The Storytellers (20 page)

C
HAPTER

I
N THE THIRD week of March, Argentine soldiers landed on the British island of South Georgia, a remote and largely uninhabited territory in the South Atlantic, once used for whaling. A fortnight later, and taken completely by surprise, the British Falkland Islands Government surrendered to Argentinean troops. Located some 300 miles from the South American coast, and almost 1,000 miles northwest of South Georgia, the Falkland Islands had long been claimed by Argentina even though it was the British who had colonized them in the 1840s. A day after the surrender, a Royal Navy task force set sail from Portsmouth to the Falklands, a journey of 7,876 miles. The hastily drawn-up plan called for the ships to be provisioned en route. The British were at war.

From the first moment of hostilities, Sylvia was on the edge of her seat following every twist and turn of the unfolding drama on her little monochrome screen.

“Now you'll see what a woman can do,” she almost sang as the Prime Minister declared a 200-mile exclusion zone around the islands.

When a party of Royal Marines recaptured South Georgia at the end of April, and a week later a Vulcan bomber from Ascension
Island made the 8,000-mile round trip to bomb Port Stanley Airport so that it couldn't be used by the Argentine Air Force, being refuelled in mid-air on the way out and on the way back, she was ecstatic.

“The Argies don't stand a chance against Maggie,” she whooped when it was announced that the nuclear submarine
HMS Conqueror
had sunk the Argentine battle cruiser the
General Belgrano
.

When
HMS Sheffield
was hit by an Exocet missile and sank a few days later, she was crestfallen.

“Those poor boys,” she said, almost weeping when it was reported that the frigate
HMS Antelope
had been torn apart following an unsuccessful attempt to defuse two Argentine bombs which pierced the ship but had initially failed to explode.

Harvey was in and out of
The Sentinel
offices getting updates from their embedded reporter on the scene. The British amphibious landings at San Carlos Water were being relentlessly harried by Argentine fighters. Initially it was hoped to bypass the Argentines' well-defended but largely static encampment at Goose Green, some 13 miles south of San Carlos, and advance directly on Port Stanley, 50 miles to the east. But, with the landings at the beachhead appearing to stall, the government was anxious to demonstrate momentum and a decision was taken to attack Goose Green.

It was late evening on 29th May when Harvey was called into
The Sentinel
office. George Gilder was looking anxious. The first land offensive of the war had been underway for almost 48 hours.

“We're getting reports of casualties, Harvey,” George told him as soon as he entered the conference room the great editor had established as his command centre. The use of his Christian name suggested to the journalist that all was not well.

“Have we lost?” Harvey asked.

“No,” George replied. “The reports coming in suggest we have won. But it looks as though David Graham might have been killed.”

“Frances Graham's husband?” Harvey asked incredulously. “I
didn't know he was involved.”

“An SAS unit took part in a softening-up exercise apparently,” he explained. “The usual stuff: ludicrous bravery and horribly effective. You knew he was a Special didn't you?”

“I suppose I did,” Harvey answered. “But I hadn't really got much beyond him being a Highland chieftain with a great eye for beauty and a low threshold for boredom.”

“A typical SAS officer!” George mused. “It seems the battle that followed was a lot tougher than expected. The final count's not in yet,” he added, as if recounting a cricket score, “but it looks as though seventeen of our lot were killed and some sixty or so wounded. The Argentines almost certainly lost many more and we have ended up with a thousand of them as prisoners.”

“A thousand!” Harvey exclaimed. “It must have been a big encampment.”

“Mostly conscripts, we're hearing, who weren't that thrilled to be stuck on a barren island, but they were well dug in and we were outnumbered. Downing Street is cock-a-hoop. There'll be medals for sure, quite a few posthumous, sadly.”

“A great comfort to their families,” Harvey remarked drily, the image of a distraught Frances Graham welling up inside his head.

“Fighting's what soldiers do, Mudd, and with fighting comes dying.”

His editor's gentle rebuke was clear. And of course he was right. But it was politicians who moved the chess pieces taking much of the glory from success and escaping most of the blame when there was failure. Several months later, he learned that Lieutenant-Colonel Piaggi, the Argentine officer who had surrendered after fourteen hours of fierce fighting, when continuing would have been pointless, had been discharged from the army in disgrace. The man he had surrendered to, Major Chris Keeble, who had taken over command after his own officer, Lieutenant-Colonel H. Jones, had been killed in the action, was awarded membership of the Distinguished Service
Order. Sara Jones later accepted her husband's Victoria Cross, awarded for his conspicuous bravery in the face of the enemy, proud that he had helped prevent a small country from being overrun. These were the fortunes of war and perhaps, Harvey thought, of life itself.

* * *

It was after 5.00 a.m. when he eventually left
The Sentinel
offices. The news from the front was in and the blatantly jingoistic front page crafted:
Argentines Trounced – Goose Green and Darwin Liberated!
Inside were pictures of sorry-looking prisoners and residents happy to be free and out of harm's way, along with stories of derring-do which would have sat easily inside any
Boys Own
magazine.

As he walked the largely empty streets, he smiled to himself at the thought of a hard-nosed conservative doing more to discredit a Latin American junta than all the liberal handwringing that had accompanied South America's uneasy path towards democracy. Even Margaret Thatcher's warm relationship with General Pinochet of Chile was pragmatic. She simply admired people who got things done and did them properly. Democracy could be as messy and unproductive as dictatorship could be cruel and fallible. Democracy may have been a terrible system of government although better than all the rest, but he did think too many excuses were made for its failings. It could surely be improved. Even dictators knew how to hide behind a plebiscite, and as the troubles of the 1970s amply illustrated, vested interests within a democracy were no less artful.

He passed two young men staggering back from a late-night party. The girl they were propping up grinned at him and then bent over to be sick. He couldn't get Frances Graham out of his head and tried to persuade himself that he was concerned for her welfare, which he was, but what about his mother's conviction that their inauspicious friendship had a future? In a witch-believing world it would have been
said that she had ridden on a broomstick to Goose Bay, transformed herself into an Argentinean soldier and done away with the obstacle to her son's happiness. What rubbish!

As he approached Buttesland Street, tiredness, which the excitement of the night had kept at bay, began to catch up with him. And yet he felt content. His work was going well. He was seeing the world more clearly, although that could have been an illusion. His relationship with Suzie had been going nowhere and was over. Now there seemed reason for hope.

Frances Graham! Would a note of condolence be appropriate? Or was that a little formal and working class? He could hardly say nothing. A short note might be better, expressing his concern without assuming too much about their relationship. Something casual, not forced, warm and yet respectful, and then he laughed out loud. How hard was casual? Only when he was outside the door did he notice the light shining through the curtains of the front room. Leaving lights on was not something his mother did.

‘Don't forget the lights, Harve,' she would say. ‘The electricity company makes enough money without us giving them extra.'

Entering the room, he could see the top of her head above the back of the chair and the cold grey light of the television staring back at him, showing only the test card. His heart muscles became tense and felt fear.

“Mum?” he said as he moved in front of her, only to find her head bent back, her mouth open and her eyes staring up at the ceiling like a loon. He reached down for the spot on her neck where one was supposed to feel a pulse, but felt only a clammy cold. He quickly went back to the hall and started to dial for an ambulance – but stopped halfway, replacing the receiver.

Back in the living room, he closed her eyes and sat down in a chair opposite. The familiar sounds of the house were strangely reassuring. He could pretend that nothing had changed. The wheels
of death would start turning soon enough: ambulance, hospital, death certificate, funeral arrangements, the funeral itself, replying to letters of condolence, sorting through her things, the will – he knew what that contained; they'd written it together, probate, wondering what to do with the house, adjusting to life without her. For what remained of the night he simply wanted to be alone with the person who had been the mainstay of his life for thirty-five years.

And who was this person, or who had this person been? She was the child who had sat on her father's knee listening to tales of The Great War. She was the twenty-two-year-old who had sat by her parents' radio listening to the Prime Minister's gravelly voice urging his countrymen ‘to fight on until the curse of Hitler is lifted from the brows of men'. She was the young woman in the audience with her fiancé to hear Carmen performed at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, the company's first operatic production since the war. She was the mother holding a Union Jack who had been waiting in the Mall, undeterred by terrible weather, to cheer the Queen on as she passed by towards her coronation. She had become a widow; she had worked to sustain herself; she had brought up her son, never once complaining about life's injuries, because for her, life's blessings had always seemed greater.

Harvey tried to remember his father, but beyond the photograph lovingly placed above the mantel, he couldn't. He remembered the funeral. He knew that his father had been a hard-working, decent man, because that is what Sylvia told him.

‘Your father was a good man, Harvey, a good provider.' How many times had he heard those words? Looking back he realized they had been offered up as an incantation against his own moments of idleness. But the man himself? Whenever he attempted to look back, it was his mother's presence he encountered. He smiled, recollecting the ceremony in Oxford's Bodleian Library where he had received his degree with his mother standing so proud telling anyone within
earshot, ‘That's Harvey Mudd, my son!'

He had come to realize that those of his university acquaintances of a socialist persuasion would have regarded his mother's ideas as unsophisticated and simple. And perhaps they
were
simple. Her two core beliefs were that deeds counted for more than words and that to give up responsibility for oneself was to accept a form of slavery. While left-wing radicals talked loudly about saving mankind, she would be round at a neighbour's house helping out. It was not that she thought men shouldn't organize to protect themselves – that was what a nation was for, after all – but to sell one's soul to the devil, to union bosses, or to national politicians in return for promises of succour, well that, for Sylvia, was a blank cheque too far. She admired the sentiments behind the welfare state, created after the Second World War, but remained acutely suspicious of its implementation.

‘You mark my words, Harvey,' she told him, more than once, ‘if it is left to politicians, they'll just try to bribe us with our own money. It will end badly.'

Had she studied economics, Harvey thought, she would have added ‘and better still, try to bribe us with our children's children's money', until that great Ponzi scheme was exposed for the fraud it was. Her sophistication lay in an implicit belief that life was about what individuals did to and for each other. Institutions were essential means to specific ends, but never a substitute for that. Had his mother lived long enough she would have understood exactly what Margaret Thatcher meant when she said there was no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families, even if more sophisticated commentators would feign otherwise.

He must have dozed off because suddenly he became aware of sunlight streaming though the curtains and the smell of death permeating the room. He got up, kissed his mother on the forehead and went to the hall to call an ambulance, dabbing tears from his eyes. Life was for the living, not the dead.

Part Three

C
HAPTER

I
T WAS 1983. Since his compact with the security service and break-up with Miranda de Coursey, Jack Pugh had become an increasingly bitter man. He had seen the financier's daughter once since Oxford. She had taken him on holiday with her to the French Riviera where he had wallowed in the luxury that surrounded her, only to be humiliated in front of her friends and dismissed at the end with the crushing rebuff: ‘when it comes right down to it, Master Trotsky, you are nothing, not even a good fuck. I don't really want to see you again.' MI5 appeared to have dropped him, too. More than ever, he was convinced that the system was rotten to the core and had thrown himself behind Arthur Scargill, elected president of the National Union of Mineworkers by a landslide in 1981.

To make matters worse, Margaret Thatcher, buoyed up by her victory over the Argentines, had been returned to power in June, winning a majority of one hundred and forty-four seats in the House of Commons with only 42% of the popular vote, against a hopelessly divided opposition. From demon to demigod in the space of a few months! If that didn't illustrate the false consciousness that underpinned democracy, he didn't know what did. Voting was little
more than a sham in support of the status quo and financiers like Sebastian de Coursey. The right had shown all the daring. That had to change.

He strode into the room, accompanied by John Preston. This was the fourth meeting he had addressed that day. In spite of their working relationship, he wasn't close to his colleague. The man toiled hard enough for the cause, but rarely stayed for the late night ‘put the world to rights' sessions he so much enjoyed. Jack reasoned that not everyone could have his intellect and besides, armies needed their foot soldiers.

“Brothers!” he called out. His customary greeting was met with nods and grunts, and sometimes silence, depending on the mood of those being addressed. On this occasion, the sounds were warm and supportive. The NUM had secured a substantial pay rise and a promise of no immediate pit closures from the first Thatcher Government. Now, with their champion, Arthur Scargill, in charge, the men were starting to feel invincible.

“As you know, in March of this year, Margaret Thatcher” – he had learned to fairly spit out the words
Margaret
and
Thatcher
, eliciting the desired murmur of disapproval – “appointed Ian MacGregor to head up the National Coal Board. I have been finding out about this man and, brothers, we have Thatcher in trousers, or possibly a kilt – he is a Scot.

“He was born in 1912, in Kinlochleven, some two hours north of Glasgow. His father was an accountant at the nearby aluminium plant and his mother a teacher – so the MacGregors were a bourgeois family to the tips of their fingers.”

Not much imbued with Marxist theory, the bourgeois reference was largely lost on his audience, but Jack had become used to that. His job was to lead the proletariat, not educate it.

“Young MacGregor studied metallurgy at Glasgow University,” he continued, “and then joined his father at the plant. But Ian had
ambition and was soon recruited as a junior manager by William Beardmore and Company at their Parkhead forge making vehicle armour. It was there he had his first run-in with organized labour, seeing off a strike by crane drivers when he actually drove the cranes himself. A super-scab from the word go! Naturally the chairman of the company was impressed, and Ian's career has been on an upward trajectory ever since. The ruling class supports its own.”

By now his audience was quite impressed with the Coal Board's new chairman and a few even wished that their sons could do as well. One thing Jack Pugh did not mention, doubtless because he didn't know it, was that, from its foundation in 1894, British Aluminium, where MacGregor had cut his teeth, was increasingly run as an arm of the state, supported by highland landowners. As the importance of its product to aircraft manufacture in the First and Second World Wars increased, its relationship with government grew closer. The statist model, implicitly endorsed by Jack Pugh, had served the country well in wartime, but had produced nothing but rigid inefficiencies afterwards and it was these that Mrs Thatcher was attempting to unwind. So, youthful communist agitator though he might have been, Jack was actually an arch conservative. What drove him, however, was not a love of the past, but his ill-disciplined frustration at not being central to the present.

“At the start of the Second World War, MacGregor went to work for the Ministry of Supply,” Jack elaborated, “travelling to the United States and Canada on procurement missions. So, as you can see, his relationship with government goes back a long way.”

The irony that the career moves he was describing could as easily have been applied to a communist apparatchik was quite lost on Jack and hadn't even occurred to his audience who were more concerned with such bourgeois issues as the size of their pay packet and the security of their employment.

“Our man remained in America after the war and became known,
brothers, for his aggressive tactics against organized labour.”

Recognizing that the word ‘brother' was their cue to participate, a rumble of disgust spread around the room and Jack looked fulfilled.

“In 1977, it was Prime Minister James Callaghan, a union man himself who should have known better, who brought MacGregor back to this country as the number two to that South African snake Michael Edwards, at British Leyland. But after helping to get rid of our esteemed brother, Derek Robinson, he left.”

There were a few gasps. Red Robbo had become an icon.

“As Secretary of State for Industry, it was our Prime Minister's intellectual guru, Keith Joseph, who appointed MacGregor chairman of British Steel. Well you all know what happened there!”

This evoked widespread murmurs, as to some degree or other, everyone did.

“When he arrived in 1980, British Steel employed one hundred and sixty-six thousand people and was producing fourteen million tons of steel a year. When he left early this year to become chairman of our Coal Board, there were seventy-one thousand people employed and less than twelve million tons being produced.”

There were gasps across the room. The parallels with their own industry were clear. Few were sufficiently good at mathematics to see that if employment had fallen by 57% and output by 14%, productivity had improved dramatically and Jack was not about to point this out. Neither did he intend to mention that when MacGregor arrived, British Steel was losing £1.8 billion annually and that when he left the loss had been cut to £265 million.

“Can you imagine what this did to the steel communities?” he shouted instead. “Yes, it has utterly devastated them. That, brothers, is what capitalism does to you. That is what we must resist!”

John Preston watched from the side as the men in the room fell squarely behind their organizer, clapping enthusiastically as much to counter their fear of the future as to congratulate Jack Pugh. Who
was fooling whom? Hadn't Joseph Stalin's forced collectivization of farms in the Soviet Union resulted in the death of millions? It sure as hell wasn't just capitalism that could make people's lives a bloody misery.

* * *

The girl at the bar didn't seem to be attached to anyone and Jack felt like company. He had agreed to have a drink with John Preston and his girlfriend, after their last meeting of the day in Barnsley. The crowd had been enthusiastic. This was Scargill country.

“My friends and I wondered if you'd care to join us?” he asked as he stood at the bar waiting for their drinks.

The girl looked at him and then towards the table he had come from.

“Yes, why not,” she said.

“What are you drinking?”

“Shandy,” she answered.

“And could you add a shandy?” Jack called across to the barman who had already earned his respect by recognizing him as the speaker earlier at the Cortonwood Institute.

“Great talk, by the way,” the barman said as he handed Jack the tray of beverages.

“Thank you,” Jack acknowledged, gathering up the tray with aplomb and guiding his catch back to their table, although it was unclear who had caught whom.

“Mona Dexter,” the young woman announced, leaning over and shaking hands with John and Stacy.

As Mona slid into the booth next to Stacy, her already short black dress crunched up like a compressed accordion before she managed to pull it back down again. Jack felt immediately aroused in the way of a bee attracted to pollen inside a flower. There was just something
about white knickers next to brown skin.

“So what was your talk about?” Mona asked after everyone had been introduced.

“You are in the presence of
the
union organizer,” Stacy eulogized, knowing that any such introduction would have stuck in John's throat. “Jack travels round the country motivating the members and explaining the big picture.”

Instantly John's girlfriend went up in the organizer's estimation and for a moment he imagined a threesome. But then there was John to consider and he certainly didn't fancy making it four.

“Explaining how the mining life is under threat, mostly,” he told Mona, with uncharacteristic modesty, “and that miners had to stand firm against this evil government.”

“So are you a miner then?” she asked.

Luckily Jack did not spot John Preston's smirk as the organizer told his new disciple that only someone like him, with a true Marxist understanding, could explain to the miners how they were being manipulated and describe to them the nature of the forces they were up against.

“We must engage in permanent revolution,” he told her, “and not allow the social democratic charade, so beloved of the bourgeoisie, to distract us from our objective. I am at the coalface of ideas each and every day,” he explained, adding with a theatrical flourish: “I am, indeed, a miner!”

“How wonderful,” expostulated Mona as John Preston almost choked on his beer and Stacy had to lift a napkin to hide her mirth.

“Well, just this 'un an' we'd best be off,” said John. “It's a two hour drive ter Longbridge. You comen' wi' us, Jack, or are you stayin' here tonight?”

“The union's booked me a room in the Bull, so I guess I'll stay here.”

“That's a shame,” complained Mona, “I've hardly got to know
you people before you're off.”

“Oh, I'm sure Jack will make up for us,” said Stacy.

“Yer can be sure o' that!” added John.

“At least I might be able to enjoy a sensible discussion tonight with this intelligent lady,” Jack protested, which John and Stacy both knew meant treating Mona to one of his political monologues and then attempting to bamboozle her into bed with fancy words.

The four talked on until their glasses were empty and the travellers left. Jack wasted no time in suggesting he and Mona continue their drinking at The Bull, which was more intimate and conducive to discussion, he said, and only a short walk away. Mona did not need persuading as she had already decided how the evening was going to end.

“They just don't understand,” the organizer protested as they huddled together in a corner of The Bull bar with a fresh round of drinks.

“What don't they understand, Jack?” Mona asked.

“How capitalism works,” he said. “If you've got the money, you call the shots, you see. And what do the people with money want? They want more money. So what do they do? They pay their workers as little as possible to maximize their profits.”

“Who'd be a worker, then?” quipped Mona.

“Just about everyone without capital,” Jack told her, his irritation that she did not appear to be taking his revelation seriously tempered by his desire.

“That's what you're here for, Jack, to explain things to the workers.”

“Yes, that's true. But it's really the whole system we want to tear down. And all these bloody workers want is higher wages and jobs for life. They are so damn bourgeois!”

“Well I wouldn't mind more money,” said Mona, “although I'm not sure I'd want a job for life. How boring would that be!”

“Unless power is taken from the owners of capital and transferred to the people, they will always be slaves.”

“So if everyone has a little and no one has a lot,” questioned Mona, “who gets to make the decisions?”

“The party does, for the people.”

“So we become slaves to the party rather than to capital?” she asked.

“But the party works for the people. Capital just works for itself.”

“Well, you've clearly thought it all out, Jack. I wish I had your brains.”

That was just what Jack needed to hear. There were not enough people like Mona able to grasp the essentials.

“How close are you to Arthur Scargill?” she asked.

Jack pressed two fingers together. “That close,” he said, exaggerating, but how was she to know?