Frankly, I was surprised at my emotion during that last week in Kiddington. “You’re only going to Spain,” Suzie told me, repeatedly, every time I drifted towards the morose. “You can be back here in three hours, and that includes the drive from Punslet airport.”
It wasn’t the house. I don’t get emotional about bricks and mortar. True, we had lived in it for over twenty years, had stone-clad its exterior, extended it to the left, paved the outside with Portland look-alike, and replaced the metal window frames with double-glazed upvc, permanent white, no more painting. But it wasn’t the house...
And it certainly wasn’t Kiddington, itself, that brought on the tears. After sixty-four years of residence, I now feel a foreigner in the place. There’s no Kiddington folk left there. It’s been happening for years, of course, ever since the 1960s when the Coal Board started moving miners to jobs, rather than recruiting youngsters locally. The village filled up with Scots, Geordies and Welshmen when the locals retired. The young, with no more local jobs available, moved away or stayed put to opt for a life on the social. People of my age were probably the last to grow up with the expectation of being hired locally. Like most traditions, however, it was barely a couple of generations old. It only came home to Kiddingtonians when the pit finally closed and symbolic, but now useless, half winding wheels were set in concrete at the village’s borders on the main roads. Kiddington Colliery, 1865-1993, the plaques said. It spanned, thus, not much more than a century, five generations at most. It lasted longer than many, but it had its life and that had come to its close. But in the local psyche its presence was perceived more like an eternity.
It was, of course, 1984 that was to blame. We’d had previous tiffs with the toffs, not least under Gormley in the 70s when I was on the picket lines with the rest of the lads. I can even remember the boos Gormley got when he descended the hallowed steps of the worshipped Wembley to greet the teams before the cup final when Gagstone Rovers last won the cup. I don’t think I have before or since heard seventy thousand people say the word “traitor” at the same time. Roots, you see, run deeper than most think. My granddad told me about 1926 and the dark years that followed. But 1984 was different. It was make or break, and we were broken.
My use of the inclusive ‘we’ is somewhat disingenuous since, to this day, in Kiddington I remain one of ‘them’, a ‘they’. By 1984 I was no longer a mere collier. I had done courses, educated myself, improved myself. I had been promoted, reclassified, re-graded, and I was already a team supervisor, with half a dozen electricians working for me. I was not yet at the level of ‘gaffer’, but I had certainly achieved ‘ganger’.
Now there are two things that most people don’t understand about coal mines - coal and mining! To be serious, what I meant to say was mining and mechanisation. The former had been around for four generations or so. In fact, even at the start of our pit’s story, mining had been a Kiddington activity for centuries. The common testifies to that. The old way was called bell mining. You sank a shaft until you reached your shale layer and then cut horizontally through it, lifting the product by the basketful up the shaft. As the workings undermined the earth above, a bell shaped cavern was created below, hence the name. Eventually the roof collapsed because no-one used any timber shoring in those days, so no doubt you took the tailings and the bodies out of the same hole, or perhaps you didn’t, preferring just to declare the plot a grave. After the collapse, it was thus time to move on, just ten metres either side to start again. It wasn’t long before the whole top caved in, of course, and it is the remnants of these catastrophes that today are the boggy depressions where reeds grow in the bottom.
In later, more sophisticated times, mines were more like cities than holes in the garden. As a kid, I can remember a black and white plate illustrating a coal mine in section about a quarter of the way through my dad’s Gresham English Dictionary, one of the four books we had in the house. It made a pit look so neat, so manicured, pedicured. The shafts were all perfectly vertical and the workings perfectly horizontal. Little men pushed tubs of product through perfectly circular cross sections, while ponies hauled the same tubs half a dozen at a time empty to and laden from the face. Order reigned. Physics didn’t, however, at least in the consciousness of the graphic artist, who clearly never appreciated the gravitational difference between a full tub and an empty one!
Reality begged to differ. Like any human creation, the pit had more foibles than plans, more dead-ends than thoroughfares, and nothing, not even the people, was uniform. They were straight folk, however. You could bet on that. You didn’t last long down the pit if you were found out a wrong ‘un. Miners had to rely on one another for their livelihoods and often their lives. There was no place for a bad egg.
Three generations of skilled operators had built it up after the owners first raised the capital to sink the shafts. The workings were wooded, cared for by carpenters who continually made and remade its structures. Everything was cut to measure, custom-built, bespoke, if you like. Everyone in his own way was a craftsman. Even the pick and shovel men had their qualifications, being their bodies which did not last long, despite their training, honesty, piety and community spirit. You had to work together. Individual difference or assertion endangered everyone. It was a way of work for the miners, and a way of life for the community.
And then there arose a new era, an era of reconstruction, expansion, GDP, demand, consumerism, gadgets, small families and home ownership, an era when the individual was raised to the cross to replace God. Home fires were burning bigger and brighter. We had never had it so good. Flames need to reach further and further up the chimney, now as far as the soot deposits that might later ignite. It was soon the 1960s. We mechanised. It was the decade of reinvention, when all past became invalid overnight and death was finally defeated by demotic denial.
Coal had to be raised quicker and in greater quantities. We invented the walking hydraulic pit prop and sacked the carpenters. We made mining machines designed outside and assembled in situ, the exact width and depth of a seam. The cutter would run like a chewing bear along a sinew of mother earth to eat a strip of her collapsing body, to reach an end that would then demand that I and then my gang reassemble it one cut depth deeper. And so, during the 1984 strike, to preserve the delicacy and integrity of our subterranean city’s complexity, I and my gang worked as normal, if that word could possibly be applied to the gauntlet we ran each day through the pickets. It was agreed, but you would never have thought it. And thus evolved my own 1984.
It wasn’t merely the literature course, E111, The Twentieth Century English Novel Reviewed (Despite The Fact That There’s More Than Twenty Years Of The Century Still To Go) that rendered the year 1984 memorable. The course was one of the first I attempted, back in the 1970s. It was even before the fateful week of our first trip to the Benidorm Palace, the evening when Suzie dropped her bombshell and said she was staying in Spain with Mick. In that era, of course, The University Of The Air courses ran television programmes on BBC2 early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, a tactic that my self-respecting Marxist mind interpreted as a conspiratorial agreement between the university administrators and some nebulous, even undercover association of manufacturers of video cassette recorders. It was an era when almost all of the presenters wore kipper ties with knots like footballs oscillating at the neck which, itself, lay like a banana between jacket lapels the size of swan wings. Beneath the Pat Jennings haircut there drooped a Peter Wyngarde moustache that seemed to want a life of its own in flight. It was an era of studio presentation, a time when it was perfectly respectable media practice for a head to talk, or even read from a book without the need of a hand-held camera waving its way repeatedly across the image to create a false illusory urgency.
1984 had a programme all of its own. I’d seen the film made some years before, not the remake, by the way, but the original, because the remake hadn’t been remade by then. It was a good sto
ry, despite Edmond O’Brien’s Americanisms. Donald Pleasance made it come alive, the lights shining off his pate being a memorable element. By the 1970s, when I studied it, we’d already reached the stage of belittling the story’s message because of its style of presentation. We already had colour television by then, so the idea that some year in the still distant future would have little black and white sets in the corner of the room got in the way of our understanding. It’s a tendency that’s even more marked today, a tendency that produces an obsession with appearance in the visual media by requiring all front line presenters to conform to a notion of beauty that the population at large does not mirror. It may have been the case that Praxiteles was perfecting the human form for an ancient Greek audience that was short, bent, smelly and scabby, but I think not. “And not just a pretty face” is thus commonly and inappropriately applied.
But, as a Young Socialist, a member of the neo-Marxist, part-Stalinist, proto-Maoist, achiever of the highest form of Leninism, chapter of the Trotskyite sub-branch of Kiddington Labour Party (non-affiliated) that used to meet on Thursdays, I could identify with Winston Smith, but not that other current Winston, WC, no less. The latter, in fact, was a character whom my grandfather taught me to describe as a murderer, since he had personally ordered the British Army to shoot at strikers to force them back to work in exploitative conditions. The only other person he taught me to despise was a certain Ramsay MacDonald who, every time his face appeared on repeats of All Our Yesterdays, had to be pointed at with an associated blast of “Turncoat”.
Winston Smith, on the other hand, was a laudable, if rather incredible character, since he seemed to be motivated by love rather than politics, despite being surrounded by totalitarian brutality. “It’s what we fought against in the last war,” said my granddad when we were watching the film. I can hardly remember his saying as many words in a single day. I remember he leaned forward at the end of the sentence, gently removed his pipe from between the lips that made a regular gentle popping noise whenever he smoked. A moment’s deliberation, even thought, followed - a moment of shared, silent anticipation - before the gathered gob went flying across the hearthrug to find its spluttering vaporisation in the depths of the coal fire. Then he would lean back, reinsert the pipe, tamp down the bakka with the stub of his penknife, raise his slippered feet back to his stool and strive for renewed silence. It was a silence I remembered and grew to love. The pop of his lips broke it, as did the almost inaudible rattle of the cuckoo clock chain as the spring wound down. When, each hour or so, the coal fire collapsed to cinder, its fall was almost deafening.
But it was when I read the book for the first time that its message became clearer. Until then, I had never really understood the idea of symbolism in art. I, like most of my compatriots still do, used to take things literally. For instance, I thought Animal Farm was a story about pigs and horses, that Coronation Street was about a northern working-class community and that the evening news was reported with a detached journalistic integrity, a God-like vision. It was only then that I began to understand the meaning and power of conformity, irrespective of whether it might be imposed, required or assumed. Precociously I had read Gramschi - at least I had turned the pages - as part of an earlier foundation Course, P101, Essential Basic Marxist Concepts For The 1960s, and so had absorbed the term hegemony and was able to insert it impressively into my dialectic without really grasping its consequences. We’d sit in the pub after our interminable Thursday meetings, commenting on the declining quality of the pint of Tetley’s and murmur phrases about the growing hegemony of the big boys in brewing. We would all nod sagely and communally agree to deride the keg enemy before getting the next round.
By the time the fateful 1984 actually dawned, of course, Orwell was out of favour, since the literal minded populace could no longer stomach a sage whose predictions had proved so obviously inaccurate. We’d already had colour televisions for twenty years, for God’s sake!
A lot of water had flowed under the bridge by then. Between doing E111 and the start of eighty-four, Suzie had left me for a new life in Spain and had returned chastened, though perhaps still no wiser. Our Dulcie, bless her, had gone through her phases and had settled down with her bloke. She wasn’t exactly speaking to me at the time, and had not shared a single word with Suzie since she had sat next to that empty seat on the plane home from Alicante those years before, a journey during which she insisted in addressing her mother as normal, despite the fact that she was still in Benidorm. But we did make up soon after and, by the end of 1984, Dulcie was at least sharing an odd word with us. It’s a pity no-one else was. To cap it all, it was in that year that Suzie felt the onslaught of what she immediately interpreted as an early menopause. I had progressed to Chief Electrician at Kiddington Colliery and we had moved into a new three-bedroom semi on the new estate behind the Working Men’s Club. It cost eighteen thousand pounds in 1977 and the mortgage payments had ballooned after interest rates hit twenty percent. My clearance to work in the 1984 strike, thus, was communally judged rather convenient. It was.
I am reminded of this auspicious year by the comments of a former Tory MP and a man with more than just a passing association with Spain. His comments were particularly specious, even for him. Pitted against an artistic type whose understanding of labour relations was filtered through Romanticism, our Cambridge graduate, ex-MP, now journalist played the apologist. The 1984 strike, or its defeat, if I catch his drift-mine, was a necessary evil, an eventually laudable extermination of culture, livelihood, and, let’s admit it, politics to achieve a greater good for a greater interest. English Utilitarianism was thus equated with the Spanish Civil War, whose outcome he placed upon the same rainy plane, a greater, inevitable, eventual good achieved at the cost of great, but perhaps necessary suffering. Now I am gratified that the tortile parti pris[14] revealed himself as both a fascist and an idiot at the same time.
“Why do we remember the conflict so vividly?” the plum-mouthed presenter asked. “And why is the miners’ case so regularly reconstructed?”
“It’s because in great conflicts,” replied the Tory paries, with both the authority and transparency of false sincerity, “the victor’s claim to right is so persuasive, so self-evident, that the defeated sometimes adopt the Romanticism of the underdog. Conflict creates victors and vanquished,” he continued, “and it is often the vanquished whose case is more easily remembered.”
Well I would like to ask the tophaceous coney a question or two about his theory. If it is true, then why is history always written from the victor’s point of view? Has he ever been to St. Paul’s Cathedral, I wonder, and plodded from monument to monument through their slough of victories? Has he ever noted the true nature of those victories? It is worth making the cathedral tour of central London just to notice the perfect correspondence. The royal church, that of Westminster, has its victories for sure, but they are made in the name of a monarch to establish and confirm inevitably his closeness to God, his Divine Right to rule. Pragmatism rules, inevitably, since those who lost didn’t get the chance to build. But in St. Paul’s, a number eleven ride through the heart of the state within a state, the era had a different flavour. Intermingled with the victorious are the really victorious, the bankers and capitalists of the City, who financed the campaigns and exploited the trade. And who cares if the money was made in an insular possession by selling opium to China? Their descendants are now in government calling for an end to the drugs trade. The third stop on the tour is a pleasant walk across Old Father Thames. Southwark is almost hidden away at the side of London Bridge. It was in the poor man’s city, the work-a-day city that was just a commute from work. There are no victories here, only people who went about their lives, mingled with an occasional writer who frequented the area.
So where, dear cunicular asperity, are all the monuments to the vanquished? Could he answer that question? Where’s the monument to the British defeat in North America
? And where, pray, is the monument to the shared honours of the British-American War of 1812? And, if his theory is so good, could he tell me who lost the FA Cup final in 1961? And could he, perhaps via legal chambers, establish who was injured early on and didn’t even finish the game? Coming second and not finishing are activities that have never been history, except when it has been in the interest of the powerful to create and perpetuate a scapegoat.
But I do thank him deeply from the bottom of my failing heart for equating the victory of the she-child of Grantham with that of the fascist Caudillo in Spain. The victory he claimed for right was thus the same in nature and result as that which condemned Spain to two generations of stagnation while the rest of Europe prospered.
And, as one who facilitated the victory for him and his kind by working against the interests of my mates, my fellow Kiddingtonians, my fellow workers, I hope one day to have the chance of stuffing an entire weekend edition of the newspaper he writes for, supplement and all, down his privileged gullet. It’s been over two decades since the strike, two decades during which Donald Cottee’s face was never again welcomed in the Working Men’s Club because he was still working.
1984 was a tale of internal conflict resolved by the utter subjugation of dissent and denial of individual fulfilment. It was achieved by the brutal pursuit of control against the backdrop of propagandised, non-existent threat to ‘our’ national integrity, ‘our’ way of life. 1984 came and went - and we’d already had colour television for twenty years.
14 Possibly literal, referring to twisted prejudice - ed
Twenty
It’s not often one hears a public figure described... - Don considers political correctness. He discusses a phrase heard on television and submits it to rigorous analysis and, in doing so, conducts a little media studies.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 20
