1985 (26 page)

Very moving, almost as moving as the films they'd been shown, very well made creatures of TUCFILM at Twickenham, historical films of the Struggle that made you want to cry out with rage. But nothing, neither film nor lecture nor group discussion, had yet dared to make the point that denied all history, centuries of religious and humanistic teachings alike: the right of man to loneliness, eccentricity, rebellion, genius; the superiority of man over men.

‘Okay, love, I'll jump,' said Bev, and he donned his uniform with its TUC badge of a silver flywheel on a ground of shed workers' blood. He put on his issue slippers. The 16.00 hour bell shrilled. They kissed, they parted, she to her seminar, he to his.

‘I know what is still in the minds of most of you,' said Mr Fowler to his group of twelve. They sat informally in what, in the days of its aristocratic ownership, had been the Blue Room. It was now distempered in buff and very plain, and even the old baroque cornices had been chipped off. ‘You're seduced still by the traditional notion that to give one's total allegiance to a collective is to deny one's rights as a human being. You're holding out, a lot of you, against what you regard as the philosophy of the anthill.' Mr Fowler beamed, a beaming sort of man in these sessions though, strolling on the paths outside, he frowned much and muttered to himself, and concentrated the beam on Bev. ‘You anti-anters have to provide an argument powerful enough to shake us collectivists, but none of you has yet done so. Am I not right, me old Bev?'

Bev shuddered at the facetious colloquialism, then growled briefly, then said: ‘I want to approach this business from a perhaps illegitimate angle –'

‘Bastardize all you will, Bev boy.'

‘You, I mean you, Fowler. You're not a worker. I'd say you were a product of a middle-class home, father a clergyman perhaps, with a middle-class education –'

‘My father,' said Mr Fowler, ‘was an agnostic. A bank inspector, if you must know. As for my education –'

‘Middle class,' said Bev. ‘You've never practised a trade, am I right?'

‘Teaching is a trade, as you know. Books are the tools of it. As for class, your term is outmoded. There are only employers and employees.'

‘What I mean is – why,' asked Bev, ‘do you put the generality in front of the individual? Why do you so passionately blazon this belief in the Syndicalist Society?'

‘I've explained all that. Because it is the will of the majority and the aspirations of the majority that must count in the modern age, that the cult of minority power, interests, culture –'

‘Of course I bloody well know all that,' cried Bev. ‘What I want to know is this – what's in it for you?'

‘There is nothing in it for me except the happiness of seeing fulfilled –'

‘Come off it, Fowler. You don't like the majority. You don't like beer, football pools, darts. A spell on a factory floor would give you neurasthenia. You don't give a monkey's for the worker's cause. What are you getting out of all this? For that matter, what is the great bloody Mr Pettigrew getting out of it?'

‘What am I getting out of it, Mr Jones?' It was Pettigrew's own voice. All turned. Pettigrew was sitting on a plain wooden chair by the door. He had made a sneaking entrance at some point in the session unacknowledged by Mr Fowler in smile, nod or bow. Bev, abashed, turned and stoutly said:

‘Power.'

Mifflin the librarian and that other travelling companion of a fortnight back, the Midland youth who had whined about Christian martyrdom, both seemed to make ‘That's torn it' gestures with their mouths. The rest of the group looked among themselves with smiling eyes of anticipation: this bugger's up for the chop, he is that. Pettigrew rose and came forward, nodding pleasantly at Fowler. He took one of the standard-pattern easy chairs and said:

‘Of course. Power. So obvious one doesn't even bother to think about it. Why do people become shop stewards, union leaders, group chairmen? Because they want power. A more interesting question is: why do they want power? Can you answer that, Mr Jones?'

‘Because,' said Bev, ‘the exercise of power is the most intoxicating of narcotics. Sexual power, the power of wealth, the power which can grind to a stop the wheels of industry at a mere lifting of a finger, that can hold a whole nation dithering in fear, the power of the blackmailer –what does it matter what kind of power it is? It's always the same potent drug, desirable for its own sake. And it's usually a substitute for a more wholesome kind of fulfilment. A compensation for the failure of the creative urge, or for sexual debility, or because one's mother doesn't love one enough.'

‘Because your mother doesn't love you enough,' said Pettigrew. ‘Do get rid of that impersonal pronoun. It's the most tiresome vestige of Bourgeois English. Yes,' he then said, ‘one kind of power instead of another. You've told us nothing new, Mr Jones. There has to be a dynamic. But the power invested in the leaders of the new community is, you must admit, not dedicated to human destruction. It's not Nazi or communist power. We have no concentration camps or extermination chambers. The power of the leaders of our collective is the power of the collective itself. It has never yet done anything that has not benefited that collective. The strike weapon, the most evident instrument of power, has, without exception at least in the last forty years, always succeeded in bettering the worker's lot. Can you deny that?'

‘Yes,' said Bev, ‘I can. The bettering has all too often been purely nominal. Wages shoot up and prices follow. The vicious spiral, as it used to be called. Small firms can't meet new wage demands or go smash because they're strike-bound and can't fulfil their orders. Okay, they're nationalized, there's a blood transfusion of public money. But where does that money really come from? From increased taxes the workers immediately strike against. It's not true capital, it's only paper money.'

‘How old fashioned you are, me old Bev,' beamed Mr Fowler. ‘Capital isn't money. Capital is resources, energy, the will to create. Money is nothing.'

‘Interesting,' Bev beamed back. ‘Money is nothing, and yet it's the only thing that the workers care about.'

‘Substitute the word
consumption
,' said Pettigrew, ‘and you've said all that has to be said about the Outer Life. Yes, the workers want to consume, they have a right to consume, and the Syndicalist State uses power to fulfil that right. They had little enough chance to consume during those glorious historical epochs you were prevented from stuffing the heads of the kids with, and sulked because you were stopped.'

‘Consumption,' said Bev bitterly. ‘And what consumption. Colour television and food without taste or nutriment, workers' rags that call themselves newspapers and substitute nudes for news, low comedians in working men's clubs, gimcrack furniture and refrigerators that break down because nobody cares about doing a decent job of work any more. Consumption, consumption and no pride in work, no creative ecstasy, no desire to make, build, improve. No art, no thought, no faith, no patriotism –'

‘Me old Bev,' said Mr Fowler, ‘you forget a very simple truth. That the techniques of modern manufacture do not allow for pleasure or pride in work. The working day is a purgatory you must be paid well for submitting to, paid well in money and amenity. The true day begins when the working day is over. Work is an evil necessity.'

‘It was not that to me,' said Bev. ‘I enjoyed my work. My work as a teacher, I mean. My work as a rather better paid dropper of nuts on chocolate creams was a mere nothing, a sequence of simple bodily movements above which my mind soared in speculation, meditation, dream. But to educate young minds, to feed them –'

‘To feed them rubbish,' said Pettigrew. ‘Force-feed them with innutritious fibre or downright poison. Your chocolate creams were a more honest fodder, Mr Jones. Listen to me, sir.' That
sir
was like a promise of steel whips. ‘You were wrong to enjoy your work. Even the Bible says that work is hell: “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn bread.” You are at your old business of confusing two worlds.'

‘There's only one world,' cried Bev.

‘One world is coming,' nodded Pettigrew, ‘but not the one world you mean. Holistic syndicalism, the fulfilment of the ancient battle cry about workers of the world uniting. You mentioned patriotism, which means what it always meant – defending the property of a sector of the international bourgeoisie against an imagined enemy, for the only enemy of the worker was the ruling class that sent him off to fight against other workers. This is old stuff, Mr Jones. The age of war is over, along with the age of the blown-up national leaders. The age of the imposed mystical vision, the madness, the cynicism. Done, finished.'

‘And now we have the age of dullness,' said Bev. ‘I wonder how long it can last? Because it can't last for ever. There's something in man that craves the great vision, change, uncertainty, pain, excitement, colour. It's in Dante, isn't it? “Consider your origins. You were not made to live like beasts, but to follow virtue and knowledge.” You've read Dante, I don't doubt. Read him and rejected him because he's nothing to say to the workers.
Homo laborans
replaces
Homo sapiens
. Caliban casts out Ariel.'

‘Gentlemen,' said Pettigrew to the group, for there were no ladies in it, ‘I'm glad you've had this chance to listen to the arguments of one kind of dissident. Conceivably, some of these arguments were once your own. We're coming to the end of this rehabilitation course. Next week,
after a four-day break for the staff, the next one starts. During these last few days, I have the task of visiting your discussion groups or syndicates and putting straight questions: how are things with you now? Simple things are required of you before you effect your re-entry into the world of work. First, a choice of job. Our Employment Officer, Miss Lorenz, is at your disposal with a list of vacancies. Second, the issue of a new union card, meaning a reinstatement, a resumed citizenship of Tucland. Third and last, a formal recantation of heresy – chiefly, I may say, for our own propaganda purposes. A whole-hearted acceptance of the closed shop principle and a rejection of the delusion of right to unilateral action.'

‘So,' said Bev, ‘in effect you ask us to set up a new morality in our hearts. A hospital burns down and the firemen stand by waiting for their £20 rise. We hear the dying screams and we say: This is right, this is in order, first things first.'

‘No,' cried Pettigrew with such force that the word struck the opposed wall and came bouncing back. ‘No and again no,' more softly. ‘You see the breakdown of a public service and you regret that this should be so. You regret the stupidity of the public employer that has allowed things to get so far, that has refused to listen to the just demands of the workers and has now forced them to use the ultimate terrible weapon. You look beyond your immediate vision to the reality.'

‘To a man whose wife has perished in a burning building,' said Bev bitterly, ‘such a mystical vision is hard to attain.'

‘And yet,' said Pettigrew, ‘there have been moments, and very recent moments too, when you have said to yourself: I cannot altogether regret what happened.'

‘What do you mean?' Bev felt his heart tumbling into his belly and blood pumping up to his throat.

‘You know what I mean.' Pettigrew looked at him steelily. ‘We here are entitled to know what inner worlds you enter. After all, you are in our charge.' He turned to the rest of the group. He said: ‘Do any of you still have misgivings? If so, speak honestly.' Nobody answered because they were preoccupied with the shock of seeing Bev leap on to the great Mr Pettigrew and belabour him with his fists. Pettigrew's glasses flew off and were heard to tinkle tinily on the floor. He tried to get up from the chair where Bev had him pinned, blinking and gasping. Fowler, not now beaming, was on to Bev's back, disclosing a strength none of the normally
beamed at would have suspected. Nobody came to assist Bev. Two men, metalworkers, once very bloody-minded, came to assist Fowler.

‘You damned traitors,' breathed Bev, while Pettigrew looked with woe at his broken glasses and Fowler panted, straightening his tie. A metalworker said:

‘You're mad, mate. Fucking nutcake case, do you know that?' Pettigrew said:

‘Perhaps, Fowler, you'd get me one of my spare pairs. In the left-hand drawer of the desk in the office.' Fowler went. Pettigrew tried blearily to focus on Bev. ‘Strangely or not,' he said, ‘this will not be held much against you. It's a last spurt of dissidence. I think you're going to find yourself cured. Group, dismiss. I'll see you all sometime tomorrow.'

Supper that evening was a solid worker's meal of cod deep-fried in batter with chipped potatoes and a choice of bottled sauces, spotted dick and custard to follow. Tea was served, as usual, in half-kilo mugs. Everybody looked strangely at Bev, not knowing whether to approve his belligerence or not, since none really liked Pettigrew though they feared him; some seemed to be fearing the worst for Bev, sucking their teeth thoughtfully at him as they lighted up their penultimate issue fag of the day. Pettigrew was not present at what he facetiously called High Table. Mavis said to Bev, as they entered the cinema together after supper:

‘How could he know?' Bev whistled a few bars of
I have heard the mavis singing
. Mavis was quick. ‘Don't be a bloody idiot. I'm not a nark. Do you honestly think I go round telling the staff who I sleep with.'

‘How many do you sleep with?'

‘That's none of your flaming business, Jones.'

‘Sure you're not the Official Whore of Rehabilitation?'

She cracked him a damned flat-handed slap for that and bounced off to sit with some of the girls. Bev, his cheek tingling, sat alone but not neglected. There were many sad or wondering eyes on him before the lights dimmed. The curtains opened to show a wide bloody screen and
a turning silver flywheel, with the first two measures of
Tucland the Brave
stereoing out in hunting-horn harmonies. TUCFILM presented
The Fury of the Living
. The story was conventional but it was given painful force through the technique developed by Paramount's experimental workshop in the seventies, whereby the minute blackness between frames, normally filled in by continuity of vision, had been eliminated, and the images on the screen struck like raw actuality. The subject might have been chosen specially for Bev, since it was about a factory fire service going on strike in order to secure better equipment and working conditions, and the rest of the employees going out in sympathy. The dirty employers, who had planned its demolition anyway in a programme of improvement and expansion, set on fire their own warehouse, making sure first that the pretty young wife of Jack Latham, one of the strikers, was imprisoned in a washroom there. None believed this when told: a filthy employer's trick, no more. The strikers watched the warehouse burn, and then Jack Latham heard his wife screaming: ‘Jack, Jack, save me, Jack,' and after that actually saw her arms and hair waving from the flames, but his mates held him back: a filthy trick, don't look, don't listen. So the warehouse burnt out, and the strike remained unbroken, and the workers had won. But in the charred ruins Jack found his wife's asbestos identity-disc and went wild with grief and attacked his own mates. And his mates admitted: yes, they had known. But a calmly wise elder, a veteran of the cause, put him right: the cause needs martyrs, the cause is sanctified by their blood or their black heavenward-soaring flinders. But why the innocent? Why should the innocent. . . .? Jack screeched from the four walls and the ceiling of the cinema. Bev went out.