1982 Janine (16 page)

I did not despise him, he was a good man. I loved him.

I did not despise him, I loved him but he advised me only
once about sex. The day before I married Helen he made sure mother was out of earshot then said abruptly, “Jock. Regarding sex. Have you practised it more than once?”

I said I had. He said, “Good. Then I need say nothing on the matter, except that you should not neglect her breasts.”

I said I would bear that in mind. He hesitated, blushed then said, “Another thing. Sex is more important for women than us, they get irritable if they don't have it once a week. In my experience Friday night is quite a good night.”

I told him that I would bear that also in mind, then I went to the lavatory, locked myself in and sniggered heartily. I was eighteen and the idea of a married man making love only once a week struck me as absurd and even appalling. I did not know that already I had enjoyed more sex than I would ever have again, ever ever ever have again ever ever ever ever ever shut up ever shut up ever have again. All I need remember is that nowadays Britain is OF NECESSITY organized like a bad adolescent fantasy, hello Alan.

Alan. I see his head as big as the sky, the sardonic Arabic-Italian-Jewish face smiling out of the cloud of black hair. A small white sun gleams between two curls of it, this is an effect of perspective. Alan is actually standing against the window of his home in West Graham Street, on the top floor of the tenement knocked down in the sixties to let a motorway reach the Kingston Bridge. He holds the world carefully between his thumb and forefinger, it is a small blue globe marked with green and brown continents and islands, actually a child's pencil sharpener with a hole at the South Pole where the pencilpoint goes in. Alan enjoyed adjusting toys and ordinary tools until they were precision instruments. He would hone and realign the blades of a cheap sharpener until they could bring a pencil to needlesharpness with two delicate twists. But the globe-shaped sharpener belonged to me. I found it in the heel of my Christmas stocking when I was six, and loved it, and took it to school where it was stolen, so I am imagining, not remembering this. With a needlesharp pencilpoint Alan touches the spots on the globe where there is hunger, unemployment, riot, war and disease, spots not always identical but always connected. He says, “We don't need those bits.”

I explain to him very patiently why these bits are essential and he points out a simple adaptation which will totally abolish them. But the adaptation is in the human mind and I cannot conceive it. The human mind after childhood is the most superdense rigid substance in God's universe, we will kill, we will die rather than change it. “Love your neighbour as yourself.” “Do unto others as you would they should do unto you.” Go away God. You cannot expect winners to take that advice, especially not winners who know they are ordinary people doing ordinary jobs. Alan never talked about politics. I don't know why I imagined him like that.

Alan never talked about politics except once when some of us sat yattering while he repaired a 1931 Mullard walnut-case wireless set. There was Isi the architect, and Wee Willie the anarchist alchemist, and Frazer Fairbairn, an unemployed gym teacher who said he had been forced out of education because of his progressive attitude toward the pupils. Frazer spend his days in public libraries getting very excited by every second or third book he read. He was telling us about Machiavelli's
The Prince
. “Listen,” he said, “you have just conquered a neighbouring state, right?, and you want to conquer another. So what do you do to the defeated people to stop them revolting against you when you withdraw most of your army?”

We could not answer because we had not read Machiavelli. “Easy!” cried Frazer, “You split the population into three, take most of the wealth away from one-third and divide it with the rest. The majority have now profited by being conquered. They accept your government in return for your help if the minority start a civil war to get their own back, a civil war which will
not
occur because the impoverished losers know they are bound to be defeated. The conqueror can now repeat his manoeuvre elsewhere. What I don't understand,” said Frazer, “is why no governments have taken Machiavelli's advice? Surely the first to do it would conquer the world?”

Isi the architect said that Machiavelli's formula was far too arithmetical; human societies were natural growths which could not be divided and ruled along arithmetical lines. Wee
Willie disagreed. He said the nations were ruled by the power of gold, which had a numerical value the financiers juggled and bargained with; each morning and evening the Stock Exchange reports describe very precisely how the world is ruled by arithmetic. Frazer Fairbairn said, “Then why have governments not used Machiavelli's formula?”

Alan, who seemed not to have been listening, said, “They do.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

After a pause I said, “You don't mean the British Empire.”

“No. I mean Britain.”

I did not understand him. This was in the fifties.

In those days I was calm, confident and very happy. Though not legally married I had someone more completely my wife than a signed oath could have made her and I suspected that I would soon have someone else. I was even complacent about the state of Britain. Winston Churchill was again prime minister but my politics were still shaped by my father's socialist rhetoric of the forties. “Thank Heavens Britain has stopped being
great
,” he said, “for what is greatness in a country? As the word is commonly used it means simply the habit of interfering with other countries. Nobody today can doubt that the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. are very great nations but Britain is giving back her Empire to the folk she stole it from. We have voted to be not
great
but
good
, and even at home we are an example to Russia and America. Without riot or arrest, without one single death or one broken law, our elected government has undertaken a truly socialist revolution.”

“You are a very nice man, Peter, but also a terrible blether,” said Old Red. “We are giving up an empire because we are too poor to hold on to it. And at home the Attlee government has done nothing but give a more lasting form to some measures introduced by a right-wing government in a state of funk. It was the coalition which froze profits, rents and prices, brought in rationing and took over big properties for the good of the nation. Our ruling classes are not idiots. They saw that Hitler would beat them if they continued feathering their nests at the expense of the worker, so they
agreed to a temporary shareout.”

“Which has been made permanent!” said Dad. “Nobody wants a return to the lockouts and strikes of the twenties, the depression of the thirties and a third bloody war. Everyone with a memory knows capitalism is a rotten system, so our lighting, heating and local housing, our main fuel, transport and healthcare are now public services belonging to the whole people. The whole people!”

“Peter,” said Old Red very patiently, “the top men drawing the big wages in the newly nationalised industries are exactly the same sort of businessmen and landlords who used to own them. They are also being compensated by the British taxpayer for the loss of shares which before the war had become practically worthless. How do you think our managers and directors are using the new money they get from us? The banks have not been nationalised. They are investing in the oil and car industries, in building societies, in companies exploiting nations where socialism hasn't a chance. If the National Coal Board and British Rail were directed by miners and rail way men, instead of former company directors and admirals of the fleet, they would cost the nation a lot less and keep the nationalised industries running far more securely.”

“But working men can't run their own industries,” cried Dad, then blushed and clearly wished he had used other words. After a pause Old Red said, “Spoken like a true member of the British Labour Party.”

“I understand the point you're making,” said Dad. “The Bar Association is run by lawyers and the Medical Association by doctors, why not have a railway system managed by enginedrivers and Stationmasters? You must know the answer to that. Only people with university degrees have the training to direct large organisations. But in less than twenty years the new education grants will have produced a completely different breed of managers, folk whose fathers and mothers are working folk like ourselves. Can you seriously doubt that these will turn Britain into the nearly classless society we have in Australia and Scandinavia, with spacious homes for everyone and full enjoyment of the four freedoms Roosevelt spoke about: freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of belief and freedom of speech?”

Old Red sighed, whistled a line of
Over the Sea to Skye
and said, “It's your ostrich who talks the most perfect Utopian.'

Did he really say that? It sounds the sort of thing Hislop said. I liked Old Red more than Mad Hislop but I didn't like him much. His arguments upset Dad and spoiled the quietness of our house, they distracted me from my schoolbooks and my fantasies.

Dad and Old Red completely agreed about one thing. Another Conservative government would ruin the country. The Macmillan administration disconcerted them terribly. There was an increase in upper-class luxury and even debauchery but the working class seemed cheerfuller too. However, by the end of the sixties it was clear that in the general scramble for the nation's pennies the investors, the professions and a few well-organised unions were still doing well but everyone else was beginning to lose. Harold Wilson became prime minister. “I just don't understand him!” cried Dad, “he seems to be telling us that he'll help Britain get a little more socialism when the Stock Exchange feels secure enough to allow it. Surely he knows that will never happen?”

“You must remember, Peter, that our Harold is a very clever and increasingly rich man who knows far more about the world of business than ignoramuses like ourselves,” said Old Red. I chuckled heartily. Red and I now had something in common. We both thought Britain could only be helped by a political organisation which did not exist. He wanted a form of co-operative Ruskinite syndicalism, I wanted a strong government of decent Tory gentlemen who would prevent the worst sorts of poverty and social squalor, not because poverty and squalor are unjust, but because they are ugly and unsafe. So we were both amused by Dad's mixture of hope and shockability at the antics of the Labour Party.

One afternoon I came back from a very big job in the Shetlands and found a week-old letter from Old Red on the lobby floor. It said Dad had suffered a stroke and was in the intensive care unit of Kilmarnock Infirmary. I phoned and
heard he had improved a little and tomorrow would be shifted to an ordinary ward. I went straight out to see him.

He lay in bed looking pink and feeble but also very tranquil and glad to see me. I explained the reason for the delay. He said, “I understand, Jock. A man's work must always come first.”

I said my work did not come before him and in future he would always have an address where I could be contacted if he had another accident. And I would phone him at least twice a week. He smiled and said, “Not at all. A man's work must always come first.”

I produced a book I had grabbed from my shelves before rushing out of the house and I said, “You'll have more time for reading now. I think you'll enjoy this, even though it's a novel. It shows the First World War from the Austro-Hungarian side. Listen.”

I read out the beginning.

“And so they've killed our Ferdinand,” said the char
woman to Mr Schweik, who had left military service
years before after having been finally certified by
an army medical board as an imbecile, and now lived
by selling dogs – ugly mongrel monstrosities whose
pedigrees he forged
.

“Which Ferdinand, Mrs Muller?” he asked, rubbing
his knee with Elliman's embrocation, for he suffered
from rheumatism. “I know two Ferdinands. One is a
chemist's messenger who once by mistake drank a
bottle of hair oil. The other is Ferdinand Kokoska who
collects dog manure. Neither is any great loss.”

“O no sir, it's His Imperial Highness, the Archduke
Ferdinand, the fat churchy one. They bumped him off
at Sarajevo, sir, with a revolver, you know. He drove
there in a car.”

“Jesus Maria!” exclaimed Schweik. “What a grand
job! And in a car too! Well, there you have it, Mrs
Muller, in a car. A gentleman like him can afford a car
and he never imagines a drive like that might finish
badly. And I wouldn't mind betting, Mrs Muller, that
the chap that did it put on smart togs for the occasion.
Potting an Imperial Highness is no easy job, you
know. You've got to wear a topper, so the cops don't
nab you beforehand.”

Dad smiled and nodded but I was not sure he had been listening, though when I put the book on the bed he rested his hand on the cover. He spoke of the coming election. The Tories said they would
encourage enterprise
if they were returned, Labour said it would
show that it cared
. The small Scot Nat party had provoked a debate by referring to a fact: multinational companies were getting a lot of North Sea mineral very cheaply. Harold Wilson had announced that this was true, and only a Labour government had the power and will to tackle the big oil companies. Edward Heath had accused Wilson of planning to nationalise Britain's oil. Wilson had hotly denied this: he had only been trying to convey that a Labour government could combat tax-avoidance.