A Summer in the Twenties

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Did he, by Jove! How . . . ?’

  It was too late. The question should not have been begun, the surprise not shown, any more than Mr. Barnes should have been provoked into saying what he had. They had stumbled into one of the forbidden patches of their relationship, a mysteriously poisoned area that would not support the trust and mild admiration that grew readily elsewhere. Much earlier Tom had made a few carefully vague enquiries and had immediately discovered that the man called Ricardo inhabited such a patch. It was clear that they had now come to the same place from another direction.

  As if turning away from some unpleasant sight they wheeled round the corner into the Holderness Road and walked on in silence. A tram banged by. Tom swore at himself for allowing the conversation to take this course. He ought not even to have asked Mrs. Barnes about Ricardo. Would she tell her husband? Quite likely. Therefore this was not going to be the right moment to sound out Ernie Doyle—he could have gone with Judy to this idiot movie she was determined to see, sat beside her, enjoying at least her gasps and sighs, instead of which he’d be sparring with Doyle . . . Mr. Barnes must now be persuaded to stay for that—time the rounds perhaps—yes . . . at least it would mean that the decision whether to sound Doyle out had to be postponed . . . that was a relief.

  As Tom settled the problem to one side he was snatched—as suddenly as if he had tripped the trigger of a gin-trap—by that mental process which answers a question which is not being thought about. What Mr. Barnes had told him about Ricardo’s sources of information was very strange, but he had almost deliberately put it out of his mind for the moment. Now a lunatic solution leaped like a pantomime devil into his mind and stood there mouthing and gesticulating at him, shaped and recognisable, before any of the arguments that might make it marginally less lunatic crawled slowly onto the stage. Ricardo. Dick. Tom had for some time had a curious feeling that he would recognise Ricardo if he were to meet him, in the way that one seems to recognise certain strangers in one’s dreams. Now there was a chain of dream-logic to go with this. Ricardo knew about him, therefore Ricardo knew him, therefore he knew Ricardo. Tom forced himself to think about the possibility with his waking mind. True, Dick was one of the very few people who knew what Tom was doing in Hull; then there had been that strange, sad-seeming argument at Bertie’s champagne breakfast, about his sense of a need to test himself in the manner in which his elders had been tested in the trenches. He had said the comrades at Oxford hadn’t taken his pretensions to communism seriously—could this not have driven him not out of the party, but further in? Would he then have been so ready to brandish his party card in that frivolous manner? Well, perhaps—a man who did that, who went to fancy-dress parties as a comic-cuts Bolshevik, couldn’t really be one, could he? It was a disguise that suited Dick’s temperament far better than any aristocratic lace and ruffles . . . and the rescue at Drewton Cutting! That tale of the innkeeper’s son who had told his scoutmaster! That had come through Dick.

  It had seemed an unlikely fluke from the first. Tom remembered the interview in his Oxford digs, Dick’s unease and reluctance to explain how they had known. But if he’d made up the story of the boy scout for Bertie, when all along he’d known by surer means . . . but why should he tell Bertie at all? Because . . . because Ricardo needed Bertie almost as much as Bertie needed Ricardo. Just as Bertie wanted a genuine Bolshevik conspiracy so that his army could have an enemy to fight, so Ricardo would actually welcome a gang of rich young loafers, hooded, armed, lined along the cutting wall and cowing the workers in hooting, arrogant voices. What better bogey-man could an agitator ask for?

  Tom shook his head. The idea remained absurd. Considering what trouble he himself had had making the smallest contact with Mr. Barnes . . . Hull was no more Dick’s native ground than it was his own . . . but suppose Dick had been put in contact by Party Headquarters . . . with seamen such as Ned Dyke coming and going from the Baltic ports, there was likely to be a genuine Bolshevik organisation in Hull long before . . .

  No. It would not do. The logic was still dream-logic, fantasising rational connections between images that come into the sleeping mind for reasons that have nothing to do with reason itself. Tom had only to wake and look around him to see that the dream could not possibly be true. There was no way in which Dick could have altered one footfall among the stream of men who had headed to Marfleet Strand. The bricks of the houses along the Holderness Road, the ribbons of slow smoke wavering up from the countless chimneys as the evening meal was cooked, the empty shelves behind the grimy shop windows, all declared their difference from any world in which Dick had power to act. Tom felt almost ashamed at having, even with a drowsing mind, believed in the possibility.

  But still he was vaguely haunted, as one sometimes is by a dream. An image continued to nag, not of Dick, but of a far more shadowy figure. It was as though there had been something in the dream that he could not remember on waking—a glimpse, perhaps, of the man he had been looking for, head turned away, but . . . known? If that head had turned in the dream, what face . . . ? Was that absurd? Tom remembered his persecuted notion a few weeks back that the dockers would not speak to him because they knew why he was there. Only just now Mr. Barnes had let slip that the feeling had not been madness. Tom returned to that point. Ricardo knew about Tom. Was it not therefore possible that he actually knew Tom? And in that case Tom must indeed know Ricardo.

  He was actually beginning to take the notion seriously, and applying his arguments to the not quite so impossible figure of Bertie Panhard, when Mr. Barnes gripped him by the elbow and drew him to a halt. Another tram was clattering away westwards. The evening quiet closed in behind it like a calm sea smoothing out the wake of a liner. Tom stared at Mr. Barnes, startled. Had he muttered some secret thought aloud? But Mr. Barnes had his head cocked to listen to a far noise that had been drowned by the passing of the tram. A bell, two bells, in panicky, arhythmic bursts of ringing. Mr. Barnes stepped into the road and pointed. Tom followed. It had been a fine day, though hazed all afternoon with thin high cloud which now shone unspectacularly with the diluted glow of sunset. Low above the rooftops a nearer and darker cloud was rising, surging in the stillness with its own inward winds.

  ‘Fire,’ said Mr. Barnes.

  ‘A big one, or is it a ship?’

  ‘Timber docks. Best get along down. There’ll be trouble.’

  ‘What about Ernie?’

  ‘He’ll be coming.’

  As they passed the next side-street Tom saw a man hurry from a house, jerking himself into his jacket as he did so and calling out to a neighbour. Further down three men emerged from one of the alleys between the back-to-backs. Ahead, a couple of boys wheeled into the main road at a scamper and raced away.

  ‘What sort of trouble?’ said Tom.

  ‘Lads are very bitter. I’d like you there, Mr. Hankey.’

  ‘Are you saying that somebody might have started the fire?’

  ‘That’s what the papers will tell us, whether or no.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better if everyone kept away?’

  ‘If pigs could fly it would. There’s Ernie now.’

  Doyle, waiting as arranged on the corner of his own side-street, answered Mr. Barnes’s wave and pointed towards the smoke cloud. Mr. Barnes made a wiping-out gesture, clearly cancelling the training-session. Doyle waved agreement, turned and ran to catch up two of his friends, clapping them on the back when he reached them and saying something which had the effect of setting all three into a trot. Even the pace of the older men had a fidgetiness about it, as though they too were on the edge of running. Behind them, far down the road, came the clang of a bell. Tom looked over his shoulder and saw that a whole stream of men was moving down either pavement. Between them he could see the glint of the fire engine, and now hear the boom of the big engine nearing and nearing, punctuated by the shrilling of the bell. Another wave of sound came with it, a long rolling hoot of booing and catcalling from the men on the pavements, mixed
with jeering whistles. The engine flashed between the walkers with its crew clinging to it, their helmets and equipment glittering like the accoutrements of a cavalry squadron, and was saluted as it went by with gestures of anger or derision. A second engine, following a hundred yards behind, had to run exactly the same gauntlet, and this time Tom saw a couple of missiles flying towards it from among the men. He turned to Mr. Barnes, who had not looked round.

  ‘They’re throwing things!’ he said.

  ‘I told you the lads were bitter. They mun take it out on someone.’

  The crowd jostled to cross the narrow sidewalks of Drypool Bridge and turned south down High Street, a narrow cobbled way that ran first between respectable old brick offices and then became a canyon of brick warehouses. To their right, down another road, more fire engines clamoured towards the blaze. The men made no move to stop them, though several alleys joined the two streets. Instead they seemed to be drawn trance-like, as if by some outside will, to the event, not knowing what they were going to attempt or achieve by their presence but simply needing to be there. At the end of the canyon the smoke cloud swirled. Tom could hear the fire now, a breathy roaring interspersed with crackles and louder explosions. Flakes like black snow, but edged at times with crinkling rims of ember, eddied down. The air stank of burning.

  The street turned right and widened. In the corner of ground between the tributary River Hull and the dock that served the main Humber Ferry was a large timber-yard, which turned out to be the seat of the fire—or rather fires, for two separate columns of smoke, shot through with sparks, were roaring up among the arched shed roofs to join and compose the main cloud. It had seemed a windless evening, but here there were sudden gusts and roasting down-draughts created by the upward rush of the fires. A swirl of smoke brought by one of these was clearing from the area in front of the dock gates just as Tom and Mr. Barnes arrived on the scene. Having been already out on the road, on their way to meet Doyle, when they heard the alarms they were among earlier arrivals, but already a crowd three or four deep stretched from the dock wall right across the road. The newcomers, still drawn as if by a mass biological urge such as that empties an ants’ nest for the flight of the queens, pressed forward to join them. Tom found himself being carried on by the current just as another fire engine swept past the front of the crowd. Boos and cat-calls rose. The crowd surged. He could see beyond them the dark outlines of the helmets of the line of policemen who were holding them back from the gateway. As the engine lurched between the gateposts the struggle relaxed, and in the general easing Tom came to his own senses. Seeing Mr. Barnes a pace or so ahead of him, he reached out and gripped him by the shoulder. The wrinkled old face turned. The eyes, usually bird-bright, seemed dazed.

  ‘We shan’t do any good here,’ called Tom and gestured with his free hand away from the gates, then loosed his hold and nudged his way to his right. They had reached the line at the area of maximum density, the natural focus to which newcomers would press forward, so in a few yards the scrum thinned and Tom was able to wait for Mr. Barnes to catch up.

  ‘Getting out, Mr. Hankey?’

  ‘Find a better place—look—where those boys are.’

  The space in front of the docks was twice as wide as a normal road, lined on its northern side with the usual jumble of offices and storage places built to serve the minor appetites of the river. Opposite the timber-yard gates was a small warehouse with barred ground-floor windows. Some boys had already climbed onto one sill and were perched clinging to the bars. Without waiting for Mr. Barnes’s agreement Tom shoved his way across the current of men to a vacant window. For the moment nobody else seemed concerned with anything but to get as close as possible to the gates, or at least to the line of police who kept the entrance clear for the fire engines. They had not come to see but to take part. Even in Mr. Barnes’s expression there was something that suggested that he had acted contrary to his nature in following Tom away from that magnetic centre.

  ‘I’ll give you a leg up,’ said Tom.

  The little man was heavier than he’d have guessed, the slight body muscled by a life of heaving loads from awkward corners. As soon as Mr. Barnes was on his perch Tom pulled himself up beside him. The four feet of extra height made an extraordinary difference, not so much in what there was to see but in the manner in which one saw it. The dockers were massed to Tom’s left, restrained by a line of police with linked arms. Beyond the cleared space stood a much smaller and less homogeneous crowd of sightseers, with only a constable or two to control them. Over them all hung the broadening cloud, so dense and low as to turn the evening almost to nightfall. The ten-foot wall of the yard and the sheds and timber-stacks beyond it still hid the seat of the fires, though from time to time great flames would leap among the roofs and mingle with the black uprush. Around the two furnace-centres, elegant and apparently unhurried, curved the white water-jets from the fire hoses. But the roar of the fire and the steadier drumming of the pumps imposed the forward-driving rhythm of drama, like the long drum-roll at the climax of a circus act, declaring that at any moment some huge new event must burst into being.

  The crowd at Tom’s feet also seemed imbued with a sense of coming crisis. They were still gathering, still pressing forward, with very few of the random swirls of men jostling for a better viewpoint, but almost all in one blind but coherent mass, probing for a weakness where the restraining line of police might give way. From his vantage-place Tom could see that the mass will was not directing them with human intelligence. By arriving almost all down High Street the men had allowed themselves to be penned between the timber-yard wall and the warehouses, leaving the other end of the street clear for the approach of the fire engines. More police were even now gathering from that direction, but a bell clamoured beyond them and they scattered to let through not the expected fire engine but a couple of ambulances. The crowd watched in sudden silence as these swung through the gate, lurching to a seemingly impossible tilt on their soft springs. Perhaps the police relaxed a little in the lull, for as the ambulances vanished there was a surge from the crowd that pushed the line almost to the gatepost of the yard. The approaching policemen broke into a run and hurled themselves against the wall of men. Two or three truncheons were out. Fists struck back. Helmets rolled on the cobbles. By the gates the line inched back, but at the same time it surged forward at Tom’s end until a wedge of men had forced their way along the pavement to his right. More police ran to this point. The pressures stabilised in new positions.

  It had been a near thing. Suppose forty or fifty men had detached themselves from the back of the crowd, run back up High Street, through one of the side alleys and down the road taken by the fire engines. A quick charge out of the dusk, a wavering of purpose by the police, a push from this side, and the line would give. The men would be at the gates, pressing on through to where the fires were raging . . . Suddenly in his mind’s eye Tom saw a shadowy figure, lurking in a doorway, seeing what he had seen, deciding in this very move. He tried to put a face on the man but couldn’t make it form. He turned to Mr. Barnes.

  ‘Is anyone telling the men what to do?’

  Mr. Barnes shook his head.

  ‘How did they come so quickly, then? Were they waiting for it to happen?’

  ‘Fire after fire in the timber-yards, nineteen eleven,’ said Mr. Barnes, almost yelling to be heard above a sudden clatter of explosions from beyond the wall. ‘They know what’s what, even them that was bairns at the time.’

  He turned, craning to be part of the crowd, and visibly flinched when one of the down-draughts sent a fresh pother of smoke sweeping across the men by the gates. Tom was aware of the real gulf between the two of them. He also was more than a mere spectator, but was unable to feel part of the mass below. Instead he found himself shocked and distressed, not so much by the outward manifestations of violence—the stoning of the fire engines and the struggle against the forces of order—but by the irrational mass will. Even this, he realised,
was not something wholly new to him. The whooping gangs of Oxford bully-boys who had gathered to break up the rooms of their enemies the aesthetes—half-a-dozen purple-nosed squires growling fantasies of feudalistic revenge against Lloyd George over Father’s port—both could be said in their small way to be animated by something of the same instincts as the men below. It was the sheer mass of the collective will that shocked. It had the energy of ocean, of storm-waves pounding a sea-front, while even at their ugliest the violences of Tom’s own class were little more than the rufflings of inland waters.

  How could anyone harness such a tide? At first Tom searched the crowd for some eddy or movement that might indicate a presence there, a man who was not subject to the tide but was using and directing it to his own ends. It was hopeless. The men’s heads, facing away from him and almost all covered with their dark cloth caps, might have been a mass of rounded pebbles on a beach. If the man Tom was looking for was among them he would adopt that camouflage, lurking among the others like a pebble-coloured crab, and careful to keep the stillness of a pebble. But gradually, as the phenomenon of the tidal will impressed itself more and more, Tom came to realise that nobody could hope to direct such a force. It would do what it would do. Nobody could play Napoleon with it, using it as his army. Even the cleverest revolutionary could achieve no more than minor nudgings and coaxings, working towards an alteration in the way the men thought and felt. If you wished to fight such a revolutionary you had to do it in the end by the same means—not, as it were, with restraining lines of police, let alone Bertie’s private army, but with nudgings and coaxings in the opposite direction.

  This fire, for instance. What mattered was not the burning of the timber, the success or failure of the fire-crews, but the presence of the strikers outside the gates. They had to be here, as Mr. Barnes had said. Their presence was symbolic but necessary. Whatever happened in the next half hour would become part of the way they thought and felt, and hence affect their future movements. In this light even the stoning of the fire engines could be understood, in a way. And therefore the important thing was to provide not a counterforce but opposing symbols, some event or action in which they took part and which moved their perceptions away from the direction Ricardo was working for.