The Storytellers (31 page)

C
HAPTER

T
HE STRIKE limped on until March of the following year. In November, cash bonuses had been offered to any miner returning to work and although the Coal Board had done its best to flatter the total, it wasn't until after Christmas that an appreciable number of men did so. Stanley and Mabel came up with a car load of provisions for Christmas and there had been a
fin de siècle
atmosphere of dark-humoured jollity at The Centre. But when Alfie confided to Stan that, with Evie due in three months and their bills mounting, he would be returning to work in the New Year, the Prestons had decided that this would be their last trip north.

The truth was that the public had lost interest in the plight of the miners. And when a Cardiff taxi driver taking one to work at the end of November was killed by two pickets who had dropped a slab of concrete onto his car from an overpass, indifference turned to revulsion. In December, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, based in Nottinghamshire, came into existence and on 3rd March 1985, one year after it had begun, the NUM executive voted to end their strike. Three days later, Peter Betsworth accepted John Preston's request that Marx be retired.

* * *

The atmosphere inside
The Sentinel
was one of quiet satisfaction.

“Why don't you go to Grimethorpe?” George Gilder suggested, looking at his gazetteer. “There can hardly be more of a Yorkshire mining village than that: one road in, one road out and only the pit.”

“I have always loved the name!” Harvey said.

“Yes, isn't it a doozy,” George agreed. “Apparently it came from Grime, a Viking chieftain who set up his stall there. So perhaps the chief was a forbidding character and ‘grim' came from him and the village became his alter ego. I can't pretend I've ever been there myself.”

“It did experience some quite serious riots last year,” Harvey told him. “Twenty-two people were arrested.”

“What was the spark?” George asked, dimly recalling something.

“Two miners picking small coal from the surface near the pithead to heat their homes – pretty much an accepted tradition around there, apparently – were arrested for theft. Youths in the village took to the streets and twenty were arrested. The police, who were not local, did offer an apology later saying that they had not been aware of the custom.”

“That would have made a good story,” George Gilder remarked.

“Yes, it did,” Harvey agreed, “but you refused to run it.”

“Ah!” his editor laughed. “I knew it rang a bell. In victory magnanimity, Winston Churchill said, so why don't you go on up there and right that wrong.”

* * *

Harvey needed little persuading. For over six years he had borne witness to and reported on a time of great change in his country's history. He had even played a small part in moving it along. Now the
much-mellowed journalist wanted to be in the heart of Yorkshire mining country when the men returned to work.

As he drove north, he thought about his start in life. Never once had it occurred to him that he was a prisoner of his background.

‘Everything's possible, Harvey dear,' his mother would say between back-to-back cleaning jobs, and the implausibility of it never struck him. Only when he arrived at Oxford University, every penny paid for by his fellow countrymen, did origins become a concept with any meaning and even then its meaning seemed superficial.

His drift into journalism had matched his ill-formed politics. George Gilder picked up where his mother had left off as guide to his hazy opinions, which were little more than a sense of things, in the way you sense heat from a fire without much caring how it came about. But since then he had observed many things and become aware of what they meant in human terms – not just in terms of how best they could be dressed up to please an editor.

The Sentinel
had a political point of view, certainly, but perhaps he had failed to notice this because that same point of view had run though his mother's blood. Even at university, where socialism was fashionable, he had not strayed much beyond wondering why such people were intent on ‘helping' the less well off when the less well off he knew already had pretty good lives and could mostly look after themselves. So he had kept clear of politics and immersed himself in history. And history had taught him that individual men and women mattered, even when – or perhaps especially when – circumstances conspired against them.

He had seen inflation devour great chunks of people's livelihoods and the value of his mother's pension wither. He had watched those who could, fight back, exposing government and trades union weakness. He had been there when parts of the economy had ground to a halt and become accustomed to piles of rubbish rotting in the streets. He had witnessed the aftershocks from England's long colonization
of Ireland. He had walked through industrial graveyards filled with companies put there by government policy. He had reported on race riots in Brixton and Toxteth. He had helped his newspaper wave the flag when his country had gone to war with Argentina over some sparsely populated islands 8,000 miles away. And he had almost been blown to pieces by a bomb, along with the Prime Minister and her cabinet. Now a titanic struggle, involving violence and subterfuge, between the government and members of a union whose forebears had powered Britain's Industrial Revolution, was coming to an end, along with much of their industry. It seemed as though the nation he belonged to had been at war with itself for most of his working life.

* * *

Harvey and his cameraman were muffled up against snow flurries that danced around a dilapidated town laid low by a year without income. People had gathered at the end of the High Street, men, most in their pit clothes, together with their wives and children, to hear an address by their leader. Only two had broken the year-long strike and gone to work in nearby pits and they were nowhere to be seen nor would they ever be spoken to again, not in Grimethorpe anyway. This was a community where jobs had been handed from father to son since the pit was sunk in 1896, jobs that were hard and often dangerous, but jobs that gave these families their identity.

Wearing a thick plum-coloured anorak, their leader mounted the platform. To be heard against the weather, he lifted a loudhailer to his lips. The machine emitted a plaintive whine which was carried away in the wind as had been their hopes.

“On Sunday, your executive voted ninety-eight to ninety-one for a return to work,” he began, against calls of “Shame!” and “We'd have gone for another year!”

“There will be those who say that after a year of hardship, of no
income and rising personal debt, that our members have achieved nothing,” he went on. “But that is not what you should think. We faced not only an employer but a government aided and abetted by the judiciary, the police and people in the media.”

Harvey felt a twinge of guilt. His presence was being acknowledged.

“We have been criticized for not having held a national ballot at the start of this strike. Perhaps we should have. But what we did, under union rules, was support each of our areas as they opted for strike action.

“We have been criticized for supporting strike action at the start of the year when coal stocks were high and usage was about to fall over the summer months. But that is to ignore the fact that the Coal Board had announced the closure of twenty pits and loss of twenty thousand jobs and that our members wanted to resist this. So the timing was not of our own choosing.

“We have been criticized for endorsing violent picketing. It is true that some of our members, fired by a sense of great injustice, did resort to violence. But their violence pales to insignificance when set against the violence meted out to our members by the police.”

Murmurs of “Thee are reet theear!” and “An' still they didn't break we!” rippled through the thousand or so listeners huddled together for warmth like emperor penguins.

“We have been criticized for our unwillingness to sit down and negotiate with the Coal Board. But we have always been willing to sit down with the Coal Board as long as pit closures and manpower cuts, other than on the grounds of pit exhaustion, were off the table.

“The Coal Board has already announced twenty pit closures and twenty thousand job losses and the Board's own papers indicate that sixty pit closures and sixty thousand job losses are likely over coming years. What union, in its right mind, could endorse such a programme? What responsible union could agree to endorse its death warrant and the death warrant of all those communities dependent
upon the mining of coal?”

Cries of “Not fra Grimethorpe, not t' NUM an' not we miners!” ricocheted around the crowd like pinballs.

“Throughout this confrontation we have been told that uneconomic pits must close. But what other jobs are there in towns like this? How is it economic to put miners on the dole and to pay them for doing nothing so that cheaper coal can be imported from abroad; cheaper either because it is subsidized or because those who mine it are paid rock bottom wages?

“One has to ask this: if market forces are allowed to override communities and to destroy people's livelihoods, what did our members fight for and die for in two world wars?”

A shout of “No fer bloody this!” said it all.

“Of course we wouldn't be where we are today if the Trades Union Congress had given us their full support,” the leader thundered to the supportive sounds of an opinion widely held. “But what I would say to them is
your turn will come
. This Tory government, under Maggie Thatcher, is out to destroy the trades union movement.”

The mere mention of the Prime Minister's name triggered cries of “Maggie out! Maggie out!” from a group of children and their mothers whose folklore now included stories about the wicked witch from the south.

“But let us not be despondent. Let us raise our banners, let us have our musicians strike up and let us march back to work with our heads held high. You and your families have fought for your way of life as hard as any group of individuals could have fought. Take pride in that.”

The brass band began hesitantly as cold lips and chilled limbs adjusted to the challenge and people shuffled into position behind their colourful gold-braided banners –
The National Miners' Union: Grimethorpe
–
Fennymore Lodge. NUM: South Kirby –
and slowly started their march down the High Street which would take in as many roads
as they could manage on their journey to the pit.

When the band got into its stride, the mood lifted. They passed the fish and chip shop, In Cod We Trust, they passed St Luke's with a capacity for 500 worshippers, but which had lately seen its congregation fall to as few as thirty. They marched with growing enthusiasm towards their colliery built to tap into the rich Barnsley seam, a 6-foot layer of high-quality coal and one of the country's most productive tended by miners, scientists, joiners, electricians and all those needed to sustain the town's population, which had grown from a few hundred to many thousand with the discovery of coal. Harvey couldn't help wondering what the future held for the bustling oil city of Aberdeen, now so prosperous and confident.

They passed the Red Rum public house, actually opened by the three-time winner of the Grand National, where men would unwind after finishing their shift down the mine. Along Ladywood Road were the red brick and white pebble-dash houses of White City, built by the mining company in the 1930s for an influx of miners from as far away as Scotland. These had been taken over by the council at the time of nationalization and some were now owned by mining families using the government's Right to Buy scheme; but who would purchase them if the pit was closed?

Harvey's cameraman captured the faces and some of the placards –
Coal not Dole; Grimethorpe Women's Action Group; Too much coal? Give it to the pensioners
– as the crowd, with increasing verve, every man, woman and child determined not to show any hint of defeat, approached the colliery gate. They lined up on either side. The band, which would one day attain fame after starring in Mark Herman's black comedy
Brassed Off
!, started in on the rousingly soulful tune ‘Nimrod' from the great English composer Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations as the men marched away to the mine. These were people who knew their fate and the snowflakes melted on tear-stained cheeks. There were few dry eyes that day.

Postscript

P
OSTSCRIPT

I
N SEPTEMBER 1990, the opinion polls gave Labour a 14% lead over the Conservatives and with an election due in eighteen months, Mrs Thatcher's party was restless. Over the course of her time in office as Prime Minister, her approval rating had averaged only 40%, which was the lowest for any incumbent and regularly less than support for her party. The root cause of Labour's substantial lead this time was a profoundly unpopular tax she had introduced to pay for local government.

The Prime Minister had never much liked the way local government was funded: a combination of central government grants and a tax on the value of property. The opacity of such a system, she felt, divorced the majority from how their councils were financed because most people did not own property. This, to her mind, was wholly undemocratic and encouraged some councils to be spendthrift. So her government had introduced a flat rate of tax, with adjustments for students and the poor, to be paid by everyone.

This Poll Tax, as it came to be called, caused riots on the grounds of its regressive nature. It also proved hard to collect because councils never knew exactly who was living where at any point in
time. Recognizing its political ineptitude, many in the government wanted to abandon the tax, but knew this would not happen while Mrs Thatcher remained at the helm. So a succession of leadership challenges were mounted and when it became clear in November that she did not command sufficient support from her parliamentary party, she was persuaded to resign. After watching as she left the Prime Minister's residence for the last time with tears on her cheeks, Harvey set about writing her political obituary.

The Sentinel

November 29th 1990

Yesterday a political life came to an end and it was perhaps fitting that the dagger which brought this about was thrust in by a Brutus from South Wales. The Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe's resignation speech may have purported to be about the government's drift away from Europe, but in reality it was about much more: fundamentally it was a call for the ex-Prime Minister to listen more and assert less
.

But he must have known that every fibre of Margaret Thatcher's being lay against consensus because it was the post-war consensus she blamed for so much of her country's ills
.

Margaret Hilda Roberts was barely twenty when the Second World War ended. For five years, wartime Britain had been run by the government and with the war over, the newly-elected Labour administration set about rebuilding the country's shattered economy
.

A National Health Service was established, the welfare state put in place, workers' rights improved and large swathes of industry taken into public ownership: the Bank of England, civil aviation, coal mining, the railways, road haulage, canals, telephony, electricity, gas and the production of steel. Within six years, some 20% of the economy was being run directly by the State. But
,
following a war during which almost everything had been directed by government, this seemed more logical than odd
.

When Margaret Thatcher, as she became, entered Parliament in 1959, the conflicted nature of this State-run colossus was beginning to show, although the belief that government could do it better continued right up to the nationalization of British Leyland in 1975. The problem with such a structure, as the Soviet Union was also discovering, is that it reacts to political signals rather than commercial ones and can only be kept going for as long as there are tax revenues to support it
.

With the rapid rise of oil prices in the 1970s, governments found themselves between a rock and a hard place. The illusion that ‘collective bargaining' was a commercial exercise ran headlong into the reality of tax receipts that were insufficient to meet workers' inflation-matching wage demands. Because the cost of our energy had risen, our wealth, in effect, had declined. What was needed to adjust for this was either a fall in wages or employment or both, but the colossus found this politically impossible to engineer
.

What Mrs Thatcher and those closest to her argued publicly, and many – even inside the Labour Party – admitted privately, was that the consensus around the colossus had to be broken. But this was a Herculean undertaking. Over thirty years' worth of structure, every bit of it precious to someone or some group, needed to be unravelled. In 1979, the British people gave Margaret Thatcher and her government the chance to try
.

Her Conservative predecessor, Edward Heath, had reached for a revised consensus but this had been rejected by both the trades unions and, in 1974, by the electorate, albeit narrowly. This convinced Mrs Thatcher and those closest to her that there could be no consensus, only an entirely new structure built around market principles. What this meant was that the colossus had to be broken up into chunks which willing customers, rather than reluctant taxpayers, were ready to support
.

For the next eleven and a half years, in the face of a deep recession, mounting unemployment, a war she did not seek but which she won, a terrorist campaign that almost killed her and a bitter stand-off with the National Union of
Mineworkers (which was fighting for its very existence), this remarkable woman held the line. She operated within the rule of law and our democratic system – more or less – and carried the country with her
.

Way back in 1948, she had once applied for a job at Imperial Chemical Industries but was rejected after the personnel department assessed her as ‘headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated'. Well, their loss was our gain!

The country endured a great deal of pain between 1979 and 1990. Individual lives were ruined, businesses wrecked and whole industries destroyed. It would have been preferable if these great changes had been more intelligently managed, but they were not. Politicians and their civil servants cannot run everything under the sun – other than in bursts and during a war – and should not pretend that they can. A government's task must surely be to maintain a framework that enables people themselves to adapt
.

How great leaders leave office is rarely pretty. The Poll Tax was certainly not Mrs Thatcher's finest hour, and I for one am pleased she has retired. But the lady did her duty. And although she may not realize it, there are a great many miners' wives out there just like her – hard-working, loyal, intelligent, honest, patriotic and proud – who did theirs. If her time in office has taught us anything it is that we must learn to manage change better
.

But to do so we will have to fight one another less, face up to reality more, agree what problems we are trying to solve and be accountable for our own actions. It may have been George Orwell who said that ideology serves power, not truth, I am not sure, but having observed Britain for these last twenty-one years, I am inclined to agree
.

Harvey Mudd, Editor

* * *

“Andrew, its Harvey … Pretty good, really. And you? … The reason I'm calling is that I was wondering if I could book the private
room in your new establishment on Thursday fortnight? … Dinner, say around eight … Twenty-two people, give or take … How's it going, by the way? I've read some good reviews … That's excellent. Now, Andrew, there's one more thing. Could you be at the Chelsea Old Town Hall at 7 p.m. on that day? … You've guessed it. Frances and I are going to do the deed. So could you? It'll just be some of her family and a few from my office … Perfect … No. Absolutely not! We will definitely pay … Well I won't say no to some champagne on the house. That's really kind. Thank you … Yes, we've become a nation of shopkeepers again! … OK, until then. Bye Andrew.”

* * *

Harvey stood in the Brydon Room with Frances on his left and George Gilder, as best man, on his right. The apprehension he and Frances had both felt was now firmly locked in the past – was it fair on her children? Weren't the two of them doing just fine as they were? She had wondered if she really wanted another husband. He had wondered if he really wanted to
become
a husband. But now their union was out in the open. The chit-chat from the small assembly had subsided and the sideways looks across the aisle given way to full attention forward.

“Harvey, will you take Frances to be your lawful wedded wife?”

“Frances, will you take Harvey to be your lawful wedded husband?”

Frances's son then stepped forward to give his mother's hand to Harvey, a simple gesture of great poignancy which Frances had assured him her son had wanted to make. Her children understood what she had been through.

Next came the rings, circles with no beginning and no end, symbols of everlasting love.

These were exchanged.

Harvey and Frances confirmed their vows and the registrar pronounced them husband and wife.

Their single selves had been transformed.

* * *

Although it was only a ten-minute walk down the King's Road to Quince, Andrew Champion's new restaurant, they all tumbled into minicabs outside Chelsea Old Town Hall and tumbled out again the other end three minutes later. Andrew was as good as his word and corks from bottles of vintage Pol Roger popped like firecrackers as restaurant staff handed round bite-sized delicacies; that is until George Gilder, who had just been made a knight of the realm ‘for services to journalism', started tapping his glass.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention…”

The buzz reluctantly subsided.

“Before we sit down to what I know will be a culinary treat, I thought I should fulfil my duty as Harvey's best man and say a few words.

“Harvey joined
The Sentinel
fourteen years ago from the
Oxford Mail
. He landed his first job as a result of an exposé in his university paper about some goings-on between the college kitchen and a local butcher who believed that the price of his wares should be arrived at by consenting adults, in this case himself and the head chef. This happy union might have continued had our fearless cub reporter not discovered that the price covered both the meat and an annual holiday for the chef. There will be no such goings-on here!

“Now I don't think Harvey would mind me saying that back then he did not dwell on the rights or wrongs of such a situation. He just knew it would make a good story. Not only did it, but his little exposé earned him an internship at the
Mail
. And so a young man, with no clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life, became a journalist.

“I have been a newspaperman all my working life and I think I can safely say that most journalists remain more interested in what will make a good story than they are in what is right or wrong. Journalists, as a breed, are profoundly amoral, mining that seam of activity just below the surface of current convention for nuggets that will stimulate, shock or simply entertain and earn them a pat on the back from their editors, or better still, a pay rise.

“I freely admit that I have done my fair share of back-patting, although – as Harvey will corroborate – I may have been a little less than fulsome on the pay front.

“The difference between a good journalist and a great one is that a great one develops a moral sense without becoming a tiresome moralist, and Harvey here has done just that. One of my great pleasures in recent years has been to watch this side of him grow and when I retired earlier this year he was my obvious successor.

“However, I am not going to give Harvey all the credit for this. As he would be the first to admit, he owes a great debt to his mother, Sylvia, and I just wish she could have been here today. It would have given her such pleasure. Sylvia was one of those people who possessed instinctive good sense and rock solid values. Harvey was twelve when his father died and Sylvia just got on and coped. She never expected anything from life that she did not work for and she had a deep suspicion of all those who offered to make her life easier – ‘They're after something, Harvey. Now you find out what it is,' was one of her favourite expressions and her son has been finding out ever since.

“A love of opera was another gift his mother gave him and it was opera that brought Frances and Harvey together. I believe she and Sylvia did meet once, after a performance of
La Bohème
at La Scala in Milan, and they got on. But Frances was married to my friend David Graham then. When tragedy struck, Frances picked herself up and got on with life, just as Sylvia had once done. So here we are.
And I have to say, what could possibly be a better advertisement for a positive attitude than today? Please raise your glasses to our lovely Frances and to my Harvey.”

The best man just couldn't help feeling a little possessive.

* * *

The guests were split across two circular tables of twelve, with Harvey at one and Frances at the other. Twenty-four sat down in the end when Frances's two daughters both brought boyfriends. The initial plan had been to jumble everyone up, but tribal loyalties asserted themselves and the atmosphere was better for it. But like two planets separated by gravity, it did leave the bride and groom having to settle for amused glances at one another as the general level of bonhomie escalated around them.

“This is most awfully good, Andrew,” extolled Porter.
The Sentinel's
social reporter and avowed monarchist was in his element. “Is it hard to find cooks these days?”

“They are called chefs now, Porter, and are like royalty. This one's my partner.”

At the royal comparison, the duck egg tart he'd selected almost stuck in Porter's throat.

“What's the wine, Harvey?” asked Pete who had selected the crab raviolo with samphire in a bisque sauce. “It's tasty!”

“Tasty!” scoffed Porter. “Tasty is what you say about a plate of jellied eels, not a Côte de Beaune Meursault.”

“How did you know it was that?” gushed Georgina.