Agnes Owens

by Agnes Owens

  Her eyes moistened. To prevent any sentiment I said, ‘Hurry up wi’ the dinner, I’m starvin’.’

  Afterwards I went to my room to collect my gear. It wasn’t impressive. Surprising how little you own when you are faced with the total sum. I wouldn’t even have got a balloon from Duds the ragman for the lot. I packed a pullover, two tee-shirts, a pair of pants, two pair of socks, a pair of denims and a pair of boots into Mrs Smith’s shabby holdall, and was all set. I looked at my watch. It was only six o’clock. The pubs would be open. A tempting thought to get a couple of pints, but I decided against it, because I might blow the lot and that would be easy. Tonight I would keep my mother company with the telly viewing and please her for once. I counted my notes. Eight in all. Hardly a fortune but folk had set out with less – and starved to death.

  I was up early next morning and made myself a cup of tea. No sense in wakening my mother any sooner than necessary. Everything was ready all too quickly. I hung around a bit playing for time. Then I went into her room. She sat up wide awake. ‘Ye should have got me up,’ she accused, ‘I would have made ye somethin’ tae eat.’

  ‘That’s OK. I’ve had somethin’.’

  She faced me in her dowdy petticoat, or whatever it’s called. She was shaking and seemed to be searching for words. ‘I’ll miss you,’ was all she said.

  ‘I’ll miss you as well.’ It was the truth. Right then I felt I would genuinely miss her. After all we had been together for twenty-two years. I put my arm round her cold shoulder, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be OK.’

  I kissed her then left before it got any worse. She knocked on the window as I passed. God, what now. She opened the window. ‘Mind and write.’

  ‘I will,’ I assured her. I didn’t look back but I knew she would stay there watching until I was out of sight.

  As I headed for the bus-stop I began to feel better. It was a bright cold morning with a hint of spring in the air, just enough to make me feel optimistic – and even happy. As I waited at the stop I could pick out the landmarks of my life. Facing me – the Paxton Arms. On the hill behind – the building site. Over the river in front – the derelict Drive. Behind the Drive – the cemetery wherein lay the nameless grave of Paddy McDonald. But that was all finished. It was, goodbye everybody. I was on my way to better things. I was on my way to adventure.

  Postscript by Alasdair Gray to Agnes Owen’s Gentlemen of the West

  You will not have read as far as this unless you enjoyed the foregoing tale, so you are probably relieved that Mac has had the sense and energy to step out of the trap his world had become, and leave us with a convincingly hopeful end. This may be the place for someone who has read the novel more than once to explain why he values it, and I will approach my explanation through some remarks about other writing. Readers who dislike windy summaries should read only the last three paragraphs.

  There are many reasons why there are few good fictions about folk with low incomes. Great poverty is so disgusting that even the poor hate to be reminded of it, and modest incomes which allow some spare-time pleasure and independence – the incomes which Burns called ‘honest poverty’ – are usually earned by work which feels like slavery. It is a horribly ordinary truth that our imaginations reject most of the living we do, so from the earliest days of recorded wealth we have lifted up our eyes to the wealthy. Wealth is enchanting, even at a distance. It bestows freedom, or a convincing illusion of it. Love, friendship, loss and pain are the materials of every life, but the rich wear their materials with distinction. Lord Marchmain can choose to die in a Queen Anne four-poster set up in the Chinese drawing room by the estate carpenters. Getting and spending has not laid waste his powers. Which is why (says D. H. Lawrence in his study of Thomas Hardy) artists have an inborn taste for aristocrats. Other classes exist by making things and making money, but unearned wealth allows people to make themselves, to develop their distinct individualities. This is what every flower that grows does, and what we all ought to do, says D. H. Lawrence. Maybe Lawrence was influenced by his marriage to the daughter of a German baron, but he was also pointing to a fact. Not just writers but the mass of the public like to imagine they are Gods, owners of great lands and houses, highly paid man-killers, monarchs, priests, politicians and gifted youngsters Making It to the Top. This cast list contains the main characters in fairy stories, the Old Testament, Homer, Shakespeare, all history books until recently, and most of today’s newspapers.

  But heroes and heroines need servants to help them, buffoons to amuse them, criminals and rabbles to bring out, by contrast, their distinct individualities. Folk with low incomes are not wholly excluded from history and the daily news, and in nearly all the world’s great fictions – yes, even in that Homer who most celebrates the courage and cunning of the mighty – a truculent commonsense voice declares that heroic grandeur is not worth the cost of its upkeep, that all but some selfish winners are degraded by it. And a Shakespearian prince tells a band of artists the aim of their profession in language which must have inspired Brecht. ‘Your job,’ he says, ‘is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.’ The nature mentioned here is human nature, of course, with whatever in land and climate influences it; but to show the whole age and body of a time to a time – to reflect the constitution and abuses of a whole commonwealth – is an enormous undertaking. Langland, Chaucer and Sir David Lindsay tackled it. Shakespeare partly tackled it in the history plays. His princes of the church and state, rustic squires and horde of normally unemployable ruffians are drawn into social union by an imperial plundering raid on France. Fluellen and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Prince Hal and Falstaff are of equal dramatic and historical weight. That war needed all of them.

  But not until the nineteenth century did a lot of geniuses deliberately describe, with an attempt at equal sympathy, most of the sorts of people who made their nations: Scott first, then at least twelve others in France, England, Russia and America. The French and industrial revolutions had shown that history was what everyone did. A Clydeside engineer, a Corsican corporal, a club of Marseilles republicans, the Lancashire stocking-weavers had changed the world faster than any king or house of lords. In Britain shake-up would have been a better word than revolution. None of the mighty had been brought low, but it was now possible to sell books without flattering the aristocracy. It had been joined by whole classes of newly prosperous people with intense curiosity about how wealth and status were acquired and how the less lucky were living. The less lucky had also become literate. Of the three best English authors after 1850 one had been a child-labourer in a blacking factory, one the kept woman of a London editor, one had earned money as a fiddler in country pubs. Through journalism, translating and a builder’s drawing-office they had become popular novelists. They were qualified to show the struggles by which self-respect and money were gained, or barely kept, or wholly lost. While Karl Marx in the British Museum investigated the matter statistically, Dickens, George Eliot and Hardy described dependencies between makers of wealth in workshop, colony and farm, and users of it in the bit of society which called itself Society.

  In 1895 Jude the Obscure was published. The critics condemned it, and Hardy decided to devote himself to poetry. After that, with few exceptions, there were no writers with the talent and experience to create lowly paid people with considerable viewpoints. Lawrence is the great exception, but in the twenties he deliberately ‘washed his hands of England’. In the mining town where he grew up he had known a community: people who accepted each other for what they had in common as workmates, neighbours, chapel-goers. His mother wanted her children not to be common, but professional and moneyed. By his talents he became these things, and found that the professional, talented, wealthy folk he now mixed with, though good friends who recognised his uniqueness, had no community beyond cliques based on love-affairs and conversations about art and ideas. So he went sea
rching through Australia, New Mexico and Italy for a working community like the Eastwood of his childhood, but not based on wage-slavery, and with room for a free spirit like his own.

  He left behind a literature almost completely class-bound, and bound to the propertied classes. Galsworthy, Forster, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Bowen are dissimilar writers, yet all describe people so detached from their source of wealth in land, trade or industry that they can ignore it, because it is handled by their bankers. The sensitive among them think this unjust. Forster’s Miss Schlegels feel that they stand on an island of golden coins in a wide ocean. Their finely tuned existence consumes the coins, but the sea-waves keep casting more at their feet. The ocean is people. The hydraulic pressure which howks the money up from the human depths and casts it on the lucky island is depicted in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists and A Scots Quair, exceptional novels which show the pressures being resisted by working men’s defiance and organisation. In other fiction, highbrow or popular, the lowly paid have become what they were in Homer’s fictions: servants, helpful or truculent eccentrics, a rabble jostling in the street. When authors attempt a larger view of them the usual angle of vision presents something like beetles crawling on each other at the bottom of a tank. There is no suggestion that such people can initiate anything of value, or be much, even to themselves.

  When I spoke of people looking like beetles crawling in a tank I was not thinking of Greenwood’s Love on the Dole but of a shallower book called No Mean City set in depression Glasgow. Then the image reminded me of some stage plays by Pinter, Orton and Bond. Why did the war with Hitler not change Britain’s literary sense of itself ? ‘The only good government’ (says Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth) ‘is a bad government in a fright.’ Perhaps. The National Coalition which saw Britain through the war was a right-wing body, but it would have been destroyed if it had not mobilised the nation. It froze profits, took control of industry, imposed rationing, fixed wages and prices. It got the unions on its side and ensured that nobody starved or was unduly exploited. It had spokesmen who said the post-war Britain would not return to the poverty and unemployment of the inter-war years. To some extent that promise was honoured. Attlee’s government set up a welfare state. Macmillan’s government did not propose to dismantle it. Butler enlarged the education grants, and in 1954 Somerset Maugham was regretting, C. P. Snow applauding, what they agreed was the first literary fruit of the newly educated proletariat: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. Then came Room at the Top by Braine, Look Back in Anger by Osborne, and reviewers said that a social revolution had discovered its voice. Yet these authors had depicted no working-class experiences whatsoever! Jim Dixon’s bumbling irreverence toward authority is not different in kind from Bertie Wooster’s. Jimmy Porter’s contempt for Britain where ‘all the good old causes have been won’ (he means full employment and some welfare services) was voiced at that time by many aristocratic people, frequently in the press. Joe Lampton thoroughly enjoyed the lives of the affluent who accepted him. The most working-class thing about these men is the sound of their names. They and their authors are examples of a very commonplace shake-up. Like Lawrence they entered an affluent part of England through the educational system. Unlike Lawrence they enjoyed it and stayed. Nor, in getting there, did they feel they left anything worthwhile behind. Their reputation as messengers of social change came from a temporary failure of nerve by a rich conservative (Maugham) followed by a rich socialist’s premature faith that a just nation had at last been founded (Snow). Not the book but the critics showed the state of society, but nobody noticed this.

  The first post-war stories to make good use of low-income experience came out of the English north in the sixties and are firmly set there, but tell truths about the whole country. This Sporting Life shows a gifted youngster Making It to the Top, and also a love-affair. The hero’s talent is rugby football. The machinations by which he pushes his career estrange him from the woman he loves, but as a well-paid sportsman he tries at the end to reclaim her: he has so much to offer! Himself, money, etc. He stands in the street before a burdened aging woman with a shopping bag, and pursues her home, and cannot get her to see him, hear him or acknowledge his existence. He has become that part of the nation which is no use to her. If she were to submit to him and become his mistress or wife it could only be as his property, his appendage. She would feel, look and be out of place. If we seek the flaw which cracks the couple apart we can point, if we like, to his ambition, but the flaw is in Britain. The comic novel Billy Liar is equally desperate. Billy’s mother thinks of her family as ‘just ordinary people’. His father says, ‘I may be just an uneducated working man, but . . .’ They take wage-slavery as a norm, and treat their son’s imagination as a disease: which it is, even to him, because all he makes with it are fantasies and comic dialogue. He is part of a community which wants to keep him. His boss is so disconcerted by the thought of Billy trying to be a script-writer in London that he refuses to accept his resignation. And at the end Billy skulks away from the London train and the adventurous girl who shared his daydreams. He returns to his parents’ council house, cheered by an imaginary army marching at his heels. His imagination will be used not to free but to keep him as he is. Billy loses his lover by crushing his imagination in order to stay in the community. The rugby star loses his lover by developing the skill which takes him out of it. In Kes the picture is yet harsher. A victimised schoolboy learns a falconer’s skills by nursing a wounded hawk – he is healing his own spirit and teaching it to soar. The community barely tolerates this, and his working brother kills the hawk out of spite. And in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner the talented sportsman deliberately loses the race, to stop his victory being used by a highly paid headmaster to glorify a kind of boys’ prison.

  These stories demonstrate the Great British assumption, which is also the Great British lie, that any special talent, initiative or knowledge not advertised as popular is a property of the affluent, a luxury of the posh. This particular lie is the unwritten British constitution. It lets Royalty, the government and most professional people raise their wages and keep themselves employed without drawing much attention, and ensures that coalminers who try to do the same are treated like greedy unpatriotic scoundrels and enemies of the state. When a lie is acted upon by most of the highly and lowly paid parts of a nation it must be treated as a fact. Unluckily for the truth, therefore, stories which show how the lie works can be read as mere matters of fact. Many kindly conservatives who enjoyed the books I mention above will have thought: ‘Yes, that is how they must live down there. How sad!’ The moral then drawn is not that the nation’s wealth should be used to create productive jobs with high wages and pleasant conditions for everyone, but that talented people of lowly birth should have easier admission to the society of those who can make use of them.

  It’s a pity that storytellers cannot be moralists. They may invent people who pass moral judgements, when these are convincing and appropriate, but if they make their inventions the text of a sermon then a sermon is all they will write, no matter how well they have reflected their time. Readers must be enticed to their own conclusions, which cannot be predicted. In his study of the novel in the west of Scotland, Douglas Gifford notes that the commonest theme is the crushing of imagination by poverty, and that Archie Hind and I have both written stories about artists of lowly paid origin who, after tough struggles, despair of producing anything good. Douglas regrets that neither novel indicates what he, a lecturer and critic, lives by indicating: these books are in a Scottish tradition which has made several good things. But we were trying to write tragedies about makers whose work is not wanted by their own kind. A sense of elevated tradition would only give them hope of being ‘taken up’ by people of a different kind.

  But perhaps all parables of the talent are fundamentally ambiguous. A talent is a measure of silver as well as an inborn capacity or well-learned skill, and when we sit down to wri
te what we want to read and which nobody else has written, we enjoy a rich privilege. At that moment we are self-employed and self-sufficient. Nothing need dominate us but our sense of the good, exciting or true. Then we put words on paper, notice these are not very good or exciting or true, and the work begins. But what keeps us writing is an occasional heady feeling of being above the world, above everything but a dim, supportive excitement. Wordsworth thought this sense of freedom, power and possibility was an intimation of immortality. It is well known to children whose growth is not pressed down by labour and responsibility; and stories which revive the sense in adults are likely to be read. Working-class novelists usually incarnate it in someone like themselves who has left or will leave his community, or is suffering because he can’t or won’t. I say he because women are less likely than men to seek satisfactions which detach them from their community. Working-class women are usually too busy holding the community together.

  So who will tell good stories about the people in Britain who still labour with their hands? Who can write a whole novel about (for example) an unambitious bricklayer? Someone whose culture and education have made him a manual worker, and who likes manual work, but finds there is less and less of it to be had? Someone who lives in a housing estate which was thought a great gift to the lowly paid in 1950 because each flat had an inside lavatory, but which otherwise has fewer amenities than an army barrack? I fear that no talented male author could embody himself in such a man for 127 pages without feeling stifled or wanting to rave or do something violently nasty. It is true that Mac, at the start of the ‘Up Country’ chapter, flings a glass across a pub out of rage at the dull bigotry of the surrounding conversation, but despite his scars he is conventional in his judgements and kindly in his actions, though his judgements and actions tug in opposite directions. His feelings towards the hippy German tourist and poor Tolworth McGee are as dismissive as those of anyone else in his community, yet the hippy and McGee get all the companionship and assistance he can offer them. Like his companions in that part of the community which is no longer employable, he is a gentle man. I cannot imagine the social pressures which would drive him to riot. He is a socialist, living in a labour-voting area, but has no expectations that the Labour Party or trade union action will do anything to help him. If, to the three million unemployed Britons at the time of writing (October 1985) we add twice as many casual labourers whose work is part-time or threatened, then Mac is typical of a huge piece of Britain. Conservatives can draw soothing morals from his existence. I hope they will not.