No Man’s Land. Simon Tolkien
couldn’t. She knew they couldn’t afford a strike – not with the colder weather coming. The winter before had been bad enough; and everyone said that this one would be worse. But her husband wouldn’t listen whenever she tried to talk to him about her worries: it was as if she didn’t exist.
She felt as if there were taut strings inside her body that were being tightened like piano wire until they were almost at breaking point. When she tried to exert herself she coughed and coughed, and had to grope her way up the rickety stairs to her bedroom where she lay completely still, listening to the sounds of the street below coming up to her through the open window like the noise of the sea, receding away from her on an ebb tide.
In the end it was a safety issue that lit the fuse. Daniel and his crew had been refurbishing a department store on the north side of Oxford Street. It was a large job needing to be done quickly so that the shop could reopen in time for the Christmas season, and the contractor had been cutting corners by using high ladders instead of scaffolding for painting the high ceilings. Some were so high that the painters had to work, balanced at ninety degrees almost on the top rung, and it wasn’t long before a man fell, suffering appalling injuries when he hit the ground. The union demanded proper scaffolding be installed and refused to carry on working until it had been put in place, and the employers responded by bringing in new labour. They saw the strike as an opportunity: times were hard and the strike-breakers were prepared to work for lower wages.
Daniel was tireless, toiling day and night to organize the picket lines that the blacklegs had to cross to go to work, but the strikers’ shouts and curses didn’t deter them. And as the refurbishment continued apace, the strikers’ anger grew. Police were called in to keep the peace and stood in a solid blue line between the two sides, their truncheons at the ready. The rain ran down their capes into pools on the ground, but they stood motionless, ignoring the strikers’ fury, indifferent to their frustration.
‘How long will this go on?’ Lilian asked her husband, confronting him in the hallway on one of his rare visits home.
I don’t know,’ he said. ‘As long as it takes. Until the owners see reason.’
‘And what if they don’t? What do we live on?’
‘The union will help.’
‘A few shillings,’ she said contemptuously. ‘That won’t pay the rent.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said wearily. He was dog-tired – all he wanted to do was sleep. ‘We’ll have to do our best, make sacrifices. We have justice on our side – it’s a cause worth fighting for.’
‘Worth starving for, worth dying for,’ she shot back, mimicking her husband’s phrase, echoing it back to him, invested with all the despair she felt inside.
‘It won’t come to that, Lil,’ he said, moving past her to go up the stairs. ‘I promise you it won’t.’
Another week passed and she’d had enough. There was nothing to eat in the house and no money to pay the tradesmen who came knocking at the door. Next it would be the bailiffs. Daniel talked about justice but there was no justice in leaving her alone and abandoning his family. For Adam’s sake he had to come home, give up the cause once and for all and start over; she would make him if she had to. Wrapping herself in her thin overcoat, she set out to find her husband.
It was getting towards evening and the strike-breakers were beginning to come out, keeping their heads down, hurrying between the lines of police to where the special buses laid on by the employers were waiting to take them away. Another week’s work done and Sunday, a day of rest, to look forward to, at home or in the snug at the public house with beer in their bellies and a warm fire in the hearth.
For the strikers it was too much. Enraged by their own impotence, hating the scabs who had stolen their jobs, imagining the pay jingling in the pockets of their enemies’ overalls, they held up their banners and pressed forward against the phalanx of police, trying to find a way through the human barrier. And when it stayed firm, they began to throw stones. It was what the police had been waiting for. At a whistled command from behind, their front rank charged forward, laying about them indiscriminately with their truncheons and trampling the strikers, who fell down under their blows.
Daniel was hit on the side of the head and lost consciousness. When he came to, he was lying on his back in the gutter; he opened his eyes and then closed them immediately as the darkening sky came hurtling down towards him. His head ached and his shoulder hurt, and he swallowed back hard on the vomit that had risen up into his throat, mixing with the blood in his mouth. Slowly, very slowly, he pushed himself up on to his knees, looking back down the road to where his workmates were fighting a losing battle with the police. Everything was blurred and confused: a melee of movement; a cacophony of noise – cries and shouts and something else, a beating, and someone running towards him, calling out his name. Someone he recognized – Lilian, his wife Lilian, with her beautiful blonde hair flying out behind her as it had when she was a girl and they had first met faraway by the sea – in another time, another century.
She was shouting: ‘No, no, no,’ running towards him and shouting: ‘No,’ and something else was running too – behind him where he could not see. The beating was the beating of hooves on the asphalt. In despair he held out his hands towards his wife – whether to stop her or to receive her he didn’t know. His back contracted, shrinking up, anticipating its own destruction. But miraculously the horse passed over him, leaving him unscathed and able in the next instant to watch his wife being crushed to death only a few feet in front of where he knelt.
Afterwards he crawled forward, indifferent to the madness all around him, and covered her body with his, even though he knew that he had failed her and that it was too late to redeem his fault.
Daniel broke the news to his son in a flat, matter-of-fact way. He told him that he was responsible and that none of it would have happened if he’d been a better husband and a better father. And when Adam rushed away up the stairs he didn’t follow him but just went out the back door and stood with his hands thrust deep into his pockets under the empty washing line, gazing up at the stars with dry, unblinking eyes.
Adam buried his face in his pillow, turning, winding the sheet around his body. And from outside he could hear a cry, human but inhuman, coming up from down below. Falling and rising on unconscious breath, it was the cry of a broken spirit, someone alive who could not bear to be alive. He heard it again five years later in the trenches in France on the night after battle and recognized it for what it was.
He slept, stupefied by exhaustion, and woke up in the early light and for a moment didn’t know. And when he did, he pulled on his clothes quickly. He had to keep moving. Across the landing, his father was asleep, lying face down on the bed in all his clothes. His shoes hung over the edge and Adam thought of untying them, but he couldn’t. It was his mother’s bedroom too and he couldn’t bear to go in there. In fact he couldn’t bear to be in the house. Downstairs her sewing machine and her needlework, her spectacles and her apron, all spoke of her continuity, but her coat missing from the stand by the door told a different story. She was gone; she wasn’t coming back. And each time he remembered, it was like the twist of a sharpened knife in a raw, open wound.
He went out into the street. But now he saw it with new eyes: it was a tawdry show, a mockery of life. Cabbage stalks and refuse in the gutter; horse manure; a dead cat. And the uncertain sympathy on people’s faces made him remember when all he wanted to do was forget. He walked on quickly but aimlessly – anywhere to get away, and found himself outside the church his mother used to take him to. He gazed up at the high tapering spire pointing like a compass needle towards heaven and wondered if it was a meaningless gesture. Was there anyone up there? If there was, the God in the clouds wasn’t a loving God as his mother had said. Adam knew better now: God was more cruel and vengeful than even Father Paul could imagine. Adam shook his fist at God and turned away.
He was hungry; famished. He wanted to die