His observation post was a first-floor window above the display windows of Beckwith and Lowenstein's, the once-fashionable Strand branch, now set on its slow decline since the carriage trade had drifted east to Regent's Street and Oxford Street. It was almost the last shop in the north facade of the Strand, and he was there as lookout on behalf of the forlorn band of leaflet-throwers stationed two storeys above. Among them, at her urgent insistence, was his wife, Romayne, disinherited daughter of one of the wealthiest merchants in the land.
It was not the first foray in which they had been involved, but because of the occasion it promised to be the most sensational, certain of earning press coverage, which was more than could be said of earlier protests, even the abortive one they staged at the Lord Mayor's show last November.
Soper, the fanatical secretary of the newly formed Shop Assistants' Action Group, had conceived it; Soper was a pallid, tireless, and, in Giles's view, a very reckless campaigner who had won a majority vote in committee on the grounds that a gesture of this kind—a challenge thrown at the feet of the most powerful and influential people in Britain—was irresistible, and perhaps he was right. Few among those who were offered the Group's standard leaflets in the street, or at Hyde Park Corner, accepted them, and even those who did discarded them ten steps beyond. "We have to move on," Soper had argued passionately, "we have to force the campaign on the national press, and what more certain way of doing that than putting our case to the Queen on her way to St. Paul's?"
Put like that it was unanswerable, and Romayne, her imagination fired, shouted "Hear, hear! Bravo!" as if the proposal of such a bold gesture represented its accomplishment. But Giles, to her private dismay, had argued against it, first publicly in committee, where he had been outvoted, then privately on their way home. She did not often run counter to him, but she did now, saying, "But don't you see, Giles? It's dramatic, something they can't laugh off in the way they did when we paraded with placards!"
"It's certainly that," he said, trying to locate the springs of his instinctive misgivings, "but there's something about it I don't like. It's not just the risk of arrest on some trumped-up charge—obstruction, creating a public nuisance—they'd find something if they laid hands on any of us. And it's not the pleasure of reminding all those popinjays that there are more important issues than waving flags. Maybe it's the timing."
"The timing? I don't follow, Giles, dear."
He said, grumpily, "Well, there's no point in us falling out about it. It was a majority decision and we'll go ahead. I only lay down one condition. They leave the wording of the leaflet and the tactics to me."
"Oh, but they'll do that," she said, and he thought she was probably right. The Shop Assistants' Action Group did not lack ideas and enthusiasm, but it was woefully short on funds and prestige, both of which Giles Swann, a director of a nationwide haulage network, could provide.
The Jubilee ambush continued to bother him. They lived in a pretty little Georgian house at Shirley, within easy reach of East Croydon Station, and the back looked over woods and pastures to the Kent-Surrey border. That same night, unable to sleep, he got out of bed and went on to the terrace looking across the fields to the blur of Addington Woods and here, in uncompromising moonlight, his misgivings crystallised. He saw the leaflet raid as a single jarring note in a national overture. It was easy to imagine the wrapt expressions of the Jubilee holiday-makers, each of them revelling in a day's release from monotonous toil to witness an unprecedented display of pomp and martial display in which they would feel themselves personally involved, and a majority, regarding the Queen's personage as sacrosanct, would surely regard the descent of a shower of leaflets on her entourage an act of impiety. It would be irrelevant too, on a day when London was out to enjoy itself, and when every man, woman and child assembled there personally subscribed to the mystique of Empire and took pride in the spread of red on maps hung on the blackboards of the redbrick Board Schools.
Of all the Swanns, Giles saw himself as the only one involved in the present. Alex, George, and Hugo were forsworn to the future, to an increasingly modernised army, to the spread of commerce, and to the triumphs of the sports arena as the might of the tribes increased year by year. His father, who had once had a social conscience, had slipped back into the past, to the battles for franchise and human rights of the 'sixties and 'seventies. But it sometimes seemed to him that he alone was equipped to lift the lid on this treasure chest they called the Empire and examine, piecemeal, the terrible injustices concealed under the plumes and moneybags stowed there. As a child he had witnessed an aged couple evicted and despatched to separate workhouses, and as a youth he had penetrated the galleries of a Rhondda coal-mine and seen, closehand, the filth and degradation of the industrial cities in the north. Everywhere, it appeared to him, was gross imbalance; wealth and power on the one hand, grinding poverty and naked cruelty on the other, but so few acknowledged this boil on the body politic. They chanted patriotic music-hall ditties, put their money on the Grand Fleet, and thought of themselves as actually taking part in an eruption of power and plenty, unique in the history of mankind. Then they went blithely about their concerns, the privileged making money, gallivanting on river and race-course, snug under a mantle of rectitude woven for them by Providence. For the others, who made all this possible, it was very different. The conditions worked by shop assistants in the big emporiums were only one of the blatant contradictions in an age of tremendous technological progress, and the flagrant contrasts within the system tormented him, for it seemed to him that, once they were publicly recognised and acknowledged, they could be so easily adjusted. Romayne's revelation was a case in point.
He remembered her as she had been in their courtship days, a pampered, highlystrung child of an industrialist, who had seemed never to comprehend his smouldering quarrel with the status quo, who had taken all her privileges for granted and had indulged in a fit of temper whenever anything was withheld from her. But all that had changed and under pressure of what he looked back on as absurdly melodramatic circumstances. Unable to adjust to her selfishness, he had jilted her, abruptly and finally after a scene in an Oxford Street milliner's a minute to closing time one Saturday night, and had glumly assumed that the incident marked the end of their bittersweet relationship. Yet it was not so. Something had rubbed off on her, enough to project her out of her cushioned surroundings and into the workaday world, there to test his theories in the light of personal experience. Eighteen months later, against all probability, he had found and reclaimed her, earning her living in the cash desk of a North Country haberdasher's, and sharing the submerged life of living-in shop assistants working a sixty-hour week under what was really no advance on the lot of slaves. The experience had transformed her utterly, and if that could happen to her it could happen to others, providing the point could be brought home to them with equal emphasis. Yet how to achieve it, without revolution and blood on the streets? Not by protest meetings at Hyde Park Corner. Not by leaflets, placards, parades, and letters to the press. Surely by legislation, and the slow reshaping of public opinion, it would be possible. There was a lesson here somewhere, for him and for everybody else. Possibly, just possibly, Soper was right. The public needed a shock, a whole series of shocks, and perhaps his underlying misgivings concerning Soper's tactics stemmed from an excessive respect for law and order and an instinctive distaste for involving himself and his family in scandal. Romayne, out of regard for him, had not succumbed to those pressures, and remembering this he discerned the real source of her enthusiasm for Soper's paper bombardment. Standing there in the moonlight he thought, forlornly, She did that. She endured that purgatory for eighteen months, and for no other reason than to prove that we belonged to each other, paying in wretchedness for her tantrums, her ridiculous involvements with grooms and music-teachers, her gross extravagance and the capacity, hardening like a crust, to see the dispossessed as serfs. Well, then, to hell with what I think about the proposal. I'll do it. Not f
or Soper and not even for the poor devils he claims to represent, but for her.
He went in to find her sleeping soundly and studied her in the shaft of moonlight that fell across the pillow. A beautiful child, robbed by sleep of the strange contradictions imposed upon her by the past, that included her failure to present him with a child, something she would probably see as a fresh source of inadequacy, although he did not. There were already too many children in the world. Many of them would never have enough to eat. Many of them would grow into spindle-legged, weak-chested adults with no alternative but to work out their lives at the dictates of some stonefaced overlord like her father or his grandfather. Like his own father, even, despite Adam Swann's national reputation as an enlightened gaffer. He slipped in beside her, still troubled certainly, but comforted, to some degree, by the completeness of her transformation.
Two
Paper Ambush
It was difficult to rid himself of a sense of melodrama as he went about his preparations, beginning with the drafting of the leaflet and ending, an hour or so before the procession was due to pass the corner-site, on the day itself. It was as though all the time he was planning, counselling, conniving, he was standing off watching himself masquerade as a nihilist, a Balkan assassin or a bearded anarchist resolved upon some stupendous masterstroke instead of what it was—an insignificant discord in the national overture.
More than once, as the day drew near, he came near to admitting he was a pompous ass to involve either himself or Romayne in the charade, yet he persisted, partly because he had his full share of Swann obstinacy, but more because, below the level of self-mockery, he acknowledged his cause was just. And then, when every last detail had been perfected, and he was alone in the airless little annexe, partitioned off from the empty showrooms, excitement liberated him from the sense of the ridiculous and he told himself that he would not have been anywhere else. But it still nagged him that Romayne had insisted, as the price of his involvement, on becoming one of the four selected for the perpetration of the actual deed.
They had all wanted a part, even if it was limited to throwing a handful of leaflets apiece and then running for it, as Giles and his chosen three planned they should. But four, he said, was the maximum number within a safety limit. Their escape route lay down four flights of stairs, into the corridor between shop and staff entrance, past the janitor's cubicle and out into Catherine Street, there to lose themselves in the crowd. The plan was as perfect as he could make it. There was a more than even chance that they would all be clear away before the distributing point was located and searched, for Soper, himself an employee of Beckwith's, laid long odds that Meadowes, the janitor, would quit his cubicle at the side entrance the moment cheering heralded the vanguard of the procession.
This part of the premises, the western end, was deserted. The entire staff of the emporium, some fifty of them, were now lining the row of windows nearer the Law Courts, and it seemed very improbable that anyone would leave them at the climactic moment, so that the stairs leading to the upper stockroom, where the ambush was centred, were likely to remain free. Soper and his fiancée, a fragile girl with huge, trusting eyes, who served at Beckwith's glove counter, were positioned there, with five hundred leaflets apiece, laboriously blocked out on a child's printing set, for printers could be traced. The wording was direct and, in Giles's view, necessarily inflammable. It ran:
AFTER THE SPECTACLE THE RECKONING! MILLIONS OF HOURS OF UNPAID OVERTIME WERE WORKED BY COUNTER-JUMPERS TO MOUNT THE SPECTACLE YOU ARE WATCHING! THE AVERAGE SHOP ASSISTANT WORKS AN ELEVEN-HOUR DAY ON A SMALLER WAGE THAN AN AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. TAKE ACTION NOW TO ORGANISE THE TRADE AND OPPOSE:
Low Wages Fines for "refusing"
Unjust dismissals without a character or right of appeal
Prison diet, fed to living-in staff
Abbreviated half-days.
THESE ARE BUT FIVE CURRENT GRIEVANCES OF THE MOST EXPLOITED WORK-FORCE IN BRITAIN
Soper and his committee had been ecstatic about this broadside, embracing, as far as it could on a leaflet measuring about six inches by eight, most of the major ailments of this industrial lame duck. Privately Giles thought it could have been condensed to a point where it could be read at a glance, but there was no time to redraft so he let it pass, concentrating on the strategy of the ambush with particular emphasis on the escape route. And now, in the stifling heat of a room piled with the paraphernalia of a haberdasher's window-dressing team, he watched the eddying crowds below, ten deep he would say both sides of the Strand, with a dribble of latecomers drifting down sidestreets in the vain hope of finding a chink in a kerbside phalanx.
Time passed slowly. About nine, as Soper had predicted, the distant throb of drums and the cheers of spectators lured Meadowes, the janitor, from his cubicle and he went out, leaving the staff door open. Soper's key had ensured their entry before he was on duty, and Soper and his fiancée, Miriam, had climbed to the second storey with their bundles of leaflets. Romayne had been stationed as signaller on the third landing. His own job was to watch for the head of the procession, give the signal, and keep a close watch on the escape route and the movements of the janitor.
Timing, he had insisted, was vitally important. It would do far more harm than good to throw the leaflets over the sills before the royal entourage was safely past and on its way down Fleet Street. He hoped to select a section of the cavalcade that was marching rather than riding, for it was always possible that a shower of leaflets would frighten a horse and cause casualties. If there had been the faintest hint of a breeze most of the sheets would have drifted the width of the Strand, but the bunting and flags on the lamp-standards hung motionless and it seemed likely that nearly all would find pavement level on the northside. It didn't matter, so long as Soper and the girl followed his orders and waited for the signal passed on by Romayne. Soper was an impatient chap and waiting there, with the sounds of the drums and brass drawing nearer as they battled with the almost continuous roar of the crowd, Giles wished he had had someone steadier to take his own place as scout in order that he could oversee the leaflet bombers in person. He stepped out and tiptoed halfway down the last flight of stone steps to a point where he could see the empty cubicle, then back again, calling softly to Romayne to tell Soper and Miriam that the janitor was safely out of the way. Then he resumed his place at the window and concentrated on the area immediately below. And it was at that moment, his eye ranging the north pavements, that he noted the movement of the thickset man wearing unseasonably heavy brown tweeds and a brown derby hat.
He was clearly more than a spectator and seemed to have some official purpose down there, for he walked purposefully along the carriageway, head tilted, eyes scanning the facades instead of the carriageway, as though he was some kind of policeman or marshal, assuring himself that all was well among the tiers of patriots massed at the windows of the northside premises. There was no menace about him, only an unwavering watchfulness, and when the blaring bands and the cheering engulfed them all like a tumbling wall of masonry he still sauntered there, turned away from the oncoming procession. By then, however, Giles had all but forgotten him, his attention caught and held by the spectacle in spite of himself, as the royal entourage rolled by. It began with eight rosetted greys pulling the open carriage containing a little old woman under her white parasol, the splendidly mounted and richly caparisoned bevy of royalty in its immediate wake; then the glittering, jingling squadron of Horse Guards; and behind it rank upon rank of blue, scarlet, and gold, a thousand or more men with brown faces and martial step, their presence representing the flag at the ends of the earth.
The moment was at hand and he was on the point of turning to call up to Romayne when, once again, the man in the brown derby caught his eye, insistently now for he had stopped sauntering and was standing squarely on the kerb, staring up at a window immediately above. It was the window where Soper and his girl were stationed. With a grunt of alarm, Giles saw the first of the leaflets flut
ter down, drifting idly and aimlessly, like birds dropping out of the sky, and in the same moment he saw the man below stiffen, gesticulate, and run swiftly round the angle of the building and out of Giles's line of vision.
There was really little but instinct to tell him the watcher had spotted something amiss up there and for a second or so he dithered, his eye roving the fringe of latecomers in search of Meadowes, the janitor, but as he hesitated more and more leaflets floated down, separating in flight so that they seemed to multiply out of all proportion to the number printed. Then, whipping round, he heard the scrape of a boot on the stairs and leaped for the landing, almost colliding with a thickset figure in the act of tackling the third flight.
The man must have moved with extraordinary speed. Ten seconds or less had brought him this far but his step, notwithstanding his bulk, was as light as a boy's. In a few strides he would be level with Romayne, staring over the stairwell. A moment later he would have Soper and his girl trapped with his back to the door.
Giles shouted, "Run, Romayne, run!" and flung himself at the steps, grabbing the heavy material of the man's trousers, then enlarging his hold on one brown boot, so that the man lurched and stumbled, falling heavily against the iron stairrail and half-turning, so that Giles caught a glimpse of a red face with heavy jowls, a large moustache of the kind made fashionable by Lord Kitchener, and eyes that glared at him with a baffled expression. He was so occupied with holding the man that he did not hear Romayne's warning cry, or the rush of feet on the stairs heralding the frantic descent of Soper and Miriam, the girl still clutching a double handful of leaflets. He was aware, however, of Romayne darting past or over them and into the store room he had just left and almost at once, it seemed, her reappearance with a dust-sheet that billowed like a sail and all but enveloped him.
Give Us This Day Page 3
