A Summer in the Twenties Read online

  ‘I want no part of this, Mr. Hankey,’ he said as soon as Mrs. Tarrant had left the room. ‘I cannot tell her to her face, but you’ll be better without me and I’ll be better without you.’

  His voice was so soft that Tom had to strain to be sure of the words. There was a faint hint of the whinnying Hull accent, almost overlaid by education.

  ‘Oh,’ said Tom.

  ‘I cannot think what she’s at,’ said Mr. Hutton. ‘Three generations her family have been owners, but they will not learn, any more than they will forget.’

  ‘Learn what?’

  ‘How to deal with the men.’

  Mr. Hutton spoke without vocal emphasis, letting the gleam in his pale eyes give weight to the words.

  ‘Are dockers so different from other trades?’

  ‘A different world, Mr. Hankey. They’re a law to themselves. It comes of being in work one week, laid off the next. Even when the work’s there, a man can’t be sure he’ll be picked for it—and that’s been the way for generations. Now only a dockie knows what it’s like to be a dockie.’

  ‘You sound as though you had a good idea yourself.’

  ‘My grandfather was a dockie all his life, and my father started as one. Then he began a little business and was lucky with it—so you could say my family’s changed sides. I’ve cousins still who are dockies, and sometimes we meet at a family funeral or the like, but anything to do with the docks they’d no more think of doing me a favour than I would them. There is a chasm between us you can scarcely get your voice across, let be going yourself.’

  ‘You are telling me that I’ve no hope of making contact with the man I want.’

  ‘I understand from Mrs. Tarrant that you are looking for a group of Reds, Mr. Hankey.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You’ll meet a brick wall. Try to get past it and there’s a fair chance you’ll be found floating in the river.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  Mr. Hutton barely nodded, but continued to gaze at Tom as if speculating what quality of corpse he would make.

  ‘Are there a lot of Bolshies among the men?’

  ‘It depends what you mean by the word. With the coming and going of ships to the Baltic there’s plenty of opportunity for dealings with Moscow, but I doubt there’s more than a score of Communist Party members. I cannot tell you who they are—they’d get no work on my wharf if I knew their names. Then there’s very likely a hundred or more who are good as members, apart from paying their subscriptions and such. And so on, working outwards. Larger numbers, weaker sympathies. But I can tell you, Mr. Hankey, that if you try to come to them through me, every man jack you talk to might as well be taking his orders from Moscow, for all the help you’ll get from him.’

  ‘I see. You’d rather I didn’t go at all?’

  ‘To be blunt, Mr. Hankey, much rather. I cannot imagine what Mrs. Tarrant thinks she’s up to, setting you in there at a time like this. She knows, for I’ve told her often enough, what the mood is like along the waterfront. Hull is a hot town at the best of times, and the docks are the hottest part of it. We had trams burnt during the General Strike, which is worse than you can say of most of the towns in England. A lot of the men remember nineteen eleven, when there was rioting and arson, and warships in the Humber with their guns loaded. Now the men are still bitter from May—their leaders were all for staying out with the miners, and it was touch and go whether they went back. Trade’s bad, with no coal going out and a lot of the other firms not really recovered from the General Strike. The ship-owners have been losing profits all summer, and Monday week they’ll be announcing a cut in the men’s rates. There’d be trouble about that at the best of times. But now, with some of the men’s leaders arguing for blocking the coal imports . . .’

  ‘These leaders—they won’t be the men I’m looking for?’

  ‘One or two, maybe. There’s leaders and leaders. Hull’s not like other ports—the Unions haven’t the hold here, not since the owners broke them in ’ninety-three. There’s a lot of little organisations, and a tangle of loyalties and feuds. Suppose one were to pluck the leaders out from among them all of a sudden, just when trouble came to a head . . .’

  For the first time Mr. Hutton made a gesture, lifting his right hand and removing with precise fingers an imaginary particle from the air in front of him. He smiled rather pleasantly at Tom, as if apologising for the touch of melodrama, and returned his hand to his knee.

  ‘I understand,’ said Tom. ‘You don’t want me putting anyone on their guard, or making them nervier than they are already.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well I don’t propose to. I wasn’t going to go about it that way at all. I happen to be interested in boxing, and I believe one of the chaps I’m looking for may be too. I thought I’d start there.’

  Briefly he explained about Donovan. Mr, Hutton appeared to lose interest, scarcely in fact to be listening. When Tom finished he sighed.

  ‘What do you think?’ prompted Tom.

  ‘I think you’ll do no harm. I doubt you’ll do much good. But Mrs. Tarrant must have her way—I understand that.’

  The interview had seemed to be at an end, a waste of both their times. Mr. Hutton had got to his feet and was looking at the rain with a grim kind of pleasure as if it would suit his mood to trudge home to Hull through it instead of being chauffeured back in one of the Brantingham cars.

  ‘Do you think these men are dangerous?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Dangerous?’

  Mr. Hutton did not turn, and the word was almost too soft to hear.

  ‘I don’t mean in the sense that one might get knocked on the head,’ said Tom. ‘I suppose I mean are they worth finding? Are they really dangerous to society at large? No doubt they think of themselves as doing great things, but do they actually make much difference—I mean beyond stirring up a bit of trouble in the docks, making the odd strike a little more bitter than it might have been and so on? Mightn’t one do more harm by trying to get rid of them than by leaving them alone?’

  Slowly Mr. Hutton turned and looked at Tom, for the first time, it seemed, as though he might have something of interest to say. He drew his mouth together so that the lips disappeared and the little moustache marked where it ought to be. He took some time to answer.

  ‘That’s a good question,’ he said. ‘The answer to it is yes. They are dangerous. They are worth finding. If somebody could come in, like I was saying about the strike leaders, and pluck them away, he would have done the country a service.’

  ‘Couldn’t the police do that, supposing it was known who they were?’

  Mr. Hutton shook his head—a gesture typical of him, somehow both slight and emphatic.

  ‘There’s very few of them the police could hold,’ he said. ‘They’re too careful for that. Myself, I’m a strong believer in the law, but there comes a time when the law can’t act, and then somebody outside the law must act for it.’

  (No wonder, thought Tom, Bertie found Mr. Hutton impressive. It would be interesting to know whether they had ever talked about this sort of thing, or whether their understanding was intuitive. At least it was almost as though Mr. Hutton had guessed that Bertie’s private army, or something very like it, might exist.)

  ‘Well, that’s a great help,’ said Tom, rising. ‘It certainly sounds as though I ought to have a go.’

  Mr. Hutton stood where he was, still gazing at Tom, indeed now clearly studying him from head to toe, as if sizing him up and making a mental comparison with himself. When at last he moved it was not towards the door but back to the window.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing more,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t meant to, but I will. There’s a man they call Ricardo.’

  ‘A foreigner?’

  ‘I don’t think so. More of a nom de guerre. Don’t you breathe his name. Don’t you go even hinting that you might have heard he exists. I wouldn’t care to have it on my conscience that you were fished out of the river with your head split
open because of something I told you. Don’t even mention it to your own friends, or Mrs. Tarrant, or the police, in case it gets back. I’m putting my own life in your hands telling you this. But that’s the man you’re after. Not the fellow you met who’s interested in boxing, but the one who’s at the heart of all the trouble.’

  Mr. Hutton didn’t look at Tom as he spoke but gazed at the rain, as though as far as possible dissociating himself from the secret he was passing on. The effect was remarkably powerful. Ricardo at that moment sprang into Tom’s mind not as a vaguely rumoured bogey-man, but as a quite definite and serious adversary, capable of doing all that Mr. Hutton implied.

  ‘How did you hear of him?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t tell you that. I can risk my own safety on your good sense, but not anybody else’s.’

  ‘Right oh. I’ll stick to my boxing and see where I get.’

  The answer had been nowhere. The only glimmer of light had come on the very first day, when an old bruiser at the Hull Sporting Club had said he had heard of the man Tom was after but didn’t know his name. Tom gave him half a crown and he promised to make enquiries. But next morning the bruiser, very surly, returned the coin and said that the man he’d been thinking of had died last year. He knew of nobody else who could help and would make no suggestions. After that, to Tom’s increasing surprise and desperation, he achieved nothing. It proved impossible to get into conversation with any of the dock-workers. He would not have believed that there was a part of England in which a remark about the weather would not evoke a response of some kind from a stranger in a pub, but the best he got was a grunt, and more often than that a swearword or a blank look as though he had not spoken at all. One evening he heard a man ask a friend the closing score in the Leeds Test Match, but when Tom supplied the information the pair of them simply turned away. He began by Wednesday to feel that the men had actually received orders not to speak to him, though it seemed impossible that there could be any mechanism by which they could know his purpose—unless they had a spy among the Brantingham servants. Or could the silent John who had brought Bertie his Bollinger have spent the previous twenty minutes listening at the library door? By Friday evening he could think of nothing better to do than lurk in this chapel porch and peer at faces.

  The last stranger strode by and there was nothing to see but the blank side-walls of Rosemount Close and Paradise Close, with beyond them the corner of a bigger block, the Seaman’s Hostel—very likely the same one that Mrs. Tarrant had spoken of on the rockery. So very likely too the porch in which he was hiding belonged to one of ‘our’ churches. The thought widened the chasm. There seemed an immeasurable gulf between this sooty, hulking, dismal edifice and the neat little stone church beneath the woods at Brantingham, where Tom had attended Matins last Sunday and listened to his host, the Reverend Cyprian Tarrant, fluting his way through a sermon on the symbolic meaning of the two stones on the shoulders of the ephod described in Exodus 28, xii. Tom had been in the pew behind Judy, but she had been wearing one of those hats with an almost blinker-like brim framing the face, so he had had to make do with a view of a few square inches of neck for his only chance during the five days of the house-party to watch her without seeming to stare.

  With an exploding sigh of frustration he turned and opened the door of this chapel. It was not like Brantingham. That too was Victorian, but very plain and cool, with a clear country light behind the stained glass windows and the stones of arch and pillar cut from some open hill. This was brick, with plaster painted to look like marble; the pews were dark pine, the carpets and hangings a monotonous dull maroon, the windows dingy with exterior soot. The occasional sparkle of polished brass emphasised the gloom, and the air smelt stale and dusty. If one closed one’s eyes one might have been in a warehouse.

  Tom mooned around as one does in such places, reading the black-lettered brass plaques to the memory of dead aldermen, and the names of men killed in the war. For once there were more ships listed than regiments. To waste time thus seemed no more pointless than roaming the streets looking for his quarry until he had to catch the train to Brough. When at last he returned to the door his hand was on the handle before he realised that there were voices just outside—undistinguishable beyond belonging to a man and a woman, and arguing. He stepped back, assuming that they were about to enter as soon as they had composed themselves into chapel manners. The next words came clear, the woman saying ‘Ah, get off, you stupid git!’The man’s answer was indistinct, but had the banal rhythm of swearing for emphasis. The woman’s reply was cut short. Tom hesitated. He had little desire to intervene, but less to stand there listening and embarrassed, and miss his train to boot. He opened the door.

  They were in the dark-shadowed corner where he had lurked ten minutes ago. The woman was almost hidden, but clearly struggling. The man had her pinned against the wall with his arm round her shoulders and was trying to force his mouth against hers while she wriggled her head away. Neither had noticed the movement of the door. Tom felt an utter fool. He could quite well have slipped past and left them to solve their own problems, but this seemed to be, so to speak, culturally impossible. If his training had had any purpose, surely that purpose included the moment when he would need to ask some lady whether some gentleman was annoying her. He stepped forward and tapped the man on the shoulder.

  The struggle stilled. The man grabbed the woman’s arm and turned slowly round, giving Tom time to retreat a pace before their eyes met. For a moment the man stood there with his left arm twisted behind his back, still gripping his prey; his large oval face was flushed with struggle, his thick lips were moist and his eyes a furious blue. The woman, still invisible, was making a curious noise which Tom assumed to be sobbing, but before he could embark on the inane ritual of chivalry the man let go of her and rushed at him. Tom sprang back, caught his heel on the doorstep and sprawled into the aisle; even as he was falling he had seen the man’s rush converting itself into a kick. He twisted to one side. The heavy boot scraped painfully but not harmfully along his ham and buttock. Without thought he grabbed at the swinging ankle and heaved. The man flew on beyond him, yelling as he fell.

  They got to their feet together, three paces apart. At once the man lurched in, his right arm flailing back for an enormous punch. Tom slipped inside it and closed, driving his left hard into the man’s stomach, then stepped back to give himself room for his right. All the week-long waste compressed itself into the stabbing uppercut that caught the descending head full on the chin. Even the blaze of pain round Tom’s knuckles was like a shout of triumph. The man straightened. His head went up and sideways like an El Greco saint in prayer. The straightening movement continued and he went arcing over, landing on his back with a single huge thud. He did not move.

  Alarmed Tom knelt by his side and felt for his pulse with his left hand. A voice behind him said ‘Don’t you trouble, mister. He was three parts soused, and drunks fall easy.’

  Tom looked over his shoulder. The woman was standing under the arch of the doorway, her face as pink with effort as the man’s had been. But she wasn’t sobbing, she was laughing.

  ‘When he comes round and finds himself in chapel!’ she whispered.

  ‘I can’t just leave him . . . his pulse is OK . . . breathing . . .’

  ‘Sleeping like a babe,’ she said, coming nearer to gaze down at the man. ‘Tell you what, I’ll drop by Mrs. Pollock and get her to send one of the bairns round to his missus, tell her where to find him . . . Oi! I know who you are!’

  Tom had risen while she was speaking but stood where he was, uneasily studying the unconscious man. Startled by the change in her voice he turned. Her mouth was open, as if she’d started to blurt something out and stopped herself just in time, but he’d barely glimpsed the look when amazement became amusement.

  ‘You’re the one who fought Donovan!’ she said, and laughed aloud.

  She was no beauty—a square-set body in a shabby dark suit with a skirt six inches l
onger than anything Judy would have dreamed of wearing. Her face was squarish too, its features large, eyes dark but lively. Her hair was a golliwog tangle of jet-black curls which stuck out stiff as wire all round her head.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Er . . . can I see you anywhere?’

  It seemed an absurd offer, almost as out of place as his intervention in the porch, but she accepted it with a decisive nod.

  ‘If you please,’ she said, turning to the door.

  He held it for her and closed it behind them. In the porch she bent and picked up from the corner a shiny black straw hat. She patted her hair about, without as far as Tom could see having any effect on its intransigent stiffness, and settled the hat on top. Then she slipped her arm through Tom’s and stepped into the street.

  ‘My name’s Tom Hankey,’ he said, feeling that this sudden intimacy demanded some kind of introduction, however belated.

  ‘I’m Catherine Barnes.’

  ‘Oh. The, er . . .’

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘Agitator—I suppose it should be agitatrix, really.’

  ‘What a lovely word! Aye, that’s me, Red Kate Barnes.’

  ‘Are you going to the meeting?’

  ‘Aye, but how did you hear of it?’

  ‘Some of the men were shouting about it just now, on their way home.’

  ‘It’s my Uncle Ned, you see. According to him I’ve got to have a man along of me. He says it’s in case I have trouble with some of the Company men, but really he’s just set in his ideas about women.’

  From the first he had noticed an oddity in her voice. Now he saw that although she used the same vowels and rhythms as a workman she was actually an educated woman. She chose to speak as she did, but need not.

  ‘That chap in the church,’ he said. ‘He was supposed to be your escort?’