How I Killed Margaret Thatcher (12 page)

They had the same argument on and off for years. Later, during the miners' strike, when the miners fought the police at Orgreave, exactly one year after my dad died, I watched, excited, as they looked like they were winning. Arthur Scargill was arrested. You saw him being dragged off towards a police van still talking at the camera, wearing a cap with a slogan that you couldn't read. I wanted the miners to smash them.

Why doh they have a proper vote? my grandad had said.

They doh need one, Dad. We'm past that point.

Why have they all gotta come out, why not be strategic, tactical?

Her's gonna shut all the mines, Dad. Her's gonna close em all. Her's gonna close everything. Look around yer. Look what her's done here and we just rolled over. They've gorra fight. Iss now or never.

Why doh he listen to Kinnock?

Neil Kinnock wanted the miners to ballot before going on strike. Scargill said no. I could see what voting gave you. Voting gave you Margaret Thatcher. The more they attacked Scargill, the more I loved him.

I doh know why he doh have a vote, my grandad said, but that didn't stop him stuffing a few notes into the collection bucket that the miners brought to the marketplace in Dudley. I was with him. That money was for the gas bill, though. We'd seen one of my uncle Eric's new work vans drive past and it had sent my grandad into a rage. He held the money up to show him it was notes he was putting in there. The papers said the money came from Russia, from Libya, as well as from our gas bill. I wanted the miners to have guns. Arthur Scargill, too. They could get guns, weapons, all sorts. They could blow up police stations, power lines, the enemy. They needed to do more than throw a few rocks, I could see that. They might have been winning the fighting at Orgreave on the telly, but it was chaos and the next time the police would win. It was the same with the riots. Everyone would fight the police for a bit and smash windows and steal a few televisions, but then a few days later the police would be back in charge again.

You still hear people say Enoch was right. I've heard it muttered like a kind of mantra in the pub when I'm serving the last old men their pints of mild, when they're talking about whatever the latest disaster to plague the town is. People have been saying it pretty much since he made that speech, as an act of defiance, as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Two of them, Stan and Malcolm, were draymen back when there was the brewery walk-out in Wolverhampton in support of Powell, not long after the speech. They get the bus up from Gornal on a Saturday, sleeveless pullovers under their suits. They talk about how they stopped the traffic, how people looked at them, about how they were somebody. I don't say anything, serve the beer meekly and wipe the bar over and they sit there in their comfy chairs, drinking on the banks of the rivers of blood.

I hardly see my dad now. He's at work all the time. Machines break down and he has to fix them. That's his job. He goes to work at the normal time, half past six, and I hear him talking quietly to my mum while she makes him a cup of tea and then he'll be back late, or early, to have a sandwich and then go back out to work again. My mum is angry, I know that, at him going out to work, at the machines for always breaking down, at the men at the factory for always phoning up and asking if they can speak to Francis and can he come and fix the machine so they can cut more shapes in the steel and not lose their jobs. If you lose your job it means you can't go to work any more because the factory has to close down because the machines keep breaking or Margaret Thatcher doesn't want you to work there any more. It's happening all over the place. Even at Cinderheath, my grandad says, some of the men have been told not to come back. They've been made redundant. That means you have to sit around or stand on the step of your house drinking cups of tea not doing much. Instead of going to work you get given dole money by Margaret Thatcher. That sounds okay; being given money to listen to the radio and drink tea but it's no good. It isn't very much money, not if you worked in a factory and got paid your wages and did overtime and got paid time and a half for that as well. If you do that you are rich, but if you get dole money you aren't rich any more.

Margaret Thatcher wants to stop our people being rich and wants other people, her friends, to be rich. She's attacking us because we rich and powerful and she doesn't want us to be. I think she's jealous of us.

Do you think Margaret Thatcher is breaking the machines at Dad's work on purpose? I ask my grandad.

He smiles and says, I shouldn't rule it out, son, I shouldn't.

That was the last year we went to the caravans. We had days of bright, hard sunshine and the sands to ourselves, all the way between the castles at Harlech and Criccieth; that's what it felt like, anyway, especially knowing everyone else was at school or at work or doing their dole. It was like we'd escaped. School wasn't the same by then. Jermaine had gone, and I missed Ronnie, and there was only Paul left to bicker with in between lessons. Rodney and Michael and their class were off to secondary school. I was already trying to find excuses not to go to school at all. Later, when I stopped going altogether, it was easy to say it was because of what happened to my dad but I'd already begun to daydream about not going. I imagined days stretched out in front of me like the wide green valleys of Wales, free. I talked to Michelle, I suppose. She had her own problems then. Her dad had come back to live with them and the house got raided.

She told me about it one wet break-time when we sat and watched the rain like waves breaking against the window. I imagined we were on a boat, sailing far away, down the cut to the river, down the river to the sea.

The policeman, the fat one, sat on his head, she said.

What did you do?

I hid under the table in the kitchen. The police had him in the hall. Michael tried to kick one of em.

Did he?

Yeah, me mom tried to stop him and he kicked a hole in the kitchen door.

Shit.

Michael hates the police.

What happened to yer dad?

They took him off.

What did they want him for?

She took a while to answer, just looked at the rain.

I doh know, really. He was looking after something for somebody, I think.

He still looks after things for people, Isaac. He comes in the pub for his pint of Mickey Mouse every few weeks. He makes the kids laugh, his grandkids, loves them in his way, forgets their birthdays then sticks a roll of twenty pound notes in my hand at odd times. Sometimes Michelle pretends to be out when she sees him limping along from the bus stop. I like him, but then I never had to live with him on and off for twenty years.

That holiday at the caravans, we went on a day trip on the train from Porthmadog and had the whole carriage to ourselves, could see for miles across the lakes and mountains. I remember the Sunday afternoon we left, looking out the back window of the car as we drove across the causeway away from Porthmadog, with the Ffestiniog train puffing steam alongside us and the shadows of clouds making patterns on the hills across the water. I looked back; back at the sun dropping down behind the mountains until we drove into the dark of a plantation of fir trees.

A few weeks later the factory where my dad worked closed down.

It's the night before the royal wedding. Everyone has been given the day off to watch the wedding but at my dad's work they said not to come back at all. They've run out of money and orders for things made of steel so that's that, everyone has to go home and go on the dole. I'm not meant to be listening. I sit upstairs and hear my mum and dad talking. There's nothing much else to do, anyway.

It cor goo on like this. I'll pick summat up. Things ull pick up in the autumn.

My dad is trying to sound cheerful, I can tell. My mum sighs.

Yer say that but where's the pick-up gonna be? Where's it gonna pick up? There ay no sign at all. The onny sign is of things gerrin worse. Me dad says he reckons there's a couple of hundred more going at Cinderheath. They'll shut the whole thing, yer know. Patent Shaft. Round Oak next. Iss gonna get worse. I'm onny repeating what yow've said yerself, Francis. I doh know. I'm tellin yer own words back to yer.

Yome telling me yer dad's words back to me.

Tell me yer doh think they'm true.

We'll be okay.

How will we be okay? How will we?

Doh get upset.

But I am upset.

We'll be okay.

Yer keep sayin that, but how?

I'll get summat. There's always work somewhere.

Try tellin that to the millions out of work.

It ay millions.

It bloody is millions. Even they say that. They fiddle the figures any road. I'm onny repeatin yer own words back to yer. Yer said this to Johnny the other night.

Iss just talk.

What, so yer doh mean what yer say now? Look outside. Yer can see what it's like. Yer know what it's like.

Okay. Calm down.

I want yer to tell me how it's gonna be different for us. This bloody mortgage. I tode yer we should've stayed on the council list.

Doh start that now.

Start what? Start to think about how we'm gonna pay the mortgage on a house we could barely afford in the first place.

All right. I've tode yer it ull be all right.

But how? Yow live in cloud cuckoo land. All that talk of another house and we can barely afford this one. Well, thass over now, thass finished. I doh want to hear any more talk of it.

Look, you said to look out the winder. Think about it. If me an Harry Robertson, or folks like him, goo for the same job, who's gonna get it, eh? If it's me against twenty, thirty folks round here it ull be me that gets the job. We'll be okay. I'll make it okay. I'll get summat else.

My dad says it'll be okay over and over and strokes my mum's hair; I can see the reflection in the hall mirror.

I'll get another job, he says.

He didn't get another job, but even if he had, things might not have worked out. Paul Hill's dad got stopped at GKN, then started on at another place, a galvanizer's down by Burnt Tree, and he was finished on his first day there. It messed his dole up for ages afterwards and meant Paul and his mum almost got evicted from their flat because Paul's dad paid their rent after the divorce. This happened about the same time Paul split my head open when the Falklands War was on. He told me years later when we bumped into each other at the job centre, where else, that the whole thing with his dad's work was why he had been so angry. I told him not to worry about it, that there was a lot of water under the bridge.

Yer know what's gooin on?

I nod. She knows I've been listening.

Try not to worry, darling, she says. Everything will be okay.

I nod again, knowing full well that she doesn't mean it. She smoothes down my smart clothes on the hanger on the back of my door: Farah trousers and a check shirt. They're for the royal wedding. For a family who doesn't even believe we should have a queen, or a king for that matter, we're doing a good show of it. I've got a new pair of shoes and new haircut. We are going round to my nan and grandad's house to watch the wedding on telly and then to Cinderheath, to the football club, for a Fun Day afterwards. There's going to be a party and barbecue and games. There'll be a bouncy castle and a five-a-side competition at the other end, with things like egg and spoon races between games. This seems a lot of fuss to me, for a boring wedding, for Prince Charles and his big ears. There shouldn't even be a royal family; we should get rid of kings and queens and lords and all that and have a republic. That's what I thought our family thought. That's what Johnny told me. Instead, we're getting all worked up about a wedding when it seems to me that we've got other things to worry about.

Don't worry about anything. We'll have a nice day tomorrow, eh? My mum flattened down the hair on the top of my head.

You need to put your kit in your sports bag. You can change for the races and things when we're at the ground. You'll enjoy that.

Can I just go in me kit?

No, we've been over this, Sean. Everyone will have their nice clothes on to start with, for the wedding and the party. Then you can change. That's what Uncle Johnny's doing, everyone.

Even Johnny's been sucked in. He said for weeks that he was having nothing to do with it, that he wasn't coming with us, that he'd sit out the back in the quiet and do a bit of painting on his day off. My nan had rolled her eyes and called him a misery and my grandad had shrugged and said, Suit yerself. Then the club phoned him up and asked him to go in goal for one of the teams in the five-a-side competition and suddenly he was all for it.

Why am we having a party if we don't even believe in the royal family? I ask him.

Ah, well, he says. It'll be a nice party and yer mum and nan'll enjoy it. If I play well they might ask me to play again next season.

But I think it's wrong. They spend all their money on this wedding and there's loads of people with no money and who are unemployed and it's their fault, the rich people's fault.

You said because they live like they do that poor people have got no jobs and things. You said no wonder people was rioting. I thought you was gonna do a protest.

Thass true but, Johnny says and then he shrugs. Iss a game of football and a few drinks. We'll all be there together. It'll be good. We'll have a nice time. There's plenty of other stuff to protest about. Doh worry abaht it, Sean.

I've been told not to worry about it by every member of my family. I am eleven years old and can see better than any of them that this doesn't make sense. I thought that maybe I would run off on the morning and go and hide over the allotments or even all the way over to the quarries so no one could find me. That could be my protest. But I realize as my mum is laying my clothes out, snuffling back tears, telling me not to worry like that's going to make everything all right, that there is no way I can upset her any more, so I nod when she says I can't go in my kit.

It's a shame I didn't think about her feelings more later on, that's all I can say now.

It was brilliant, the day of the royal wedding. We all watched the service in the front room at my nan and grandad's. Johnny was right that my mum and nan really loved it, even before we got to the party. They talked about how beautiful Princess Diana looked and cried through the service.

Years later, when my mum was ill, I drove her down to London in the days after Diana died. It was one of the last trips she ever made, in fact. It was a few weeks after I came back, maybe not even that. My mum placed flowers on the Mall. I took some photos. There's one of them up behind the bar now. She looks too thin. You can see the smoke rising from the candles people had lit and the garlands that had been laid to Hindu gods. When I bent down near the spot where my mum laid her flowers there was a card with a picture of Saint Francis on it; the same image that used to hang up above the telly before Margaret Thatcher shamed him down. I felt the tears well up and I turned away from the card and moved towards my mum as if to hold her up. But she was holding me up.

My dad and grandad drink beer at the kitchen table.

Watch what yome having. Yow'll be having plenty of that after, my nan warns my grandad.

He groans and nods at Prince Philip on the screen. Enough to turn yer to drink, he says but he's joking, I think. The people he swears at most when they come on telly are Prince Philip, David Owen, Roy Jenkins, Norman Tebbit, Ron Greenwood, Lester Piggott and Bob Monkhouse. He hates David Owen and Roy Jenkins most of all out of the SDP traitors. If Margaret Thatcher comes on, he walks out of the room. I think it's the biggest insult he can think of, the only thing he can think to do.

Propaganda, he says now, and winks at me.

We never called her Maggie. No one in our family did. It was as if calling her Maggie was something suspect, that it showed you secretly really liked her, thought she was just a pantomime villain that you could shout Out! Out! Out! at and she'd disappear back into the wings. No, better to stick to her full name, or better still, no name at all, a look and we'd know who you meant. She was always there, anyway; you didn't have to name her.

He killed her, yer know. My grandad says this to me late one night when I'm sitting with him in the kitchen getting him warm after bringing him home from the pub. Johnny's upstairs putting my grandad's electric blanket on. For a moment I think he means my dad. Then I think he must be talking about my mum. The anniversary is a few weeks away.