Lambs to the Slaughter (2 page)

Tommy sighed, in an exaggerated manner, as if he could not believe that Len Hopkins was being so stupid.

‘Of course I don't think I can buy your soul for a glass of lemonade,' he said. ‘I know that you're a man of principle – as I am myself – but you can't blame me for hoping that, for just once in your life, you'll see reason, now can you?'

‘I can see reason well enough,' Len said. ‘And my reason tells me that a strike would ruin this industry.'

‘It'll be ruined if we
don't
strike,' Tommy countered. ‘Don't you realize how many pits have closed down since the war?'

‘And don't
you
realize that this Tory government wants to close down even more – and that a second strike in two years will give it just the excuse it's looking for?' Len asked.

‘I'll tell you one thing . . .' Tommy began.

But then, instead of telling him anything, he began coughing violently.

‘Is that real?' the woman asked Harry Price, as she watched the scene at the bar being played out.

‘Is what real?' Price asked.

‘The coughing fit. Or is he just stalling, while he comes up with a new argument?'

‘Oh, it's real enough,' Harry said. ‘He's got what the experts call pneumoconiosis, though to us miners it's just “black lung”. It comes from breathing in all that coal dust and silica down the pit.'

‘And is it serious?'

‘In some cases – like Tommy's – it's very serious. Most people round here don't think he'll live to see next Christmas.'

Tommy was continuing to cough, and Len Hopkins took a couple of steps sideways and laid his hand gently on the other man's heaving shoulder.

‘Take it easy, lad,' he advised.

Slowly, the coughing subsided, and Tommy reached out for his glass of lime cordial and took a small sip.

‘Better now?' Len asked sympathetically.

‘I'll better be when you start thinking straight,' Tommy said. He looked Len straight in the eyes. ‘Listen, lad, this strike won't be just about wages – we want compensation for all the miners who've had their health destroyed by working down the pit. That's only right and proper, isn't it?'

‘Yes,' Len agreed sombrely. ‘It's only right and proper.'

‘And the thing is,' Tommy pressed on, sensing he'd gained the advantage, ‘your support could be vital in getting us that.'

‘I'm only one man,' Len said. ‘I can't alter anything.'

‘Now you know that's not true,' Tommy said. ‘There are certain miners whose word carries more weight than others – and you're one of them. With you backing us . . .'

‘That isn't going to happen.'

‘. . . we could win the ballot. But without you . . .'

‘I'm sorry, Tommy, I really am,' Len said – and he sounded it. ‘Now, given your condition, I understand how you feel, and if I was in your shoes, I'd probably feel the same.'

‘That was a bit below the belt, wasn't it?' Zelda asked Harry Price.

‘It was, the way it came out,' Harry agreed, taking a thoughtful, but generous, slug from his pint of bitter. ‘But I don't think it was intended that way. Len's just trying to be honest – like he always is.'

Tommy Sanders swayed a little, then steadied himself.

‘And if I was in
your
shoes,' he said, his voice thick with malice, ‘if I had no family to follow in my footsteps – then I might feel the same as you do. But I very much doubt it.'

‘Now that really
was
below the belt,' Harry whispered.

‘What makes you say that?' Zelda wondered.

‘Len had two sons – great lads by all accounts – but they were killed, along with Len's wife, in a car crash, twenty years ago now.'

‘Jesus!' Zelda said.

Things were turning nasty at the bar.

‘You're a bastard, Tommy Sanders!' Len Hopkins hissed.

‘You're the bastard,' Tommy shot back at him. ‘You're a mean, bitter bastard who wants to stop everybody else having what he can't have himself.'

Later, when the Mid Lancs police had become involved, there were people who would claim that it was Len who launched the attack, though there were others – equal in number – who were prepared to swear that Tommy had started it. But whatever the truth, blows were exchanged before anybody watching really had time to grasp what was happening, Tommy punching Len on the jaw, and Len hitting Tommy hard on the nose.

Several of the miners – Harry Price among them – jumped to their feet and rushed over to the bar, grabbing the two combatants and pulling them apart.

‘Now, fellers, we don't want any trouble,' said the bar steward – approximately thirty seconds too late. ‘In a minute, I'm going to ask these lads to let go of you, and when they do, I want you to shake hands.'

‘I'd rather shake hands with the devil,' Tommy snarled, between gasps for breath.

‘And I'll not shake hands with him,' Len said. ‘But I didn't come here looking for a fight, and if you let me go, I'll leave quietly.'

The bar steward nodded, and the miners released their grip on Len.

Len walked towards the door, stopping only to exchange a few words with some miners, sitting at a table near the door, who supported his anti-strike stance.

Tommy turned to face the bar steward. ‘I'll have a whisky,' he said.

‘Are you sure you should, what with your condition and everything?' the barman asked dubiously,

‘I'm sure,' Tommy said, ‘and while you're at it, make it a double.'

Harry Price smoothed down his jacket and looked across the room to the seat where Zelda, the woman with whom he'd been looking forward to spending an erotic evening, should have been sitting – only to find that her place was empty.

Tommy picked up his whisky and knocked it back in one.

‘Another!' he said.

Len Hopkins had finished his conversation with his supporters, and had almost reached the door.

‘Somebody should do something about you!' Tommy Sanders called after him. ‘Somebody should fix you so you can never betray the working man again – you bloody Judas!'

They were harsh words – many would say
unjustified
words – and almost everyone who heard them that night would remember them the following morning.

T
he politicians on the morning radio programme had all had their say – the Conservatives obviously blaming the Labour Party for the crisis, the Labour Party naturally blaming the Conservatives – and now it was the turn of the show's resident pundit to give his own take on the situation.

‘The roots of the current problem lie in the miners' strike of 1972,' he said, in a calm, authoritative voice.

‘Is that right?' asked DCI Monika Paniatowski, taking the hot bread out of the toaster, and quickly dropping it on to the plate.

‘In the aftermath of that strike, the government felt it had been held to ransom by the National Union of Mineworkers, and to avoid ever finding itself in that position again, it decided to build up stocks of coal at both the pithead and the power stations.'

‘Must have seemed like a smart move, at the time,' Paniatowski said to herself, as she reached for the butter.

‘At the time, it seemed like quite a smart move,' the commentator unwittingly echoed, ‘but back then, of course, no one had any idea that the Egyptians and Syrians were planning to invade Israel during the Israelis' Yom Kippur religious holiday.'

‘That's not quite true,' Paniatowski said pedantically, ‘I imagine the
Egyptians and Syrians
had a pretty good idea it was going to happen.'

She walked into the hallway, stopping at the foot of the stairs.

‘Breakfast's nearly ready, Louisa!' she shouted. ‘Get yourself down here right now!'

‘When the war started to go badly for the Arabs, they sought to put pressure on Israel's Western allies by first curtailing the supply of oil, and then increasing the price,' the commentator told her. ‘In early October, it cost $3 a barrel, by mid-October it stood at $5, and would reach $11.63 by Christmas.'

‘Or to put it another way,' Paniatowski said, ‘it now costs me an arm and a leg to fill my little MGA with petrol.'

‘And what effect did the oil price hike have on overall economic planning?' the commentator asked.

‘It made using coal suddenly look like a pretty good idea?' Paniatowski suggested.

‘It made solid fuel more viable,' the journalist said. ‘Indeed, given the precarious state of the British economy, it made it an outright necessity. And the miners, realizing how much stronger their position had become, began to press for a large pay rise by taking industrial action. And that, in a nutshell, is the story of how we reached the point at which we began experiencing selective power cuts and the three-day week.'

‘Speaking of which, how long is it to
our
next selective power cut?' Paniatowski asked herself.

She glanced up at the kitchen clock, and strode into the hall again.

‘The electricity will be going off in five minutes, Louisa!' she shouted. ‘Have you got that? Five minutes!'

‘Just coming, Mum,' a sleepy voice replied from upstairs.

‘Well, make sure you are,' Paniatowski replied.

As she passed the hall mirror, she noticed the rueful smile that was playing on her lips.

And it might well be rueful, she thought, because after all those years of listening to the way other women talked to their children – and promising herself that, in the highly unlikely event she ever became a parent, she'd never sound like them – she had become a carbon copy of all those mothers. And the worse thing was, she told herself, as the rueful grin widened into a joyous smile, she couldn't possibly have been happier about it.

Becky Sanders had awoken in darkness and dressed by candlelight that morning, but by the time she set off for her grandfather's house, the power for Bellingsworth had been switched back on.

It had become a regular part of Becky's routine to visit the old man before she left for school every morning. She didn't do this on the instructions of her parents – they took little or no interest in any of her activities – nor had anybody else, her grandfather included, even so much as hinted that it might be a good idea. She did it because she
wanted
to do it – she did out of both love and pity.

When she arrived at his house that particular morning, she found her grandfather sitting, as usual, in his favourite battered armchair, with a chipped enamel bowl on his knee.

‘How are you feeling today, Granddad?' she asked.

‘Not too bad,' Tommy Sanders replied, though evidence of the black and red phlegm at the bottom of the bowl showed he was lying.

‘So what's it to be this morning?' Becky asked, with forced cheerfulness. ‘The full cooked breakfast? Or would you just like toast and jam?'

‘I don't fancy any food at all,' Tommy Sanders replied. ‘But a cup of tea would go down a treat.'

‘You have to eat, Granddad,' Becky said severely.

‘I know,' the old man agreed, then added unconvincingly, ‘I'll have something later.'

It was then that Becky noticed that her grandfather's best sports jacket was draped over the back of the chair, and that he was wearing the trousers that went with the jacket.

‘Are you planning to go out, Granddad?' she asked.

‘No,' the old man replied. ‘Why did you ask that?'

‘Because of the way you're dressed.'

‘Oh, this is just what I put on last night, to go to the Institute.'

‘So why are you wearing the same things this morning?'

‘To tell you the truth, I haven't been to bed yet.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because I didn't think I'd sleep, and it seemed pointless to go upstairs and just lie there.'

‘You have to look after yourself, Granddad,' the girl said.

‘I know, I know,' the old man replied wearily.

‘You're the one who persuaded me I was clever enough to go to university. I'd never even have considered it if it hadn't been for your encouragement. And if I
do
get in . . .'

‘You will.'

‘. . . and I end up walking on to the stage to collect my degree, I want you sitting in the audience.'

‘I'll be there,' Tommy promised.

‘You'd better be.'

But they both knew it was never going to happen. It would be four years before Becky was accepted by a university and another three years before she graduated – and Tommy would be long dead by then.

Becky put the kettle on, and spooned some tea into the teapot.

‘When I was working down the pit, I used to dream of retirement,' Tommy said.

‘Did you?' asked Becky, who'd heard this particular refrain many times before.

‘But back then, you see, I always pictured retirement as being very different to what it is now. I thought I'd be healthy and vigorous – I thought I'd be able to go for long walks in the hills.'

‘Everybody has to grow old, Granddad,' Becky said, reaching into the fridge for the milk.

‘And I thought I'd have your grandma by my side,' Tommy continued.

A single tear ran down Becky's cheek.

‘We
all
miss Grandma,' she said.

‘Well, I've had my time and there's no point in dwelling on it,' the old man continued. ‘It's other people I worry about now.'

‘If you're worried about me, then there's no need . . .'

‘It's these young miners, you see,' her grandfather interrupted her. ‘They never had to live through the 1930s, so they've no idea what it was like. Some of them – not all, by any means, but some of them – only care about this week's wage packet, so they can pay off an instalment on their colour televisions and their new sofas. They don't see that if they won't stand and defend their ground, the bastar— the beggars . . . who run the mines will cut that ground right from under them.'