There is No Alternative (37 page)

Brian is now flourishing—he receives “one book commission after another”—and his daughter is applying to study at Cambridge. Brian is not married to a millionaire. He pulled on his bootstraps, and his body flew into the air.

You would not know that this lush and gentle countryside was once covered in grey mountains of slag and sulphur. “That was the Newmarket Pit,” says Brian as we drive, gesturing in the direction of a hill. “Ackton Hall. Gone” . . . “Allerton Bywater. Gone” . . . “Prince of Wales. Gone” . . . “Whitwood Mere. Gone” . . . “Methley Junction. Gone” . . . “Fryston Main. Gone” . . .

We drive down a long lane with a cemetery on one side and a row of bleak brick houses on the other. These were pit houses, says Brian. You can recognize the ones that were purchased by their residents, thanks to Thatcher's determination to sell off government housing. They are the ones that have been renovated.

We are en route to meet Harry. Brian tells me that Harry was a miner who became a painter after the closure of the mines. As we
drive to Harry's house, Brian tries to explain the politics of the miners' union to me, the regional factionalism, why the working classes didn't support their own kind. “They are a federation. Take American politics. Oklahoma isn't gonna be the same as New York, right? Seattle isn't gonna be the same as Colorado—”

“Right, right.”

“And if you got Utah in the center, bloody hell—”

“Right.”

“But that's what it's like. It's a patchwork of unions, all with various attitudes. Right? And that's absolutely significant in the strike. Because in the big strike, what alienates, where the big problem comes from, is the Left, the far Left in Scargill, and some of the ambitious people—the guys who were very angry, the young braves—they
invade
Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire! Nottinghamshire in particular. And they say, ‘Come out, come out, on General Strike with Yorkshire!' And Nottinghamshire says, ‘Up yours
,
mate! We're not coming out with you bloody—' That's where the conflict is. And sometimes the conflict will be so complicated because the leadership in Nottingham might be going with Scargill, but the rank-and-file are not. They're saying, ‘Those bastards came down and they picketed our pit.' ‘Bloody Yorkshire, we're not going in with that lot!' Primitive!”

“So would you say that in the end, clan solidarity proved more powerful than class solidarity?”

“It did in the early stages, but then it became an attack on the working class. Right? And a lot of people would come in. I mean, I went to a meeting in Wakefield, and a young comrade got up, and he said, ‘We were just peacefully picketing, and this bloke grabbed me, this copper grabbed me, and he threw me into the back of a Black Mariah, and he beat me up.' And then he said, ‘
T'ain't right
.' He suddenly saw that. Thatcher had built it up so that the police were seen as absolutely alien to the—you know, he was beaten up in the back of a van! This was a lad who was politicized by brutalism. And he used those words: ‘
T'ain't right
!'”

We pull up at Harry's house, a picturesque brick cottage in the countryside. When Brian said that Harry had been down the mines for twenty years before the strike, I imagined a stooped emphysemic with blue veins in his nose. When he told me Harry had become a painter, I thought he meant a house painter. But a youthful, pink-cheeked man welcomes us at the door and ushers us past walls decorated with his paintings—mostly acrylics on canvas. They are painted in a style that might be described as post-Impressionist Socialist Realism. There are sculptures, too, and glazed charcoal-and-crayon sketches. They depict men in the mines, rippling with muscles, drenched in sweat, coated in soot, wearing lamps and helmets. Even the color paintings suggest overwhelming grayness. Every image evokes the horrors George Orwell described.

We sit in a drawing room decorated with Harry's sketches and reliefs. Harry's wife, Lorna, a gentle woman quite a few years his junior, comes in to introduce herself. She is scrambling eggs and smoked salmon in the kitchen, she says. Would we like some? I look at her, then look back at Harry. He is clearly healthy and prospering. This is a middle-class home, complete with dried flower arrangements and scented candles. This was not what I had in mind when I asked Brian to introduce me to people who had been affected by Thatcher's policies. I think of asking Brian to introduce me to someone who is suffering a bit more conspicuously, but I can't bring myself to do it. I don't want to sound like the infamous Fleet Street journalist who hopped off the plane in the Congo and bellowed, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”

Harry always had a knack for drawing, apparently. He practiced on his father's back as a child, because there was no paper in the house. When the pits closed, he found himself sketching scenes from the mines, over and over. Unemployed, at loose ends, he submitted one of those drawings to a local competition and won first prize. His first exhibition was in a Pontefract pizza parlor. His second was in the Royal Festival Hall in London. His paintings are
now prized by collectors and sold for thousands of pounds. All that talent was sitting at the bottom of a coal mine. No one noticed it. No one would have, had Scargill had his way.

Lorna brings us tea. We sit in Harry's living room, talking about his memories of the strike. “It were a glorious summer for me,” he says. “It were one of the best years I had.”

“Really? Why?”

He looks at me as if this is quite a stupid question—and I suppose it is. “It were marvelous to do no bloody work!” He sips his tea, then asks me if I've ever been down a coal mine. I tell him that I haven't. “Well. You're talking a shit job. It's the worst of the worst.”

“What was your feeling about Scargill's declaration that there should be ‘loss without limit'?” I asked Harry.

“I suppose we were talking ludicrous economics, I thought.”

“You thought so then?”

“Oh, I thought so then. You could see where they were spending money on mines; we spent a million pounds on the canteen at Fryston pit. Fryston were a reasonable-sized pit, but it weren't a big one. The canteen, you couldn't get a bloody Kit-Kat once they upgraded it . . . So they're spending money on a thing because you got national control of it, and if this is going on on that scale'round the country, then obviously it's going belly-up, as it were.”

I wasn't expecting to hear this. I wasn't expecting what he said about the miners' enthusiasm for strike action, either: “We're talking here that people would strike over lots of bloody things. We're talking about pits here that would strike regular . . . There'd be strikes 'cause of conditions, there would be strikes over pay, there would be strikes just 'cause they felt it were a lovely day and wanted to go home. Sunshine pits.”

“I'm sorry?” I said.

“You know,
stick it up your ass where
—”

I nodded.

“There were a lot of hard workers,” Harry adds, “but also a lot of bloody idle workers. Now, I knew a lot of guys who were influenced by pubs.”

“By what?” I ask.

“Drink. The miners tend to be that sort of men, usually. They come from a background of hard workers, hard drinkers. So much of 'em spent a lot of time in the pubs. To the extent that in the'70s, I knew guys that weren't hardly working three days a week . . . There were one guy in particular, he were sacked on fifteen occasions, and the union reinstated him. Basically, you're going to do a job, and you've no bloody help, because everybody's buggered off home . . . You're struggling, because no one will do any bloody work. I'm not saying that—you know, you've a thousand blokes here, and out of that were a reasonable percentage, and most of them would be at the coal face, as it were. But you're basically forgetting that the whole purpose of a bloody coal mine were to get coal out. And without that, you're going nowhere.”

Thatcher would have perfectly agreed.

“What do you think your life would be like if you'd won the strike?” I ask.

“Well, that's the crux o' the matter as well, that's something that—I look back with mixed blessings, I suppose, really. I'd still be back at the pit, and most likely still be married to the first wife. There's no way I woulda met Lorna. My life has changed considerably since finishing the pit. Changed a lot. And whether I'd still be walking is another kettle of fish. Whether my health would still be—certainly I'm a different guy than I was twenty years since. In some respects I feel a lot better than I did in my thirties.”

Harry obviously understands the logic of Thatcher's policies and benefited from them. He nonetheless maintains that they were wrong. “You're closing people's lives down,” he says, “people's culture down, almost. You know, it's almost like you'd go
to a country and wipe out their culture. You wouldn't dream of it, would you, nowadays.”

I ask, “But do you think that if an industry isn't economical, it's the government that has a responsibility to keep it alive and preserve the culture around it?”

“There's more things than economics comes into it. There's more things than how much does the coal cost, how much can we sell it for. Because once you close the mines down, you're closing a way of life down, that basically people depended on. And how much money did they spend after the strike, keeping communities together? How much money will you spend on welfare, whatever, after the strike because people's whole way of life had gone belly-up, as it were?”

“Do you see it as abnormal that certain industries would cease to be profitable and be replaced by other industries?” I ask.

“That's the way of life, in some respects,” says Harry.

“That's bound to happen,” Brian agrees.

I ask Harry, “So, if you'd been in power at the time, if you'd been prime minister, and you're looking at a progressively less economical industry, how would you have handled the pit closures?”

“That's a good question,” Harry says. “And I've never been in that situation.”

“What other options were realistically open to Thatcher?”

“The option that she wanted, it weren't about closing the mines down, for me, it were about taking power away from the unions. That were the prime target, the prime objective. Basically, emancipating the bloody unions.”

I suspect he has misspoken—I believe he meant to say “emasculating” the unions. But I can't be sure. Thatcher maintained that she was emancipating the unions, in the sense that she believed she was freeing the worker from the tyranny of the closed shop and insisting the union leadership adhere to democratic procedures. “Emancipating” is the word Harry uses, but “emasculating” is the word his voice and the context convey.

A feeling of emasculation, whether or not that is what he meant, is obviously something Thatcher aroused in many men. The fact that they were defeated by a woman, I would have thought, must have made the insult of losing their jobs particularly hard for these men to bear.