We are off in a beaten-up van to Abertillery, to the food depot. I tell the charming grey-haired miner who is driving that I am thrilled by the land. “Oh yes, it is very beautiful,” he says. “We have a scenic drive back there, six miles, you should see it. It is most beautiful here in the spring.”
Three store rooms, loaned by the council, and two women, a man and his daughter are preparing the weekly free food ration, a carrier bag with flour, tea, half a dozen eggs, bread, a tin of meat, tins of fruit, soup, veg, baby food, whatever. Five thousand of these go to the neediest in a community of 8,000 miners across this valley.
“Our people go around the villages with a trolley and ring doorbells. ‘Something for the miners,’ they say, and it's wonderful how people help.”
“Pensioners give a few tins of soup, everybody tries to give something. And of course we've raised money however we could. It's about £5 worth in each bag. No, it's not enough to eat, that's the truth of it, people are going hungry.”
The van will deposit 300 bags in a garage to be collected on foot in that neighborhood; more bags are taken elsewhere.
I said I'd like to see a young miner's family with children. An attractive bearded man said, “I've got two kids.” I had not thought he was young. The kids are five and seven.
“His wife gets £23 supplementary benefit,” said a square, busy, little woman, the boss here. “He'd get £54 on the dole. The electric is about £5 a week, 50p in the meter you know, and the milkman is £2.”
How can they manage?
“You have to,” says the young-old man. ‘This helps,” pointing to a carrier bag. “But the children,” I said—£16 a week for a family of four. ‘They get free dinner at school now.”
Upstairs is a room crammed with free old clothes, which probably help too; it must be painful for those self-reliant people to accept them. The clothes were sent from France, Belgium, Sweden.
Money for the food bags is running out; so is the free coal, a miner's perk. “I've got three hundredweight left: for the winter,” says the young father and no one says anything. It is the same for them all.
It would be useless to beeseech Mrs. Thatcher in the bowels of Christ to think it possible that she might be mistaken. Politicians do not err and repent; sometimes they U-turn, though not Mrs. Thatcher. But what if she has been grievously mistaken? Was it right to select that elderly gentleman, who knows nothing of mining communities, and give him the sole directive—profitability?
The miners did not provoke this strike; they reacted at a hopeless time to a direct threat. Apart from the gigantic cost to the taxpayers of breaking the strike, something far worse has happened: the emergence of a national, almost paramilitary riot police, looking as ugly as any in the world, and of a new hatred between police and working men.
Has anyone thought out coal and the future? The next generation may regard as madness the stockpiling of indestructible deadly nuclear waste, and demand coal—but where will miners be found, a vanishing species.
If, through hunger, the spirit of the bravest of the working class has been crushed, that will indeed be a famous victory. And a most grievous mistake.
The Times, 20 July 1984: “Mrs. Thatcher said that at the time of the [Falklands] conflict they had had to fight the enemy without; but the enemy within, much more difficult to fight, was just as dangerous to liberty.” British Miners’ Strike: March-October 1984.
Newness of Life
GEO, January 1985
I am about to tell you an historical tale of travel in 1931, in the spring, when the world was young and gay. Of course the world was not young and gay, it was already spiraling down the Great Depression towards war. But I didn't know that, I didn't know anything much and all things are relative: the world was undeniably younger and I truly believe gayer than it is now. As for me, I was twenty-two and never more alight with gaiety.
The purpose of the journey then and forever after was to see the world and everything happening and everyone in it. The means were a triumph. I persuaded the St. Louis Post Dispatch that I would write dazzling feature stories for their Sunday magazine at $25 each, and persuaded the Missouri Pacific Railway that these stories would publicize their fine trains and the captivating sights along their routes, if they would give me a Pullman pass. At last I had become, in my own eyes only, a roving correspondent, heart's desire. I set out in my regular warm weather clothes, blue cotton shirt, matching full cotton skirt and sneakers, but carried a small suitcase since the knapsack of previous European journeys was not suitable to my new estate.
Trains were lovely. (No one in his right mind can say the same of airplanes.) You were flung about as on the high seas while cinders from the engine blew through the open windows like a black hail storm. Only the porters, who served as kind nannies, and the waiters could walk upright in a straight line. The passengers grew very chummy as they banged into each other and fell on strangers’ laps. The meals in the dining car were delicious though tricky with plates and cups and glasses leaping around the table. At night, behind the swaying green curtains of the Pullman berth, I listened with excitement to the train. When it stopped to take on water or coal, the train made animal noises, puffing, groaning; the whistle sounded like a fierce bird cry. The wheels clanged their special beat, dragging us through the miles and the dark. By day I listened to others and was entertained and instructed. People traveled on business and to visit relatives, usually to help in illness or childbirth. Holiday travel was a summer event for the privileged few.
Trains were leisurely. You had time to see the modest little towns and isolated farmhouses, both built of wood with shade trees; mules and wagons on the roads; old trucks collecting goods or family at the stations. Not a shiny rich scene, from the train window, but peaceful. Perhaps it was a hard life; I have an ancient memory of stern faces on those station platforms and obesity was certainly not a national problem. But places and people were nothing compared to the land. You had time to watch it change, to feel the differences and the great distance. You knew you were traveling.
I bounced across the continent to the Pacific coast and back, on that journey, and America looked vast, beautiful and empty. A year earlier, at the 1930 census, the population of the U.S.A. was 122,775,046, roughly two thirds of it east of the Mississippi. Texas and California, the largest states, had the largest population in the west, but people were still thin on the ground. In California, just over five and a half million people lived uncrowded lives in the sun. By 1980, three million people lived in the Los Angeles smog; who knows how many more are now frazzling their nerves on the freeways.
The first stop, my first feature story, was an oil boom. The name of that town in East Texas is long gone; besides it wasn't a town, it was a straggle of weatherbeaten frame houses on dirt roads in the middle of a dead flat landscape. Home for 200 impoverished citizens. Within sixty days, oil having spouted from their front yards, 30,000 crazy joyous men were churning up dust among a forest of oil wells, towers eighty feet high. The gaunt new millionaires sat in rocking chairs on their crumbling porches, bemused. The ladies wore faded flowered calico garments, the gents wore old jeans and collarless shirts; both sexes sparkling with diamonds. Hordes of people besieged the only store, waving fistfuls of greenbacks, and an iron cot sold for $200. Peddlers swarmed. A suitcase of new shoe laces was worth a fast small fortune, and no one could buy enough diamonds.
Everybody seemed to be drunk despite Prohibition, still officially in force. The noise was colossal: trains of tank cars, four hundred every day, clanking in and out, machinery scraping, chugging, pounding, and overall human bedlam. Law and order problems, arising from theft, assault and battery, extreme drunkenness, were handled by three Texas Rangers with enormous hats and enormous pearl-handled pistols. There was no jail so the Rangers pegged a chain in a large circle in the dust and chained their prisoners to it by the leg. The prisoners were as cheerful as everyone else. Their friends brought them booze and they managed to huddle for crap
games, papering the dust with dollar bills, singing uproariously when the spirit moved them. To impress me, the Rangers stuck matches upright in the ground, pulled out their pistols like gunfighters in the movies, and shot the heads off.
At night, I retired to luxury quarters, a de-railed Pullman car which I shared with the elite, oil men who had arrived to make this gold rush work. Like the rest of the population, they drank and gambled all night, leaning from their berths, while greenbacks fluttered down like falling leaves. They addressed me as little lady and whenever excitement or rage caused anyone to shout four- letter words the others hushed him, no bad language in front of the little lady. We lived on cold baked beans, eaten from the can.
The Mayor, having heard that the Press was in town, came to call with diamonds on eight fingers. He apologized for being hurried but he had laid on a private train and was taking his townfolk, in their jewels and worn-out clothes, to New York for a spree at the Waldorf. I laughed from dawn to dawn and loved every minute of it.
Nowadays if you don't want to risk sleeping in the airport or in any fleabag hotel with a spare room, you are well advised to make reservations when you travel. I believe this sorry state of affairs began about twenty-five years ago and has been getting steadily worse and worse. Before, you never had to make reservations for anything anywhere. You moved by whim, when you pleased. To my mind that is the only good way to travel. By whim, I came to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, across the border from El Paso, where I intended to interview the only woman bullfighter in the world, another dazzling feature story. Ciudad Juarez had an attractive bad reputation. All the pleasure domes—saloons, brothels, gambling joints—forbidden in the U.S. were wide open and cheap in this picturesque dump of a town. Sin had not paid, judging by the unpainted false-front buildings, derelict care and scurf of garbage on unpaved streets, and the general lassitude of the citizenry. I walked from my sleazy hotel to a sleazy cabaret-brothel where a group of ladies invited me to their table.
They were the resident prostitutes, keeping a colleague company; she was temporarily unemployed due to advanced pregnancy. She looked dowdy and middle-aged to me, a very nice Frenchwoman who was reading Alexandre Dumas and André Gide as a good pre-natal influence on her child. Her friends, heavily painted in low cut gowns with lashings of sequins, were charming and soft-spoken in French. French, not English, was then the lingua franca, fortunate for me as I knew no Spanish. They complained that business was bad and I suggested helpfully that they buy a tent and move to East Texas where business was sure to be splendid.
A scarecrow figure in dinner jacket, Maurice Chevalier straw hat and monocle began to sing gibberish and jerk dance steps in the middle of the dirty room. That was the cabaret. He joined us, kissed my hand and told me he was a Bavarian Baron, a passionate monarchist who fled the detestable Republic of Germany in 1919. His talk and eyes grew wilder. Never having met a junkie before, I knew by instinct that he was on the needle, poor fellow. What a fine evening, I thought, you didn't meet such interesting people every day.
The only woman bullfighter in the world turned out to be Juanita, a pretty gentle shy seventeen-year-old. Her mother and brothers kept her locked in a squalid hotel room, like a substitute convent, letting her out only to practice her alarming profession. The bullring was small, poor and poorly attended. Juanita flung me her cape and dedicated the bull to me, a moment of intense self-importance, but I closed my eyes when I saw her running knock-kneed and not very fast from the oncoming bull. The bull though undersized was furious. Juanita's life worried me. I urged her to get a safe job as a waitress or salesgirl in El Paso but she said she was used to her work and had to support her family.
The trouble with the traveling life is that you never know the end of the stories. What became of the French prostitute's child who had such good pre-natal influences? What happened to Juanita? Did the East Texas oil millionaires end in Florida mansions or did they splurge their fortunes and end on the crumbling front porches? It saddens me to think how many stories I failed to understand even at their beginnings, and how many people I have forgotten.
Somehow my deal with the Missouri Pacific Railway got me to Mexico City. Mexico City is now one of the outstanding disasters of the world but in 1931 it was more magical than any European city I had seen. I wandered the streets in a daze of joy, admiring the strange old handsome buildings and the dignified brown-skinned people. The volcanoes shone in that clear light and the air smelled of flowers. The entire Federal District of Mexico, 570 square miles of which the city was only a part, had a population of 1,230,000. Now the population of Mexico City alone is 16 million. The fatal difference.
I wandered through a noble doorway into a great hall with a ceremonial stairway. Sitting on a plank, high up the wall by the stairway, a fat man in overalls was painting a mural. I thought such work went out with Michelangelo and stood transfixed. The huge wall was already half covered by brilliant agitated figures. He saw me and asked if I wanted to come up and presently, beside him on the plank, I was asking how he knew what to do next, while he went on painting as easily as he breathed. A voice from below shouted “Hola!” The plank was lowered and a small dark Frenchman joined us with tacos and beer, a lunch party suspended in air. That plank in the Palacio National was a meeting place for painter friends of the fat man with curly black hair and round happy face whose name, I learned, was Diego Rivera. They were a new breed to me, these men, I longed to be like them, geniuses in the art of living with friendship and laughter, poor and unworried, absorbed in their work, free.
The Frenchman, a painter named Jean Chariot, invited me to go south to the hacienda where Russians were making a movie. I was delighted to go anywhere until I saw the hacienda, a gloomy ruin set in oppressive fields of giant cactus. Furniture was minimal in two rooms; one a dormitory of beds, the other for eating, with table and chairs. You had to be careful not to put your foot through broken boards on the filthy floors and the place stank of dirt, drains and mildew. Two large fair-haired Russians, the camera crew, chased Mexican maidens through this chaos, whooping Russian war cries, and flung them on the beds, iron four-posters with torn mosquito nets. I became very stuffy on behalf of the maidens.
And nothing was happening. The movie was held up for lack of film or money or whatever. Meals were appalling. Sheathed in glittering black flies, we ate boiled cactus and boiled goat meat from unwashed plates on a tablecloth stained by months of such grim fodder. The boss man stayed in his neat ascetic room, behind a closed door, and read St. John of the Cross. He received us briefly in audience, to discuss Catholicism with Jean. I gathered he was called Eisenstein; I thought him old and grumpy. In no time, I got ptomaine poisoning and clamored to depart. Eisenstein told me, contemptuously, in French, that I was the sort of girl who went swimming and drowned. It is a cherished memory.
The world changes around us at desperate speed every day, for better (not enough), for worse (too much). The population explosion, the airplane, and tourism as a major international industry have changed travel, for an old traveler like me, from thrilling impetuous private discovery into a hassle of the deepest dye. Naturally I no longer love it as I did. To millions of latecomers travel today still brings newness of life, which is what travel is all about. Or anyway I hope crowding and organization do not flatten the surprise and dim the wonder. Nostalgia is foolish. There is no place to live except in the present. But what fun it was, what easy fun, long ago.
Cuba Revisited
GRANTA, January 1987
The first morning in Havana, I stood by the sea-wall on the Malecon, feeling weepy with homesickness for this city. Like the exile returned; and ridiculous. I left Cuba forty-one years ago, never missed it and barely remembered it. A long amnesia, forgetting the light, the color of the sea and sky, the people, the charm of the place.
The Malecon is a nineteenth-century jewel and joke. Above their arcade, the mini-mansions rise three stories, each house exuberantly different from the next: windows garlanded
with plaster roses, Moorish pointy windows of stained glass, caryatids, ornate ironwork balconies, huge nail-studded carved doors. The paint on the stone buildings is faded to pastel, a ghostly reminder of former brilliance: pink trimmed with purple, blue with yellow, green with cobalt. Whoever lived here, when Cuba was my home from 1939 to May 1944, had departed: fluttering laundry suggested that their rich private houses were now multiple dwellings.
A delightful little black kid bounced out of somewhere, in spotless white shirt and royal blue shorts. He smiled up at me with a look of true love and undying trust. “Rusa?" he asked. I was mortally offended. Russian women of certain age, seen in Moscow, had bodies like tanks and legs like tree trunks.
“No,” I said crossly, “Americana.” I should have said “Norte-americana” South of the U.S. border, people do not accept Americans’ exclusive ownership of the continent.
The loving smile did not change. “Da me chicle”, he said. Give me chewing-gum. Cuba does not manufacture chewing-gum. In due course, I gathered that kids admire gum chewing as seen in American movies, still the most popular.
The Prado is a stylish old street with a wide central promenade: live oak trees, big light globes on wrought iron lamp-posts, benches. The benches were occupied by old women knitting and gossping, old men reading papers and gossiping, poor people by our standards, looking comfortable and content. Now in the lunch-hour, groups of school children—from gleaming black to golden blonde—romped about the promenade, healthy, merry and as clean as if emerged from a washing-machine. The little ones wear a uniform of maroon shorts or mini-skirts, short-sleeved white shirts and a light blue neckerchief; the secondary school children wear canary yellow long pants or mini-skirts and a red neckerchief. The neckerchiefs show that they arc Pioneers, blue for the babies, like Cubs and Scouts in my childhood.
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