A Summer in the Twenties Read online

‘Our friends the police have been informed of the meeting, so let’s have no trouble, brothers. Let’s show the world we can make decisions with our minds. Let’s show the world we do not need our fists. Let’s . . .’

  The emphatic rhetoric was ruined by the voice, nasal, whining, thin. He would hardly have been heard without his speaking trumpet, but unfortunately what it added in power it lost in spread. He tried to remedy this by swinging from one part of his audience to another, spraying his words over the crowd like a child hosing a flower-bed. The first half of a sentence might be clear, and even cogent, but then he twisted away and the rest was lost in mutter. He attempted to overcome this further problem by repeating individual phrases in successive sentences, and also by using his arms a great deal for emphasis, wagging his forefinger, counting off points, shaking a clenched fist or slamming it into the other palm, or raising both arms in world-accepting gestures of embrace. As far as Tom could make out he was telling his hearers that the ship-owners had failed to keep some agreement which his union had negotiated in 1923, and had even tried to use it as an instrument of oppression beyond whatever oppression had existed before. He finished in a frenzy of barely audible rhetoric.

  ‘ . . . all over again? Will . . . never learn? Will the owners . . . ting is on the wall. They have made no official . . . firm for your rights. Stand firm for your . . . a living wage, brothers. It is not even a dying . . .’

  He was cheered at the end with great enthusiasm by men who, Tom thought, had been thoroughly bored by the whole performance. How could you take decisions on the basis of incomprehensible and mainly inaudible jargon? Mr. Pottinger climbed down and was replaced by a younger man with a round, suety and complacent face.

  ‘Sam Pragg, ‘ explained Mr. Barnes. ‘Gas Workers and Allied. Won’t like what Charlie’s been saying, but won’t show it. That was a joint agreement, twenty-three.’

  Mr. Pragg had a clear enough voice, but so heavy as to sound listless. Moreover he read his speech from a large green notebook. This was no doubt necessary as it consisted mainly of a great many dates and figures, apparently to do with the piecework rates for different grades of dockers. The men seemed to be listening with care and even grunting assent now and then, affirming Mr. Pragg’s veracity over a detail, but it meant very little to Tom. His eye was caught by a movement among the three or four men who stood just behind the platform, presumably on some kind of lower step, because their heads and shoulders rose clear of the audience. The movement was little more than a stare by one of them, a shared mutter, more stares and a nod or two. Carefully Tom turned to see what they had been looking at.

  Being a few inches taller than the average docker he was able to see over the massed heads to the edge of the wasteland. A group of men, dark-uniformed, were crossing the footbridge that spanned the Holderness Drain at its southern end, and along the fence by the Hedon Road two similar groups had appeared. These were clearly policemen, some thirty of them, simply standing and waiting. There seemed to be something a little different about the men crossing the footbridge, but he was too far off to make sure.

  Tom’s attention returned to Mr. Pragg, who had closed his notebook and was embarking on his peroration, which was strangely impressive. He was able to speak in quiet, almost fatherly tones but still be heard.

  ‘The companies have let us down,’ he said. ‘It is not through incompetence, though Lord knows they have their share of incompetents on the boards. Sometimes I think they breed incompetents deliberate to put on the boards. No, lads, this time they have let us down because they wanted to let us down. They wanted to show us who’s master. A crack of the whip and we’ll come to heel, they thought. And will we so come to heel? Eh, lads, will we?’

  ‘No,’ bayed the crowd, and broke into cheering. Mr. Pragg nodded at them like a master whose class has given the right answer to a school inspector and smiled for the first time.

  There was a brief pause while he climbed down, and Tom was about to ask Mr. Barnes what on earth gas workers had to do with a dispute in the docks when somebody yelled ‘Where’s Kate?’

  ‘What have ye done with Kate?’ called someone else.

  ‘Married her off to the boss’s son,’ chanted several voices to the tune of Nuts in May.

  ‘Boss’s son, Boss’s son,’ sang several hundred men, out of both time and tune. ‘Married her off to the boss’s son on Christmas Day in the morning.’

  This was evidently an old joke and popular, another element of half-ritualised horseplay which Tom found comforting, though he could see that Mr. Barnes didn’t much care for it. Then Miss Barnes herself climbed or was lifted onto the platform, looking flustered but cheerful.

  ‘I’m still here,’ she called, as the applause died away. ‘I told him to ask me again some time.’

  ‘When, Kate, when?’

  ‘When his father pays the workers a living wage.’

  This evidently ancient riposte was answered by another baying cheer, during which Miss Barnes made meaningless adjustments to the position of her hat on her shock of hair. Then she lowered her hands and held them waist-high, arms half spread, a signal answered by almost immediate silence. She launched herself into her speech with absolute confidence, in a clear carrying voice that could afford to start at a seemingly quiet level and still leave plenty of room for crescendi.

  ‘My father died in the Alexandra,’ she said. ‘A derrick slewed and crushed him. The company paid my mother twenty-five pounds compensation. Twenty-five pounds for a man in his prime. That was the going rate, then. And it would still be the going rate if the Companies had their way. If you men had not fought year after year and generation after generation for better wages and better conditions.

  ‘Your committee have asked me to speak to you, but if they hadn’t, I would still have the right. And what gives me the right? Not my father who died for twenty-five pounds in the Alexandra. Not my grandfather, who worked the Victoria, when there was work, for twenty-two shillings a week. Not my great-grandfather who came to Hull to dig the St Andrews Extension. No. It is my mother, and my grandmothers, and my great-grandmothers. Women of Hull who generation after generation have had to feed their men and raise their children on a wage that would not keep one of Mrs. Tarrant’s lap-dogs in chicken for a week. Generation after generation you men have fought to raise that wage. You have squeezed a penny here and a penny there to feed your women and your bairns from men who have let you have it as though each farthing was their own hearts’ blood. And these were the men, these were the men, who thought nothing of buying gold horseshoes to bury their favourite hunter!

  ‘And now what, comrades? Now what? These self-same men are trying to take those farthings back! They are trying to take those farthings back at a time when prices are rising. You know that the tobacco in your pipe costs more this year than it did last year. You ask your woman, and she’ll tell you that the meat in your dish and the clothes on the backs of your bairns and even the soap she scrubs her front step with all cost more! And where is that extra money going? Is it going to provide better wages for your comrades who stitch those clothes and your comrades who boil that soap? No it is not. It is going straight into the pockets of the shareholders.

  ‘And who are these shareholders? Why, they are the very men and women who sit on the boards of the shipping companies.

  ‘This is the great capitalist conspiracy. The self-same men who are sending out the notices next Monday, the notices informing you of a cut in your rates, these men are going back to their clubs to lunch off lobster and champagne and pay for it with money that you have given them when you buy shirts for the backs of your bairns. This very Monday you will get the notices. It is all very well for Charlie Pottinger to say that the Companies have made no statement. Nor have they. Nor will they. They will just give each of you a notice when you come to work on Monday.

  ‘How do I know? I know because I have seen that notice I know because I have a copy of it here.’

  Her hand plunged into
the side-pocket of her jacket and pulled out a buff-coloured sheet of paper which she unfolded and brandished in the air. A solid roar arose from the crowd, nothing like the jocular crowing that had greeted her when she began, but a deep, angry bellow. Objectively Miss Barnes’s style was extremely effective. The short sentences, the repetitions, the slow delivery that ensured that not a word was lost but at the same time never dragged thanks to the sustained energy of her personality—these could not have been better done. Earlier Tom had thought for a moment that she had something of the appeal of a steam locomotive, and now he saw that he had been right. In action she had just that impression of blunt unmitigated power driving with all its energy towards its distant purpose. Her wild hair, her flushed and passionate face, transcended categories of human beauty and made her something other—Bellona, Tom’s schoolmasters would have said, breathing rage into the minds of men. The classic image was quite inappropriate. Though she had appealed to the past at the beginning of her speech she seemed to Tom a new and very dangerous phenomenon.

  For, though impressed, he was also deeply shocked, not so much by what she said as by the fact that it was her saying it. It seemed to him that her performance was an act, put on to deceive unsophisticated listeners, and that the real Miss Barnes was the pleasant, quiet, amused and intelligent woman who had walked with him down the Hedon Road. That woman had been much too perceptive and subtle to believe the misleading simplicities she was mouthing. He noticed that she had not started calling her listeners ‘Comrades’ until she was sure that she had them hooked. And the details she chose to illustrate her argument, though dramatic and effective, were coarsely out of alignment with the truth. Yes, Mrs. Tarrant did keep two yapping and neurotic dachshunds, but she was unlikely to feed them on chicken. It would be one of Mrs. Tarrant’s many certainties that dogs should eat dog-food. And yes, Lord Belford, Woffles’s grandfather, had buried his favourite mare in golden horseshoes, but the gold had been paper thin, and Belford had never turned a labourer off any of his farms because the man was too old or ill to work, but had kept them all and their widows on pensions in their own cottages, rent free, even when it meant building new houses for the men who replaced them on the farms. The world Tom knew was other than what Miss Barnes declared it to be.

  As he watched her hold her sheet of paper aloft like a fiery cross he felt ashamed for her, and was beginning to wish he had not stayed for the meeting. Then, in the middle of the cheering, something altered. There was a moment of uncertainty in her movements. A small dark object flashed past her head, and the next instant another struck her shoulder and burst apart, manifesting itself to have been a clod of earth. The volume of shouting faltered, changed, rose. More clods flew. Miss Barnes did not flinch, but held up her arms for silence, peering at the same time in the direction of the attack with a vague and craning stare that made Tom realise suddenly that she was extremely short-sighted. Several more missiles flew, but only one hit her. They must appear to her to be coming at her from out of a misty sea of faces, though Tom thought there were only two, or possibly three, groups of assailants, one quite close to him. He turned and saw an upheaval in the crowd, a definite centre of scuffling. The men round him were pressing in that direction, yelling with anger. Tom moved with them without thought until a hand tugged at his elbow.

  ‘You better stay out on this,’ shouted Mr. Barnes.

  Tom nodded and began to work his way sideways, clear of the press of men. It was thus that he saw what happened next.

  The fight was taking place right on the edge of the crowd. Three, or perhaps four men, were defending themselves against the rest. Despite the numerical odds they had a momentary advantage because they had armed themselves with rough clubs of driftwood, picked up presumably on the wasteland before the fighting started; but the crowd was closing round them like an amoeba digesting a particle and in a few seconds they would be overwhelmed. Just before the crisis of the fight a man who had been standing a little clear of the crowd drew something from his jacket pocket, pulled his cap down to cover his eyes and barged into the melee. His arm rose. The thing in his hand was a revolver, which he pointed at the sky. Before the shock of the explosion was over his arm was withdrawn and he was barging his way out of the crowd again. With rapid, rehearsed movements he snatched his cap from his head, stuffed it into his pocket and knotted a red scarf round his neck.

  The shot produced only a brief shock-wave of silence before fresh roars began, but the man who had fired it turned almost jauntily and began to thread his way clear. Tom was about to follow him when he saw Mr. Barnes jammed between two larger men who were struggling to close with the men with the clubs. Tom took him by the shoulder and heaved him clear.

  ‘I saw the chap with the gun,’ he shouted. ‘He wasn’t one of you.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There! Red scarf!’

  At once Mr. Barnes dashed after the man and seized him by the sleeve. The man swung round, his fist doubled for a blow. Mr. Barnes flung up an arm and warded it off. Tom was rushing to help when a swirl of men hurtled against him from the flank. His legs caught against each other and he fell to his knees, but rose at once and shoved his way towards where Mr. Barnes was still gripping the man’s sleeve and with his other arm protecting his own head. Before he could reach them another rush of men, dark uniformed, closed round them. Truncheons rose and fell and Tom saw Mr. Barnes stagger to one side with blood streaming down his cheek. The man with the scarf was slipping away between two policemen. Tom ran forward and caught Mr. Barnes by the shoulders, shouting ‘No! No!’ and holding up his free arm to cover the old man’s head from the next blow. The shock of it numbed his fore-arm, and in almost the same instant something crashed against his own head. There was pain and a dark red roaring, another shock of pain and darkness.

  Consciousness came in waves, first as mere pain in the head, followed by more blackness. Then, added to the pain, there was knowledge of being face down on harsh earth with a huge weight on his shoulders, his right arm twisted behind him, and sour vomit in his mouth, mixed with the softer taste of blood. Next time he could hear the yelling and the sharp bark of orders, and knew where he was, lying on a patch of waste by the Hull docks while a man knelt on his back and locked his arm behind him. Around him the police were breaking up the strike meeting. When he tried to protest and ease his position the man on his back swore and twisted his arm still further. The pain slid him back into darkness.

  But now through the darkness he could still feel pain, and hear the shouts and fighting, and a new roaring, the engines of large vehicles like lorries, throbbing erratically closer as their drivers eased them across the hummocky ground. They ceased. The shouts moved further away and the voices of command became less urgent. ‘Right, Ted, we’ll have your one now,’ said someone. The weight left Tom’s shoulders. Hands seized his arms and dragged him up, then thrust him, staggering through red-gold glare, towards a dark bulk. All edges were blurred and double. His shin bashed a sharp barrier, ‘Step up, you silly bugger.’ Obediently he pawed for the step with a foot, found nothing, was heaved from the ground and thrown forward, sprawling.

  Men caught him half fallen and passed him, crouched and staggering sideways, easing him onto a harsh bench, close against someone’s shoulder. Almost at once, with new noises of stumbling and scrabbling, a body thudded onto the bench on his far side, propping him upright. He moved his head to and fro trying to clear the darkness, but then perceived that it lay outside his mind, that he was sitting in a dark tunnel lit only by an upright slit through which several more men—blurred forms still—stumbled or were propelled.

  The slit closed with a bang. Locks rattled. The throbbing engine roared and the darkness began to jolt and sway. Men clutched at each other, swore, groaned. Somebody vomited. Tom’s head hurt too much for him to think or consider anything at all, or do more than accept without noticing the easing of the jolts and change of gears when the truck reached a road surface and could move faster and mo
re smoothly.

  When the drive stopped and the door was thrown open he found that despite the continued pain his vision was improving. He could see that he had been sitting in a large, metal-walled space with benches down either side on which two rows of men faced each other, tight packed, many with bloody faces, and all looking sick, or at least stunned. A voice barked ‘Let’s have you, then! One at a time!’ A large policeman climbed into the space and moved down the centre gangway, peeling the men from the benches by snatching at a shoulder and as the sitter rose giving him a shove towards the door. Tom emerged to find the fading daylight darkened by the walls of a small courtyard across which the file of men from the truck was being hustled between two ranks of policemen. The prisoner in front of him paused in his shambling trot and turned as if to make some sort of protest but before he had begun the policeman behind him seized his elbow and propelled him on, maintaining the momentum of subjection. Tom was in no state to think out a course of action, but instinct and schooling told him that there was no point in protesting to underlings. These policemen were simply the cogs and rollers of a conveyor belt; somewhere somebody controlled a switch.

  There was a short, dank, stone-flagged corridor, a half-flight of steps down to another corridor lit by yellow-green gas, a door on one side through which the men ahead of Tom vanished, a heavy clang of metal and a shove in the chest, forcing him to jostle back against the men behind, another door unlocked and a counter-shove on his shoulder-blade forcing him on and through into a small bare cell lit by a heavy-barred window a foot square. Men followed him. The door clanged. Its lock snicked. All the men in the cell let out their breath in a long, communal sigh. Somebody said ‘It’s a bugger, eh?’ Nobody demurred. ‘Our friends the police,’ said someone else, ‘Half on ’em sodding dock rozzers.’ Grunts of assent. Another sigh. ‘Az onyonyeonyonye?’ Cigarettes were passed round. Tom shook his head when one was pushed at him, but the man said ‘Best have one now, mate. They’ll be taking them off of us.’ Tom accepted the wizened object, bent to the last half-inch of a shared match and sucked the smoke in. It was as rank as cow-manure but its very pungency seemed to clear his brain. The men smoked in silence, venting little mutters of outrage and disbelief, calming their shock like a sleeper woken from a nightmare who attempts to restore his confidence in the solid world with small twitches and movements, only gradually loosening the residual stillness of dread.