She was impressed and her face showed it. ‘I never knew none a’ that,’ she said.
‘It’s the very first time there’s been a general strike,’ he told her and he was glowing with the pride of it. ‘I think it’s noble. All the poorest workers standing together for a better deal, thousands and thousands of them, losing pay, an’ going without, but standing firm, d’you see, an’ that’s why they’ll win.’
‘Like an army.’
‘Yes, that’s right. Like an army fighting a just war.’ That was Mr Cooper’s phrase too and it thrilled him to be able to use it. A just war.
‘Will it go on long?’ she asked.
He knew the answer to that too. ‘As long as it takes.’
‘Well if that’s what they’re doing I hope they win,’ she said.
At that moment Mr Allnutt came striding into the room from his kitchen bearing a most peculiar object before him on a battered tin tray. It consisted of a short plank of wood with a thick cylinder of coiled wire balanced on top of it. There were lots of untidy ends of wire sticking out of the plank in front of the cylinder and two yellow wires leading from the cylinder into a pair of black headphones which looked very ugly and uncomfortable.
‘There you are!’ he said proudly. ‘My new wireless set. Whatcher think a’ that?’
‘Did he call it a wire-less?’ Megan said, giggling at him once he’d passed, ‘But it’s all wires. That’s all it is, wires an’ a bit a’ wood.’
The singing petered out, as their neighbours turned to see what he’d brought. A space was made on one of the benches and the wireless was lowered reverently into position. People were coming back into the room from the street, flocking round their host, waiting excitedly for their turn to put the earphones over their ears and listen. Even Mrs Roderick was in the queue.
‘If you want to know what’s really going on,’ Mr Allnutt said, encouraging them, ‘you listen to this. No good expecting that rag a’ Winston Churchill’s ter tell you the truth. British Gazette, I ask you!’
‘I know what it is,’ Jim said with sudden recognition. ‘It’s a radio. They’re broadcasting the news. That’s what it is.’ And he jumped up from the stairs and went to join the throng, with Megan and Peggy following dubiously after him.
They had to wait ages before the earphones were put into their hands and then what they heard was really rather a disappointment. It was a man’s voice droning on about the law. ‘Sir John Simon,’ it said, ‘speaking in the House on Thursday night made it clear that every railwayman who was on strike in disregard of his contract was personally liable to be sued in the County Court for damages, and every trade union leader was liable in damages to the uttermost farthing of his personal possessions.’
Peggy couldn’t understand a word of it and relinquished the earphones to Mrs Allnutt after a few puzzled seconds.
‘It’s a man. Talking.’ Mrs Allnutt said. ‘Listen to that, Mrs Roderick.’
Mrs Roderick lowered the earphones gingerly across her marcel waves. ‘Can’t hear a thing,’ she said. ‘Only buzzing.’
‘What?’ Mr Allnutt said. ‘Give it here, Mrs R. Can’t have that.’ And holding one earphone against his right ear he listened intently. ‘Must be something loose somewhere,’ he diagnosed. ‘Early days you know. Hang on a tick. I’ll soon fix it.’
They hung on, chattering together like starlings, and for a great deal longer than a tick. A strong smell of burning drifted back to them from the kitchen and presently Mr Allnutt emerged with a soldering iron steaming in his hand. ‘Keep well clear!’ he called. ‘Now then let’s see.’
It took him such a long time to find the right wire to fix that the sing-song began again while he was at work. Three songs were sung and he still hadn’t located the fault although he called out a progress report between every verse, and was cheered and applauded. Finally after much running in and out to reheat the iron, his son persuaded him to take the wire to the fire and he and his machine disappeared into the kitchen again, to his wife’s considerable relief.
‘He’s such a worry with that awful thing,’ she confided to Flossie. ‘I’ve been worried out me wits one a’ these kiddies’ud go an’ get burnt.’
‘Still,’ Mrs Geary commiserated, ‘it’s nice to get a bit a’ news. I’ve missed my Evening Standard.’
‘Standard!’ the parrot agreed. ‘Star, Newstandard!’
‘Well will you hark at that?’ Mrs Geary said impressed. ‘He’s a caution! He must’ve heard the newsboy.’
‘More than I have,’ Mrs Roderick complained. ‘They could have kept the papers going.’
‘I wonder how long it’ll be before we see a paper again,’ Flossie said.
It was sooner than anyone imagined.
When Megan arrived to call for Peggy on Wednesday morning, a mere nine days after the strike began, she said her Dad had got a paper and it was all over. ‘They called it off, so Dad says. Yesterday evening.’
‘Thank heavens for that,’ Mum said, buttoning Baby’s coat. ‘Now perhaps we can have a bit of bacon for a change.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Baby hoped.
‘We’ll see,’ Mum said cheerfully taking her stand on the front doorstep ready to wave goodbye.
Mrs Boxall was opening her door to urge Pearl and Lily out and they could hear Jim leaping down the stairs.
‘Strike’s all over, Mrs Boxall,’ Mum said. ‘Back to normal now, eh?’
‘Oh!’ Mrs Boxall said, giving Pearl a little push with her good hand. ‘Off you go or you’ll be late.’
‘Who won?’ Baby wanted to know.
‘The soldiers,’ Megan said. ‘Soldiers always win. They’ve got the guns.’
‘It doesn’t matter who won,’ Mum said. ‘It’s over. That’s the main thing.’
But Peggy was wondering what Jim would say because she could see him coming towards them along the dark hall.
When he stopped out on the pavement she could see he was biting his lips with emotion. ‘It ain’t true,’ he said to Megan. ‘They’d never give in so soon. They was winning. It can’t be true.’
‘Perhaps Mr Allnutt heard on the wireless,’ Peggy suggested.
He was knocking on the Allnutts’ door as she spoke.
Mr Cooper opened it and both children could see from his expression that the news was as grim as they feared.
‘Called off last night,’ he said. ‘I can’t understand it.’
‘What went wrong?’ Jim asked.
‘No idea, son. You’d better go to school or you’ll be late. I’ll tell you dinner-time if there’s anything else on the wireless.’
‘It’s a tragedy!’ Jim said to the girls as they walked to school. ‘A disaster! What’ll happen to the miners now?’
That evening Mr Baldwin broadcast to the nation. He said the ending of the strike was a ‘victory for common sense’, and added ‘our business is not to triumph over those who have failed in a mistaken attempt.’
But the newspapers triumphed just the same. The British Gazette ran the headline, ‘Men to return forthwith. Surrender received by Premier in Downing Street.’ And the Mail crowed, ‘Surrender of the revolutionaries.’
It was a total and ugly defeat. And as they were all to discover, after a defeat the victors take their spoils and exercise their new-won power and the losers suffer. The miners struggled on alone for nearly six months but there was no strike pay for them because the funds were dry, and in the end starvation forced them back to the pits, where they were obliged to work longer hours and for less pay, exactly as the owners had required them to do in the first place. And of course other employers were quick to follow the lead of the triumphant mine owners. Soon rates of pay were being cut in other manual jobs and even clerks, who had thought themselves above the argument and had turned out in their thousands to help break the strike, now faced the necessity of cutting their living standards as their income dropped. Although some of them were cute enough to cut someone else’s living standards instead. And on
e of these more astute gentlemen was Mr Margeryson, Joan’s employer.
Flossie was most upset.
‘Are you sure you’ve not annoyed him?’ she asked tetchily when Joan came home with her unwelcome news.
‘No,’ Joan said miserably. ‘He says it’s the strike. Everybody’s got to take a ten per cent cut to pay for the strike.’
‘That’s all very well but what are we supposed to do?’ Flossie wailed. ‘It’s enough to bring on my nerves. Well I can’t manage with less than you give me and that’s all there is to that. You’ll have to make do with less in your pocket, that’s all.’
‘I have little enough as it is,’ Joan said. ‘Two an’ three it was. Now it won’t even be a shilling. Just as well I don’t smoke.’
‘Could you get another job?’ Peggy wondered. ‘Somewhere nicer.’
But Joan sighed most miserably. ‘Not with my record,’ she said. ‘No one’ud have me. The only way I shall ever get away from old Miss M is if someone’ll marry me. And who’ll do that?’
‘I’ll see if Jim can get me a job in the market Saturdays,’ Peggy promised, trying to comfort her.
But even Saturday jobs were hard to come by now, and try as he might Jim couldn’t persuade anyone to take her on.
Meals in the Furnivall household diminished. Bread and scrape replaced bacon and eggs for breakfast and dinners were often reduced to vegetable soup or potatoes baked in their jackets. It upset Flossie to be living so poorly but it was either that or go without her weekly trip to the pictures and she knew she simply couldn’t live without the pictures. She justified her decision by telling herself that her three girls had always been strong, even Baby for all her delicate start. A little hardship wouldn’t hurt them, provided it didn’t go on too long. They only had to hold on for a little while and Peggy would be at work. Five school terms. Why, it was hardly any time at all.
To Peggy, secretly worrying about their lack of funds and cursing the law that kept her unprofitably at school when she ought to have been earning for her family, five terms was a very long time indeed.
‘I wish they’d let us leave at twelve like they did in the old days,’ she said to Megan. ‘Mrs Geary was at work on her twelfth birthday. She was telling me.’
But they wouldn’t, so it was no use fretting about it.
The misery of that first winter after the strike was made worse by bitterly cold weather. There were storms and gales all through November and at Christmas-time it snowed, thawed and snowed again, so that the streets were full of trodden re-frozen slush, brown-smeared and litter-embedded and looking uglier by the day. All three of the Furnivall girls got chilblains and Megan caught the flu and was very ill for nearly a fortnight.
The spring was late and cold and the summer was the wettest in living memory. Tabby produced another litter, which cheered them all a little, although Peggy was glad there were only three kittens this time, because there were fewer fish pieces to feed her with now and she was as hungry as her mistress.
But the year passed eventually, and three of the five school terms were over, and now the older pupils began to leave, one by one as they reached their fourteenth birthday.
‘I wish I’d been born in September,’ Peggy said to Jim as they walked to school one foggy November morning.
‘When were you?’ he asked.
‘August. I shall have to wait till the end of the year.’ Her snub nose was quite red and the chill was making her eyes water.
‘Poor you,’ he said. ‘I go in February.’
‘Have you got a job?’
‘Apprenticeship,’ he said, but his face was so pinched with cold she couldn’t tell whether he was happy about it or not. ‘Warrenden Brothers, the marine engineers, in Deptford Creek. Better than nothing I suppose. At least I can start getting some qualifications.’ The failure of the strike had made him more determined to educate himself than he’d ever been. Without qualifications a man was nothing.
‘At work?’ she said.
‘No. At evening classes. I’ve signed up for English and General Science. Start January.’
‘Ah.’
‘It’s a funny world,’ he said, ‘when you got to wait to leave school before you can get educated.’
And put like that she had to agree it was.
They walked on together in companionable silence, she thinking how much she wished she could start work in February too, he pondering the basic unfairness of the world and how it ought to be put to rights.
He was glad to be leaving school, and glad that he would soon be earning, but although it was better to be going to an apprenticeship instead of to a dead-end job, an apprentice’s wages were very low indeed, and nothing to the sort of salary he could have commanded if he’d been allowed to take his place at the grammar school. It had been a bitter day for him when half a dozen of his class mates sat the second chance scholarship and he’d been left in the classroom. But what was the use of hoping or entering? His father would have refused that just as he’d refused the first. Now at least he would be his own man with his own wage, however small. And February was only ten weeks away.
He left school quietly, as they all did, collecting his reports from the headmaster on his last afternoon and walking away from the building without a backward glance. It was a cold bleak day and the houses in Randall Place were huddled and grey like a row of little old men. But he had already started his evening classes and was enjoying them very much, and tomorrow he was beginning the next stage of his life and would be a wage-earner, and that was what was important. As he turned the corner into Paradise Row he was humming to himself with pleasure.
The next morning he was awake at half past six, and up, washed, dressed and breakfasted by seven. He was full of restless energy, eating his bread and marge on the prowl, hovering behind his mother while she cut his sandwiches and made up his lunch-box.
‘Two of yer now,’ she said proudly, smiling at him.
He gave her a hug. ‘Everything’ll be different from now on,’ he said. ‘Only don’t you tell him what I’m giving you.’
Mention of her husband made Mrs Boxall wince and turn her ear towards the stairs. ‘He’ll be down presently,’ she said, listening to the clumping sounds above their heads. ‘Better get off before, eh?’
So he went off early.
It was bitterly cold out in the first light of that February morning, and the gaslight in the windows of Paradise Row was so pale it was almost colourless. He turned up his collar against the chill, tucked his lunch-box under his arm and trudged off towards Church Street, where the trams were humming and clanking and he could hear a car hooting.
The main roads were a little more lively and the gas lamps here gave a better light, buttery yellow with a blue corona. There were plenty of men on the pavements walking to work, just like he was, and several cars and delivery vans already busy among the trams. He quickened his pace, heading towards Billingsgate Street and the wharves. And found he was whistling to himself.
‘Well hello!’ a voice said behind him. ‘Where are you off to?’
It was Johnny Foster, his old rival, lucky Johnny Foster who’d taken up his scholarship and gone to Roan’s, perched on a bicycle with a newspaper sack round his shoulders, his fair hair dampened by mist and his glasses glinting in the gaslight.
‘Work,’ Jim explained, with just a touch of pride.
‘No kidding,’ Johnny said. ‘You can’t be. We’ve only just started the third year.’
Jim had almost made himself forget what a long education boys were given at Roan’s. ‘Yes well,’ he said. ‘Some of us start earlier than others.’ It was no good getting upset about such things.
‘Poor you,’ Johnny said. ‘I started German this year. Can’t say I like it much, all those declensions. It’s worse than French and that’s saying something. Science is OK. We’ve got a super stinks lab.’
Jim was irritated by this conversation despite his intention to make the best of his lot. ‘You’re lu
cky,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Johnny agreed, ‘so they keep telling us. But it takes a lot of work you know. It’s not easy.’
It would have been for me, Jim thought. ‘You on your paper round?’ he asked trying to change the subject.
‘Yes, bit of a bore, but you’ve got to show willing.’
He looks different, Jim thought, noticing the uniform blazer and the neat shirt and tie underneath his friend’s macintosh, and he talks different. Two and a half years and they’ve quite changed him. He sounds like a toff. And he knew he was jealous of the change and was annoyed with himself for succumbing to such an ugly, useless emotion.
‘Better be off,’ he said. ‘Mustn’t be late on my first day.’
‘Where’s the job?’ Johnny asked casually.
‘Warrendens.’
‘That dump!’ Johnny said disparagingly, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. ‘Poor you! Well rather you than me, that’s all I can say.’
Humiliation, jealousy, anger and a searing sense of the injustice of his life suddenly boiled in Jim’s chest and rose towards his throat in a treachery of tears. He had to get away, to put a distance between himself and Johnny’s thoughtless success before he burst into tears. God, what a disgrace to weep in the street, and in front of Johnny Foster too. It couldn’t be borne. He turned on his heel abruptly and for the first time in his life stepped out into the road without looking.
The van hit him in the arm and the chest. The blow was so sudden and unexpected it stopped his thought and his breath together. He knew he was being propelled through the air, that he was falling sideways, his arms spread like wings; he felt the shock of his landing, the force of it spreading through his body in terrifying uncontrollable waves; then darkness pressed him into the pavement.
CHAPTER 13
The arrival of a policeman in Paradise Row in the middle of a quiet Thursday morning caused a dreadful stir. Mrs Geary saw him first, naturally enough, glimpsing his dark uniform in one corner of her mirror just as she was arranging her legs more comfortably on the footstool. She swung the mirror round at once to see where he was going.
London Pride Page 18
