by Dai Smith
* * * * *
His old man said you could divide life by decades or by smells and tastes. That these vanished along with fashion in clothes or music or speech, but that they were ever loitering, ready to call up a whole time. He said the ’20s, for him, smelled of damp and decaying plaster as water seeped through a tiny back bedroom and the lumpy bed he shared with his “Aunty’s” three sons. It tasted of cold dripping and sweet, mashed-over tea. The ’30s was the acrid smell of cigarettes and the bitter-sweet taste of Fry’s Five Boys chocolate bars, and the mingled smell and taste of underground workings in deep collieries where horse manure and fetid air penetrated mouth and nostrils. The ’40s was the taste of fear in the mouth and the smell of burned flesh filtered into human acceptance by the numb of alcohol, and indifference once horror was made routine. The ’50s, he said, was the last time he knew these things distinctly, and the smell then was of newness and happiness, and the taste was of my mother’s lips.
* * * * *
His old man was constantly against the grain in all things. He loved to smoke. Usually untipped Players or Capstan Full Strength which came in weirdly effete, mauve-tinted packets. If he had lived beyond the mid-1980s he would have scorned the huddle of fellow conspirators in the fug of a den for their designated dirty habit. For him the addiction, for such it was, was also a ceremony, for such he made it. The old push-up packs with their frisson of silver foil just covering up the plump white paper rolls of tobacco. The spurt and flare from a struck match. The rich field tang of burning leaf. The wispy curlicues of blue metal smoke. And sharing. Billy had been with him once in a crowded bar full of colliers at the start of Miners’ fortnight, two weeks of caravans and sand and beer to come, with cigarettes flung the one to the other as individual packets were opened up for all. There were men, the old man told him, who brought the habit home from what was then not a distant war. Then they more often than not shared a match and a fag passed on from one battle-dressed baby-faced veteran to another. If it was the warmth of glamour, no less was it the attitude of bravado.
* * * * *
His old man claimed to have met Burt Lancaster. The actor, he said, was not then either a star or indeed an actor. He was a circus performer enlisted into the US Army to divert and entertain the raw troops, mud-soaked and bombarded to a standstill outside Monte Cassino in 1944. Everyone “knew” Burt Lancaster by the time the old man asserted his own former friendship. He told his adult students how The Crimson Pirate, in 1952, was a deliberate riposte to McCarthyite witch-hunts, with the Red Flag waved in the philistine face of Middle America. And what else was The Flame and the Arrow in 1954 if not an assertion of the New Deal which had sustained the young Burton Lancaster in the ’30s? The old man met scepticism head-on with an account of getting smashed on rough red vino with the tumbler and hand-springer from East Harlem who’d got a mental and physical education in a settlement home no different from the miners’ institutes that had once added intellectual juice and social cohesion to the Valleys. No one quite believed the old man on this.
* * * * *
His old man thought the War might change everything and for a time he thought that it felt as if it had, or would yet. He had returned, on a late demob via Austria after North Africa and the slog up through Italy, to work in the pits again. Nationalised if not socialised, he’d say. It was another front line. Welfare was to be the first step, not the last, neither public ownership nor social care only marking time, but signalling what was to be next. He lived in the front room of an overcrowded house and paid rent to the family. Everything was limited. Beds were shared as readily as scarce pint glasses were fought over, to be filled as they were emptied. For a few, brief years before the 1950s the sense of unfulfilment and possibility irked and sustained them. Underground, men wore army berets instead of the new safety helmets. Nights, if he worked days, were indiscriminately passed between pubs and pictures and political wrangling. If he worked nights he slept days. He grew weary. He was single and coiled with anger. A chance remark made underground took him to a WEA session and to the opening of things up by, at least, an ordering of their otherwise confusion. He was never sure that was progress. But he met the boy’s mother, Mona, in Coronation year and she decided self-improvement in order to help others was to be his lot. He could never release his memory of her into any forgiving of himself for her dying.
* * * * *
His old man had been to Spain before package holidays. He said he’d gone as a fellow traveller, and grinned, with the alibi of art-history research as excuse for the stuffed money belt he’d worn for the Party. It was always the only Party, even when he stopped working and voting for it. Mona had fretted but gone with him. Was it there, Billy would wonder, that he was conceived in 1957? Bill Paynter himself, now the president in South Wales, had gripped the old man’s hand and asked him to go. The old man said you could never forget Paynter’s handshake nor his unrelenting eyes. No forgiveness in them. Not for himself anyway. His own first wife had died in childbirth, in 1940, leaving the young revolutionary with twins to raise.
* * * * *
His old man had thought of Ceri as a son until he considered him to be yet another prodigal. Early on, joining the old man’s class he was soon, by calculated choice, attached to an older generation, and so perfectly positioned to link, though cannily dismissive of his own contemporaries when it mattered, into his own generation, as a leader. Even as the working-class hero he would fashion himself into, both for himself and the needs of others, in the 1970s. By then the leather jacket and rolled brylceemed quiff had given way to a more class-universal garb, one that was more suburban Rolling Stones than subterranean rock ’n’ roll. Either way, whether on his home patch or further afield, Ceri, with his easy, self-assured manner and gentle, yet chiding, malice, offered himself as knowable and serious and exotic and welcoming, open to a future that embraced change, not as tribal as the more common ingrowing political follicle. One like the old man soon seemed to be. Ceri would hug you close and clap you to his confidence. He was difficult to resist. The act was no act, the authenticity was sincere, and not to believe in him was to show a lack of faith in the purpose. And in the old man’s weekend schools Ceri gathered others to him like a cultural pilotfish guiding a shoal. In his prime Ceri, now with a craggy face more hewn than sculpted, more planed by intent than moulded by experience, became, in the unofficial guerilla strikes that lit up his special sky, almost the physical embodiment of the Idea others had configured. Men, at this time, admired him and wanted his friendship, and women generally just wanted to fuck him. He generally just obliged.
* * * * *
His old man could hold harsh opinions. He would say that his protégé, Ceri, was a music hall act who came to believe in the propaganda of applause. His old man had been a connoisseur of variety acts and a regular to the variety theatre in its last golden post-war flush. He’d sit through the trick unicyclist, the songbird imitator, the Irish tenor, the check-suited northern comics, the exotic fan dancer, the Hungarian acrobats from Glasgow, the sopranos, crooners and dancers and the dress-suited compères. He claimed to love to read the safety curtain, a kind of commercial Mondrian he’d say, marked out from right to left and top to bottom with squares and rectangles of colour within which haberdashers and hairdressers and animal feed and furnishings and ladies’ corsets and liver salts and linoleum and hire purchase and soap and newspapers, all declared their worth and wares. The finale would inevitably be a double act to follow the saccharine warble of Ruby Murray or Joan Regan or the buck-toothed hoofing of Billy Dainty. The old man loved the banter, Socratic dialectic he’d say, between Jewell and Warris or the young Morecambe and Wise. The last two names Billy recognised from television. He doubted the old man had seen them live on stage any more than he’d met Nick Cravat or Burt Lancaster in a mess tent in the drear of an Italian wartime winter. His old man, he thought by the mid-1970s, was full of bullshit.
* * * * *
His old man was not
yet sixty when the coal strikes of 1972 and then 1974 derailed any lingering complacency about industrial accommodation. He thought the NUM’s own double act of Gormley and Daley had schemed and organised to a tactical perfection and with a moral beatitude that knew its own origins. After those deceiving moments had passed he increasingly railed, and despaired. Nobody heeded. He told Billy, whenever he came home these days, that somehow, somewhere along the line, we’d become a cultural nomenklatura parasitic on our own half-dazed working-out of our past or else, like Tommy, just endlessly turned and turned around, with the change or aim of self-direction lost or repressed. Easy meat for the nomenklatura. The old man liked Tommy, so the despair worked in deeper and deeper when Ceri led the charge into 1984, and Billy’s generation jumped to offer its support. To be inside, really inside Tommy’s head, he’d rage, you’d need a blowtorch, a chisel, a pair of tweezers and an advanced degree in Victim Studies.
* * * * *
His old man told him we’d swallowed our own shit and mistaken it for nutrient. He was good at upsetting people. He told Ceri at Paynter’s funeral that the strike had become an orgasmic shudder orchestrated by the pimps of history, himself included. A generation of wannabes actually wanted this release from stasis into an oblivion that would eventually engulf not them but the Tommys and the Lionels who’d tasted the saltiness of being, again, in the collective frame. Except that it was only the glycerine slick of temporary notoriety for them, the stage army. And for Billy, Bran, Maldwyn and Gwilym there was, at last, the longed-for generational credibility and, of course, whatever happened, having for themselves the bonus of not being personally doomed thereafter. On the contrary, his old man said, the dreamers would perish and the doers would profit. And it was clear who he meant and why. He railed but did not convince.
* * * * *
His old man shocked them all – Billy, Bran, Gwilym and Mal – one day by telling them he did not believe in any of it, any more, especially not in their activity in the strike, and even in any struggle that was defined as they defined it. He told them that the moment had passed. He told them, again, of what Bevan had said in 1951, when the moment was still there to seize: that even in the ’30s, with three million out of work and ingrained poverty everywhere, they couldn’t guarantee majorities for Labour even in the worst hit areas, that building socialism was not about pressing buttons. They argued. The old man was silent. Then he said that, once, when he was eleven years old, in the lockout of 1926, he followed a group of boys down a back lane where, it was said, they would all see something, but only if they had a halfpenny or two farthings or a cigarette butt. At the back garden gate of a terraced house whose steep garden ran up to the steps that led up again to the home itself, there was a queue and an older boy who was taking the coins and dropping them into a tin. The old man said the boy’s name was Byron Keys and that his father had been imprisoned for riotous assembly. Stoning blacklegs. That the Keys family were ardent and active members of the Party. That the payees lined up and went in up the garden path, past the wilting rhubarb and the scruffy blackcurrant bushes to the paint-flaked wooden door of an outside lavatory. Each one, in their turn, had to lift the latch and go inside and look and turn and come out. For a halfpenny you could look at Byron’s ten-year-old sister, Ginny, sitting on the seat with her knickers round her ankles. His old man said that if they didn’t get the point, his own point was well made.
* * * * *
His old man said they acted like participants but were, in reality, avid consumers. He made it worse when he called them parasites. He broadened the definition to include himself, to make the insult seem lighter. It didn’t. He tried to explain that he, too, had gone from being inside it all to being – he searched for the correct instance – like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon when his partner, whose wife he was banging as well, stumbled around in the dark looking, not for clues as he pretended to think, but for excuses for his behaviour, an Übermensch of consciousness, with the world he inhabited slipping away without him, which was what, here was the most terrible thing, the very thing he wanted. See? the old man would exclaim. See? More as if it was a statement than a question. All they saw was an old man in delirium and all they heard was a rant against the seriousness which they needed to invest the fun they were having with the ballast of other people’s gravity.
* * * * *
His old man didn’t live long enough afterwards to witness the successive falls from grace. He had stood on the embankment when the last stand-out colliery workers walked back in behind the thump of a drum and the dirge of a plaintive brass band before dawn on a March day. He watched a more circumspect Billy move in and out and around and from the back of the straggled line, taking pictures. He knew there would be no easy routes mapped out from now on. They’d run off the maps of a known and once cherished world. The dynamics of action had been replaced by the melancholia of that loss. The pits were morphing into mausoleums. Billy looked closer at the assumptions behind his own feverish images and found any traces of the real had gone, or else were just lingering as accusatory, shadowy presences. That last march had been one final act of public exposure before the shades of anonymity closed in.
* * * * *
His old man spent his last autumn and winter in reflection. He wondered how that history which had now left us could be properly remembered. He decided that lists and structured narratives were another species of lie. That the simultaneity of any actual life was what gave it value and so any flattening or compartmentalisation was as much of a subsequent denial of the humanness of living as, in life, was the denial of the interconnectedness of desire. He said that the art of self-perception, in our common life, had been smothered by the perception of ourselves by others, and to which embrace we had too readily succumbed. You would need new forms, fresh categories, a deliberate breaking of the neck of convention wherever it sought to inhibit full expressiveness. Just as the history had been lived. You couldn’t do the tragedy bit without it seeping, or even racing headlong, into melodrama. You’d need comedy, black and ironic, to keep it sane, and the surreal to prevent the historic and the epic being registered as romance. Increasingly, he was sure that painting alone, or other types of fine art, provided a field of vision that allowed the otherwise ungraspability of the world to be confronted. At its best, painting was intellect suffused with emotion, working colour and form, beyond the shamanism of music, the pretence of words, the smash and grab in the jewellery window that was the best photography. The old man wrote to Billy to tell him that the adage “show” not “tell” was for adolescents, and that we had all grown up. He said how could you “show” anymore, other than in the gabble of a nursery class seeing everything new for the first time, if what was truly there to be shown now necessarily resided in the act of telling. That the one big thing to hold onto in our ruins was the consciousness of ourselves, not just what had been experienced but how it had been perceived, imagined not only felt. His son had left by then and he was dead when Billy had the last letter.
* * * * *
His old man had once told him that there were no photographs of Crazy Horse. The Oglala Sioux war chief had been assassinated in 1877 one year after the Plains Wars had ended with the pyrrhic victory over Custer at the Little Big Horn. A former ally, the Sioux warrior Little Big Man, had pinned his arms back and a soldier had bayoneted him in a guard house. It was predestined but it was also planned. The other chiefs, the wily Red Cloud, his enemy, and the indomitable Sitting Bull, his friend, posed for and were captured by the lens, and the names of all of them had been stolen and corrupted into English, even that of Tashunca-Uitco, which properly means His Horse is Crazy. But the face, the body, and therefore mostly the spirit, of course, of Crazy Horse were never taken by whites. Only an Indian pictograph shows us Crazy Horse. He made sure that what was to tell about him would remain simple, true and ultimately unknowable. His friends wrapped his body in a red blanket and took it with them out onto the prairie, and carried it about with th
em as they travelled, until they buried the body of Crazy Horse weeks later, in secret and with no traceable marker. They called themselves not Sioux but Lakota, an alliance of comrades.
* * * * *
His old man submitted to one last photograph. It was of his clasped hands. The veins were bunched and somehow pulsing, even in their stillness. There were black, raised blobs of oil paint flecking his knuckles and staining his nails. The fingers were twined, suggesting a prayer. He never said prayers. They were, for all that, the hands of a maker, and of one who had dreamed. Billy would use the photograph as the centrepiece of an exhibition. It came as a shock, since no one had seen the images on which he had begun to concentrate in the dog days of the strike and its sour aftermath. He had no appetite to home in on grief and misery, or even despair and anger. The earlier photographs which had suddenly brought professional recognition and fleeting fame, those faces featuring defiance, rage, bravery, resolution, unity, exultation, the gestures of speaking and listening through all the true joyfulness of what was, in the end, a false and fake scenario, none of those could suffice now, even as negatives. The old man had warned of the vacuous drudgery and drift that was to be the fate of those with no boltholes left to find. Billy surveyed those inhabiting the ruins and instead picked up the bits and pieces left, the segments that told of their fracture. He shot backs. He blew up fists. He took away the support of arms and legs and just left the torsos. He cast down at feet. He pinpointed an eye or two. He showed mouths shut. He closed off the things and cropped the people that had whispered and shouted, and let the ears remain deaf to further entreaty. Photographs were a piled-up detritus of humanity. A tangle of hair. A sullen neck. An arthritic knee. A discarded banner. A child’s extended arm. An empty seat. A wiped brow. And hands, hands, hands. Fluttering, open-palmed and waiting, held together and praying. Something had fled. Had drained away. Something had been beheaded. Something had been killed. He called the exhibition and the book of it he made “No Photographs of Crazy Horse”. And when it was finished, he said goodbye to the old man and left. He never saw him again. He carried him inside himself, and would now forever.
