Agnes Owens (16 page)

The first post-war stories to make good use of low-income experience came out of the English north in the sixties and are firmly set there, but tell truths about the whole country.
This Sporting Life
shows a gifted youngster Making It to the Top, and also a love-affair. The hero's talent is rugby football. The machinations by which he pushes his career estrange him from the woman he loves, but as a well-paid sportsman he tries at the end to reclaim her: he has so much to offer! Himself, money, etc. He stands in the street before a burdened aging woman with a shopping bag, and pursues her home, and cannot get her to see him, hear him or acknowledge his existence. He has become that part of the nation which is no use to her. If she were to submit to him and become his mistress or wife it could only be as his property, his appendage. She would feel, look and
be
out of place. If we seek the flaw which cracks the couple apart we can point, if we like, to his ambition, but the flaw is in
Britain
. The comic novel
Billy Liar
is equally desperate. Billy's mother thinks of her family as ‘just ordinary people'. His father says, ‘I may be just an uneducated working man, but . . .' They take wage-slavery as a norm, and treat their son's imagination as a disease: which it is, even to him, because all he makes with it are fantasies and comic dialogue. He is part of a community which wants to keep him. His boss is so disconcerted by the thought of Billy trying to be a script-writer in London that he refuses to accept his resignation. And at the end Billy skulks away from the London train and the adventurous girl who shared his daydreams. He returns to his parents' council house, cheered by an imaginary army marching at his heels. His imagination will be used not to free but to keep him as he is. Billy loses his lover by crushing his imagination in order to stay in the community. The rugby star loses his lover by developing the skill which takes him out of it. In
Kes
the picture is yet harsher. A victimised schoolboy learns a falconer's skills by nursing a wounded hawk – he is healing his own spirit and teaching it to soar. The community barely tolerates this, and his working brother
kills the hawk out of spite. And in
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
the talented sportsman deliberately loses the race, to stop his victory being used by a highly paid headmaster to glorify a kind of boys' prison.

These stories demonstrate the Great British assumption, which is also the Great British lie, that any special talent, initiative or knowledge not advertised as
popular
is a property of the affluent, a luxury of the posh. This particular lie is the unwritten British constitution. It lets Royalty, the government and most professional people raise their wages and keep themselves employed without drawing much attention, and ensures that coalminers who try to do the same are treated like greedy unpatriotic scoundrels and enemies of the state. When a lie is acted upon by most of the highly and lowly paid parts of a nation it must be treated as a fact. Unluckily for the truth, therefore, stories which show how the lie works can be read as mere matters of fact. Many kindly conservatives who enjoyed the books I mention above will have thought: ‘Yes, that is how they must live down there. How sad!' The moral then drawn is not that the nation's wealth should be used to create productive jobs with high wages and pleasant conditions for everyone, but that talented people of lowly birth should have easier admission to the society of those who can make use of them.

It's a pity that storytellers cannot be moralists. They may invent people who pass moral judgements, when these are convincing and appropriate, but if they make their inventions the text of a sermon then a sermon is all they will write, no matter how well they have reflected their time. Readers must be enticed to their own conclusions, which cannot be predicted. In his study of the novel in the west of Scotland, Douglas Gifford notes that the commonest theme is the crushing of imagination by poverty, and that Archie Hind and I have both written stories about artists of lowly paid origin who, after tough struggles, despair of producing anything good. Douglas regrets that neither novel indicates what
he, a lecturer and critic, lives by indicating: these books are in a Scottish tradition which has made several good things. But we were trying to write tragedies about makers whose work is not wanted by their own kind. A sense of elevated tradition would only give them hope of being ‘taken up' by people of a different kind.

But perhaps all parables of the talent are fundamentally ambiguous. A talent is a measure of silver as well as an inborn capacity or well-learned skill, and when we sit down to write what
we
want to read and which nobody else has written, we enjoy a rich privilege. At that moment we are self-employed and self-sufficient. Nothing need dominate us but our sense of the good, exciting or true. Then we put words on paper, notice these are not very good or exciting or true, and the work begins. But what keeps us writing is an occasional heady feeling of being above the world, above everything but a dim, supportive excitement. Wordsworth thought this sense of freedom, power and possibility was an intimation of immortality. It is well known to children whose growth is not pressed down by labour and responsibility; and stories which revive the sense in adults are likely to be read. Working-class novelists usually incarnate it in someone like themselves who has left or will leave his community, or is suffering because he can't or won't. I say
he
because women are less likely than men to seek satisfactions which detach them from their community. Working-class women are usually too busy holding the community together.

So who will tell good stories about the people in Britain who still labour with their hands? Who can write a whole novel about (for example) an unambitious bricklayer? Someone whose culture and education have made him a manual worker, and who likes manual work, but finds there is less and less of it to be had? Someone who lives in a housing estate which was thought a great gift to the lowly paid in 1950 because each flat had an inside lavatory, but which otherwise has fewer amenities than an army barrack? I fear that no talented male author could embody himself in such a man for 127 pages without feeling stifled or wanting to rave or
do something violently nasty. It is true that Mac, at the start of the ‘Up Country' chapter, flings a glass across a pub out of rage at the dull bigotry of the surrounding conversation, but despite his scars he is conventional in his judgements and kindly in his actions, though his judgements and actions tug in opposite directions. His feelings towards the hippy German tourist and poor Tolworth McGee are as dismissive as those of anyone else in his community, yet the hippy and McGee get all the companionship and assistance he can offer them. Like his companions in that part of the community which is no longer employable, he is a
gentle
man. I cannot imagine the social pressures which would drive him to riot. He is a socialist, living in a labour-voting area, but has no expectations that the Labour Party or trade union action will do anything to help him. If, to the three million unemployed Britons at the time of writing (October 1985) we add twice as many casual labourers whose work is part-time or threatened, then Mac is typical of a huge piece of Britain. Conservatives can draw soothing morals from his existence. I hope they will not.

Why read about this man? Is
Gentlemen
a dod of social reality we should dutifully rub our noses on because so many folk are sunk down in it? Yes, if you like reading for that reason, but I read it first because I found it funny. Indeed, I thought the first two chapters too funny by half, the characters a mere grotesque bunch of comic proles. Many popular tales about the poorer classes exploit that sort of condescension in the reader. Had the other chapters been equally facetious,
Gentlemen
would have been as enjoyable in small doses, and as disappointing on the whole, as any book by O. Henry or Damon Runyon. But I think Agnes Owens writes better than those good Americans. As her hero's stories accumulate they become a real novel, a moving picture of a hard, surprising world which is forcing a young man to understand both it and himself. The fun is not in the casual violence of oaths, black eyes and falling down drunk. The narrator takes these for granted but does not dwell on them, for he usually wants to avoid them. The
fun is in the comedy of mainly decent people misunderstanding themselves and each other. This is the social essence of all comedy from
A Midsummer Night's Dream
to
What Ho, Jeeves!
The council flat, the Paxton Arms, the building site and the wino squat are not grotesque anarchies but societies maintained, like all societies, by affection and by codes. The affection is usually invisible, because the codes regard it as a dangerous weakness. The codes promote much misunderstanding because nobody knows all of them. The mother sells a box of tools her son has kept under her bed for years. She cannot grasp that, like crown jewels in the Tower of London, they are not for use but for status:

‘Wait a minute,' I said, scarcely able to credit my ears. ‘You didny gie him ma set o' tools that took me two years tae pay up when I was an apprentice brickie?'

‘Well, ye never had them oot the box far as I can remember.'

‘Ye don't understand,' I said slowly, my head beginning to ache. ‘Ye never use your own tools if ye can help it. Ye always nick someone else's. If ye took your own tools they wid just get nicked.'

She was unperturbed. ‘How should I know that?'

By the last chapter our man has been unemployed for several months, his only close friend has died of drink and exposure, and he has been arrested as accessory to an unusually futile crime. Heavy drinking has so washed out his chances of a sex-life that he has never considered one, and this is lucky. In his community sex leads to children and marriage, and who would gladly bring children into such a community? It is collapsing. The only choice is, collapse with it or clear out. If he had children his decent instincts would lead him to collapse with it. So his worst habit allows him a hopeful ending.

I began the last paragraph but two with an extended rhetorical
question which I had better answer.
Gentlemen of the West
could only be written by someone who knew and liked building-workers and, without approving the harsh parts of their lives, found release, not confinement, in imagining them. It had to be written by a mother.

T
he boy was out of breath. He had been running hard. He reached the bus stop with a sinking heart. There was only a solitary woman waiting – the bus must have gone.

‘Is the bus away missus?' he gasped out.

The woman regarded him coldly. ‘I really couldn't say,' then drew the collar of her well-cut coat up round her face to protect herself against the cold wind blowing through the broken panes of the bus shelter. The boy rested against the wire fence of the adjacent garden taking in long gulps of air to ease the harshness in his lungs. Anxiously he glanced around when two middle-aged females approached and stood within the shelter.

‘My it's awfy cauld the night,' said one. The well-dressed woman nodded slightly, then turned her head away.

‘Ah hope that bus comes soon,' said the other woman to her companion, who replied, ‘The time you have to wait would sicken ye if you've jist missed one.'

‘I wonder something is not done about it,' said the well-dressed woman sharply, turning back to them.

‘Folks hiv been complainin' for years,' was the cheerful reply, ‘but naebody cares. Sometimes they don't come this way at all, but go straight through by the main road. It's always the same for folk like us. If it was wan o' these high-class districts like Milngavie or Bearsden they wid soon smarten their ideas.'

At this point a shivering middle-aged man joined them. He stamped about impatiently with hands in pockets. ‘Bus no' due yet Maggie?' he asked one of the women.

‘Probably overdue.'

Her friend chipped in, ‘These buses would ruin your life. We very near missed the snowball in the bingo last week through the bloody bus no' comin'.' The man nodded with sympathy.

‘Gaun to the bingo yersel' Wullie?'

‘Naw. Ah'm away to meet ma son. He's comin' hame on leave and is due in at the Central Station. Ah hope this bus comes on time or Ah might miss him.'

‘Oh aye – young Spud's in the army ower in Belfast. It must be terrible there.'

‘Better that than bein' on the dole.'

‘Still Ah widny like bein' in Belfast wi' all that bombin' and murder.'

‘Oor Spud's got guts,' said the man proudly.

The boy leaning on the fence began to sway back and forth as if he was in some private agony.

The well-dressed woman said loudly, ‘I shouldn't wonder if that fence collapses.'

The other three looked over at the boy. The man said, ‘Here son, you'll loosen that fence if you don't stop yer swingin'.'

The boy looked back in surprise at being addressed. He gradually stopped swaying, but after a short time he began to kick the fence with the backs of his heels as if he was obliged to keep moving in some way.

‘You wid think the young wans nooadays all had St Vitus dance,' remarked the man.

The well-dressed woman muttered, ‘Hooligans.'

It was now becoming dark and two or three more people emerged from the shadows to join the queue. The general question was asked if the bus was away, and answered with various pessimistic speculations.

‘Hi son,' someone called, ‘you'd better join the queue.' The boy shook his head in the negative, and a moody silence enveloped the gathering. Finally it was broken by a raucous female voice saying, ‘Did you hear aboot Bella's man? Wan night he nivver came
hame. When he got in at eight in the morning she asked him where hud he been. Waitin' for a bus, said he.'