The White Dove
Along the endless road, and in the villages and towns where they had stopped, there had been surprising support. During the day the farmworkers in the fields and most of the drivers of the cars and lorries that rumbled past them, splashing them with filthy water from the potholes in the roads, had stared and then, when they understood, there had been encouragement and coins dropped into the bags marked ‘March for Work. March for Food.’
At nights, when they stopped dead tired in the town halls and even, once, in a huge barn still stacked with hay bales, people had brought food. Sometimes it had been local union representatives, bringing cash donations and messages of support as well as thick sandwiches and urns of strong, sweet tea. But sometimes it was different people, prosperous, middle-class and not workers, as the miners described them. These people looked shocked and sympathetic, and murmured ‘We must all do what we can to help,’ and they brought exotic pies with rich, crumbly pastry and, on one memorable night, a huge baked ham. He had been eating much better than Mari and Dickon would be doing back in Nantlas, Nick thought painfully.
He finished his soup and the last of the bread, and then reached into his rucksack. He had given most of the chocolate to a boy with a terrible cough who had been struggling to keep up almost ever since they had left Wales, but there was one square left. He had been keeping it to have as a celebration when they reached London, and he unwrapped it now and ate it slowly, thinking about Mari.
It was right that he had come, even though he had had to leave her, Nick was sure of that. The march was running under its own momentum now, already a success. Out of the seven hundred men who had left Newport eleven days ago, only a handful had dropped out, in spite of the official labour movement predictions that the miners would never make it. Even those men had had to be ordered to stop marching because their torn feet or exhaustion were holding up progress. Their dogged determination to reach London was a testament in itself, because the marchers had deliberately been chosen, by Nick and the other organizers, from the poorest and weakest of all the thousands of unemployed men across the coalfield who had wanted to march. Any man still receiving the meagre unemployed benefit or the Poor Law relief had been excluded, because no one could guarantee that he would be able to claim the money again on his return. None of the march organizers wanted to claim the responsibility for another destitute family.
Only those who had nothing were chosen, just because they had nothing to forfeit. Nick put aside the thought that he stood to lose his own benefit. That was something he would have to reckon with if and when it happened. It would have been impossible to act as a spur to the other men and not to march himself.
And the march was a success. People were with them, no one could deny that. The food, and the money in the fighting fund proved it. Best of all was the support that had come not only from workers, often in defiance of their own right-wing unions, but from the secure, middle-class people who need never have bothered to think about unemployed miners. If we can reach them, Nick thought, not the politicians, or the coal-owners, but ordinary decent people with money in their pockets, then perhaps we can get something done for us all.
He unstrapped his blanket once more and found a space to unroll it. The floor was draughty bare boards, but to Nick it felt as welcoming and comfortable as a feather bed. He wasn’t hard with working muscle any more after the months of enforced idleness, and the general shortage of food had taken its toll, but he was still fit and strong enough. Yet his legs ached all the way up into his back, and his calves and feet felt leaden with the endless walking. He rubbed the complaining muscles and reminded himself that he was comfortable compared with the older men suffering from pneumoconiosis, and the thin boys transparent with undernourishment from babyhood.
Nick carefully unlaced his boots, afraid that they might fall apart if he handled them too roughly. The sole of the left one had parted company from the upper and the two halves were bound together with rag. Yet some men didn’t even have that, and their progress had slowed to a shuffle that threatened to hold up the whole march.
He smiled suddenly. They had looked like the last tattered remnants of a defeated army long before reaching London, but the fire of spirit had burned stronger and stronger all the way. At first the sheer distance had overwhelmed them, but as the days and miles slid past they had begun to sing again, the old songs remembered from Flanders and the Somme, and the favourite hymns from the chapels in the valleys. They had talked, too, endless fiery discussions of political theory, literature, and even philosophy. Most of the men had brought books in their packs. Reading seemed to satisfy a kind of hunger when there wasn’t any food.
Nick himself had brought a fat, black volume of Paradise Lost borrowed from the Miners’ Welfare library. The magnificent, stately rhythms of the verse soothed him even though the thread of meaning was sometimes lost to him. He took the book out now, thinking that he would read a little while there was still light. But he had hardly begun when from down the crowded hall came a low, bass humming, rising and falling like the sea. Nick put his book away again. There would be singing tonight, instead.
The visiting vicar sat down on one of his wooden chairs, and the men in the kitchen stopped clanking the pans and crockery. The hall grew dark while the singing went on, and somebody brought in oil lamps flaring behind their smoky gas mantles.
The final hymn was the one that was always left until last. The singing rose and filled the hall, and drifted beyond it out into the suburban night.
Bread of Heaven, Bread of Heaven, Feed me till I want no more, want no more, Feed me till I want no more.
There was no more, after that. The hall was just a crowded, stuffy room full of tired men turning on their thin blankets ready for sleep.
Nick was smiling when he fell asleep. Tomorrow they would do what they had come to do, and then they could go home.
Six
It was raining again, a cold, thin rain that fell straight down from a blank, grey sky.
Amy turned away from the window and went to her wardrobe. She was supposed to be shopping and having tea with her old schoolfriend Violet Trent, and Bethan had pressed her pale grey suit for her and put out her high-heeled grey suède shoes. But Amy had telephoned Violet to say that she couldn’t manage tea today, and she put the suit back in her wardrobe. She wasn’t sure of the appropriate costume for this afternoon, but it certainly wasn’t a Charles Creed suit and a shirt with a pie-frill collar and two dozen tiny tucks in the front.
Amy frowned at the outfits hanging on the rail, each one shrouded in its linen bag and with the matching shoes polished and wrapped in the racks below. The right sort of clothes that she owned were mostly at Chance, and this array only underlined the frivolity of her London existence for her. In the end she put on a pair of dark trousers with the stoutest shoes she could find, and the plain coat she had worn to Appleyard Street. A beret hid her hair, and at the last moment she snapped off her pearl ear-studs and dropped them back into the red morocco box that stood on her dressing table.
Amy slipped downstairs and out of the house without anyone seeing her. The rain dripped monotonously from the trees in Berkeley Square, and the pavements were crowded with bobbing black umbrellas. She set off down Hill Street, certain of where she was going, and emerged a few minutes later into Park Lane.
Amongst the red buses and taxis sending up plumes of spray she saw a handful of police on horseback plodding towards Marble Arch, their waterproof capes spread out over the big brown rumps of the horses. On the opposite side, beyond the traffic, was a thin but continuous stream of people heading in the same direction. There were more policemen amongst them. Amy crossed the road and with her hands deep in her coat pockets she began to walk too.
At Speaker’s Corner the crowd was already a thousand strong and it was swelling steadily as people trickled to join it from all directions. A brass band was playing cheerful music under the trees at the edge of the Park, but the musicians’ faces were solemn and no one seemed to be listening to them. Amy edged close to the makeshift platform of piled-up boxes. Most of the people she passed were simply waiting quietly in the downpour, their collars turned up and dark, damp patches showing on their shoulders. There were policemen everywhere, ringing the growing crowd and filtering through it in pairs. Amy wondered why there were so many of them to control this dejected, almost silent gathering of people. The banners and placards held up were smudged and limp, at odds with their defiant messages.
Amy read them as she waited, wishing that Tony had let her accompany him so that he could explain.
‘Bermondsey for Workers Control.’
‘London Workers Support the Miners.’
‘A Job for Every Man.’
Suddenly, in the middle of a knot of people beside the platform, she saw Jake Silverman. His dark head and black beard stuck up above the rest. He was bareheaded, coatless and soaking wet, but Amy could sense the crackle of his liveliness even from where she stood. She was about to run towards him, unthinking, when a motorcyclist came nosing slowly through the crowds. A red armband was fastened around the sleeve of his jacket. Jake’s head jerked up at the throb of the engine, and he beckoned the rider forward. Reaching the foot of the platform steps, the man pushed up his goggles and said something to Jake. At once Jake seized his hand and shook it, pumping the man’s arm up and down in his pleasure.
Then Jake vaulted up on to the platform. Amy saw Kay there at the front in a bright green waterproof with her hair wrapped in a scarf. She immediately began to look from head to head, searching for Tony, but there was no sign of him.
‘Comrades and friends!’
Jake was up at the edge of the platform, beckoning them all forward. The crowd surged forward immediately, pressing closer around Amy. She let herself be carried forward too. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the head of one of the police mounts rear upwards, its harness jingling.
‘Friends, we have just had word from the courier here that the marchers will reach us in fifteen minutes.’
Jake’s voice carried easily over the cheering that broke out, raggedly at first and then growing in conviction.
‘You all know that they have been on the road for twelve days. That on every one of those days comrades and workers have come out to support them. And that their support was often in direct defiance of the Labour Right who have done their best to sabotage this march. Let’s give our marchers a welcome now to beat anything they’ve seen yet. Let’s every one of us be proud that we are here to march with them on the last lap to Trafalgar Square. And let’s go on from there to Downing Street!’
The cheering was a roar now. Somehow Jake Silverman had drawn the soaking, silent crowd forward and set it alight.
‘Today we’ll show Ramsay MacDonald that a capitalist Labour government is no bloody good to us. Let’s show him that we want work. That we want to control that work ourselves. And that we mean to do it. Let him be warned!’
Jake’s clenched fists came up over his head and he shook them, and the cheering rose to meet him as if he was conducting his own powerful orchestra. The forest of placards and banners rose in a wave and the clenched fists defiantly answered Jake Silverman’s defiance.
‘Be warned! Be warned!’
It was a chant now. Under the trees the band began to play again. Dimly Amy recognized The Red Flag, and at the same time, quite close to her, she heard another shout.
‘Commie saboteur!’
‘Kike! Kike! Fuck off to Russia if that’s what you want!’
The surge of the crowd towards it half-turned her around. She saw a big man with a red face ducking away, and the smooth flanks of a police horse as it wheeled sharply in front of her. The horse blocked her view for an instant, and when she looked again a space had opened in the crowd. The margins of it were held back by lines of police with their arms linked tight.
Amy was suddenly cold. Something ugly was flickering here, behind the police helmets and in the London faces milling around her. It might not be safe, for one thing, Tony had said when he had refused to let her come with him. What was it that wasn’t safe, amongst these people and the half-understood rhetoric of their slogans?
Part of her was detachedly aware that the rain had stopped, and that towards the west beyond the ragged edges of the clouds there was a faint, pale blue line. But with the rest of herself she was listening to the crowd noise, and waiting fearfully for that flicker of ugliness again.
There was more shouting from the roadside now.
‘They’re here!’
The police, with their arms still linked, were easing the crowds further apart so that a wide aisle opened between them. The cheering and shouting died into an expectant silence and the band sounded much louder.
Amy stood on tiptoe, craning to see. A fat man in a coat much too small for him grinned at her, showing black teeth. ‘‘Ere y’are, my love. Get in ‘ere in front.’
In the sudden breathless silence, between the square shoulders of the policemen, Amy saw them coming.
It was a long, black column, with lights bobbing on either side of it. The miners were in ranks of four, swinging smartly along as if they had only set out that morning.
As they came closer, the leaders turning in between the held-back crowds, she saw that the impression of blackness came from their dark, sodden clothes and from their physical likeness. They were small, hunched men with dark faces under their caps. And the lights were miners’ lamps. Each man carried his lamp, lit up and swinging to his step.
She was struck by something incongruous about the column as it drew closer. The men were marching like an army, and the band was playing them on. But there was no triumphant ring of well-drilled boots on the metalled road. Amy listened, and the sound she heard caught at her throat and sent a shiver deep inside her.
There was only the muffled flap, flap of hundreds of pairs of broken boots, boots tied up with rag and shored uselessly against the rain with newspaper.
It was the flap, flap that cleared Amy’s head and drove her forward against the wall of policemen. She found her voice and she was shouting, shouting the same welcome and greeting that rose in a deafening crescendo around her. She stretched her hand out past the uniform shoulders and waved and shouted as she had never done before.
If men could walk so far in boots like those to ask for help, how badly must they be in need of it? And in her own cupboards at home, polished for her and brushed and carefully stored in bags, there were dozens of pairs of shoes in crocodile skin, soft suède and supple pastel leather.
In that instant Amy knew, with as much certainty as she had ever known anything, which side she was on. She was with these men, with their proud lights and their thin, drawn faces and their terrible boots, and she was with Jake Silverman and his friends. With Tony Hardy, wherever he was. Amy felt as if she had just come home, and yet as if she had cut herself off from everything she loved and understood. Gerald Lovell and Peter Jaspert, Adeline, and even Isabel, didn’t belong in this new home because they couldn’t or wouldn’t see what was happening here today.
Amy was gulping for air that tasted of wet wool, sweating people and horses. Were these people her friends and family, she thought wildly, looking at the strangers surging and shouting around her?
The column of marchers was still passing.
Amy saw a green banner with a red and gold dragon. Nantlas, Rhondda it proclaimed. Bethan’s home village. Bethan was having a rare day off today. Was she here in the crowd too? Why hadn’t the two of them come together? Amy felt dizzy, as if her world had suddenly tilted to one side and changed all her perspectives. Under the Nantlas banner she saw a man much taller than his companions, bareheaded like Jake Silverman and with his black hair flattened to his head by the rain. He was looking over the heads of the crowd and smiling, pleased with what he saw. Amy had time to think, There, there’s someone who knows he’s right, before the man had passed and was swallowed up into the black ranks beneath the platform.
The tail of the march arrived and the aisle held open in the waiting crowd was filled with miners.
There was one brief speech from the platform and then Jake was speaking again, not shouting yet his voice carried to the back of the huge crowd.
‘The last lap now. We’ll march together to Trafalgar Square. Let’s tell our friends from South Wales that we’re proud to march behind them.’
There was a great burst of cheering, but there were other shouts too and Amy struggled to hear what the raw voices were threatening. The police horses wheeled round again and the miners raised their banners once more. The dark-faced men in their black clothes turned and led the way along Oxford Street with their lamps swinging and the band, playing behind them. Amy let herself be carried forward in the press as the police chain broke to let them through and then she was walking too, past the familiar shopfronts and the curious, staring faces of shoppers on the city pavements. For one odd, hallucinatory moment she thought she saw herself and Violet Trent among them, faces blank under their smart little hats. The gutters were huge puddles after the heavy rain, and Amy’s shoes were unsuitable for walking any distance. Her feet and trouser legs were soon soaked, but she was oblivious. She felt as proud as Jake Silverman could have hoped, and she cheered and sang at the top of her voice with everyone else. The fat man with the tight coat was still at her side, and he winked at her. ‘We’ll show ‘em, eh?’ He was holding one side of a placard that read National Unemployed Workers Movement.
I am unemployed, that’s true enough, Amy thought wryly.
They passed Oxford Circus. The police were holding up the traffic and she glimpsed Regent Street choked with stationary buses. At the far end of Oxford Street they turned and streamed down Charing Cross Road. Amy’s right shoe had rubbed her heel into a blister, and she thought again of the hundreds of miles from South Wales in boots tied up with rags.
At last they reached Trafalgar Square. There was another, bigger platform here, draped with banners that read ‘London Workers Welcome the SWMF Marchers’. The square filled up behind her and Amy found herself pushed closer to the front. Just ahead of her and to the right, on the steps between Landseer’s lions, she saw Jake and Kay again. There were still more policemen here, on foot and on horseback, and another brass band playing outside the National Gallery. The cheering and shouting was deafening, and the crowd surged and swayed in pulsating waves, suddenly much bigger. More people must have been waiting for the marchers to arrive in the square.
It was difficult to hear the speakers and Amy strained to catch the words of one after another of the march leaders and organizers. ‘This government … be made to see that the failure of private enterprise in our industries … chronic poverty and destitution among unemployed men … persistent pit closures … repeal of the Eight-Hour Day Act … iniquity of the not seeking work clause …’
Then, as she struggled to hear through the din, she caught the sound of different chanting.
‘Commie scum! Commie scum!’
The crowd bulged around her and swayed towards the sound with a sudden, ominous life of its own.
‘Dirty reds! Dirty reds!’
Amy glimpsed Jake Silverman hoisting Kay out of the way on to the steps and then plunging forward. The chanting broke up into urgent shouting. Four police horses and a dozen bobbing helmets converged on the spot where Jake had disappeared. From somewhere ahead of her Amy heard a woman’s scream, and then as if at a signal the boiling crowd erupted into violence. Right beside her a man’s fist came up and smashed into another’s face, and a spurt of blood sprang from his nose before he fell backwards under the trampling feet. Amy heard her own scream rising with the others, and then she was propelled violently forward by the fighting breaking out behind her. She stumbled forward, catching at clothes and arms to stop herself being pushed over, and almost fell over another man lying on the ground with his arms up to protect his head and face. Then the high brown flanks of a police horse loomed over her and she saw the great polished hooves only a foot or so from the man’s head. She ducked down to try to help him but be was already being hauled to his feet by his friends.
The crowd from the back of the square was still pushing forward to the steps, and Amy felt an instant of pure, panicky certainty that she would be crushed to death or suffocated in this dense, heaving mass of bodies.
The steps, she told herself. Try to reach the steps where she had seen Jake lift Kay up. The next blind surge carried her forward, and she saw that she had come up against the solid phalanx of miners in front of the platform. A lamp was still swinging in someone’s hand. The steps were only a few yards away.
Then, right beside her, Jake Silverman was fighting to pull away from two men who held his arms pinned savagely behind his back. A mounted policeman was just behind them with his stick raised. Amy saw the leather thong wrapped around his gloved fist. Then there was a third man right beside Jake with something short and heavy in his hand.
A lead bar. A length of piping. Whatever, it was for Jake.
Amy opened her mouth to scream but he would never have heard the warning. As she watched, frozen, the bar came up and then down. The dull crack of metal against bone and skin made her feel sick to the pit of her stomach. Jake’s head flopped forward and he fell like an empty sack.
Horror gave Amy strength. She thrust past the men blocking her way and knelt beside Jake. His face was as white as candle wax and his eyes were closed. When Amy looked up again to scream for help the three men had vanished and there was nothing in the world except trampling feet and swaying bodies that threatened to topple over them. In feeble desperation she tried to pull at Jake’s coat and realized that she would never be able to drag his weight to safety. Then someone else was pulling her aside and stooping beside Jake. She saw the blue scars on the hand turning Jake’s unconscious face, and the lamp hooked to his belt.
‘Murdering bastards,’ the miner said.
Then he bent and scooped Jake up. He hoisted the dead weight over his shoulder as if it was nothing, and began to strike through the tangle of people. Amy looked wildly around for Kay or another familiar face, but there was no one. The police were moving through the crowd in blue lines now, and the violence was ebbing away. Most people were standing still, bewildered, with their arms hanging at their sides. A little path opened in front of the miner with his burden and Amy ran after him, almost sobbing with relief.
He didn’t stop or look round until they were clear of the mass in the square. In front of St Martin-in-the-Fields he glanced back over his shoulder and then very gently swung Jake down and put him on the pavement. His face was so white that Amy was afraid he was already dead. There was a tiny trickle of dark blood at the corner of his mouth.
‘Are you his friend?’ the miner asked abruptly.
Amy nodded.
‘See to him, then. I’ll run for the ambulance. Bloody First Aid Post’s the other side of the square.’
He was gone immediately.