Crusaders

by Richard T. Kelly

  Joe could then segue with ease from how the struggle for a fair wage on Tyneside was much akin to that of the Viet Cong against the US imperium, or of blacks against tyranny in Rhodesia and South Africa. Martin saw the pictures on the news, he knew there were violent things afoot round the world. It impressed him that his dad seemed wise to them. It bothered him but slightly that no one else’s dad held anything like the same set of views.

  It was not uncommon for them to trudge back to Heaton without a paper sold. But Joe never took the bottom line as his judge. ‘It’s sad, really it is, son, to see working people sat supping their wages, arguing against their own interest. I mean, look about you, eh? Even you see what the problem is, aye?’ Martin nodded. One night in Battle Field was sufficient to observe the dismal lot of working people. It offended the eye no less than the spirit of fairness, and someone, clearly, needed to do something about it.

  *

  Martin couldn’t deny that he liked the look of himself. Encouraged by what the mirror dependably showed him, he developed a crisp diction, a certain bearing, a style of looking down his nose at less able adversaries – all of which he shared with Jenny. She made no claim over her son’s endowments, yet seemed to exude satisfaction in the handsome figure he cut. Joe, though, more or less openly regarded his son as a crude work-in-progress, to be coaxed and fretted over, albeit with patience.

  If Jenny was Martin’s first female devotee, she was soon supplanted. Come 1971 the grammar school and the neighbouring Girls’ High underwent a shotgun marriage, a line of air-raid shelters between the two torn down so they might merge as a comprehensive. This was no great novelty to Martin – reliably surrounded by lasses from his early teens – other than that he and his then-girl-friend, a darkly pretty thing called Pamela Stark, now walked together to the same gates rather than parting with a juicy kiss on Jesmond Park Road. In sharing a classroom, though, Martin began to brood on Pamela’s deficiencies – the slackness of her jaw, not to say her mind, and the frayed state of her jersey and skirt. ‘You’re well away from that one, pet,’ Jenny observed after Pamela stopped calling round. ‘Her people, Martin, they’re not our sort.’

  He knew in his boots he would always have girls on the go, for he was both a fancy footballer and a natural leader for the lads – Titch Harwood, Tony Charnley, Mike Tweddle – who were game to duck out at lunch hour to the pub by Jesmond Dene. There, a rogue’s gallery of underage drinkers, they supped Tartan Bitter at half a crown and hogged the table football, drawing a mute but giggly female audience. Martin began to tailor his swagger to their gaze, affecting a silver chain and a long sleek shag for his dark hair. He squired selected girls to see the Who at the Odeon, Roxy Music at City Hall, Rod and the Faces at the Mayfair, and in the sultry aftermath he generally found they had much the same thing in mind as he.

  Flushed with erotic success, his appetite for kitchen-table dialectics waned. He agreed less readily with his dad, and tired of arguing the toss. For one thing, Joe didn’t like anyone – with the qualified exception of Keir Hardie (‘After about, 1911? He was sound. Didn’t treat his family so well, but neebody’s perfect.’). Otherwise, Joe’s general line was that someone, somewhere, was forever selling out the good old cause. It wasn’t sufficient that the union movement had grown, for history warned that the bigger unions put their own interests before their class. It wasn’t enough that working men be MPs, for their heads, too, were all too easily turned.

  ‘If that’s how you really feel’ – Martin groaned, the devil his advocate – ‘then why don’t you bloody well stand for election?’

  ‘It’s nee small thing, standing candidates, son. They don’t make it easy.’

  But who were they? The boss class, in league with Satan? Martin’s considered response, on turning sixteen, was to join the Labour Party. He didn’t much warm to the chore of branch meetings, nor could he persuade Titch or Tony or even his most compliant girlfriend to join him. But it seemed a step further to being his own young man.

  As if in spite, Joe’s militancy grew yet more entrenched. He had always thrown a slice of his wage into a union pot for men made redundant, but now he was donating to some clandestine ‘dispute fund’. Jenny was tight-lipped about the shrinkage to the pay packet, and Martin would have known no better, had it not been for a slow Sunday afternoon when she blew up at Joe within his earshot. ‘What about the boy? Do you not think you’ve a duty to him? His prospects? Have you thought of that? Or are you only bothered for your mates? I hope they’re bothered for you.’

  ‘That is the whole bloody point, Jenny. Martin’ll be right as rain.’

  Joe then sought out his son in the quiet of his room, and they sat uneasily on his bed beneath the tacked wallposters of Led Zeppelin and A Clockwork Orange. ‘There’s a sort of a conservatism you get in women, son. It’s almost an instinct. They get so bothered for hearth and home – and I don’t mean to say that’s nowt. But it does mean they’ve not always … got the heart, you might say, for fighting a tough corner? On principle, like?’

  Martin remained in two minds. The spiel might have carried more clout had it been uttered within his mother’s hearing. As it happened, Jenny did not stew in her own juice. Rather, she set about refreshing the shorthand she had last purveyed at age sixteen, and obtained a secretarial job at the giant Purves-McArthur Pharmaceutical. Each morning she would commute to a site in Longbenton where the firm’s cleverest men conducted leading-edge research into new types of washing powder and sanitary towel. Joe made no fuss, enquiring respectfully of Jenny’s day when the family convened for tea, though he was partial to some sharp asides about low union take-up at the Purves plant. Jenny confined herself to a few quietly glowing remarks about her boss, Dr Colin Honeyman, PhD, whose dignities she carefully observed. New social opportunities came her way, she took up invites to dinner parties and dances, and Joe escorted her without gusto. Some nights they returned in silence, Joe in a high colour, Jenny heading directly upstairs. Martin felt for the slow decline in his father’s manly charm. But he could see where Joe had let things slide. He remained sure that his own brand could carry all before him.

  Newcastle had begun to feel a little too small for him – dreary, fatally deficient in bright lights and crackle. The idea of London gained a foothold in his daydreams. There were trains leaving daily and nightly from Central Station. What if he just climbed aboard one? Similar fancies were perhaps the undoing of his concentration that day on the wintry school sports field when he raced for a fifty-fifty ball with an advancing keeper, realising far too late – committed to his slide – that he would come up badly short. Before he bit the turf, his ankle was wrecked – a blow for the First Eleven, but an outright sickener for Martin Pallister. ‘I hope you’ve got hobbies, bonny lad,’ said the doctor who cast his foot. ‘Or it’ll be whist for you every Saturday night ’til new year.’

  With renewed application he hobbled along to Labour branch meetings, now convened at the Corner House pub, and there, amid the drear standing orders, he found himself stuck on one thought. This Party liked to boast of a thousand members per constituency, yet if Martin’s branch were typical then there could hardly be two hundred in all Heaton & Wallsend. Ten-to-a-dozen was the monthly average, no more than two or three so-called ‘activists’, and they seemed active mostly on their own behalves – garrulous blokes, who had pressed for the move to the pub, the better to suit their favoured level of brow-beating (‘You’ve not a bliddy clue, you’). By a little and a little Martin asserted himself, for he sensed that one need only open one’s mouth and keep doing so. He was not anti-machismo – he simply preferred his own brand. One night it happened that one of those bluff activists – the joiner George Manton – told him without nicety to go fetch another plate of the cut sandwiches the landlord had laid on. On his return Martin tossed the paper plate and its fare into old George’s face, and held his ground as others then held them apart. ‘Aye! Aye! And you’re an ill-mannered twat,’ he shouted across the fl
ailing arms.

  By the time the Tories went to the country in February of 1974, Martin was off his crutches and running. He dogged and heckled the rabbit Tory candidate all round the constituency. On election day he was out the door by six in the morning, the better to marshal fellow volunteers, take polling-card numbers outside the stations and ferry old folks to vote in his second-hand Morris. Joe showed no more approval for his son’s vigour that day than he did for Labour’s victory. And that, frankly, boiled Martin’s piss.

  *

  He was the first Pallister to get to college, a reader of History at Newcastle. He had daydreamed awhile of the London School of Economics, but the living looked expensive, whereas this way he could live at home, whatever vexation was entailed. Joe made some leaden cracks about ‘middle-class playgrounds’ and indeed Martin felt uneasily favoured, what with Titch off to clerk at Barclays Bank and Tweddle vanished through the gates of Swan Hunter shipyard. But he couldn’t spurn his mother’s cash when it helped him out and into a shared flat. He cruised his courses, and made a lightning ascent within college politics and the National Organisation of Labour Students. On a platform he had looks and delivery, he didn’t shy from popularity contests, and was firmly of a mind that he could win them.

  He was less assured of how to finesse his relations with Joe, an ever more prominent face in hard-left circles and the vanguard of his party, now calling themselves the Socialist Workers. Martin could not always demur from the motion that Labour was a wash-up and a sell-out. And yet it remained the pony on which he was minded to bet. His own investment in marching causes was to join CND and the Anti-Nazi League, neither of which gave him offence. There were, perhaps, too many herbivore hippies in the former, and in the latter too many fans of the scrofulous punk rock. Gamely he tried, nonetheless, to stay abreast of new readings in anarchism and feminism, while keeping up his general studies in the opposite sex. A dilemma arose, in that all too many young women at Newcastle were well-bred and well-mannered southerners, to whom his doggishness proved catnip. It was a treat, he found, to fuck upwardly – to give these debutantes a taste of the North. It was also less bother, on the whole, for unlike his dad Martin was unwilling to take the raw edge of any female tongue. Ladyloves came and went, for many were the nights on the lash when he couldn’t restrain his thirst, turning red-faced and lecherous or outright unmanageable. Becky Markham from Kentish Town was the one who suffered longest and yet stayed. Her fair hair pinned up like a nurse, her dark hooded eyes so authentically serious, she betrayed a true concern for his welfare. He realised that she loved him, and he was mildly chastened.

  In the spring of 1978 he and Becky took a train to London for a big Rock against Racism concert in Hackney, Martin keen to sample the atmosphere and ready, in principle, to give a fair hearing to the Clash. They stayed overnight with her parents Rodge and Pip, in a darkly shuttered terraced home of bare floorboards, littered with Pelican paperbacks and unpainted furniture, its outer walls assailed by ivy. Rodge and Pip were secondary-school teachers both, and though Martin would have genuinely liked for them to like him he soon quit trying, for he had to adjudge them dour and patronising people. On their kitchen wall they made a proud show of a pair of old miners’ helmets, hung from nails, though clearly no one in the house had ever worked with anything heavier than a pen. Martin thought it risible – worse even than the mining museum at Beamish in Durham, where the staff clarted about in period pit-costume. The sacred relics were being collected while the industry still drew breath.

  In the morning, after toast and stewed tea, Rodge sent the youngsters on their way with a clenched fist. ‘Stick it to the fascists, you two.’

  Martin found he could no longer tether his tongue. ‘Eh, it’s a pop concert, we’re not off to fight the Wehrmacht.’

  Pip tutted. ‘Martin, you wouldn’t say that if you were Asian.’

  ‘Well, I’m not, am I? Okay, we’re not so mixed in Newcastle. But I don’t think the National Front’s got a Thousand Year Reich on the cards.’

  He was aware he might as well have pissed into their tea, but was pleased to have relieved his irritation. For some time he had suspected that his tutor at Newcastle was earmarking him for teaching, and in soft moments he yielded to a certain fantasy of standing up and expounding before a classroom of keen lads and lasses. But the profession itself he disliked instinctively – middle-class fuckers in the main, it always seemed, and nary such dismal proof as that before him now.

  *

  He woke with an acrid mouth and a pulsing head. The party had been a late one, and to its arduous end he had been declaiming most eloquently to some wide-mouthed girl about the vulnerable merits of anarcho-syndicalism. It was her bedsheets he was now half-in and half-out of, her humid pit of a room. She herself – Rosie by name, he was reasonably sure – was nowhere in view. But then she was tugging him awake, for he had dozed off again. She seemed unusually troubled. He was prepared to apologise. In fact, her moaning was to do with there being a phone call for him. That he had been traced seemed the worst possible start to the day – this before his flatmate came on the line, barely coherent, to say that Martin’s mother had been trying to reach him all morning. Joe had suffered an awful accident at work.

  Martin ran all the way to the General Hospital, cursing himself, dread clasping at his stomach and chest, afraid to imagine what he would see.

  He found Jenny seated and still and colourless, the mild Dr Honeyman hovering over her, having driven her from Purves directly on receipt of the news. But Honeyman slipped away as Jenny tried dazedly to talk. Joe had been in charge of an overhead crane that unloaded prematurely, a steel drum crushing his right side against a concrete abutment. As Martin put his arms around her, hoping to instil calm and control the wild spin in his head-space, the registrar was pacing toward them, his mouth set plain in a line of regret.

  ‘Mrs Pallister, we’ve reviewed all the options, I’m afraid an amputation is going to be necessary …’

  ‘Is there really nothing else you can try?’

  ‘I’m truly sorry, just – the state of the arm, it’s effectively severed. Even if we could re-attach it, he’d never have the use of it. I’m so sorry, Mrs Pallister, this is just the place we find ourselves. So I need your approval.’

  Jenny was shaking her head, but Martin knew in his bones that matters had passed beyond redemption.

  Joe came around very late that night and was propped up, bloodless and hoarse, an immaculate bulbous cloth bandage midway between his right elbow and where his wrist had been.

  ‘I saw it come at us – saw it all the way …’

  Jenny tried a hesitant caress of his right flank. Martin stared doggedly downward at the vestiges of the mop-head across the linoleum floor.

  ‘See … It’s odd, so odd. It wasn’t the pain, that wasn’t the worst – not like you’d think. I just remember thinking, clear as day, aw God, that’s it. That’s done for, it’ll not ever get mended …’

  In the silence Martin heard the rattle and squeak of trolley wheels.

  ‘It didn’t get this, but, eh?’

  He glanced up. Joe was raising and clenching his left fist. His voice had clotted, and the gesture seemed to Martin entirely futile and forlorn. Then he heard his mother’s drastic sob, saw her painful smile, and realised that Joe’s good thumb was rubbing at the thin gold of his wedding band, which he now pressed to his lips. Martin felt himself rise unsteadily, venture to lay a hand on his father’s left forearm, and leave the room. Outside, a pair of slender nurses were trotting past and he managed but barely to bury his face behind his hands.

  Chapter II

  HEARTS AND MINDS

  Sunday, 10 November 1996

  ‘When we start to complain of all the things that aren’t like they were in the old days – well, there’s a danger we never stop, isn’t there? The price of butter. Manners – young people’s manners especially. Newcastle United, of course. The Labour Party …’

  Liven up,
John, Gore chided himself. As he had feared in the drafting, he was sounding like an old coot. The intention, yes, was to focus on his core demographic, sticks and liver spots and all. Yet as he spoke, he was counting those mainly stooped and grey heads. Thirty-nine, forty? Undoubtedly a turn for the worse – perplexing too, in light of his rising profile, and thus a slight that he was minded to take personally.

  ‘We can always have a pop at the Church, too. You’ll have noticed, I’m sure – scheme after scheme we’ve seen for reforming it, restoring its unity, making it “relevant”. Sometimes the extra effort only brings fresh disappointment …’

  Like, for instance, today. The late-declared absence of Steve Coulson and crew, purportedly ‘busy’, had reduced them to bare bones, all the more damnable since the scarcity heightened Gore’s awareness of a pair of conspicuous newcomers. Blue-suited Martin Pallister was front and centre, sitting upright, arms folded. But Simon Barlow slouched and rubbed his chin near Lindy, who was minus Jake and looking rather nice in boots of tan suede and a jean jacket over a short jade peasant dress. He would have to address the issue of her in due course.

  ‘I do wonder sometimes – with all our talk of schemes and structures – whether we’ve maybe lost sight of the relationship of God and man? If God seems irrelevant to us sometimes, might it not be because we’ve made Him a rather distant notion? Not a living God, his influence present among us. But a God stuck in some Bible-story past? Don’t get me wrong, God is God – yesterday, today, and for ever.’

  He looked up, paused, enjoying Barlow’s over-emphatic nod.