The Rotters' Club (34 page)

*

When he saw the ranks of pickets gathered outside the factory gates and spread throughout the surrounding roads, Bill felt intensely proud. The object was not to prevent the strike-breakers’ bus from getting into the factory – it would probably make for the back entrance, anyway – but to provide a show of support for Grunwick’s beleaguered strikers, who had not wavered in their resolve for fifteen months now, despite many setbacks in the Appeal Court and at best equivocal encouragement from the TUC. Bill was to learn on the news that evening that eight thousand pickets had travelled from all over the country to be at the factory. It was an extraordinary display of faith and goodwill and solidarity: just what the British labour movement needed at the moment. His own men, a week earlier, had voted against his wishes to accept a new centralized bargaining arrangement from the managers. He had been disheartened by this, and he didn’t trust the plans of British Leyland’s new Chairman, Michael Edwardes, whose appointment had been announced on November 1st. These were bad times to be a socialist, he thought. He could feel the old certainties slipping away. But this morning seemed to contradict all that. This morning was going to be remembered as a great day in the history of the workers’ struggle.

Word got around from the other end of the factory that a bus had indeed managed to squeeze through the picket lines, and the company’s handful of loyal workers were safely inside. Then a scattered cheer warmed the frosty air as Jayaben Desai climbed on to a makeshift wooden platform and prepared to make a brief speech to her supporters. She had run into Bill in the crowd a few minutes earlier and they had exchanged friendly greetings. Looking at her now, Bill again felt ashamed of the way he had automatically responded to so many women in recent years, that tired reflex, that deadening habit of seeing nothing but a quick sexual possibility. It was impossible to watch Jayaben without feeling… well, more than impressed. His admiration for her bordered on awe. She seemed tiny, on that platform – she was less than five feet tall – but somehow she could make of herself an amazingly charismatic focus of attention. Perhaps it was the brightly coloured sari, in a black sea of overalls and donkey jackets. But Bill thought it was more than that. It was her hurried eloquence and still determination and restless, inquisitive, laughing eyes. It was the mantle of authority the long months of this dispute had draped on her.

The speeches were over, and it was time to leave. Police cordons were blocking both exits from the road, making it impossible, at the moment, either to enter the tube station at Dollis Hill or to reach Dudden Hill Lane where the coaches were parked. The pickets were confused, but patient. Soon enough the police would draw back and let them through. The men stood in groups, laughing, swapping jokes and cigarettes, waiting for movement. The police ignored them, keeping rank and staring fixedly ahead, unreadable, impassive.

Where did the order come from? How was it passed along so quickly? Bill was never able to work it out. All he knew was that suddenly, there was a mighty rush of feet and a surge forward and the pickets were under attack. The police charged into them and set to work with fists and truncheons.

He had no coherent memory of the assault but some images lodged in his mind.

A teenager being lifted by two policemen and smashed head first into the bonnet of a car.

A press photographer having his camera seized and stamped to pieces.

An elderly West Indian being rammed up against a low garden wall and then levered over it, his legs contorting as he landed in a twisted heap.

Jayaben Desai being dragged by her hair through the flinching and bewildered crowd.

A middle-aged white woman seized by the neck and forced to the ground.

A black worker in his thirties, one of Bill’s coach party, pinned to the road and repeatedly kicked in the neck and face by two young officers.

Screaming and shouting and swearing all around him, cries of distress, eyes flaring to life with fear and hostility, faces caked with blood, blood on the pavement and driveways too, torn clothing, the crashing of glass, shop windows, car windows, windscreens, all splintering into chaos, and then the last thing of all, a young policeman, no more than a boy, nineteen or twenty maybe, young enough to be his son, his lips curled in a meaningless parody of hatred, something spilling out of his mouth that was halfway between a swearword and a primal scream, his truncheon upraised. Bill could remember lifting up a feeble arm and feeling it jolted aside with a horrible crack and then the truncheon must have come down and he was well and truly out of it.

Later that afternoon, the coach was parked at Watford services again. Bill stayed on board with Sam this time. His head was bandaged up and his arm was in a sling but he felt OK. Other people had suffered worse. There’d been about two hundred and fifty pickets treated for injuries that day. MPs were already pressing for an inquiry that would never materialize and a crowd had been demonstrating outside Willesden Green police station for most of the afternoon. It had turned out to be a historic day, all right, but not quite in the way he’d envisaged.

‘What are you reading?’ he asked.

Sam had been absorbed in a book for the last five minutes. Now he held it up for Bill’s inspection.

‘Twenty-five Magic Steps to Word Power,’
Bill read, and chuckled. ‘Trying to improve yourself, are you?’

‘Language is very important,’ said Sam.

‘That’s true.’

‘It says here –’ (Sam flicked back through the pages to the author’s introduction) ‘– Listen to this, it says:
The leaders of the world through the ages have recognized the miracle of words’

‘Also true.’

‘The English statesman, John Selden, said three centuries ago that “Syllables govern the world”.’

‘I’d go along with that.’

‘When a Hitler, a Mussolini or a Peron takes over, his first act is to commandeer words – the press, the radio, and hooks.’

‘Very well put.’

‘Even in a democracy words are magic instruments. He who governs, or wants to govern, must be skilled in the science of employing words. Man is more influenced by language than the facts of surrounding reality.’

‘That guy knows what he’s talking about.’

‘In truth,’
Sam concluded,
‘a word can cut deeper than a sword.’

Bill laid an exploratory hand on his bandaged head, and winced. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘a crack on the skull with a truncheon can get your message across, too. D’you know what I’m saying?’

Sam smiled, and put the book aside thoughtfully.

19

THE BILL BOARD

Thursday, 15 December, 1977

EDITORIAL: Disband the Praetorian Guard

Here’s a question for all KW’s go-getting Oxbridge candidates, the much-vaunted
crème de la crème
of Birmingham’s intelligentsia: what links the mass picket at the Grunwick processing factory, as shown on our television screens last month, with something you see in Big School every day at morning assembly?

Stumped? Well, think of that scary image from the Grunwick protest: row upon row of hatchet-faced policemen, truncheons at the ready, all lined up to protect the interests of the managers. And now think of the row of prefects standing in front of the stage in Big School every morning, forming a protective barrier between us lot (the mob) and our esteemed Chief Master as he stands there dispensing his nuggets of homely wisdom.

OK, so the prefects don’t carry truncheons. (Yet.) And there isn’t much in the faces of Lambert, C. J. or Pinnick, W. H. C., as they stand there swaying from side to side and looking justifiably embarrassed, to strike fear into the soul of the prospective school revolutionary. But the principle is the same. What is a school prefect, after all, for all the ludicrous ‘prestige’ that is supposed to attach to the job, but a glorified henchman for the Chief Master? A hired thug, in other words: except that the thugs the Chief Master hires usually look as though they would have difficulty roughing up a mischievous cub scout, and all they receive for their pains is a nice new tie and a pretty little badge for their Mummies to sew on to their blazers over the Christmas holidays.

In classical times, the Praetorian Prefect was the commander of the imperial bodyguard, an elite squad formed by the Emperor Augustus to prevent any recap of that nasty business with Julius Caesar. Unfortunately they did not prove the most trustworthy of helpers and the institution was abolished by Septimius Severus who concluded that they were just as likely to kill him as protect him. Would that today’s prefects showed as much spirit!

The Bill Board has not run many campaigns in the last few terms: our editorial policy has usually been to present our readers with the facts, and allow them to make up their own minds. But this is an issue about which we all, collectively, have very strong feelings. Quite simply, we believe that this enfeebled hangover from the days of imperial skulduggery has no place in a distinguished and forward-looking school in the 1970s.

We urge our readers to petition the Chief Master and Mr Nuttall on this subject. And, since another batch of prefects will have been ‘elected’ (how, or by whom, we mere commoners are never permitted to know) by the time this edition comes out, we also make this plea to the new appointments. Resist! Say no to those establishment perks! It is no kind of privilege to become the oppressor of your former comrade-in-arms!

SIGNED,

Doug Anderton…

‘… Signed, Doug Anderton, et cetera.’

Doug finished reading from his typescript and looked around for support. He found it at once.

‘Good stuff,’ said Claire, emphatically. ‘Very good indeed. I don’t mind signing that.’

She scribbled her signature beneath Doug’s and passed the sheet of paper on to Philip. He shook his head worriedly. ‘This’ll put the cat among the pigeons,’ he muttered. But he agreed with everything that Doug had written, and added his signature to Claire’s.

‘Benjamin?’ said Doug.

Benjamin hesitated for longer than Philip. As always, he was impressed by the power of Doug’s rhetoric and the clarity of his thinking. He envied him his ability to choose his position and defend it fiercely when, for his own part, he was cursed with the compulsion always to see both sides of every argument. He was friendly with several prefects and tended to think that they were decent people trying to do a difficult job. It was all very complicated.

‘Well… OK,’ he said, and signed the editorial too. He was an artist, after all, and artists had to do something politically controversial every so often.

That left only Emily Sandys, the newest recruit to the editorial team, who seemed more reluctant than anyone to commit herself to this act of subversion. Doug stared at her, almost accusingly, as if this was exactly what he had been expecting. He disliked Emily for the very same reason that Benjamin was secretly drawn to her: she was one of the leading lights behind the joint Boys’ and Girls’ School Christian Society. Benjamin had never actually aligned himself with this unfashionable organization, of course. By temperament he was not a joiner of groups, and in any case, he could never have lived with the social stigma. The Christians were held to be at the very bottom of the King William’s evolutionary scale, even lower than the Combined Cadet Force or a miserable-looking trio of bus-spotters who called themselves the Public Service Vehicle Group. The very thought of them conjured up grisly images of woollen sweaters and table-tennis evenings and Bible-study meetings heavy with the scents of furtive adolescent sexual attraction and lingering body odour. These people were simply too awful to contemplate. But Emily, in Benjamin’s eyes, was different. She was clever and she could take a joke and her design ideas had transformed the paper in the last few months and neither he nor Philip nor even Doug had failed to notice that she also had a thoroughly distracting body, in a plump, curvy sort of way.

‘What will happen if I don’t sign it?’ she wanted to know.

Doug looked around the table, and let out a long breath to signify the gravity of the situation.

‘Well, to be honest, Emily, I think you would have to resign. Because the rest of the board is completely united on this one, and we’re planning to throw the whole weight of the paper behind the campaign.’

‘Oh.’ She looked very disappointed. ‘But I love coming to these meetings. They’ve been such good fun.’

Doug shrugged his shoulders. The choice was hers.

‘All right,’ said Emily, and the fifth and final signature was added to the typescript. Doug took the sheet of paper back and looked at it with a smile of satisfaction.

‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘A significant moment in the history of
The Bill Board.’

Significant but, as it turned out, short-lived. Ten minutes later, Benjamin was forced to resign from the editorial team. A messenger from the Chief Master had put his head round the door of the meeting room to tell him that he had just been made a prefect.

‘You couldn’t have turned it down,’ said Philip, consolingly, at the bus stop later that day. ‘You don’t get
asked
to be a prefect, you get
told
to be a prefect.’

‘Exactly,’ said Benjamin.

‘I mean, if you turned it down, there are all sorts of ways the school could take it out on you.’

‘Quite.’

‘They might never give you a reference. Or they might write to Oxford or Cambridge and tell them you were a troublemaker and weren’t to be trusted.’

‘Absolutely. That’s what I’ve been telling everyone.’

‘You had no choice in the matter, really. It’s just your rotten luck that they decided to pick on you.’

Benjamin smiled his gratitude and wondered, not for the first time, why everybody couldn’t be as reasonable as Philip. It was all the more magnanimous of him given that he and Doug and Harding had not even, inexplicably, been elected to the Carlton Club. Why had Benjamin been singled out for such high distinction, then? It seemed to make no sense. Almost all of his friends had been scathing when they heard of the appointment. Doug had treated him to a ten-minute lecture on ‘selling out to the establishment’. Claire had simply stopped talking to him. Emily had been quite kind, it was true, but a more reliable foretaste of the delights to come was provided at this very moment by two of Paul’s little contemporaries, running up to him at the bus stop.