Coasting (39 page)

“This isn’t a picket,” said Bob, the driver of the Cortina in which I was riding. “We’re nobbut spectators now. This is our pit—and the police won’t let us inside of a hundred yards of our own bloody gates.”

At one pit, somewhere in a suburb of Doncaster, I came within a whisker of getting our picket into serious trouble. The cars had been parked in a crescent of council houses a quarter of a mile from the pithead. After twenty seconds of shouting at an invisible bus, we were walking back to the car in the half-light. In our grandfatherly group of five, I was the youngest man by a year or two; everyone was in his forties or fifties. As we turned the corner into the crescent I
saw we were being followed in by a street-wide line of very young policemen. They were wearing capes and carried truncheons. With their bulging Adam’s apples, their sprays of acne and half-formed adolescent faces, they looked like the school bullies on the rampage. They were smacking their truncheons against their palms.

“Get a move on,” Bob said.

“But this isn’t the pithead—it’s just a council estate,” I said.

“No matter. Better get on back to the car, quick as you can.”

A milk cart was parked on the grass verge. Women in dressing gowns stood curiously at half-open front doors.

The police were so close behind us now that they were treading on our heels. Bob, still walking, still looking ahead, said: “Where you lads from then, the Met?” No answer. Just the crunch of marching feet, within inches of our own.

I turned round, to face a teenager with a face as blank as a scoop of lard. “This is a public street,” I said. “No one’s demonstrating here. No conceivable offense is being committed. We’re just walking to our—”

“He’s new here,” Bob said to the police; then, to me: “Come on, lad, don’t
argy
with them.”

As we piled into the car, eight policemen stood round, batons at the ready. They made a slow, menacing show of investigating the license plates, the tax disk, the tires, the windows. A gang of kids, they looked as if they were getting their morning ration of fun out of intimidating a few old farts.

“Let’s get out of here,” Bob signaled, and backed with exaggerated deliberation, doing everything by the book.

“Christ,” I said.

“That were
nothing.”

“That were just the Met,” said a voice in the back.

“Or the Army.”

“They certainly weren’t local lads.”

“Did any of the buggers have numbers on them?”

“No. Not a number to their name.”

It was part of the basic folklore of the miners’ strike that many of the “policemen” who were defending the pits were really soldiers in unmarked police uniforms. Men on picket duty claimed that they had recognized on the police lines their brothers, cousins, nephews; sons, even—men who were supposed to be serving in Ulster with the Army. None of these stories was conclusively proved, but they vividly dramatized the strikers’ sense of having been betrayed by their class, of having found enemies inside their own families. They felt that they’d been left in the lurch by other unions, by the working miners of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and by the Labour Party. The essential idea behind the rumors was that the men with the dogs and riot shields
ought
to have been the pickets’ brothers. The quisling policemen served as convenient symbols in a story that required several million Judases to account for the miners’ predicament now.

“Don’t you think you’d have got more support if you’d held a national ballot at the beginning?” I said. It was a dusty question, but it still seemed to need an answer.

“Look,” Bob said. “When Margaret Thatcher went to the Falklands, did she need a national ballot? She had a
mandate to govern
. Same as Scargill. He’s got a mandate from us. He was democratically elected, just like Thatcher. Why is a mandate so good and democratic when it comes to the Government and so ‘undemocratic’ when it comes to the miners?

“If we’d had a ballot back in March, it would have been a clear sign of weakness. It would have been giving in to the demands of the Tory Party right at the start.”

“But with a binding majority—” I said.

“We got our binding majority. When we elected Scargill and the rest of the executive.”

Briefly back to base at Kilnhurst, waiting for our next assignment, I stood at the brazier with Yorkshire George. “There’s no question about not winning,” he said. “We
have
to win this struggle, even if we’re still standing here next year. If we were to lose, they’d close this pit tomorrow, and hundreds like it. You know what that would mean? If this
pit were to close? This whole valley—everything you can see—it would be dead, completely
dead.”

I looked down at the territory we were defending. The hillside below us was gray with snow and slurry. A few figures were moving diagonally along it, carrying brightly colored plastic fertilizer bags. They were searching for scraps of loose coal to feed to their domestic fires. At the end of the valley there was a huddle of low, sooty blockhouses. Watching the people trudging past with their ironically gay plastic bags, I realized that until Yorkshire George had told me otherwise, I’d been looking at a landscape which I thought had died already.

On our next picket, we were walking away from the shouting when we were joined by a man from another pit. He and Bob were talking about moving on to Rossington, where contractors were due to go into the colliery in half an hour.

“How far’s Rossington?” I said.

The man separated from Bob and stood square in front of me, staring. Without a flicker of expression, his eyes went from my hat down to my boots. He turned back to Bob.

“What you doing with
that?”
he said.
“Sleeping
with it?”

Feeling sudden bars of steel in my cheeks, I said, “No, he wouldn’t have me.”

“Leave him be,” Bob said. “He’s all right. He’s only writing a book.”

The man spat a gob of pearly mucus on the ground. “I wouldn’t
touch
a fookin’ thing like that,” he said.

It was the extraordinary speed of it that was so English. It wasn’t my clothes—the Italian truckload of winter fashion wear had guaranteed that I couldn’t possibly look conspicuous on a picket line. It was accent, and nothing but accent.
How far’s Rossington
was enough to open the chasm of all the dirty and invidious distinctions of the English class setup. It was like the boy scout trick of starting a fire with two sticks. In three words, you could spark off the whole miserable, loggerheaded confrontation between state and private schools, owner-occupiers and council tenants, The North and The South, Chapel and Church, Labour and Tory,
those with jobs and those without. It was no good pretending to be a coaster here; you don’t coast in Doncaster, you sail with your class colors firmly nailed to the mast. And I was wearing a blue ensign defaced with crowns and anchors and the lord knows what.

It was a small, bitter, inconclusive skirmish in what Arthur Scargill himself had labeled a class war. It was probably the most revealing incident in my short career as a trespasser on the picket lines.

“Come on, lad,” Bob said. “That’s a daft bugger, any road. He just got out of bed the wrong side this morning.”

Kind as Bob was trying to be, there was a lot more to it than that.

The long strike achieved nothing. When, on March 3, 1985, nine days short of a year after the beginning of the strike, the miners gave up and went back to work, pickets outside Congress House in London wept when they heard the news. The strike did not seem to soften the heart of the National Coal Board when it came to closing down pits that were failing to show a substantial profit. As I write (in February 1986), the people of Blyth are still pleading with the Coal Board to give Bates’s Colliery a temporary, two-year reprieve. But the regional director of the board has described the pit as “a cancer on the face of the Northumbrian coast,” and Blyth is hoping against hope for something not far short of a miracle. I shall be surprised if this footnote
^*
turns out to be a happy one.

I left Blyth with the chutes still pouring coal into the waiting coasters, and I am afraid of what will happen between the writing of this sentence and the reading of it. As
Gosfield Maid
slipped out of the curious gray climate which Blyth had created round itself, and emerged into the sun, I found myself already missing the town and trying to remember the tune of “Oh, Geordie’s lost his plinker.” The pit,
the rickety straithes, the hugger-mugger dark terraces, were not cancerous; they were a small, proud, embattled bit of serious life in the blue and empty hills of Northumberland. Yet it is the tourist handbook which has become the arbiter on questions like this in modern England, and in the tourist handbook, Blyth doesn’t stand a chance. The
Geographia Guide to Northumbria
passes a death sentence on the town:

I sailed on deeper into the same chapter of that book, where the language turns fruity and rhapsodic, north through the Farne Islands to Lindisfarne, where the anchor dropped into water as clear as a block of Lucite. Long puckered fronds of brown kelp waved sleepily thirty feet down, and fleets of blue and gold cuckoo wrasse swam in the shadow of the boat. On a nearby rock, three seals were basking like gray sausages, their lumpy heads breaking clear of their skins. Surrounded by stories of St. Cuthbert and piles of old religious stones,
Gosfield Maid
might have sat nicely in the foreground of a colored postcard. Paddling ashore, raising a twinkling blaze of phosphorescence with every stroke under a three-quarter moon, I thought I’d never been in any anchorage so beautiful. But it was a cold, too famous beauty; a beauty to be admired, not lived with; a beauty of the kind to whom photographers say “the camera loves you,” meaning that he thinks you’re a spoiled and frozen bitch. In the morning I walked round Holy Island, nodding respectfully at everything I saw, and taking pictures, and thinking
beautiful, beautiful
, and wanting to move on.

For I was bound now for a mythical city. The ruins of Troy, Byzantium, Samarkand were much like the ruins of Lindisfarne. But to the north there was still a living city whose amazing Renaissance was talked of in places as far away even as London. People spoke of its lordly wealth as if it were the imaginary Dallas of the television serial. Its jeweled inhabitants walked ten feet tall. In the decaying
industrial fabric of Britain, the city was a marvel, a promise of the good life to come.

I had been to Aberdeen when I was sixteen. I remembered it for its gray, stony weight; a town of gloomy and genteel arcades, where I waited to catch the Shetland packet from a drizzly quay. It was like spending the day inside a gaunt cathedral, where everyone spoke in the sepulchral voices of church vergers.

Not now, though. Since the discovery of North Sea Oil, Aberdeen had become a boom town. In Hull and Blyth, I had amused myself by imagining Aberdeen as an astounding counterworld to Hull and Blyth. There’d be … there’d be … There’d be all-day, all-night saloons, their granite walls drumming with the amplified sound of Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash. You’d be able to buy Manhattans and Tequila Sunrises in dollars and cents. The deep, ravine-like streets would be solid with low-slung Cougars and Chevys, their chrome faces cast in the contemptuous grin that goes with big bucks. Stetsons … there’d definitely be Stetsons. And girls. In a city of roustabouts and troubleshooters, the girls would drip with diamanté. Even the corner shops would sell Wheaties and Jell-O and the “English muffins” that you can’t buy in England. There’d be rib shacks … hot tamales … burgers-to-go; poker games in basement clubs and doormen in tuxedos packing 38s.

Such a place would also help to balance the plot. After touching on so many failures and disappointments, the story needed a crock of gold somewhere. A few happy-go-lucky riggers in studded leather jackets, snorting lines of coke and putting back six-packs of Budweiser and Michelob, might go some way to dispelling the narrative gloom.

I reached Stonehaven, twelve miles short of Aberdeen. Its single-story gray stone terraces, its solitary Chinese takeaway, its air of having been closed for the duration sharpened my appetite for the city. In Stonehaven harbor I was tied up next to a fishing boat whose owner asked me where I was sailing to.

“Just Aberdeen tomorrow.”

“Aberdeen? You’ll be needing to hang on to your watch
when you’re in Aberdeen. And not only your watch, either,” he added, in the cheerful Scottish way that takes an excessive pleasure at the prospect of misfortunes to come.

This seemed to fit nicely too. Aberdeen was not merely the Byzantium of eastern Scotland, it had become its Sodom and its Gomorrah.

I left Stonehaven soon after 0800 on August 5. The wind was coming in feeble dog-breaths off the land, and the sea outside the harbor was riddled with curlicues of morning mist. I set a course of 040° to clear Girdle Ness and waited for the sun to show out of a sky that was evenly luminous from horizon to horizon. It was a pity there wasn’t a mile or two more of visibility; from out here I could so nearly see Aberdeen that several times I thought I spotted its bawdy and licentious outline on the film of mist which hid the hills.

By 0900, with only seven more miles to go, I realized that the boat was swaddled in thick fog. It had happened invisibly, the damp air slowly turning white as if it were aging round me. It was impossible to tell how deep the fog was. Sometimes it seemed to stand like a bright cliff, a mile away across the still water, sometimes the bow of the boat appeared to be gouging a hole for itself in the swirling wall of fog.

Peering, or trying to peer, ahead, I saw the boat’s head slowly swivel round against the lumps and ridges of the fogbank. We were turning in a wide circle. I pulled the wheel round to make the boat point straight again, but then found that the compass was reading 105°—on a heading to somewhere in the Friesian Islands. I brought it back to 040°, and again saw the boat’s bow begin to spin against the fog, while the compass card remained as if glued in its bowl.