The Last Man in Europe

by Dennis Glover

  He had decided to leave ‘George’ for the literary world. The going underfoot was bad – rocky and muddy with puddles, like a farmyard in autumn. After a few hundred yards the pain of stooping – far worse for him than the others, most of whom stood a foot shorter – became by turns tiresome and debilitating. The base of his spine, his neck and his calves ached simultaneously, and he felt an overwhelming urge either to stand up straight or lie down and stretch out. At some points the tremendous pressure of half a mile of mountainside had buckled the props holding up the roof, and he had to bend double to pass through, several times scraping the vertebrae of his back on the jagged rocks, an exquisite form of agony.

  Just as he thought he could no longer go on, Grey yelled out cheerily, ‘Four hundred yards to go.’ He might as well have said four hundred miles. Then, as his hamstrings and thighs were ceasing to obey his mental commands, they reached the coal face. ‘We’re here!’

  As the other men picked up bundles of tools to begin their day’s paid work, he flung himself to the ground, in too much agony to care what the others thought. ‘Sorry, chaps.’

  ‘That’s alright, Mr Blair,’ one of the men, Ken Goodliffe, said. ‘It’s always hard first time. It’s not so bad for us, coming down first time as lads. We normally run most of way.’

  He sat up, his back against a pit prop, and watched the miners at work. The shot men on the departing shift had exploded a brace of charges into the seam, cracking the solid mass to make it more gettable. To loosen the coal further, a team with an electric drill the size of a Lewis gun was cutting a deep groove along the base of the black wall, undermining it. The drill was unbearably loud in the confined space and raised a fog of black dust so thick that Davy lamps and electric torches could barely penetrate the gloom. These added to the increasingly unbearable heat; it was like a sauna bath where you went to get dirty instead of clean.

  The whole effect was to overwhelm the senses. Even the powers of smell and taste were assaulted by the steady progress of coal dust through the nose and mouth to the back of the throat. While he watched, the team disassembled the conveyor belt that carried the cut coal back to the waiting tubs, and then reassembled it closer to the end of the seam. It wasn’t long ago, the miners told him later, that the coal was dragged by women and children to carts drawn by pit ponies. Now it had all been electrified. So this sight before him, he thought, was considered a wonder of modernity! ‘Job was much harder in our fathers’ time, Mr Blair, much harder.’ He wished they would call him Eric.

  Now the real work began. Naked from the waist up, sitting on their knees with their padded knee-caps jammed tight against the surface, the miners drove their short, sharp shovels into the loosened face, cutting the coal free in various sizes.

  Grey beckoned him over and shouted above the din: ‘Have a try.’

  He got on his knees and did his best to drive the shovel into the shiny black wall in front of him, but barely made a mark. He kept going, the men around him smiling wryly, and managed to dislodge a lump the size of a cricket ball. It fell to the floor and was picked up by one of the younger men, who spat on it and made out to polish it on his grimy trousers. ‘Here you go, Mr Blair,’ the boy said. ‘Keep it as a souvenir.’

  He stumbled back, exhausted, and watched the men working at the face. He felt humbled, humiliated almost, but it was a feeling devoid of shame. With their bodies that looked like hammered iron statues coated in coal dust, exerting themselves with stupendous force and speed as they shared the frightening dangers of their jobs, they raised in him a pang of envy. How can educated people continue to feel ourselves superior? It was only because magnificent men like these smashed away at nature like moles, and lived lives of misery and slum-squalor, that the rest of England could enjoy comparative comfort and advantage. He could see the miners now, just as Wells foretold, coming up from the ground one day to wreak revenge on the rich, and he wondered if it wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing.

  On the way back to the surface he failed to duck at the right moment and knocked himself flat on his back, almost unconscious.

  *

  After cleaning themselves up, the miners insisted on taking him to the pub. He was adamant about buying the first round and got a packet of cigarettes to share. While ordering, he noticed the afternoon newspaper lying on the bar. The headline had one word: ABYSSINIA.

  He returned and passed around cigarettes and pints of the local beer, which was thick and dark. ‘Thanks for showing me how the mine works, chaps.’ He wasn’t sure how they might receive comrades.

  ‘If you have any sense, Mr Blair,’ said Goodliffe, ‘it’ll be the last mine you go down. Writing – now, that seems much cushier. And better paid too, I’ll bet.’

  ‘Please, call me Eric.’ He thought about it for a moment. He’d collected some miners’ pay dockets for his research and reckoned that, at about £2 10s per week, he’d not earned as much as a miner in any of the years since he left Burma. ‘Well, it’s certainly a lot more comfortable than mining. I’ve never seen a man killed by a typewriter, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Aye, true enough. But none of us could do what you can do, Mr Blair – I mean, Eric – writing books and all. I’ll bet your family thinks you right clever.’

  If only they knew. He was about to tell them his parents had hoped he’d stay a policeman, then thought better of it. ‘Writing’s not so difficult, once you know how. Anyway, have you seen the latest news?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said another man. ‘The bloody FA stopping us betting.’

  It was the strangest thing. Here were men with political contacts – real rank-and-file members of the militant ILP – but the talk wasn’t of the world situation or Mosley’s sally into the north, but the decision of the Football Association not to publish the season fixture in advance, in an attempt to quell the football pools. The local newspapers wrote of little else.

  ‘Lousy bastards,’ the man continued, ‘trying to rob us of the only chance to make some real money.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand …’

  ‘Sorry, Eric. I was just saying, those of us who follow the football reckon we’ve got a good chance of winning the pools, and it’s not right of those that control the Football Association to ban betting.’

  ‘Have you ever won yourself?’ asked Orwell.

  ‘Wouldn’t be mining coal if I had, now, would I? But I know football and reckon it’s only time before I do win.’

  ‘Always bets on Barnsley, that’s his problem,’ said another.

  ‘Do you know anyone who has won the jackpot?’

  ‘Well, no; but you read about it in the papers, don’t you? Friend of mine says he has a mother-in-law whose dustman won. A dustman! Bet he won’t be picking up no one’s slops from now on.’

  ‘Quite.’

  He was eager to hear their political views. ‘I say, what do you think about the international situation? The Italians are in Abyssinia. The German army has crossed the Rhine.’

  ‘Parley-voo?’ said Goodliffe, producing laughter.

  ‘Don’t mind the lads, Eric,’ said Grey. ‘They’re not old enough to know what’s coming. Weren’t in Flanders, like me and their dads, but they might be a few years from now.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s serious? Fascism is on the march everywhere. Mosley’s round these parts right now, breaking some of your friends’ heads.’

  ‘Friends? Communists, you mean,’ said Goodliffe. ‘Bloody troublemakers. Just looking for a fight.’

  ‘Do you think you might have to? Fight the fascists, I mean. In a war.’

  ‘Oh, aye. We’d fight alright. Germans and Italians. But for England and the King, not for Russia and Comrade Stalin.’

  ‘And for better jobs,’ another added. ‘Look what our dads came back to.’

  ‘Well, what would you change about the way you live?’ From the expressions on the men’s faces, he could see immediately that to them this question was absurdly abstract.

  ‘The way we
live? I’d say we were happy enough.’

  Happy enough, he thought. He had seen their slum houses, with cancerous mould growing up the walls, no bathrooms and the only WC fifty yards away and shared by dozens of other families. ‘I mean to say, what about the social question? The economy, social conditions generally?’ Again a look of incomprehension.

  He got up to buy another round, but was stopped.

  ‘We can buy our own drink, Eric,’ said Grey.

  ‘Let me. My publisher gave me money for expenses. Beer’s as good an expense as any.’

  ‘That’s not how we do things around here,’ one said, slapping him on the shoulder and heading up to the bar. At least beer was cheap, he thought, but it struck him that few starving writers would have had such a sense of honour. The conversation turned back to the football pools.

  *

  Later that evening he was sitting at Albert Grey’s dining table. It was a council house, but one of the largest and neatest he had seen on his trip north; he had even been luxuriating in flannelette sheets. He was typing a letter, part of his interminable correspondence with Gollancz about Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which the gutless lawyers were slowly bowdlerising as efficiently as any state propaganda service.

  At his shoulder, Irene, Grey’s ten-year-old daughter, was fascinated by the typewriter. He completed the letter and rolled another sheet onto the platen. He moved the machine in front of her to let her have a play. ‘Now, Irene, write me something about your dog. Don’t forget the space bar, here.’

  She began tapping slowly: ‘my dogs name is jimmy he barcks a lott and sleeps at my feet on my bed we all love him …’

  Mrs Grey, who was sitting by the fire sewing, looked over and smiled. Her husband, in his rocking chair in shirtsleeves and no collar, and absorbed in a tawdry sensational murder tale that was then filling the local newspaper, looked up. ‘Now, Irene, don’t be annoying Mr Blair; he has important work to do. Go on, off with you.’

  Orwell patted her head and she went to the rag mat in front of the fire and sat down next to her sister, who like her was sucking on the mint humbug that was their evening treat. The girls were giggling, giving their small dog his favourite thrill – the simultaneous scratching of his stomach and ears. At their age, he reflected, he barely knew his father. He tried to imagine Grey or his wife allowing deranged sadists like his masters at St Cyprians to beat their children into submission. How much better was this childhood? He rolled a fresh page into the typewriter and commenced typing.

  Curiously enough it is not

  He hit the backspace bar three times and underlined the last word.

  Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modern engineering, not the radio, nor the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels which are published yearly, nor the crowds at Ascot and the Eton and Harrow match, but the memory of working-class interiors – especially as I sometimes saw them in my childhood before the war when England was still prosperous – that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in.

  *

  The next morning it was time to leave. Grey, who had bronchitis – although of course everyone suspected something worse – and was too ill for his shift, was at home to say his farewells.

  ‘Every success with your book, Eric,’ said Mrs Grey near the front gate. ‘We’re looking forward to reading it. And thank you for helping me with the washing-up.’

  ‘The least I can do. Your house is the most welcoming in England.’

  Grey, who was in the doorway, quietly coughing into his palm, stepped out and offered his hand, which he had wiped carefully on his handkerchief. ‘We’re relying on you to help set things right, comrade.’

  Taking the proffered hand, Orwell said simply, ‘Comrade.’ It was the first time he had ever used the term without a sense of shame and embarrassment. For a man like himself – despite his poverty, he was still an Etonian – to call another man comrade seemed somehow hypocritical, absurd even. But only if you were not a socialist.

  4

  Kingsway Hall, London, 26 October 1936. With his pixie-like frame, hatchet face and long mane of dark hair dragged unwillingly across his large skull, the radical MP James Maxton was tuning the crowd to the required angry pitch. His long and bony arms clawed aggressively at the smoke-filled air before the grand backdrop of giant organ pipes, from which hung the huge scarlet banner of the ILP.

  Eileen, whose idea it had been to come, took the cigarette from her mouth, leaned over and put her lips almost to his ear. ‘I’ve just figured out who this Maxton fellow reminds me of. You’ll never guess.’

  ‘A clue?’

  ‘From a children’s fable.’

  ‘Rumpelstiltskin.’

  ‘Uncanny, isn’t it?’

  Maxton was reading out a speech which was to have been delivered by a Spanish revolutionary leader, who had at the last minute been turned back at the airport. Amplified through loudspeakers, his metallic voice screeched with the usual slogans – ‘fascist nightmare’, ‘imperialist dreams’, ‘crimes against working humanity’, ‘stand side by side’ – riveted together with facts about the recent massacres in Badajoz, the reporting of which had incensed Orwell and Eileen as it had every socialist in Britain: the reason she had suggested they come. The impression was of a disturbing clanking noise, grinding away like some industrial machine badly in need of oil. With a slightly altered message, and some of the words rearranged, he figured, he could have been back in Barnsley, listening to Mosley; and yet he didn’t care. The fascists, no matter what faux sympathies they professed for ‘the people’, had no interest in ending the miseries of the workers in Wigan; he now realised they simply had to be stopped.

  As Maxton worked himself into a near delirium for the peroration, it occurred to him that although the man hadn’t written the speech, and indeed its author wasn’t even English, it would have been almost impossible to tell.

  ‘Workers of Britain! Workers of all political sections in Britain! Comrades – brothers! Our party, the Worker’s Party of Marxist Unity, has dedicated itself under this banner: “Unto the end – conquer or die!”’

  This was met by wild cheers and the raising of fists, the most enthusiastic of which came from the ILP’s youth section.

  ‘Where did he say he was from, darling?’ he asked Eileen.

  ‘The POUM. Anarchists or some such, I think.’

  ‘Already some of our heroic comrades have died. If it is necessary that we should all die to gain the victory, then die we will! Workers, comrades, brothers – help us! Help us against fascism, help us against war, help us for the complete emancipation of the workers!’

  From up in the gods of the grand theatre, they looked down through the thick blue smoke to see the crowd heaving, yelling slogans that could be heard with difficulty against the stamping of feet: ‘Fascist swine!… Revolution!… United front!’ The speech was complete. Wild, angry applause went on.

  Maxton, who was the chairman of the ILP, gave way to the general secretary, the taller and better dressed Fenner Brockway, whose round spectacles glinted like mirrors in the footlights, obscuring his eyes. ‘Comrades, I have a resolution,’ Brockway announced, waving a sheet of paper, and the crowd bayed at him to read it. Brockway set it down on the lectern and adjusted his glasses to the end of his nose in a characteristic gesture. The audience quietened.

  ‘This meeting believes that the threefold duty of the British workers is: One – Action to support the Spanish workers in the struggle against fascism. Two – Action to prevent capitalist intervention to destroy the Spanish workers in favour of capitalist liberalism. And three – Action to resist any war of rival capitalist imperialisms.’ He was stopped by applause.

  Orwell groaned. Something about it sounded vaguely contradictory, but it was difficult to say just what. Why couldn’t these people just speak normal English, the way the workers did?

  ‘Comrades, if carried, this pledges us to intensify our efforts to send shipments of food, m
edical supplies and other necessities to Spain. We have already sent money and an ambulance. Give of yourselves, comrades! Give!’

  Young men wearing Spanish-style berets (he had noted this fashion taking hold in the last month) began moving through the audience carrying buckets, which they shook up and down.

  ‘What about fighting, Fenner?’ someone yelled out. ‘What about troops? Arms!’

  ‘Tanks!’ screeched another, to wilder acclamation.

  Brockway hesitated, thinking no doubt of the police informers who were almost certainly in the hall, but, carried away, he soon continued. ‘Comrades, the National Administrative Council has voted to raise an armed labour battalion of socialist volunteers to fight on the front lines. Comrade Bob Edwards is developing the plan. We will begin advertising for willing fighters shortly.’

  The room erupted, and all around the younger party members – too young to have seen the trenches – raised their fists even higher, smiling in happy anticipation of being spattered with somebody else’s blood.

  He looked at them. A good old-fashioned fight, against someone truly worthy of hate, smashing their faces in with clubs, kicking them in the genitals, breaking teeth, blowing their children up with thermite – that’s what socialists really wanted, when it came down to it. In that, they were just the same as the fascists. He had thought his book about the workers’ lives in the north would attract the sort of literary attention he craved. But, overnight, Spain had changed everything, altering everyone’s priorities. Unemployment, hunger marches, poverty, slums and bedbugs – the very things that had constituted the political struggle until then – had dissolved as issues, leaving him with a half-written book about yesterday’s news. He had visions of it covered in dust, in piles out the front of bookshops, where no one really cared whether or not it was stolen. Other writers, firing off war dispatches from luxury hotels in Madrid, would get the front-page reviews and the runaway book sales, leaving him once again a failure.