There ay much we can do about it, is there? Keep working, I suppose, my dad says.
They’ll keep us working, yer can be sure of that. My grandad is looking at him again, working something out, reckoning, I can see.
My nan puts the tea down on the table.
Continental working practices, my grandad says to her.
He looks at the piece of paper again and then up at my dad. My dad leans back in the chair, his eyes closing. He always falls asleep when he comes back from work.
More work in less time, my grandad said. Thass all that is. He screws the paper up and dips a ginger biscuit in his tea.
More work in less time for less money next. Yow watch. Yow watch what happens. Yow watch what’s coming.
I don’t think Thatcher knew fully what was coming, from what I understand now, lurching from crisis to crisis in that first year or so, seeing all those Don’t Blame Me, I Voted Labour stickers, looking like she didn’t know what she was doing. There was no plan. Not then. They made a plan up as they went along when they realized we were weaker than they’d imagined. It was opportunistic. All I know is that my grandad could see trouble coming better than anyone else. He knew trouble was coming and he knew there was nothing he could do about it. He knew how weak we were.
But what is a revolution, though?
Johnny explains things to me. He wants there to be a revolution. He tells me about it at the park. I am hanging from the climbing frame, practising for a game we play where we all hold on, legs dangling and hands burning. The winner is whoever lasts the longest. You have to be hard to win. Michelle is the champion. I want to beat her. I am watching a train being shunted in the freight yard down the hill below us.
Well, the way things am shared out ay right.
What dyer mean?
Johnny is sitting with his back to me on the bench. He isn’t looking down at the train, he’s looking across to the castle and the zoo and is drawing the cable-cars. In his picture the cable-cars hang across to Kates Hill and up the High Street to Top Church and down Castle Hill to Dudley Port station. Imagine, riding around everywhere by cable-car. The patterns the cables make on the page are the same pattern as the cobwebs; that’s how Johnny got the idea.
Well, say me, my dad and your dad, we work in factories but the stuff we make is for other people and we don’t own the factories, someone else does, well in a way we own Cinderheath, we all do, the people, but it’s complicated, so we do all this stuff for someone else who doesn’t have to do any of the work.
You get paid.
We do get paid but we don’t decide how much pay we get. Someone else decides. If the people who worked in the factories were in charge of them they could work for each other, share things out equally. The way we’ve got it now, the rich will get richer and the poor will stay poor.
What am we?
What?
Rich or poor?
Well, we’m the workers, the poor, if yer like. We have to rise up and free ourselves.
I’m not sure that we are poor. My grandad is doing loads of overtime at Cinderheath. I can see the works from the climbing frame, over the other side of the railway tracks, the long factory buildings and the gantry that looks like a giant climbing frame above it. Overtime makes you rich. My mum and dad bought our house with his wages and my dad is always at work and sometimes he has to go on the phone or to work even in the middle of the night to tell the people there what to do, how to fix a machine or set it up to cut the steel into shapes. Then there is the business of buying a new house further away from here that I’m not meant to know about. There are poor people but they’re not us, I don’t think. We’ve got cars and telephones and we’re going to the caravans three times this year. My nan gives money to the poor people in Africa and the Philippines in an envelope that she keeps by the door ready for Sister Marie Antoinette. She shows me pictures of the little children on the envelope and says how we’re very lucky. Johnny doesn’t make much sense to me, saying we’re poor.
This was the first time he explained it to me. Afterwards, I came to see what he meant. We weren’t poor, though. Not then, anyway. If you ask me now, I’d say there are lots of ways of making people poor. It’s not only about money. Thinking life is only about money is another way of being poor, a way of thinking you might arrive at by counting your coppers in your mean and draughty grocer’s shop, looking across the flat Lincolnshire land towards the hills and hating us.
Doh talk so saft. Yome bloody yampy, my grandad says when Johnny starts telling him about the workers and the revolution.
It’ll never happen here, son. We get just enough crumbs from the bosses’ tables, doh yow worry about that. Just enough. And we’m grateful.
I can’t tell if my grandad’s joking or not. He looks a bit like he did when punched Uncle Eric.
Johnny blows his cheeks out.
Mind you, my grandad says, there’s one or two round here I wouldn’t mind being lined up against that wall and shot, when yer get started, like. Yer bloody uncle Eric, for one. He says this last bit quietly so my nan can’t hear.
There yer go then!
But it woh, happen, Johnny. People am happy enough as they am. Yer doh know yome born, really, when yer talk about folks having it really bad. It day happen in the twenties or thirties, when my dad went hungry, hungry. If it day happen in the twenties or thirties it ay gonna happen now. And times afower that. It woh happen now.
It ay about me. Iss about the system.
What system? We’ve got a welfare state, a National Health Service. We own the bloody steelworks and the mines. They’m nationalized industries. Who am these bosses who’m ripping us off? Weselves?
In a way. The system’s wrong.
Well, the world’s unfair, son, I know that much. A revolution woh change that. The system we’ve got now is a lot fairer than we have had, believe me.
Watch what happens. Just watch.
Then my mum and dad come in from looking for our new house. But I’m not meant to know about it, so we talk about the Wolves while they have a cup of tea.
They liked watching cowboy films, my dad and grandad. They’d watch one together sometimes, say on a Sunday afternoon: My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Shane. I remember one time, when I was really young, I pretended we were out in Indian territory looking for that girl; The Searchers was one of my favourite films. We were over at Kinver or Enville, somewhere like that. I gave everyone parts as we walked along.
Who’s Johnny gonna be? my mum asked.
One of the bloody Indians, my grandad said. I remember they’d had an argument about another cowboy film a few weeks before.
Thass all right, is it? Shooting all these people? Johnny had said.
What? They’m the baddies.
It ay right though, is it?
What ay right? I’m trying to watch this.
Well, just killing em all. That’s what really happened. It was their country and then the white men came and killed em all and took the land for theerselves.
Way of the world, son.
So that’s all right then, is it, killing women and children?
It’s a film.
It really happened.
Let him enjoy the film, Johnny, please, my mum said. Stop worrying about it. It’s only a film.
Yer doh understand, Johnny said.
Everyone ignored him and the cavalry charged. I had some plastic cowboys and Indians that I played with Little Ronnie sometimes. I used to make him have the Indians.
Propaganda, Johnny said.
Jesus Christ, iss just a film, son.
The Indians fired arrows through the circled wagons and whooped with delight.
What about Zulu? Yer support the Zulus, yer want them to win in that.
Thass different. I doh like Michael Caine.
Or the British Empire. You told me that.
They’m films, son.
You tell me all this stuff, how not to believe what yer see or hea
r, and then when I repeat it back to yer, yer tell me I’m wrong.
Ah well, maybe it’s me yer shouldn’t listen to, then.
They still go on like this at times, watching the news. My grandad is almost ninety; Johnny is in his fifties.
My dad liked Clint Eastwood, too. I remember him staying up to watch A Fistful of Dollars and drink a bottle of beer. This was before video or anything like that. He had that same straight face where you didn’t know if he was joking or angry or what.
The other night, after clearing up in the bar, I poured a glass of the good rum that Michael had brought back from Jamaica for me, flicked through the channels. There he was, suddenly, on the big screen: Clint Eastwood, walking through the desert, looking smaller and smaller as the empty plains stretched out around him. I changed channel, tried to think of something else.
When I first bought the pub there were kids selling gear out of the back room, where the pool table was. They were in one Tuesday afternoon, there was never anybody else in, a few weeks after I’d taken it on. I knew I had to do something. I got Michael to sit at the end of the bar then I walked in there with a hammer. I said they could leave now by the side door and never come back or go out the front in an ambulance. They looked at me and then at Michael, the infamous Michael Campbell, and left.
Michelle wasn’t very pleased with me. Yow think yome bloody Clint Eastwood, she said. Except he day have his brother-in-law out on bail, ready to back him up.
Me brother-in-law?
Yer know what I mean.
So you want to marry me, then?
‘The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life.’
Johnny takes me to see Star Wars again. It’s back on at Dudley pictures. I’ve seen it three times now, once with my dad, once with my grandad, who fell asleep before they even left Tatooine, and now with Johnny. Darth Vader terrifies me but I keep looking. Each time I see it I think there’s no way they can destroy the Death Star, the odds are too much, the Empire too powerful, but they keep going and keep going and there it is, a supernova, as the space station explodes, the rebels have won and good triumphs over evil, and we come out onto Castle Hill.
Johnny wants to paint the enclosures at the zoo. He takes me there after the film. The man on the turnstile stares at the red and yellow Anti-Nazi League patch on his arm, and says, God help us if there’s a war, as we shuffle through to look at the flamingos.
I want him to draw the animals. He’s got a copy of a painting of the birdhouse in his sketchbook at home by Percy Shakespeare, an artist who came from Dudley. The copy of the picture is black and white, ripped from a book, but Johnny’s gone over it with colours. It’s a great painting. I want him to paint something like that, but he tells me about the animal houses instead.
Yeah, the man who built the zoo, he wanted to build a model city. What that means is a city to show people how to live. Even though all the buildings are for animals, he tried to show us how we should build things for humans. Nobody cares about it no more. That’s why I’m taking photos and I’m going to paint them, so there’s a record of them.
He takes a photo with the Polaroid camera that my uncle Freddie left as a present when he came from Australia. I got a boomerang. Johnny tried painting outside down by the canal with an easel and oil paints. He wanted to paint Cobb’s Engine House down at Bumble Hole. That was when the skinheads came and smashed his easel. Now he uses the camera to take pictures and paints with watercolours on the kitchen table or in his room.
The skinheads hang around down near the canal tunnel, sniffing glue and drinking cider. There are punks as well, but you don’t see them with the skinheads. There’s a punk with blue hair who lives opposite the school and we all run to the fence to laugh at him when he walks past to buy the paper.
My grandad tried to fix the easel but Johnny said, Leave it, Dad. Johnny told me it was like when the Impressionists tried to paint outside and people hated them for it or when Van Gogh was in the Borinage.
I can’t follow half of what he’s saying. I’ve never thought of the zoo as a city of animals before but I like the idea of it. Johnny takes photos as we walk round. He’s not interested in the animals, just the lines of concrete on the buildings around the hill. I want to go and see the giraffes and the tarantulas in their glass cases. Once I leaned my face to the glass of what I thought was an empty tank, trying to work out if there was anything there, and the spider that I hadn’t seen sprang up on its thick back legs and pressed itself against the glass, two legs feeling for me; it moved like a strange hand, trying to sting, that thin glass between us. I shouted and the guard came and told me off and walked me out to my mum who was waiting outside with an ice cream.
It’s late, the zoo’s nearly empty. I hear whooping sounds from round the hill. I wonder if the animals call to each other when there are no humans here.
This is the best one, Sean, look at the curves. There’d been a quarry here, so Lubetkin, that’s the man who designed it, had to fit his design into the space where it had been. That was another thing about the way he had to build, he had to fit it all in with the castle and with the quarries and caves. This hill’s hollow, you know.
The zoo almost closed during those years. It didn’t in the end, about the only thing that didn’t. It was like a plague had come. It was what you’d do, I suppose, if you had a plan, if you set out to destroy a place: close the big works first, one by one, create waves that spread out from their closing, factory after factory, shop after shop; later on the brewery, the rail yard, passenger trains had long since finished, even the football ground, the cricket ground, which both slid into the old limestone workings. Johnny was right about the hill being hollow, a whole town was disappearing, caving in.
If you had a plan, you’d tell people they’re no good, finished, if they haven’t got a job, right after you’ve taken theirs from them; tell them they’re no good if they don’t own their house and then try to sell their house back to them; tell them that all that really matters are houses and cars and money, as theirs begin to slip away from them. You’d set people against each other, some of them will applaud what you are doing, some of them will want their thirty pieces of silver or pay you yours, depending on who the betrayer is – it’s not always clear, after all. Some people will do very well, and that’s what you’d understand and exploit.
You’d sell off everything else they own, have their schools make them more stupid, have their hospitals make them more sick, never give in, never surrender, make your attack as unrelenting as your voice across the radio and television, telling people how they’re no good, explaining to them with concern, and in your brittle fake-posh accent, how you are going to destroy them and there is nothing at all they can do about it.
That’s what you’d do, I suppose, if you set out to ruin a place. The zoo was saved; we go there sometimes on summer Sunday afternoons. I tell our children that the animals call to each other when no one’s there, that they stroll through their concrete city on the hill. The animals kept their houses and jobs.
The shouts I could hear have got louder, echoing down the hill. They’re not animal cries.
Johnny Marsh! a voice shouts across the bear pit. A figure comes out of the trees and down the hill. Two other figures come behind him. They’re not walking on the path but straight down the steep bank. You’re not meant to; you should stay on the path. They’re skinheads. The one in front has got his arms out wide and is holding a big bottle of cider. It’s Steven Cooper. He used to be my uncle Johnny’s best mate when they were kids. They had a falling out.
Johnny Marsh, fancy seeing yow here! Steve walks along the front of the bear enclosure. You’re not meant to do that, either; you might fall in. His two mates walk along the path now, so they come up behind us. I can see straight away that Johnny is worried because he’s trying to push the camera in his pocket in a hurry but it’s too big and bulky and won’t go in.
All right, S
teve, he says quietly.
Johnny Marsh. Fancy that. I ay sid yer for donkeys, mate.
I sid yer at the canal, Johnny says.
I can tell Steve’s drunk because his eyes aren’t looking at Johnny properly.
Less have a picture, John. Doh put yer camera away.
The other two have come round to us. I can see they’re drunk too.
Paulie, Yvette, look who’s here. Iss Johnny Marsh.
One of them is a girl. I’ve never seen a girl skinhead before. She’s got blue eye make-up on and a bit of hair that twirls down her back but the rest of her hair is shaved and she’s wearing Dr Marten boots and a V-neck jumper.
Look at him, she says and points at me. Ay he lovely. Woss his name, John?
Sean, I say. Me name’s Sean.
Woss he? Yer boyfriend, eh, John? Bit young, mate, Steve says.
Me nephew, Johnny says.
I want him to say fuck off. That’s what I’ve heard the bigger boys say when this kind of thing happens. Well, only twice really, once when everyone thought Michael Campbell was going to beat Rodney James up and Rodney told him to fuck off and then Michael didn’t do anything and then a second time when everyone thought Michael was going to beat up Mani Singh and Mani said fuck off and then Michael beat him up anyway.
I think of saying it. I try to force it from my mouth. There’s going to be a fight.
Could do with his hair cut, the one called Paulie says. He looks like Steve, maybe his brother, but his hair’s cut even shorter so his head looks blue, like it’s been shaded with one of Johnny’s pastels. He’s got the beginnings of a tattoo on his neck and a spider’s web on his elbow.
How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Page 4
