The Storytellers (6 page)

C
HAPTER

J
ACK PUGH had never been more excited. He'd joined Militant Tendency in his last year at university and helped to deselect the moderate Labour MP, Reg Prentice, from his Newham North-East constituency: a coveted first scalp. Jack took the Tendency's mission seriously: to infiltrate the Labour movement in order to promote the Marxist-Leninist agenda from within. While Militant's control over the Labour Party Young Socialists was not as firm as it had been in 1972, its influence over the shop stewards inside the nation's leading industries was at an all-time high.

Finally it was happening. He was sure of it. The tanker drivers had been operating a go-slow since December and now lorry drivers as a whole were on strike and their union, the Transport and General Workers' Union, had not even authorized it. The Labour Government and its partners in moderation, the union bosses, were in disarray. The potential to bring the nation to its knees had never been greater. There wasn't a sector that didn't depend on road transport for some of its supplies. This was the revolution he had dreamed about, the revolution that would bring him power.

They arrived at the Kingsbury Oil Terminal at first light. Most of
the fuel used in the Midlands was distributed from the depot, one of the largest in the country. As he approached the first group of pickets he rolled down his window and called across.

“Brothers!”

His greeting was met with a mixture of suspicious stares and grunts. It had been a cold night.

“Is it tight?” he asked.

“As a tick's arse,” came the reply.

He and his two colleagues drove on to the small office the organizing committee were using and only found Ralf Drydon. The two knew one another and Ralf was pleased to have some company.

“You know Max, don't you?” Jack asked.

“Won't be much for him here, I don't think,” Ralf proffered, eyeing up the pugilist Jack had brought. “Running like clockwork. Some tea?”

“Yes please, while supplies last!” Jack answered, enjoying his own joke. “And this is John, Max's flatmate.”

“John,” Ralf acknowledged. “Haven't seen you here before.”

“John's a Longbridge man,” Jack explained. “Max has hauled him along for support.”

“Well, as I say,” Ralph Drydon continued, as he moved a single tea bag from one mug to the next, “there won't be much for you boys here.”

While the mugs were being distributed – the strongest brew to Jack, the weakest to the new face: there is a hierarchy in all things – the door opened and a young woman came in holding a piece of paper.

“Been up all night, lass?”

“Best time for faxes,” she answered, “when company business is light. This one looks important. It's from the union.”

Ralf took it from her.

“Thanks, love. You'd best go home and get some sleep. I'll make
sure you're covered.”

“We're going to win, aren't we?” she questioned. “My man's on the picket line and we could sure use the extra money.”

“Aye, lass, we're going to win.”

Ralf Drydon's certainty reassured her and she left looking fulfilled. For her, and most of the wives whose husbands were ‘out', it was about keeping ahead of inflation, not changing the world.

“A communication from the top,” he announced as he read the faxed message. “From our executive officer, Alex Kitson, telling us to let essential supplies through or have the government declare a state of emergency and bring in the army.”

Mention of the army pumped Max up like a shot of steroids. In his eyes, any week without a confrontation was a wasted one.

“You're not going to agree to that, surely,” Jack demanded.

“We'll see,” he answered. He knew his members were more interested in getting a good part of their 40% pay claim than in adhering to the fine print of the Marxist-Leninist rulebook.

“Solidarity, brother,” Jack reminded him, but Ralf had his mind on other things and the telephone rang. Answering, he listened, looked pensive and then cupped the speaker.

“There's trouble up at Hunters, an independent distributor near Tamworth. You boys interested?”

“Right bloody right we are,” answered Max before Jack had time to assess the full, strategic implications of the situation.

Taking that as a collective ‘yes' he told the caller: “I'll have some lads up with you within the half hour.” And then, turning to Jack, explained: “Hunters are trying to get their lorries out. They're only a small outfit with five tankers, I think it is, but letting them get away with it wouldn't sit well with my boys here. You up for it?”

The strike at the Kingsbury depot was a big story and Jack had hoped to get himself onto the evening news. But with Max already flexing his muscles and Ralf Drydon's men exhibiting all the discipline
of a well-trained army, making his presence redundant, he had to agree.

“I'm not sure the three of us will achieve much,” he prevaricated.

“I'll send five of our lads along in the van,” Ralf countered, adding with a grin, “five of our more motivated brethren.”

It only took him a few minutes to pull his posse from the picket line because the night shift was over and a fresh batch of men, for want of anything else to do, had already started to drift in. Jack could see that those selected were not unexercised tanker drivers, but some of the shock troops Ralf Drydon used to crack the whip and ensure that any driver foolish enough to cross the picket line remembered his mistake.

As he and his travelling companions left Kingsbury, having expressed their fraternal solidarity, the Trot from Cowley feared he was about to be part of little more than a barroom brawl. But events are rarely predictable, even in a Marxist world, and before the day was out he would have garnered more publicity than he could possibly have imagined.

* * *

Harvey had received a message from George Gilder the day before that he and his photographer should get up to Tamworth right away. An independent distributor, incensed by the union's grip on his business, had agreed to take a stand and there was sure to be a confrontation. Harvey suspected his editor had been alerted by a contact in MI5, probably the fabled Peter Betsworth, whose real name George Gilder undoubtedly knew. Sylvia had taken the call from
The Sentinel
and was in a state of high excitement when her son returned for the evening, barely allowing him over the threshold before sending him off to the station with a packed sandwich and thermos of tea.

The bed and breakfast his taxi driver had taken them to was
walking distance from Hunters' yard and their hosts, Doug and Marjory Faversham, seemed to have as little time for the unions as did the taxi driver who brought them to the door. ‘They shouldn't be allowed to hold the country to ransom,' was Mrs Faversham's opinion, candidly delivered along with that morning's bacon, sausage, fried bread and two eggs, a sentiment his mother certainly shared.

He probably shouldn't have been surprised to discover a handful of other journalists already outside Hunters, being handed cups of coffee and tea by Doreen and Anthony Hunter, assisted by their two sons, Amos and Virgil, and daughter, Abigail. The Hunters had even typed up a page of history about the firm. It was started by Tony's father, Tom, shortly before the Second World War, which it had survived thanks to Tom's wife, Constance, driving their one truck in support of the war effort. The aftermath had been harder on account of the depressed conditions, but they were up to three trucks when the first Arab oil embargo hit in 1967. This they overcame, but were almost brought down by the second oil embargo in 1973 and rapid inflation it caused, followed by the three-day week introduced by Edward Heath at the end of that year as part of his battle against the National Union of Mineworkers.

Somehow they pulled through and had since even managed to increase their fleet to five trucks, with the help of a sizeable bank loan secured against the business and their homes. Now, however, they were boxed in. Although all five trucks were full of diesel oil, they knew they would be barred from entering the Kingsbury depot to replenish their supplies. Hunters' loyal customers, built up over many years, depended on them and there was simply nothing they could do. So the family had decided to go out, if that was to be their fate, in a blaze of adverse publicity for the unions. They had even had one of their drivers pretend to be a member of the TGWU and alert the Kingsbury shop steward that his firm planned to make deliveries.

It was not a good morning for any kind of outside confrontation;
so bitingly cold, even the scattered snowflakes were half-hearted. Harvey felt sure that opposing sides in a mediaeval battle around Tamworth Castle would have agreed to postpone hostilities, at least until the frost had left the soil and made the ground safe for horses. But such considerations were not part of modern man's lexicon. So much now took place inside that the outside and its character was unfamiliar territory, leading urban children to think that cornflakes were grown at supermarkets inside pretty coloured boxes.

The journalists had quickly turned their backs on winter but the arrival at Hunters' gates of Jack Pugh's battered Ford Cortina and the van from Kingsbury caused them to consider leaving the warmth of Doreen Hunter's kitchen. But Tony told them to ‘sit awhile,' saying ‘that lot can freeze their buns off until we're good and ready'.

The plan was simple. On his nod, the trucks would drive from the yard, single file, at slow speed, so that the photographers, who would already have taken up positions beyond the gate, could get some action shots of the gauntlet his two sons and three other drivers would have to run. The rest would be down to the stories accompanying the images which he was confident, following his and Doreen's hospitality, would be well weighted in their favour.

* * *

They'd arrived around 9.00 a.m. and it was now approaching midday. The van had kept its engine running, but Jack was trying to conserve fuel and the three inside the Cortina were numb with cold. Max's ‘for Christ's sake, Jack. You're a bleeding shop steward. You can get as much fucking fuel as you want!' had yielded nothing. Jack had not wanted to get into the subtle difference between a shop steward and an organizer, which he was, and expose the limitations of his power. Real power would come later. For now his priority was to conserve sufficient fuel to get himself back to Oxford where he
expected an enthusiastic Miranda would be waiting to welcome him from the revolutionary front.

“Here we go,” Max said as people started to emerge from the house adjacent to the yard.

“Are those reporters?” Jack asked, seeing cameras slung over the shoulders of some of those exiting the building.

Things were at last looking up: action and limelight, his twin passions. Stiffly the three eased themselves from the car. But like reptiles emerging from the night's cool air, it was taking time for their metabolisms to become fully charged.

Next to them bodies tumbled from the warm van and it was clear these had not been idle. A playing card fell to the ground and Jack noticed what looked like an empty bottle tucked under one of the back seats. The heavies stamped the ground like bulls and watched their breath vaporize into steam.

“Had a good morning boys?” one of the cameramen mocked, as he passed through the open gate.

“Fair to middling,” a heavy replied, eyeing the cameramen up with obvious distaste. Their kind of work was best practised away from public gaze.

As the photographers and journalists clustered on one side of the road, the Kingsbury boys stood ready on the other, the side the tanker drivers would be on when they finally made a run for it. Max drifted over to join them, but Jack and John Preston stayed with the press.

The confrontation started in surreal slow motion. At a crawl, the five tankers, headlights blazing, moved out of the yard towards the gate, one after another. The throbbing sound of their engines swallowed up the space around them, obliterating the outside world. Three of the pickets moved to the centre of the road. The photographers moved behind them to get shots of the first vehicle approaching the human barrier. Its driver appeared heavily dressed, with a grey woollen hat, but his youthful features were evident.

As the cameras clicked like castanets and the first truck pulled level with the van, the driver was dragged from the cab, becoming invisible to the onlookers. A rain of blows fell onto him from boots with metal caps as the truck lurched to one side, scattering journalists and cameramen, and only just missing the Cortina, before sliding drunkenly into a ditch.

Barely audible, the cry came up from Max: “Jesus, it's a bloody wench!”

Against her father's orders, Abigail had persuaded her brothers to let her drive the first truck. ‘It'll show them at their worst,' she'd said.

And now she lay by the side of the road, bloodied and beaten, her long hair clearly visible beside her grey hat.