The great British miners’ strike of 1984–85 was a festival of hatred. TV news thrives on action shots; the cameras, for safety, operated from behind the police lines. Week after week we saw a police phalanx, helmets, face guards, shields, heavy boots, advance in line abreast on a shouting unruly mob of pickets who were, however, not kitted out for combat. The pickets were fiercely blamed for violence. A two-second flash would show us four riot cops beating the hell out of a picket, truncheons flailing; or we might see a picket on the ground and a cop putting the boot in. Not much of that, though. Mrs. Thatcher, now in the role of Boadicea, led the battle against these rabid dogs, these unpersons, this treacherous enemy within, the striking miners.
Apparently this island has enough coal to last to the year 3000. Nobody knows what to do with existing nuclear waste let alone all the poisonous muck that will pile up if Mrs. Thatcher succeeds in commissioning more nuclear power plants to blight Britain's coasts. Can Britain afford to lose the skill of miners? No time for theoretical stuff like that. The country, whether it likes to or not, now marches behind a banner with the strange device: profitability.
The TV strike spectacular made me sick at heart. Britain was going down the drain, become as mean and nasty as anywhere else. The new-look cops gave me the creeps; farewell to the friendly bobby. Compromise, civility, pleasantness, good humor, tolerance, all gone. Class is a fact of British life but this was class warfare. I think mining must be the hardest, dirtiest, most dangerous job there is; I was unwilling to believe that miners were monsters but I didn't know them. Then meet them.
I telephoned a newspaper in Newport to ask where the nearest mine could be found, got in my car and discovered that the famous Valleys with their mines are about an hour from the serene hilly farming country where I live. I introduced myself at the Miner's Club in Newbridge as a foreign journalist; they asked no questions and made me welcome. I liked the Welsh miners and their wives as much as any people I have met in the years I have lived in Britain. I wrote my little piece, was lucky to get it printed in the Guardian on the unimportant women's page, sent the modest paycheck to the Abertillary Food Fund, and stopped watching the TV news or reading about the strike. Too sad. It was always clear that the miners would lose and they did, after fifty-one bitter weeks. Judging by the mine folk I met, they were starved out.
The estimated cost, to British taxpayers, of breaking the strike is £6 billion. Forty-two mines have been closed, fourteen merged; four more are at present threatened. 64,445 miners are no longer miners. The mines at Newbridge are shut down. The Union is split. Probably the surviving mines will be privatized in due course. Everything else is, bit by bit. Something has to be wrong if whiz kids can earn £100,000 and upwards, per year, for fiddling with computers at the Stock Exchange but people like the miners are on the dole. Is this profitability?
“Newness of Life” is a well-paid stroll down Memory Lane. In half a century, I seem to have trod that path three times; once in the first article of this book, twice in this decade because I was asked to write about travel and had no useful ideas for recent travel tales. Poring over news of 1931, I thought: Crikey, you've been around so long you're practically an historic monument. Think of the amazing changes that have happened in your life. There followed a long pause while I tried to think what they were. You live in your time, in the present tense, the changes occur and you trundle along with them, they don't explode like bombs, they are dispersed and gradual. Each day keeps me too busy for lingering backward looks.
Since the question arises, I decided that the greatest changes were nuclear weapons, television and the airplane as public transport. I skip computers and the space age, too esoteric for me. When they invent a computerized baby robot for housework I will pay attention. In my own life, the change I feel most and deplore most is crowding; the sense of a world stuffed to bursting with people. (The Pope is not aware of this situation.)
Rats, when overcrowded, go crazy and eat each other. I think something of this order is happening in our cities. But the young, who only know crammed cities, lollop happily around in their masquerade clothes and seem to accept people pressure as normal. Nor does noise rasp their nerves; they are addicted to their own noise, the music of their generation. I travel in the hope of escaping crowds, and the weary hordes of weary souls at Heathrow or Gatwick fill me with panic. Will any quiet uncluttered places be left on earth? Time-sharing in holiday complexes in Katmandu, package tours to the Kalahari Desert?
When I read the estimated population for the year 2000—and five out of six of them predicted to exist in stages of hunger—I feel that I managed my birthdate just about right.
I had visited three communist countries before re-visiting Cuba in 1985. Poland as reported in this book; Russia in 1972; Hungary sometime in the eighties, but I cannot remember when. I never wanted to see Russia, but had been pen pals with an extraordinary Russian writer for years, and felt obliged to grit my teeth and go because of her letters. “I am old and cannot come to you, please come to me.” Within half an hour of arrival at Moscow airport, I was in a permanent black temper due to the bloody-minded boorishness of every Russian with whom I had to deal as a tourist. The general scruffiness and discomfort exasperated me; it cost a packet to be so wretched. The people in the streets looked whey- faced, dour and suspicious. Moscow was the dreariest capital I had ever seen. Though I refused to admit it, I felt frightened. I breathed in the sensation of being watched, the state like a great spider with many eyes weaving a web around everyone. I hated the place; ten days stretched ahead like a long month.
I spent those boiling hot August days with Russians whom we would consider middle class liberal intellectuals; by Soviet standards, dissidents. Dissident in their thinking, because they thought for themselves. Their living conditions were unbelievably bad. They were marathon talkers, quick to laugh. I have written about my Moscow sojourn elsewhere1 but there is one point worth repeating often. Dissident thought does not touch their feelings; they adored Moscow and would not willingly live anywhere else or among any people other than Russians. Americans in particular do not understand this Russian blood patriotism; nor do I, but I know it is there.
I have not railed against the Soviet government because I am careful of the company I keep. Anti-communism, as a creed, links you to some of the world's most odious people; the governments of South Africa, Chile, El Salvador for example, and the fanatical Right and neo-Fascists everywhere. Not to mention the shame of agreeing with President Reagan's worldview. The Soviet government can only be reformed from within; let us hope that Gorbachev's glasnost becomes a reality. Genuine glasnost could not tolerate psychiatric hospitals as punishment for dissidents. A young Russian poet, a recent gulag emigré, says that there are 2000 political prisoners though I do not see how she can know. Two thousand out of a population of 278 million. The Soviet government has condemned its rule, as no one else can, by its fear of so few critical voices.
I went to Hungary because I wanted to swim in Lake Balaton. My compulsive travels are often based on siren place names and often land me in hell holes. Lake Balaton was a vast grayish flat polluted body of water, shallow and crowded whenever you could get into it; I was bored blind. A Hertz or Avis car could be rented with a credit card, very surprising. I drove across the endless Hungarian plain, increasingly bored; I gave lifts to people and made no contact with them. German was an adequate lingua franca to supplement English but Hungarians were nothing like the Poles; I felt very much an isolated foreigner. Budapest has its own Bond Street where you could buy, at a price, cashmere sweaters from Jaeger, Dior perfumes, the entire luxury bit. You could eat well and be served by polite waiters. Communism is certainly not monolithic. Hungary was not frightening, it was dull.
Cuba must be the only communist success story. Perhaps the regime should be called Castroism, not communism. Since Khrushchev's reckless plan to site nuclear missiles in Cuba, without consulting Castro, the Soviet Union has bought Cuban sugar and let
Cuba manage its own affairs. The implacable U.S. economic embargo, meant to destroy Cuba, has instead helped it by obliging Cuba to manufacture for itself. And national pride gets a big boost from standing up alone to the Colossus of the North.
The Colossus of the North has been contemptible and myopic in its treatment of Cuba—and is doing the same with Nicaragua. Washington did not say a mumbling word against the Cuban dictator, Batista, a corrupt murderous thug, but cracked down at once on the new Castro regime. Castro was brought to power by a rebellion of the Cuban people. His mandate was social justice and the first step had to be a redistribution of wealth. Redistributing wealth annoys Washington as tyranny does not; Washington perceives social justice as communism. Cuba is communist thanks to Washington, not to any long-held ideological commitments of Castro and his bearded followers. Washington has done its best to force Nicaragua to become what it is not and does not want to be: communist.
Experience teaches the tunnel vision men in Washington nothing. One after the other, the dictators they chummily supported, from Chiang Kai Shek through Marcos, have been turfed out. Who can teach those men in Washington that capitalism and communism are meaningless words to the desperate poor but justice means a chance for what they have never had. If Washington goes on equating social justice with communism, Washington is the most convincing missionary for communism.
After struggling through six decades of this retrospective survey, I think I should conclude something. But what? A writer publishes to be read; then hopes the readers are affected by the words, hopes that their opinions are changed or strengthened or enlarged, or that readers are pushed to notice something they had not stopped to notice before. All my reporting life, I have thrown small pebbles into a very large pond, and have no way of knowing whether any pebble caused the slightest ripple. I don't need to worry about that. My responsibility was the effort. Writers work alone but I do not feel alone. I belong to a global fellowship, men and women concerned in the welfare of the planet and its least protected inhabitants. I plan to spend my remaining highly privileged years applauding that fellowship, the young volunteers and the veterans together, cheering them from the sidelines, shouting: good for you, right on, that's the stuff, never give up. Never give up.
Kilgwrrwg, Wales
September 1987
1Travels with Myself and Another
The View from the Ground Page 47
