No Man’s Land

Walking home, Daniel made light of what had happened. He seemed pleased with himself, happy with the ten shillings that he had won, jingling the silver coins in his pocket.

‘My winnings will pay for Christmas,’ he said. ‘Your mother will be pleased.’

He looked over at his son and saw to his surprise that the boy was crying. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, putting his arm round Adam’s shoulder. ‘Nothing bad was going to happen. I knew what I was doing.’

Suddenly something inside Adam snapped. ‘No, it’s not all right,’ he shouted, the pent-up fear exploding out of him. ‘He could’ve killed you, but you didn’t think. You never think.’ He didn’t know he was beating on his father’s chest with his fists until his father lifted him up and held him away.

He’d never shouted at his father like this and he expected him to be angry, but he wasn’t. Instead he looked conscience-stricken, full of remorse.

‘I’m sorry, son,’ he said, putting Adam down. ‘You’re right. I didn’t think, and I should have. It’s in my nature, I suppose, to rush into things, to look for challenges wherever I can find them. Next time I’ll try to be more sensible. Will that work for you?’ he asked, squatting down and looking Adam in the eye.

Adam nodded, using his father’s proffered handkerchief to dry his tears.

‘Come on,’ said Daniel, looking across the street. ‘I know what we need.’ Weaving their way between horses, carts and bicycles, they crossed the road and went into a brightly lit confectioner’s shop. It was a perfect heaven, but an earthly version, very different from the one they talked about in church. Row upon row of cylinder-shaped show-glasses were lined up on polished mahogany shelves containing liquorice shoestrings and peppermint drops and brandy balls and tiger eyes, and on the counter was a set of brass scales and weights for measuring out purchases. But Adam wanted none of them; before they had even entered the shop he had had his mind made up and his heart set on a perfectly sculpted brown toffee pig standing on its own in the window.

On the way home he clasped it tight to his chest, while his father clutched a hunk of ice to his bruised cheek. And at the door Daniel stuck out his hand for Adam to shake. ‘Quite a day we’ve had of it, haven’t we, old man? Quite an adventure!’ And Adam nodded: the pig was the best Christmas present he’d ever had.

The New Year brought fog: the kind of London fog that was like a moving creature, sucking at the air as it moved, enshrouding the people who had to endure its wet embrace. Dirty and acrid, it crept inside their clothes, clinging clammily to the skin, breeding sickness. The traffic slowed almost to a halt and men and horses reared up out of nowhere, suddenly illuminated by the gas-fired streetlights.

One evening Adam was out with his father and they bought two jacket potatoes at a stall, holding them in their palms to warm their ice-cold hands before they began to eat. After a few minutes the fog began to clear a little and they could see a large shed-like building on the other side of the road with ‘Salvation Army’ emblazoned on a hoarding above the main door.

‘Come with me,’ said Daniel, suddenly excited. And taking his son’s hand they went inside. For a moment Adam’s eyes had to adjust to the light before he was able to take in the great size of the hall and the huge number of men inside it. They were sitting in rows on long benches all facing forwards, and most of them were resting their heads on their folded arms, which were themselves supported by the backs of the benches in front of them.

‘Listen,’ Daniel told his son, putting his finger to his lips to hush the questions about the place that the boy was clearly about to ask. And after a moment Adam could hear it – the deep rhythmic snoring emanating from hundreds of mouths and nostrils. Everyone was asleep, sitting down.

‘They can’t lie down. It’s not allowed,’ Daniel said, pointing to a notice on the wall. ‘If they pay a penny they can sit here all night and keep warm but they’ve got to stay upright. “Penny sit-up”: that’s the name of this place, and it’s better than the public library where they have to sleep standing up, hanging on to the newspaper stands. And anyway the library’s closed at night, like the parks. That’s what the iron railings are for – to keep the paupers out,’ he added with a bitter laugh.

‘But who are they? Where do they come from?’ asked Adam, awed by this mass of sleeping humanity, the rows of destitute men stretching endlessly away as far as he could see.

‘They’re the poor of London. Men who have worked hard all their lives but have now outlived their purpose. Chewed up, spat out and left to die by the capitalists who’ve got no use for them any more. Look! They’ve got nothing to look forward to but their deaths and that’ll come soon enough.’

Adam was frightened by the anger in his father’s voice. He wanted to leave this terrible place behind. But Daniel hadn’t finished.

‘The strangest part is not that the poor suffer but that they accept their suffering,’ he went on, and it was almost as if he was talking to himself; as if he had forgotten his son standing beside him. ‘Ask them, and they’d say they are truly grateful for the crumbs that are thrown to them from the rich man’s table and, if they had the vote, they’d vote without thinking for the perpetuation of the system that keeps them poor and cold, and will keep their children poor and cold when they are gone. But I won’t accept that,’ he said passionately, turning back to his son. ‘I want a better world for you to live in: one where men are valued for who they are, not for what the rich can get out of them. It may never happen, but it’s still worth fighting for. Can you understand that, Adam? I know it’s hard, but it’s important – what I’m trying to tell you.’

The boy nodded slowly. His father had used a lot of long words that he hadn’t heard before; and with his patched clothes and thin, unshaven face Daniel hardly looked convincing. In fact he looked almost as disreputable as the paupers sleeping on the benches in front of them. But the flame of his father’s conviction burnt more strongly than ever in his bright blue eyes and Adam felt in that moment that he would follow his father into any danger, even that lion’s den in Babylon that Father Paul had talked about in church, which had given him nightmares for days afterwards. It was a man called Daniel just like his father who had gone in there and come out unscathed, Adam remembered.

An attendant approached them, asking if they wanted to sit down, and his enquiry broke the spell.

‘I’m sorry, Adam. I hope I didn’t frighten you,’ Daniel said as they began to walk home through the gas-lit streets. ‘I forget how young you are sometimes.’

‘I’m not young. I’m old enough to go to school,’ said Adam.

‘So you are. So you are,’ said Daniel with a smile, as if realizing the fact for the first time. ‘Well, we shall have to see about that, shan’t we?’

School expanded Adam’s horizons. Beyond his street, beyond his tiny terraced house with the small patch of ground at the back where his father dug at the hard sooty soil with a broken spade and tried to raise shrivelled vegetables under his mother’s dripping washing line. Into a new world.

Lilian gave her son a St Christopher medal to wear around his neck because he would be a traveller now, walking to school and back with his slate hung by a string over his shoulder. And she rubbed ointment into his head each morning to stop the lice coming. It smelt of sarsaparilla and Adam hated it, but it was better than being singled out and sent home when Matron ran her steel comb hard through the children’s hair on her tours of inspection.

School was hot with combustion stoves where the children were allowed to warm their flasks of tea in the morning, and noisy with the sound of their coughing as they tried in vain to expel the coke fumes that they breathed down into their chests. All day the windows of the schoolroom were misted over with the humidity and the children drew faces in the fog. Some of them were unflattering pictures of Old Beaky, the first-form teacher, who was too short-sighted to see what they were doing. He had a tassel on his mortar board that reminded Adam of the organ grinder’s monkey. It made Adam laugh, and, not for the first time or the last, his inability to control his mirth got him into trouble. Beaky needed to make an example and he punished Adam by shutting him up in the cellar. It was dark and wet and there was a creature, maybe a rat, rustling somewhere, and Adam was frightened. And when his father found out what had happened, he went with Adam to the school and shouted at Beaky who backed away into a corner of the classroom with his hat and tassel wobbling ridiculously on top of his old bald head.

After that school was better. Beaky taught his class about the Empire on which the sun never set and showed them a map of the world covered with pink. The pink was British and London where they were was the capital, the centre of everything. Sometimes the children sang ‘Rule Britannia’ and threw their pens up into the air at the climax so that the nibs stuck in the ceiling.

Adam had boots too now, replacing the leaking, broken shoes that he had worn through the long winter. Just as in previous years, the building trade had picked up with the coming of warmer weather and his father was back in regular work. His mother coughed less and they had meat to eat on Sundays, and could go to the eel pie shop up on the High Street in the evenings where they wrapped the food in sheets from the penny newspapers which Adam read as he ate: accounts of stabbings and poisonings that made him shiver even as the hot food warmed his insides.

In the summer the travelling fair came to Islington and encamped on Highbury Fields. Adam went there every day, greedy to experience everything it had to offer. He rode swinging boats that went high up into the air, turning his stomach over when they fell, and the joy wheel that spun the riders round and round, whirling up their clothes so he could feast his eyes on the girls’ white drawers and bare pink knees. He ate hot chestnuts and black peas and wiggle waggle, a toffee that blackened his face and lips; and gazed entranced at the strongest man on earth, who was twice the size of the champion his father had boxed in the market square, and at the human beast from the jungle who snarled and roared in his cage just like a wild animal. There were real beasts too – an elephant that stood on its hind legs and a lion on a steel chain that looked sad and dejected, not lion-like at all. At night Adam left his bedroom window open so that he could hear the roaring of the menagerie coming to him across the rooftops.

Beyond the fairground, beyond Islington, London went on forever, the roads and the rails and the tramlines snaking outward like the Gorgon’s hair in the story his mother had told him about Perseus, the hero who had killed the monster by avoiding her eye, taking care only to look at her reflection in the face of his shining silver shield.

At weekends he helped the cabbies at Euston and King’s Cross, loading and unloading bags, and used the pennies he earned to ride the brightly painted trams as they swayed through the city streets – he liked it best in the evenings when the flashes from their overhead cables lit up the darkness like blue lightning.

Or he would sit on the open upper deck of the new motor buses feeling the wind and the rain on his face as he looked down at the people in the streets – people everywhere, poor and rich, idle and hurrying, no end to them. He wondered where he fitted in amongst them all, what his place might be in this mad rushing world that stopped for no one.

He was getting older. He gambled with his school friends for cigarette cards on the canal towpath. If the policeman caught them, he passed his hat round for a bribe, the price of turning a blind eye, but often they just threw it in the water and then dived in themselves, surfacing on the other side, laughing. Always laughter surging up through Adam like life, making it possible to forget for a moment about his troubles: his mother’s sickness, his father’s anger, the endless need for money.

Everything changed when Halley’s Comet came. That’s how Adam remembered it afterwards. He was transfixed by its brightness – the flash of dazzling light drawn across the still night sky. He knew it was only gas and dust and rock held together by gravity, but he couldn’t shake off the sense of foreboding that everyone seemed to feel as the comet approached its zenith. And when the King died it seemed as if the doomsayers might be right.

Adam went to Westminster with his parents to watch the funeral procession. Daniel had been going to stay at home but relented at the last moment. ‘I’m coming to watch, not to mourn,’ he said defiantly, refusing to put on his newly purchased best suit which Lilian had laid out for him, hoping for a change of mind. ‘He was king of his class, king of the one per cent who own half the wealth of this country and want to keep it that way,’ he added as he pulled on his working clothes and straightened his cloth cap.

‘Daniel, please don’t speak ill of the dead,’ said his long-suffering wife. She’d heard it all before – every statistic, every argument. Repeating them didn’t change anything.

‘He embodied them,’ Daniel went on, ignoring her. ‘I’ll say that much for him. Gorging his way through four huge meals a day while the rest of us were left to starve; filling his fat stomach with disgusting rich food. I’m surprised the old devil lived as long as he did.’

Something inside Lilian snapped. ‘Don’t come if you don’t want to. You’re not doing me any favours. In fact, to tell you the truth, I’d prefer it if you didn’t,’ she told her husband. She was soft-spoken by nature and her harsh tone startled him, making him look up. ‘You talk to me like I’m not here, like I don’t exist except as an audience for your politics. But I do exist. I’m flesh and blood and tears and pain and—’ She broke off, unable to go on as she strangled the cry in her throat, but the tears on her cheeks bore witness to the depth of her distress.

Out on the half-landing, Adam, uncomfortable in his tight Sunday suit, stood watching his parents’ argument through the open door of their bedroom, the bed between them covered with a cheap eiderdown, the dust motes in the air illuminated by the morning sun coming in through the open window, a cheap wooden cross the only ornament on the mildew-stained wall. The moment burnt into his memory like an X-ray photograph.

Daniel was white-faced, standing up straight as if he had been struck, searching for words. He wanted to go to his wife, beg her forgiveness, but he couldn’t, forced back by the intensity of her emotion.

‘I’m sorry, Lil,’ he said, stumbling over his words. ‘You’re right. I get carried away sometimes.’ He reached out his hand across the bed, but she ignored it, wiping her tears away instead with the back of her arm.

‘It’s for Adam’s sake I want to go,’ she said. ‘It’s history when the King of England dies and our son needs to see it. What you do is your own affair.’

Daniel nodded, accepting the reproof. He picked up his best suit and began to change his clothes.

In the streets everyone was in black. The women seemed like giant crows behind heavy crape veils. Everywhere was closed up, silent, except for the muffled tolling of the church bells and the monotonous tread of the mourners walking from all directions towards Westminster.

It was still early when they reached Hyde Park and they were able to work their way to the front of the crowd by the time the draped gun carriage with the King’s coffin came into view, followed immediately by a small dog, the King’s fox terrier, Caesar, led by a kilted Highland soldier. But that was the last homely touch. The new king, George, rode behind his father’s coffin at the front of a group of men dressed in wildly extravagant uniforms. The bright May sun reflected on their shining white-plumed helmets, half blinding Adam as they came abreast of where he was standing. And then for no apparent reason the cortège stopped – only for a moment or two but it was enough for the horseman closest to Adam to look down and catch the boy’s eye. Immediately Adam recognized him. The huge absurd upturned moustache was unmistakable – it was the German Kaiser. It was only a few seconds at most, but Adam had time to sense the man’s extraordinary rigidity – his frozen left arm, his chin thrust forward, his unblinking blue eyes; his concentration and self-absorption. He seemed mad somehow, capable of anything. And then, while Adam’s impression was still forming, he was gone – a memory of scarlet and silver and gold. And the marching soldiers and sailors followed – thousands and thousands of them following their dead king down the road that led to Paddington Station, while the drums beat and the bagpipes wailed.

It was as if the old order had passed away into the mist, and now everything was changing. It was an age of wonders: a Frenchman had flown a monoplane across the Channel; there was newsreel of it at the Picture Palace where Adam also went to watch the official motion picture of the King’s funeral, peering up at the grey-specked screen, hoping in vain to catch a glimpse of himself in the crowd, a participant in history.

The world seemed to be turning faster, rushing towards some invisible climax. Motor cars were everywhere, blowing their horns, whipping up clouds of dust from the poorly surfaced roads, running down people who left the safety of the pavements. And above the noise the newspaper boys cried out their violent headlines about a country torn apart by strife: suffragettes breaking windows in Whitehall; the need for more dreadnoughts; riots and mayhem.

And strikes – that word was on everyone’s lips. Everywhere men were demanding better pay; better hours; better conditions. It was the time Daniel Raine had been waiting for: the dawn of a new age of social justice when workers would be fairly rewarded for their toil. He was the secretary of the local branch of the building workers’ union, which met in a small private room at the Cricketers, the pub on the corner of his street. Membership was up and meetings went on late into the night, taking all his attention. But Adam’s mother was unwell again and sometimes she sent Adam with messages to ask her husband to come home. Like other women on the street, she hated the pub, although in her case it was not for the usual reasons. Daniel had never been a drinker, wasting what little money they had on alcohol. Politics and the union were his addiction and the pub was where he was able to indulge his passion. Fired up with righteous zeal amid the dazzle of the gas lamps, he could forget about the rent arrears and the grocer’s unpaid bill. But Lilian couldn’t. She knew they couldn’t afford a strike – not with the colder weather coming. The winter before had been bad enough; and everyone said that this one would be worse. But her husband wouldn’t listen whenever she tried to talk to him about her worries: it was as if she didn’t exist.

She felt as if there were taut strings inside her body that were being tightened like piano wire until they were almost at breaking point. When she tried to exert herself she coughed and coughed, and had to grope her way up the rickety stairs to her bedroom where she lay completely still, listening to the sounds of the street below coming up to her through the open window like the noise of the sea, receding away from her on an ebb tide.

In the end it was a safety issue that lit the fuse. Daniel and his crew had been refurbishing a department store on the north side of Oxford Street. It was a large job needing to be done quickly so that the shop could reopen in time for the Christmas season, and the contractor had been cutting corners by using high ladders instead of scaffolding for painting the high ceilings. Some were so high that the painters had to work, balanced at ninety degrees almost on the top rung, and it wasn’t long before a man fell, suffering appalling injuries when he hit the ground. The union demanded proper scaffolding be installed and refused to carry on working until it had been put in place, and the employers responded by bringing in new labour. They saw the strike as an opportunity: times were hard and the strike-breakers were prepared to work for lower wages.

Daniel was tireless, toiling day and night to organize the picket lines that the blacklegs had to cross to go to work, but the strikers’ shouts and curses didn’t deter them. And as the refurbishment continued apace, the strikers’ anger grew. Police were called in to keep the peace and stood in a solid blue line between the two sides, their truncheons at the ready. The rain ran down their capes into pools on the ground, but they stood motionless, ignoring the strikers’ fury, indifferent to their frustration.

‘How long will this go on?’ Lilian asked her husband, confronting him in the hallway on one of his rare visits home.

I don’t know,’ he said. ‘As long as it takes. Until the owners see reason.’

‘And what if they don’t? What do we live on?’

‘The union will help.’

‘A few shillings,’ she said contemptuously. ‘That won’t pay the rent.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said wearily. He was dog-tired – all he wanted to do was sleep. ‘We’ll have to do our best, make sacrifices. We have justice on our side – it’s a cause worth fighting for.’

‘Worth starving for, worth dying for,’ she shot back, mimicking her husband’s phrase, echoing it back to him, invested with all the despair she felt inside.

‘It won’t come to that, Lil,’ he said, moving past her to go up the stairs. ‘I promise you it won’t.’

Another week passed and she’d had enough. There was nothing to eat in the house and no money to pay the tradesmen who came knocking at the door. Next it would be the bailiffs. Daniel talked about justice but there was no justice in leaving her alone and abandoning his family. For Adam’s sake he had to come home, give up the cause once and for all and start over; she would make him if she had to. Wrapping herself in her thin overcoat, she set out to find her husband.

It was getting towards evening and the strike-breakers were beginning to come out, keeping their heads down, hurrying between the lines of police to where the special buses laid on by the employers were waiting to take them away. Another week’s work done and Sunday, a day of rest, to look forward to, at home or in the snug at the public house with beer in their bellies and a warm fire in the hearth.

For the strikers it was too much. Enraged by their own impotence, hating the scabs who had stolen their jobs, imagining the pay jingling in the pockets of their enemies’ overalls, they held up their banners and pressed forward against the phalanx of police, trying to find a way through the human barrier. And when it stayed firm, they began to throw stones. It was what the police had been waiting for. At a whistled command from behind, their front rank charged forward, laying about them indiscriminately with their truncheons and trampling the strikers, who fell down under their blows.

Daniel was hit on the side of the head and lost consciousness. When he came to, he was lying on his back in the gutter; he opened his eyes and then closed them immediately as the darkening sky came hurtling down towards him. His head ached and his shoulder hurt, and he swallowed back hard on the vomit that had risen up into his throat, mixing with the blood in his mouth. Slowly, very slowly, he pushed himself up on to his knees, looking back down the road to where his workmates were fighting a losing battle with the police. Everything was blurred and confused: a melee of movement; a cacophony of noise – cries and shouts and something else, a beating, and someone running towards him, calling out his name. Someone he recognized – Lilian, his wife Lilian, with her beautiful blonde hair flying out behind her as it had when she was a girl and they had first met faraway by the sea – in another time, another century.

She was shouting: ‘No, no, no,’ running towards him and shouting: ‘No,’ and something else was running too – behind him where he could not see. The beating was the beating of hooves on the asphalt. In despair he held out his hands towards his wife – whether to stop her or to receive her he didn’t know. His back contracted, shrinking up, anticipating its own destruction. But miraculously the horse passed over him, leaving him unscathed and able in the next instant to watch his wife being crushed to death only a few feet in front of where he knelt.