The Blackpool Highflyer js-2

by Andrew Martin

  He asked me why I'd asked, and I said: 'Well, perhaps it was put there on purpose.'

  'You can't drag a great branch down off a tree, you know,' he said, and it was as if he'd tried.

  No, you clot, I thought to myself, but you can shift one that's already fallen.

  ____________________

  ‹o›--

  Come the Friday, knowing that the wife was off to a meeting of the Women's Co-operative Guild, I fixed on the idea of going up to the Palace directly after booking off, but I was all in, and it seemed to take an eternity for me to walk up Horton Street in the late hanging heat. Sugden was there, with his ice-cream barrow and his little white pony.

  'Weather suiting you, chief?' he called.

  'Champion,' I said, and it was then that I saw a long-haired man, halfway up the hill, handing out newspapers. He was not one of the Horton Street regulars. He wore a cap on top of his long black hair, so that his head was somehow very crowded. I walked towards him, and he put one of the papers in my hand.

  'Cop hold, guv,' he said.

  The paper was called the Socialist Mission, and there were no more than about four pages to it.

  'Take it,' said the long-haired bloke. 'Gratis.'

  I looked at the front page. At the top of one column were the words: 'Speech by Alan Cowan at Hull Dock Gates'. The rest of the page repeated all the questions that had been on the poster – for it was the same show – but with words beneath: the answers, I supposed. The answers according to this Alan Cowan.

  'Are you Alan Cowan?' I said to the long-haired fellow. He took off his cap and brushed his black hair back with a shaky long white hand. He seemed quite surprised to be addressed.

  'Me?' he said; 'no, though I keep in touch with him by telegram and letter. We're in the Mission together, the Socialist Mission.'

  I looked again at the paper, and the words: 'Blackpool: A Health Resort?'

  'Where is Alan Cowan just at present?' I said.

  'Dunfermline,' the long-haired fellow said instantly. He was thin and white, like a plant kept out of the light. All the energy and life that might have gone into giving him a bit of colour had instead been directed into the growing of his hair. 'He's at a speaking engagement.'

  I nodded.

  This fellow could have taken the bottom ends of his hair, and put them in his mouth. But the hair was something forgotten about, like his suit.

  'Do you work for him?'

  'Publicity Officer,' said the long-haired fellow. 'Mr Cowan pays me fair wages.'

  I knew I'd already missed Early Doors at the Palace Theatre, but I said: 'I've a couple of questions of my own, if that's quite all right?'

  The long-haired fellow said, 'Aye', though he looked a little anxious.

  'What's he, Alan Cowan, I mean… What's he got against folk going to Blackpool?'

  'Well,' said the long-haired fellow, 'I'd better start at the beginning of you're asking that.'

  'Will you step in here for a pint?' I said, nodding towards the Evening Star.

  The long-haired man shook his head. 'Don't drink,' he said.

  'Would you not have a lemonade or something?' I said, and his eyes fairly lit up at that, so we stepped into the pub.

  'It's been so hot out there today,' said the long-haired fellow, putting his hat and his papers down on the edge of the red billiard table. But it was no cooler in the pub, of course: just a different heat, with beer smell and cigar smoke mixed in.

  Looking across at the papers, my eye caught the words beneath 'The Socialist Mission'. They read, 'Formerly "The Anarchist Dispatch'".

  I had a glass of Ramsden's for myself, and the socialist missionary took his lemonade, which he drank off in one. Then he fell to looking at me, sideways, like, half trying to see round his hair, and half hiding behind it.

  'You're anarchists as well as socialists, are you?' I asked. I was talking as if there were many, but before me was just the one fellow.

  'The two go along a little way together,' he said, and then he was off, talking at me, but not looking at me once.

  He started, as threatened, from the beginning. It was all about how the liberal-labour men had not improved the condition of the working man as they had promised, and nor had the trade unions, and so a new type of organisation was wanted. What was needed was the socialisation of the means of production. 'We must have a straight-aiming struggle,' he said, and 'Alan Cowan believes that class war is its most efficient locomotive.'

  Well, at that word I cut in: 'Where do you stand on the railways?'The long-haired fellow moved his hair about for a while, steeling himself to say something. He had rather long, fine fingers, and I thought: he's never done a hand's turn. He was not part of the working life himself, but a kind of shadow, or echo of it.

  'Railways…' he said at last: 'Run by crooks, and should be nationalised.'

  'And as to Blackpool and wakes and holidays, and so on?'

  'Blackpool?' he said. 'Well, I don't call that a very worthy holiday place. The working people go there and what happens? They loiter on the sands by day, suffocate in some cheap place of amusement by night.'

  'Been to Blackpool yourself, have you?'

  The socialist missionary gave a kind of shrug, as if he didn't knozv whether he'd been to Blackpool. 'What's that got to do with it?' he said at last, and with a little more of the brass neck to him.

  'If not Blackpool, where might they go instead?' I asked him.

  'Well, they might get out into the country once in a while, but that's not… I do wish Alan was here because he puts it all over so much better than I ever could, but the question is: does Blackpool help the working class fight or does it hinder?'

  'I don't know,' I said.

  'Take this town, Halifax,' said the long-haired fellow. 'It's like a bottle with the stopper in. Fifty-one weeks of the year, everyone's cooped up in the mills, prisoners of the wage slavery. Then for one week – wakes – the stopper comes off and it's the mad dash to the seaside. Now if that didn't happen there's a fair chance the bottle would explode.'

  'Why?' I said. 'Why would it explode?'

  He sighed, looked down sadly at the empty lemonade glass. 'I forgot to say the bottle is a bottle of selzer, or maybe beer. Something volatile, any road. Something likely to explode. Alan has it right but I can't remember exactly how he puts it.'

  'Selzer will not expand in the bottle in any circumstances,' I said, finishing my Ramsden's.

  'Well,' said the socialist,'… we'll see about that.'

  I put down my pint pot. 'So you're dead set against Blackpool because folk like it?'

  'In a way yes,' said the long-haired fellow, who now brushed his hair right back from his face as if he'd suddenly lost all patience with it. 'Everything that increases the dissatisfaction of the working man must push him in a revolutionary direction.'

  'And what do you think of Scarborough?'

  'That's another…' And here he muttered something I couldn't catch.

  'Another what?' I said, and he came out with it this time, for he was a fellow who warmed up by degrees.

  'Another latrine,' he said.

  'Well then,' I said, 'would you blokes in the Socialist Mission ever stop a train that was carrying working people to Blackpool or Scarborough? Would you ever wreck it, I mean?'

  At this, he walked over to the billiard table and took up his newspapers again. 'Why do you ask that?' he said turning around, the newspapers once more under his arm.

  I told him.

  'Well,' he said. 'You must come along to our meeting to know more, and you must speak to Mr Cowan himself. But I'll tell you here and now that one difference between us and the standard run of liberal-labour idiots is that we understand there is a fever for action in the mills and factories of all the working towns in the country, and if the workers won't rise of their own accord they must be pushed to it.'

  I stared at the fellow, with the happy ringing of the till in the background. Had he just owned up to murder?

>   'But no,' he went on. 'We didn't wreck your excursion.' He half smiled in a way I didn't much like; I'd seemed in a funk, and that had galvanised him in some way. The smile changed as I watched, though, becoming something a little pleasanter. He was only a kid; good-looking, in a way; and Clive Carter would have killed for that hair of his. He should have been out courting on a Friday night like this.

  'What's your name?' he asked me.

  I was tired of being asked for my name, for I felt I was being written down in all sorts of bad books, but I gave it him anyway. 'Jim Stringer,' I said.

  'Jim Stringer,' he repeated. You felt he wasn't given a name very often, and that when he was, he made the most of it.

  'What's yours?' I said.

  'Paul,' he said. And he nodded to me before walking back out into the street.

  I took up the paper he'd passed to me and read it over a little. It was all a lot of big, windy promises: 'There will be a general expropriation of vast proportions'; 'All distinctions between classes and nations will be lost', and so on. Half the articles were headed: 'Alan Cowan writes', others were 'by a comrade'. I knew there was something queer about it from the outset but for a little while I couldn't say what. It was like looking at a night sky and slowly working out that there was no moon. Somewhere or other, there should have been a little complicated dull part where you were told who it was printed by and where, and how you might get in touch with the editor. But there was no such thing to be seen.

  Chapter Six

  I was too late for Early Doors at the Palace, and too late for the start, come to that, but I was let in after the first turn.

  I was put into the one seat left, which was in the stalls and directly in front of the orchestra. As I sat down, I knew I'd made a bloomer in coming, for I could hardly breathe. There were too many hot, red people in the theatre and not enough air to go round.

  The sweat began rolling off me as a board was put up announcing a dog circus. The fellow in charge of the dogs wore a tailcoat and high collar. He had long hair flattened to his small head by Brilliantine and sweat. He stood still and sweated, swaying slightly as his dogs jumped about him. He looked like a tadpole, and his dogs would leap and hang quivering in the air like jumping fishes. At the moment that any dog made a jump, the fellow with the big drum, who was about four feet away from me, would hit the biggest of his cymbals, worsening my brain ache by degrees. Why can't those damned mutts keep down, I began muttering to myself. And why would the old fellow next to me not keep still?

  After the dog circus came six men who were a German or Hungarian band. Oompah music. As they played, the orchestra played along, doubling the noise and doubling the heat; there was a lot of cymbal stuff from the drummer, and I would have liked to belt him with one of the bloody things. The band played against a painting of a pale-blue mountain; the colour dazzled, and I could not look at the mountain top, which was blinding white.

  The bill-topper was the ventriloquist, the one I'd come to see, but he turned out to be the sort I don't like: the kind with a walking figure.

  As the floods went up he was leaning on the figure, or the figure was leaning on him. It was an English Johnny, or Champagne Charlie. You could tell by the tailcoat and high collar. The head was weird: round, white and lumpy, like the moon or some great fungus, and the grey eyes seemed to be sliding to the side, as if the figure was sad and ashamed at having a perfectly round head. The ventriloquist was also got up like a toff: frock coat and top hat. He was breathing deeply, trying to get a breath in the heat like all of us, and preparing for the walk. The doll, of course, was not breathing at all. Any sort of weather was nothing in his way.

  The walk started, and as usual a great cheer went up at the same time as the walking music started up. It was as if a famous cripple had got to his feet and taken his first steps in years. The ventriloquist's left hand was at the figure's back, and he was working the levers that swung the legs. The figure moved by a forward jerk of the left leg, which woke up the right one, and brought it swinging along behind, and the left arm rode up towards the chest every time this happened. The doll's right arm was in the hands of the ventriloquist.

  They were heading for two chairs half involved in darkness in the middle of the stage, and you could see that disaster beckoned because the ventriloquist's legs (which were shaking) and the legs of the figure were moving further and further apart, so the two of them were starting to make the shape of an A.

  In walking ventriloquism, the figures were always the Johnny or Champagne Charlie sorts, so that their funny walks could be put down to them being cut. It was all so samey, but there was an extra sort of desperation with this pair, and I really wanted them to get to the chairs without a collapse.

  Part of the trouble was that the ventriloquist wasn't such a great hand at walking himself. He was a big fellow, but trembly from nerves. At one moment he lost control of the figure's head, which swung from left to right, as if saying:

  No, I will not go on with this. But they did reach the chair, and sat down to great applause. The ventriloquist beamed out at the audience. He had a red face, shining with sweat, a wide grey moustache held out by wax, and a sharp, pointed beard, the two of them together making a cross on the lower part of his face. He looked so completely jiggered that really you did not want him to have to do any more work. But he presently produced a cigar and put it in the figure's mouth, saying, very loud, 'Well here we are at the eye doctor's!'

  While everyone took that in, and puzzled over it maybe, and the worrit next to me continued with his infernal fidgeting, the ventriloquist produced from his waistcoat a Wind Vesta, and saying, 'A light of course, we must have a light,' he lit the figure's cigar.

  Two things now happened that brought more applause: the lights came up to show a line of figures on seats, stretching away to the side of the ventriloquist and the figure, which was now shooting out puffs of smoke from its mouth. The other dolls in the row were an old lady, a rustic type, a darkie and a costermonger. One was moving: the old lady. Her head rocked up and down, as if she was saying: Well, here we are but we must just make the best of it.

  I wondered whether folk were clapping because they thought it was good or bad, because it was bad, shocking bad. If you were a ventriloquist you ought to be funny – that was the only way you could get away with it. I had seen no ends of funny ones down in London, but they were mainly the fellows with the knee figures: schoolboy, little Johnny, Jack Tar. But it was always funny business, with the figure saucing the man, instead of this slow, exhibition stuff.

  The ventriloquist took the cigar from the figure's mouth, and the figure said something that I worked out was: 'Can we speak in confidence?'

  The ventriloquist looked along the row, and, looking ahead again, said: 'I doubt it, you know.'

  I watched the nodding head of the old woman, which ticked like a clock, and watched the orchestra sweat as my own head clock ticked.

  The ventriloquist was saying, 'Well, my vision is perfect, how about yours?'

  It struck me that at this rate it could be as much as ten minutes before the end, and I couldn't take it any more. I was far too hot, and after the conversation with the socialist I'd been quite unable to put away thoughts of the stone on the line.

  I stood up and walked out into the foyer, which was a red and gold circle of bars so that I was surrounded by barmen, who were all lining up glasses, waiting for the rush that would come at the end. I picked out one at random and walked over to him feeling strange, with my boots sinking into the carpet. I asked for a glass of water, and he said: 'You look jiggered, mate.' I told him I'd had quite a few days of it. He said, 'How's that then?' and I said, 'Well, I was in a train smash for one thing.'

  I told him about the stone on the line, and the death of Margaret Dyson, but the barman wasn't interested in her: 'You, though,' he said, 'you were on the front of the engine, and you weren't hurt even a bit?'

  'Well, no.'

  'Cor,' he said, 'You're all luck
, you are.'

  This struck me as the wrong way of looking at things, and made me feel worse about Margaret Dyson. I heard a noise behind me, and was aware that all the barmen in the circle had got hold of the story now and were leaning forward and listening.

  'I bet you were shitting yoursen,' said one of them.

  'How did the stone get there, then?' one of them called out.

  'Put there,' I said.

  'You suspect… a spot of mischief, then, do you?' asked the same fellow again.

  'I reckon it was socialists,' I said, 'socialists or anarchists who've got a down on excursions, because they're put up by the bosses… So the stone might have been put there as a sort of warning to the railway company.'

  'Well, that's all fairly choice,' said one of the barmen. Another said, 'Anarchists,' very slowly, as if he was trying out the word for size.

  Just then I felt extra heat and the ventriloquist was standing right next to me. It was powerful strange to see that marvellous beard and 'tache at large in the real world.

  My barman handed him a glass of something mustardy coloured, and nothing was said. The ventriloquist was red, shining with sweat, and panting as if he'd run a mile: he was a fellow not meant to be seen at close quarters. He began to drink the mustardy stuff, whilst looking at nothing. He was bigger than he'd looked on stage, especially in his upper half: he looked cut out for something more than ventriloquism.

  'A warning by anarchists!' said one of the barmen, slow on the uptake, and the ventriloquist continued to drink and to look at nothing, but the nothing had now moved further into the distance.

  The ventriloquist finished his drink, turned, and disappeared through a door between two of the bars.

  'I thought that bloke was on stage just now,' I said to my barman.

  'He generally takes a little summat just about now for his vocal organ.'

  'He gets through heaps of lozenges, you know,' said another of the barmen.

  'But that was whisky and honey he had just there,' said the first.