a property of the private universe which you explore or not as you please, the universe where even natural laws are suspended if you wish it so. What has it to do with the world of working and earning one's bread? You chose an impossible liberty, seeking it in the outer world, and you found nothing but a prison.' There was a chill silence, in which eyes were averted from Bev, as though even a look might bring dangerous contagion. Mr Pettigrew, with frightening speed, relaxed, grinned boyishly, took off his glasses and wiped them again on his tie. ‘Liberty,' he said, vague-eyed. ‘It's use in Workers' English is the right one, the only one. I have taken a bloody liberty in talking so long this evening.' There was a slight gasp, chiefly from the ladies, at the shocking intrusion of a colloquialism that Mr Pettigrew's oratorical style had not seemed capable of encompassing. ‘I have played the dreary demagogue. It is not, I assure you, my true forte. I hope we shall have opportunities to meet while you are here and share for a space our blessed inner worlds. Good night.' He said this glassed again, sharp-eyed.

And off he went, to applause. Bev did not applaud.

There were a few rooms in Crawford Manor where inner worlds could be visited. Some of these rooms had a bed in them and could be locked from within. There did not seem to be any bugging devices, visual or auditory. You were welcome to take bloody liberties there during your leisure periods. Bev had learnt, during a session on Workers' English with the very humorous and erudite Mr Quirk, that the terms
leisure
and
pleasure
, though not etymologically cognate, could be used interchangeably in
WE, though in practice the second word had swallowed the first. In AWE, or American Workers' English, such assimilation had not taken place, since the words had never rhymed in America. Workers in Britain, anyway, talked of being at pleasure during their pleasure hour, and that, since it was current usage, must be regarded as correct. Bev was pleasuring and being pleasured by a pleasant girl in her thirties named Mavis Cotton. He had met her before in the old days when she and he had been on a History Teaching Course at Ambleside, and both had agreed that it was a load of rubbish.

They lay back naked, sighing with satisfaction, on the bed. Bev had to admit to himself that, in his five or six bouts in this room with Mavis, he had known more sexual satisfaction than in all his years of marriage to Ellen. They had had a pleasant enough year together, though never ecstatic, the whole world burning up, before Bessie was born. After that birth, which had been a difficult one, she had shied from his embraces. He had remained loyal but frustrated. After all, he'd told himself, sex wasn't everything. Now, he saw, sex was a great deal. It was ironical that he should have to make this discovery in a place dedicated to that Outer World of abstractions which denied ecstasy. But, of course, no, not ironic: this paradise of the nerves was free to all, nothing elitist about it. And yet – wasn't there really perhaps a kind of Workers' Sex that owed nothing to erotic education, self-betterment, sex horny-handed, thrusting, bestial? Perhaps there would be a lecture on that before the course ended. Mavis said:

‘You was good. You did that proper.'

He looked at her, smiling and frowning. ‘I never know whether you're being facetious or not. With your WE, I mean.'

‘Oh, yes and no. Or, I suppose, neither do I. My father spoke like that. A terrible man for aitchlessness. Who was it said how easy it would be for the middle class to become proletarianized? You have nothing to lose but your aitches, he said.'

‘George Orwell,' Bev said. ‘My uncle fought with him in Spain. God, fifty years back. Orwell died very unpleasantly at Pamplona or somewhere. Planning, so my uncle said, a book about homage to Catalonia till the very day he was shot. He spoke rather refined, my uncle said.'

‘What are you going to do?' asked Mavis.

‘What are
you
going to do? Have they convinced you yet?'

Mavis said nothing. She twined a long hank of her black silk hair in
her shapely, rather rosy, fingers. Then, ‘Yes and no,' she said. ‘I can see myself standing up there lecturing on the Tolpuddle Martyrs and forgetting about imperial expansion and Brunel and the 1851 Exhibition. I can even hear myself doing it in WE. ‘They was fighting like for their rights, wasn't they, and they was not allowed them rights.' Because I can go home then and play my Bartok records and read Proust. The Inner World.'

‘And when your Bartok records are worn out, who will press new ones? Who'll play Bartok? The Inner needs the Outer. Books have to be printed. I bet you had a long search in the second-hand barrows looking for Proust. The whole business is based on false premises. There's only one world. If you can't fire some kid in one of your classes with an enthusiasm for Gibbon, who's going to read him?'

‘I can always bring in some aside about the fall of the Roman Empire and read a paragraph of Gibbon and –'

‘If you can find Gibbon around. And then you'll be had up for bourgeois irrelevancies and watch it sister this is your second like warning. Don't you see how it's going to be, has to be? The universities are going to lose their subsidies if they don't turn themselves into cats –'

‘Into –? Oh, CATs.'

‘And a Centre of Advanced Technology isn't going to be allowed to regard literature as a technology, even though it is. Look at the authors already out of print and likely to remain so. The levelling's going to reach the limit. Not even technical brilliance in the performing arts is going to be allowed. Them kids what sings and plays the guitar does all right, don't they, earning millions though they loses it all in tax, and they never had a bleeding lesson in their bleeding puffs.'

‘You do that very well. WE, I mean,' She rolled over and lay half on top of him, her sweet warm breath and her searching tongue-tip in his ear. ‘And,' she said, ‘the other thing.' She looked at her wrist-watch, the only clothing she had on. ‘Oh, my God. It's 15.55. Seminars.' She leapt off the bed and grabbed her one-piece garment – the siren suit or uniform overall they had jocularly been issued with on arrival, the quartermaster saying: ‘Some of you poor buggers looks a bit the worse for wear, here, a nice bit of denim with the complimongs of the ouse.' Bev said:

‘And if one doesn't go to one's seminar?'

‘If yer don't go, ducks, yer gets beat up proper in a cellar wiv very
strong lights burning away on yer bleeding body.' She hadn't quite got it yet: a whiff of refined vowel spoiled her demotic, but she'd learn. Bev looked somewhat grimly at her, arms behind his head. She'd learn, and she wasn't the only one. Some had learnt already. That religious Scot, for instance, had been ably argued at by a genuine theologian who'd persuaded him that the twelve apostles were the first trade union, that Christ had been martyrized for the principle of free organization, that the Kingdom of Heaven meant a proletarian democracy. There was one old man who had taught everybody something – a reformed dissident now on the staff of this centre of rehabilitation. He had given a very moving talk in WE on his sufferings, saying:

‘I held out, brothers and sisters, to the bloody limit. And I saw after six months of begging and tramping the roads and sleeping beneath hedges and in the nick and out of it that I was a bloody fool and a flaming idiot. I had a trade and a good one – hydraulic-press checker – and here I was not doing what I could earn good money for, and the money was getting better all the time, I could see that from odd bits of dirty newspaper I picked up here and there. I was wasting my life and, what was a bleeding sight worse, I was depriving others of what I could do, I was in a manner of speaking wasting the resources of the community. Forgive them long words, but they're the right words, brothers and sisters, and if you can think of better ones just let me know. I didn't believe in jumping to the whistle, but then I saw the light. I even heard like a voice out of the sky. “It's your hand holding the whistle,” it seemed to say, “It's your breath blowing it. There's no such thing as a solitary worker, you're all one big body. Horrible to think of an organ of the human body sort of deciding to go its own bleeding way. You want to raise a nice hot cupper to your lips and you're dying for it, being parched, and then your thumb goes into rebellion and says it won't help to lift it. Horrible, horrible.” Them was the words, or something as near like as make no bleeding difference. I saw it was not somebody else making me jump, it was me telling myself through the mouth of somebody I'd set up to do it for me. I had visions of workers marching together. I saw the power flaming from them like a flame like of fire. There'd been a time when the government had said: “Haw haw, crush him, he's only a bloody workman, we've got the bastard in our power,” but now I saw it was all different. I saw that I had the power, and my mates with me, and I've never looked back since.'