The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “Did you tell them how goddamn hungry the men are?” he asked. “You mustn’t be too proud to let them know the men are beginning to starve. Tell them to get some food in here or it won’t last another week. What is it you and your loovely wife are always spouting? ‘Hunger is a good master.’ Well, you’re right. Emotion isn’t enough, desire isn’t enough. You’ve got your unity, now you have to build an organization out of it.”

  When you need a martyr, make sure you send a martyr.

  When you need a leader, make sure you have a leader.

  When you attack power, make sure you lead from power.

  Gillon knew the sayings, backwards and forwards, but he couldn’t apply them in an organizational sense; there was nothing to organize about. The issue, as Gillon saw it, was a man’s pride and his obligation to it. It was as simple as that. They had been locked out of their work because a man asked for justice under the law and now they were being offered the privilege of sweating for the Earl at his whim if they were willing to crawl back in. It was no longer a question of Gillon Cameron or of an organization, but of the integrity of each man in Pitmungo who mined coal.

  “The reason they call it a yellow-dog agreement,” a miner explained to his son, “is that only a yellow dog would sign it.”

  As simple as that.

  On Saturday night, on what would have been pay-packet night, the Pluck Me was reopened. The constable from Cowdenbeath came with four soldiers from the Edinburgh Fusiliers, armed and looking foolish and a little ashamed of themselves, and stood in the doorway in case any hungry colliers got ideas in their heads.

  Unlimited credit, Mr. Brothcock announced from the steps of the store, would be advanced against future earnings for all those willing to sign the Mutual Trust Agreement and appear for work at the pits on Monday. Food would be sold at cost.

  “Aye, at the cost of your manhood!” Japp shouted.

  A rock sailed by Mr. Brothcock’s head and crashed through the glass behind him. The four soldiers went down on their knees and pointed their rifles at the crowd of men in front of them, but Brothcock never moved.

  “At least they can’t blame that one on your Jem,” someone said.

  “My Jem wouldn’t have missed,” Gillon said.

  “For those of you sensible enough to sign, there will be fresh pork on your table tonight and bacon for breakfast in the morning.”

  * * *

  They stood fast but it wasn’t easy for any one of them. In the end, as Selkirk said again, it would be the women and the hungry children that would decide the issue.

  They weren’t ready for the discipline of the Communists and the intricate arguments of the Socialists, they weren’t ready, these people who had just ceased to fight among themselves, for outsiders such as the Miners’ Union to come in and tell them what to do. It was their battle and they wanted to wage and win it themselves. Gillon wrote to the Scotch Miners’ Union but Keir Hardie was in Wales, running for Parliament there because he couldn’t get enough votes in Scotland, and the Miners’ Union was under a court injunction to cease its organizing activities. That was all right with the men from Pitmungo. They went down each day and stood around the mine mouth, and then, as if drawn there by magnetic force, they gathered in front of the Pluck Me, seemingly to monitor those who might try to slip in through the door, but actually drawn there by the sight of food. It seemed to reassure them to know that food still existed in the world.

  “That store is going to kill you,” Selkirk told Gillon. “If you want to win you’d better burn it down.”

  There was talk of rushing the store and taking what they needed, what they had been cheated out of in the past, but there was no one to lead them. There was no tradition of that kind of lawlessness in Pitmungo. And so they stood and waited outside and smelled the smells from the store, and the women began to faint. It became a kind of craze, a rage. The women, who hadn’t eaten a decent meal in over a month, began simply slipping to the stones, one following the one beside her, dropping to the ground and being carried home and put into bed to save her energy. And then the mood of the crowd, as Selkirk had warned, began to change. “You watch,” he had warned, “if there’s no structure to shelter them in, the crowd can be as moody as the flocks on the moor.”

  “Where are they now when we need them?” a man suddenly shouted out one afternoon. “Where’s your great Keir Hardie? Why should we have to starve for him?”

  There was all too loud a grumble of “aye’s,” but Walter Bone silenced it.

  “It’s not for them, it’s for ourselves!” he shouted. “It’s for the moor they stole from us. It’s for the manhood he wants to steal from us. We’ve pushed him this far, we can push him farther. Do we have to be cowards just because we’re treated like slaves?”

  It held them, but a crowd has a short memory, and a starving crowd, in the end, no memory at all of anything but food. In their hunger, Bone realized, they were searching for somewhere to place their blame in order to free them from the burden of themselves.

  “I ask you one thing,” a man called out. “Why should we starve to save Cameron’s pride?”

  The “aye’s” could be heard again above the crying of children in the doorways at the back of the crowd.

  “It’s not Cameron any longer, it’s us!” Bone shouted, but they didn’t hear him.

  “It’s all for Cameron’s gain. He’s using us to get his siller.”

  “To get his gowd.”

  “He’s not going to get his siller at the cost of my bairns’ lives, I’ll tell you that.”

  They began to move, to shift, as if some force was moving them against their will, a reluctant step, but one step after another, toward Colliers Walk.

  “You know it’s not so!” Andy Begg shouted. “He’s suffered as much as us and worse. There’ll be no work for the Camerons in this valley and you know that. No work in all of Scotland and you know that.”

  But they were moving, not with any great energy, not with any true desire, just a massive shifting of people without a leader and without a cause it believed in, but with a need to move, to do something, to go somewhere. It had been too long and asking too much for them to stand still any longer.

  “The Camerons always make out, don’t worry about them!” a man shouted. “They got a kist of siller in their hoose would sink a boat.”

  The house, more than the silver, was what stirred them, because it offered their aimlessness a direction.

  “The hoose, the hoose,” they began to chant, and as they did, they started milling their way up the hill toward Tosh-Mungo, and then “Tosh-Mungo, Tosh-Mungo” became their cry because it excited them more. They had no idea what they would do when they got there except that with the certainty of mobs they knew some answer would be waiting for them.

  “Mobs and cowards believe such easy things,” Walter Bone said to Andy Begg, watching the people push their way up the hill, and when he turned back to Begg, Andy Begg was gone with the rest.

  * * *

  Maggie was the first to hear them, sewing in the front window seat, and she knew at once what it meant. She was calm about it.

  “They’re coming for you,” she turned and said to Gillon. “I knew they would sooner or later.”

  “Why should they come for me?”

  “Because you’re holier than they are and they can’t stand it.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “If you don’t, you’ll soon find it out.”

  Even with the windows closed and the door shut, they could hear the cries through the foot-thick walls. If only they didn’t come with fire in mind, she thought. She never considered they might have come for the kist.

  “I don’t understand,” Gillon said, “I don’t understand.”

  They came up the Terrace and the shouting became more of a roar. There was not much anger to the shouting, or much direction, but still it was frightening; who can ever tell about a mob? Five hundred people were shouting five hundred di
fferent things, but gradually they came to settle on one that gave them the most satisfaction. “Cameron, come OOT, Cameron, come OOT!” they chanted, and things shook and trembled in the house. A tassie fell from the dresser.

  “What am I going to do?” Gillon asked. He had to shout to be heard.

  “This is your mess; you made it, you get out of it.”

  The anger in his face when he turned to her frightened her.

  “And this is your family. You made it. You want to get out of it?” He was right, she knew: the family was in it now and they had to stay together.

  “Then you’d better go out, Gillon, or they’re going to come in. I don’t think they’ll hurt you; I don’t think they know what they want.”

  Gillon stood by the door and waited. They were growing more violent.

  “The family will only excite them,” Maggie said. Gillon nodded. “You’ll have to go it alone.”

  He still stood behind the door and she came over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Come on, Gillon. You’ll know what to do.” She reached around him and put her hand on the latch. “Waiting’s no good now,” she said, and worked the latch and the door began to open and there was nothing for Gillon to do then but go out and face them.

  When they saw him, the men nearest to the door fell silent and some seemed a little ashamed. Then others saw him in the doorway and began to grow silent, and soon the only sound was the shifting of people’s feet on the cobblestones as they scuffed about for a better look.

  “What do you think you’ve come for?” Gillon called out.

  Sooner or later, a true mob, if it comes without a leader, invents one, but this mob didn’t have the leader or the will. Gillon sensed that in them and began to feel the way he had in Brumbie Hall when the words ran away with him. He asked them why they had come, and what they thought they would find or could get, and they were silent. In the protection of the little square by the Pluck Me their collective voice had thundered back at them from the walls, but up on the Terrace the wind sweeping down from the High Moor swallowed what sound they had.

  “Sign the paper, Cameron,” someone finally managed.

  “The pits are open. Any man who wants to sign the paper is free to do it. Just don’t come up here and ask me to do it for you. Don’t ask me to forgive you.”

  Some of the men began studying the stones and cobbles on the Terrace. Some at the back of the crowd broke away from it and drifted back down the hill.

  “The children are hungry, man, the children are crying.”

  “Do you think I don’t hear them crying at night? It makes me cry, too, but understand this much. I’m not going to do your quitting for you. The question is, do you want to live under law or under the whim of the master for the rest of your lives?”

  The other Camerons had come out by then. Whatever mob strength had resided in that collection of people, it was gone from them now. They were weaker, if only because of their size—a massive, collective weakness—than one strong man.

  “If you want to sign the yellow-dog agreement and get food for your children, you know where to go to do it. Just know this, too. My son Jem will never sign. The rest of the Cameron family will never sign. I will never sign.”

  They broke up after that. Fushionless they called it in Pitmungo, a withering away of the spirit, and not one of them on leaving ever looked back. Gillon and the rest of the family watched them go, and when most were on their way, straggling alone or in little groups back down the hill, they opened the door and went inside.

  “Is that the way you sounded in Brumbie Hall, Daddie?” Sam asked.

  “No, it’s the way I wanted to sound.”

  “Och, Jem would have been proud of you today, Dad,” Rob Roy said. “That would have been his true eulogy.”

  “Aye, he would have been satisfied with that,” Andrew said.

  Maggie went over to Gillon.

  “You were right, I was wrong,” she said. “And you did it almost as well as it could be done.”

  * * *

  They thought Mr. Selkirk had come up the hill to congratulate Gillon for what he had done but he hadn’t. A few days after the march up the hill a group of men, no longer able to face the eyes of their children staring at them from their beds, too weak to play, sleeping their hunger away, formed a Hardship Committee, a group of citizens before whom a man could appear and prove that his family had gone over to the far side of starvation. If the Committee agreed, with no prejudice to be held against him, with no loss of respect in the eyes of the town, a man could go down to the Pluck Me and sign the yellow-dog paper and take a creel of food home to his house.

  “So there it is, Gillon,” Henry Selkirk said. “The crack in the dam, the leak in the dike. It’s a fact of life, Gillon. No starving man can smell the stink of melting fat coming from his neebor’s house without killing him or joining him. It is my humble opinion…”

  “I didn’t know you had any of those, Mr. Selkirk,” Maggie said.

  “… that they will join him. Unless you have a finger for the dike?”

  Gillon shook his head. He had reached, he thought, a point in life when he could recognize the truth when he heard it.

  “It is my humble opinion, Mr. Selkirk, that you are full of shit,” Sam said.

  “Aye,” Andrew said, with great vehemence, “aye.” They thought he would be angry and they waited for the explosion to come but it never came. Mr. Selkirk merely stood in the doorway and smiled.

  * * *

  Over a hundred heads of families appeared before the Hardship Committee the first week alone, and on Monday morning over three hundred men—every one of them staring hard at the ground, the collar of his work jacket pulled high up around his face—appeared at the mine mouths and pitheads and waited for the cages to take them down. No one said anything to them going down or coming back covered with their pit dirt. Most of the women made an effort to cook as covertly as possible, trying to keep the smell of cooking food from wafting over neighboring houses, but nothing can keep the smell of food from hungry men. Each day there were more of them ready to sign and go back down to work, each day more and more coal came steaming up the shafts, and the hutches of coal began to roll once more toward St. Andrew’s dock. By the end of the second week it was over, although not completely over. Twenty-one men, most of them heads of families, still refused to sign and go down and Gillon knew what that meant. Like it or not, he had become the father to twenty-two families.

  “How are they going to live? How are they going to survive?” Sam said.

  “We’ll see that they do,” Gillon said.

  Maggie understood at once. “Not with my siller they won’t,” she cried.

  “Aye, with our siller they will.”

  She was staring at Gillon with an anger so deep and so dangerous that it touched on madness, they all saw that.

  “There is the price of coal and we’ve paid that,” Gillon finally said. He was very calm about it, and quiet. “There is a price for Jem and we’re paying that. There is a price for pride and we’ll start paying that.”

  “Pride!” she shouted. Her voice cut through all of them. “God, look what you’ve done with your pride, your great romantic pride. You’ve lost our work and you’ve lost our home and now you’d steal our future. For what? What? All for your stupid dignity, your Cameron pride.”

  Maggie spat.

  “But you’re the one who taught me,” Gillon said. “I never knew about pride before.”

  She ran into the other room and when she came back out the key to the kist was on the chain around her neck.

  “If you touch the kist, God will have to account for what happens to you,” she said, and to their amazement and horror, since they had never seen it before, she fell to the floor and wept with no tears.

  15

  Pitmungo was as dead as Jem in his dead-hole, as dead as the inside of a dead-kist. No man wanted to drink in the College because it was an admission that he
had dogged, as they came to call it, and so they hid in their blackness and sent their bairn to the tavern for their pints and drank them in darkness and silence at home.

  The men sneaked off to work, muffled silence in the morning, no more the raucous Japp-like shouts down the rows and lanes, all that gone, because they couldn’t stand the eyes of the Twenty-One, the righteous men, the men with hollows for eyes who stared at them from the doorways so that some men would stop and go back up the Walk and climb over fences and come sneaking around those eyes until they reached the mine mouth and were lost underground in the privacy of coal and blackness, safe from everyone but themselves.

  Some of the Twenty-One had begun going down to the shaft heads and watching the men line up, waiting to go down.

  “Have a good day doon pit with Lord Fyffe, Tam,” they would say to old friends, and Tam would wish he could fall down the shaft. But no man who signed quit, because once the chain of hunger was broken it was impossible to go back to hunger. Gillon finally had to go down to the shaft heads and restrain the Twenty-One.

  “This is their right; their choice. Ours is our right and our choice.”

  “Oh, aye, some choice. Theirs to get fat and ours to become bones. Their children to blossom and ours to become weeds.”

  “Why don’t you go back down then?” Gillon would ask.

  “I don’t know. Quit preaching to me, Cameron. I can’t go down and you know it. It’s all right for you; you’re the big hero here, the saint of Pitmungo. I just can’t go down. It destroys my dignity as a man, if you must know.” The men were embarrassed by the idealism and still they couldn’t find a way to get around it.

  “All right, that’s it then,” Gillon said. “No man is going to die of hunger or lose his dignity as long as I have siller in my house.”

  That night Gillon took the key from around Maggie’s neck. She didn’t say a word.

  * * *

  Which was the start of it.

  Until the trial—when, Mr. MacDonald assured Gillon, the men would have to be given their jobs back because the judge, like it or not, would be forced under law to find the yellow-dog agreement an illegal document—the men would need to be given money in some way that wasn’t charity. At a meeting in Walter Bone’s house, away from the eyes of Maggie, they founded the Sportin Moor Society, the organization that in the future would speak for the people of Pitmungo to the masters of the Company. The Twenty-One, as they came to be known, were to be the recruiters and organizers for the Society and no bones were made about the fact that they were chosen because the flame of their resistance had burned a little longer than the ordinary man’s with the purifying flame of hunger and denial.