At school we learn about the Victorians. Edward Oxford is the name of the man who tried to kill Queen Victoria in 1840. We don’t learn about this in school; I found it out at the library after I heard Johnny and my grandad talking about it after there was an article about it in the Black Country Bugle. Edward Oxford was from Birmingham. Queen Victoria didn’t say the insults about the Black Country, didn’t ask for the blinds on the royal train to be drawn so she didn’t have to look at us, until 1866, though, so it wasn’t like he was trying to get revenge for that. She hadn’t drawn the blinds on Birmingham, anyway, only on Dudley Port until she got to Wolverhampton, that was what I heard; she said we were too ugly to look at.
Probably reminded her of where all her money come from, my grandad says when I ask him about it. Keeping her in the manner to which her’d become accustomed, we and a few million Indians, he adds.
She thought Birmingham was okay; it was us she didn’t like. Birmingham had a statue of her by the town hall and the museum. The pigeons poo on her and the white poo runs down her face like she’s crying, like the statues of Mary in my nan’s books on Lourdes and Walsingham.
At his trial at the Old Bailey, Edward Oxford said, I may as well shoot at her as anybody else, and everyone thought he was mad, so they let him go to hospital instead of prison. That was a bit of a let-off for Edward Oxford because he wasn’t really mad at all. They decided to let him out of hospital and sent him to Australia, where my uncle Freddie lives. When Freddie came back to visit he brought me a boomerang with koalas on that Aborigines had painted. You used to get sent to Australia if you committed a crime, like the Artful Dodger at the end of Oliver Twist. It was meant to be a punishment and you had to spend weeks on a boat eating bread and water and could never come home again but it didn’t seem that bad to me, really. Uncle Freddie had to pay ten pounds to move to Australia.
There are photos in the drawer at my nan and grandad’s of Uncle Freddie, Aunty Gloria and their son, Jeff. In the photos there are palm trees and brightly coloured birds in the trees, not in a cage like Jennie Lee or Barbara Castle, and Jeff is a blond-haired boy standing with a cricket bat. They all look very happy in Australia. Uncle Freddie was always happy during his visit here. My nan shows me the pictures and tells me all about it. I ask her if she wants to go and she laughs and says, no way, she belongs in Dudley. Loads of people must have gone to Australia, though, because they needed to fill the whole country up. It looks good to me. If we need to move anywhere we should move to Australia. All countries used to send their criminals away to other places. At the caravan Dad, Grandad and Johnny stay up to watch a film called Papillon about a man from France who is taken to a tropical island that is also a prison. I can see the television from under the bed covers. The man’s name is Papillon, which means butterfly, and he is locked up in solitary confinement and has no food, so he has to eat a centipede that he finds in his cell. I hear my dad say it’s a true story and that he’s read the book.
Anyway, that’s what happened to Edward Oxford: he got sent to Australia. He even wrote a book about Australia after he’d lived there for a while and been sent to prison for stealing a shirt. I read all this in the library, upstairs at the reference table, not downstairs in the children’s section.
Edward Oxford must have had a pretty bad aim because he missed the queen from right up close. He waited behind a tree at the bottom of Constitution Hill, which is near Buckingham Palace. When the queen came along with Prince Albert in their horse and carriage, Edward Oxford stepped out and fired two guns, one in each hand, right at them. He missed both times and that was when he was arrested.
I put my hand up to start explaining all this at school and Mrs Jones, our new teacher, tells me to stop talking.
I had an inkling even then, I think. If things had turned out differently I don’t suppose it would have come to anything, it would have remained a thought, unrealized. There was something in the pictures of workhouse children and slums and crowded factories that scared me. I was worried by the darkness of the pictures in the textbook we looked at; a photograph of a boy that Dr Barnardo had found living in a barrel. And by the relish with which Mrs Jones told us that if we’d been Victorians we’d have all been stuffed up chimneys or down mines or buried in a pit at the bottom of the churchyard.
I want to carry on talking and ask Mrs Jones to imagine if Edward Oxford had shot at her. Victoria was quite a new queen then, young. None of the pictures of her looking old with her hair in a bun and her veil, all dressed in black and looking miserable existed yet. The statue wouldn’t be there by Birmingham Town Hall. We wouldn’t be learning about the Victorians; they’d have been called something else.
There would have been different kings and queens. Or maybe they wouldn’t have bothered having a queen at all after Edward Oxford had shot her and we’d have had a revolution and become a republic like Johnny wanted us to be. Maybe on stamps there would be pictures of Edward Oxford, and a statue of him up in Birmingham, his home town, because afterwards maybe everyone would have decided that it was a good idea, to have killed the queen. I know that people are always deciding things are a good idea after they’ve happened. Quite often people think things are a good idea and then change their minds afterwards, like voting for Margaret Thatcher, for instance.
Well, yow voted for it, my mum says quietly to my dad when a factory closes.
All right, I was wrong.
I could have tode yer that.
Yow have.
I think about how much those one or two shots might have changed things. I look at the picture of the boy in the barrel. He lived in a barrel in an alleyway in the East End of London in the rain and snow and fog. He had to find scraps off the floor to eat, apple cores and cabbage leaves and things that people had left out for the pigs. In the picture he looks strange, his hair all standing on end and his head too big for his body. It says that he died.
If Edward Oxford had killed Queen Victoria then maybe there would have been a big fuss about the state the country was in and about why he’d killed her because at the time no cared about that little boy in the barrel dying, apart from Dr Barnardo. That was how things got changed. It makes me think. If Margaret Thatcher is causing us all such a problem, why doesn’t someone shoot her? Probably, afterwards, people would say that they’ve done a good thing. Some people would, anyway. It’s okay to try to kill evil people, we got told this in assembly, like in the war when we fought the Germans. It’s like trying to kill Hitler or when they killed Mussolini in Italy and hung him from a lamp-post. My grandad had fought in Italy in the war. It was where the gun was from. The one that he kept in that rusty box that he’d laid out on the lawn after I broke the shed and then put back in the same place in the new shed.
I didn’t tell anyone about any of this, though. I wasn’t stupid. I ran around playing with Ronnie and the others. Most of the time I hadn’t got a care in the world. I was only a kid, after all. But there was always something there; some sense that one day we might have to fight back.
Wolves are in the League Cup final against Nottingham Forest. Johnny’s got a ticket.
I tode yer he was worth the money, Dad, he says to my grandad every time Andy Gray scores.
My grandad walks me down to the bus station to see Johnny off on the coach. Johnny is meeting Carlo, his mate from work. All the supporters are hanging around waiting for the coach. There’s a gold and black flag flying and a caravan selling bacon sandwiches. Everyone boos at a bloke that gets off the number 74 wearing a blue and white Albion scarf. He sticks his fingers up at us and we all cheer. In the corner of the bus station, down by the church, I see Steve and Paulie. They’ve got a sign: PHOTOS WITH THE WOLVES 50P. Next to the sign are two big cut-outs of John Richards and Andy Gray. People wander over and have their pictures taken standing next to the cut-outs, laughing.
They’re using our camera.
Thass a good idea, ay it? My grandad nods towards Steve and Paulie. Dun yer want yer photo done, S
ean?
I shake my head.
Am yer sure?
My grandad looks at me; he can’t work me out.
The coach pulls up. Carlo arrives, takes a can of beer from a carrier bag and passes one to Johnny.
My grandad takes a few steps towards the sign for the photos and I think, he’ll know, he’ll notice. Then he stops suddenly and looks across at the Empire Tavern and down the slope again, but I see he’s looking past Paul and Stevie, who are putting Andy Gray and John Richards into a bin bag, as people walk past us to get on the coach, some of them singing, Wemb-er-ley, Wemb-er-ley.
My grandad turns to me and says, Dyer know where I am?
I don’t know what to say.
I was born right here, on this spot, he says. This was the back room in our house, right here.
He looks around like he has never thought about this before. There are clouds of blue exhaust coming from the coach. The castle is behind him. The house he lived in was knocked down years ago. My grandad has to step back onto the pavement as the coach starts to pull away.
We wave to Johnny and Carlo. Steve and Paulie have gone. My grandad takes me for a hot chocolate in Beatties where we’re going to meet my mum.
Wolves won the cup. Andy Gray scored when Peter Shilton and David Needham collided, leaving him with an open goal, and they held on to the end. When we got back from town, we listened to it on the radio in the kitchen in Crow Street, me and Ronnie ran in and out through the back door and up and down the gardens in excitement when we scored. We had a good side that year, came sixth in the league; played in Europe the next season. We all went to the PSV Eindhoven game, the floodlights glowing and lighting up the green of the pitch and the old gold shirts. My grandad told me about Honved, how he’d been there, how Wolves had been the best in the world.
Again, it was my grandad who could see what was coming.
But where’s this money from? he’d ask, and my dad and Johnny would shrug. A million pounds on a centre-forward here, a few million on a new stand there. Iss madness, he’d say.
Doh worry abaht it, Dad.
Stan Cullis day need millions of pounds.
All right.
And he had a team we’d stand in the rain to watch. We day need a fancy stand.
Yome living in the past, Dad. Iss the way of the world.
I can see that, and I can see what’s coming.
He was right. The money wasn’t there. They went down the next year, got bought out and came back up, then down again and again and again. The ground fell apart. The papers got the obituaries ready: receivership, bankruptcy, liquidation. That was the language of those days. They’d beaten Honved thirty years before that; they were the best side in the world then.
They should pack it up now, my grandad said when Johnny came in through the back door that time they lost to Chorley, part-timers.
They was unlucky, Johnny said.
Yer can say that again, son.
Thirty years or more is what you need, I think, if you really want to destroy something; community, society, whatever you want to call it. It takes a long time for things to die.
It’s what you planned for, if there was a plan. After the first shocks, keep the pressure up. Sell off what you can, every last scrap. Maintain this permanent crisis; turn the world upside-down. You rob from the poor you’ve made and give to the rich. And you keep going, unrelenting. The revolution is permanent, after all.
Not everything dies, though. Some things linger on. The Wolves are still here, for one thing, resurrected. I take Joshua now and he loves it. Fight, fight, they sing, and You’ll never die, you’ll never die, to the tune of ‘The Red Flag’.
Margaret Thatcher starts shooting people during the World Snooker final. We are all watching it at my nan and grandad’s, Sunday afternoon going on Sunday night. Alex Higgins is our man. We love him. Everyone loves him. He plays fast and hits the balls hard. The other players stand and scratch their heads for ages and put chalk on their cues; Alex sniffs and jerks his head and knocks the balls around. Whenever I play snooker on the little table I got last Christmas I try and hit the ball on the side like Alex Higgins and send it swerving down the table. All the other players hit the white ball in the middle but Alex hits it on the side – check side or running side; one side or the other – and the balls thump into the pocket or creep in there gently and the white ball bounces and swerves off the cushions and Alex is ready for the next shot before the balls have stopped moving. Come on, Alex, we say when he gets a chance to win a frame; even my nan, who loves him too. He hits shots in the match where we gasp, all there in the front room, like the crowd at the Crucible, like when he pots the pink using the rest and knocks the black off the cushion and gets to ninety-three. It feels good, all of us sitting there together.
Then Margaret Thatcher starts shooting people.
One minute Alex is there, trying not to lose his concentration, which he always does at some point, it’s his Achilles’ heel; the next minute there’s a picture of men standing, crouching, in the street with guns. Everyone talks at once so I can’t hear the television. Next to the men dressed in black with guns is another man in a grey suit jacket rolling up a piece of carpet. It looks heavy. The men dressed in black point their guns at a row of white houses. The houses are big, with columns at the front and nice balconies. I imagine that they’re the kind of house my dad plans for us to live in one day. The man with the grey jacket carries the heavy carpet along the front of the houses. Another man helps, carrying the back end. Something drops out of the side of the carpet and I see that it’s an arm, a pale arm flopping around from inside the rolled up carpet. I realize that the flopping arm belongs to someone who is dead and although I saw my great-granny when she was dead, this is different, on television, someone who’s been shot. I think, If I’d died when I fell out of the window this is how my dad and grandad would’ve carried me.
My mum says, Oh my God, Francis, and then everyone else realizes what the arm is. Harry Robertson is outside the window, looking at half a car that is leaning against the kerb, missing it all. I don’t understand why he’s not watching the snooker in the first place. Then my grandad leans forward and swears and changes sides on the telly and there’s John Wayne in a film and everyone shouts at my grandad and he turns the channel back again. There are men, soldiers, dressed in black, standing on the balconies of the beautiful houses.
It’s the SAS, my dad says. I can’t tell from his face whether that’s good or not.
Whose side am we on? I whisper to Johnny but he doesn’t hear me.
Then there’s an explosion, a bang and a flash of fire and a big cloud of smoke so you can’t see the buildings any more, and there’s a cloud of smoke drifting down the street. We all call out when the explosion comes, louder even than when Alex knocked the ball off the table when he was trying a mad shot. I can see the shape of Harry Robertson standing looking through the window at our television. The soldiers shoot; they fire their guns through the blasted windows, then they all jump through, into the buildings; then there is nothing, just the white buildings and the balconies and the reporter’s voice talking.
The soldiers in black are the SAS. My dad explains who they are to my mum. I don’t know who they are shooting. Iranian gunmen it says on the television. Flames jump out of one of the windows; fire is coming from the broken windows.
There has been a siege and hostages. I understand that bit. Hostages are when you keep someone prisoner. Six people are dead. It’s a great success for the SAS, for Margaret Thatcher, the reporter says. At the Crucible, Alex loses concentration completely and loses the final 18–16. If Johnny really wants a revolution he’ll have to fight against the SAS. But he couldn’t even fight the skinheads.
Back at school there’s no football for a day while we all play SAS because everyone’s so excited about it. We get into trouble for being too violent. No one’s dead, though, I want to say. People love them, the SAS, except me. I can see them in Crow Stre
et, climbing on the rooftops and creeping down the entries, that one in the suit, the ones with guns and balaclavas, looming up outside the window of my nan and grandad’s house, smashing their way inside, coming up out of the trees at the back of our house. They are coming. I know it. No one else seems to think so. They are coming, if we try to get rid of Margaret Thatcher, like the police banging on the front door or the plague of spiders coming for their revenge, that’s for sure.
I started to go to the library on my own about then. My mum used to leave me there if she was shopping in Dudley; much later I’d walk down there on my own after school if nothing else was going on. When I’d read all the books I liked in the children’s section, the Narnia books, The Wind in the Willows, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Willard Price’s adventure books, Shakespeare for Children, Oliver Twist, I would go and sit upstairs at the big table where the college students did their work, to read history books. I started with what we did at school, that was how I read so much about the Victorians, but once I’d started, one thing led to another. I used to carry an exercise book with me and write down anything interesting. I ended up with a pile of them that ran from when I was nine until I was fourteen, thirty or forty of them: my assassination diaries. I would think about the books on the shelves, the way the light moved around the reference library depending on what time of day it was, and all the knowledge inside the books, and I’d look at the growing pile of books in the corner of my room; in our house to start with and then, later, back at my nan and grandad’s and the room I’d fallen out of.
I burned them later, my assassination diaries, out the back, in an oil drum, letting the wind take the smoke and ash out over the abandoned allotments. Burning books is where I ended up.
‘And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.’
How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Page 7
