Miss Purdy's Class (39 page)

Joey managed to get to his feet. His legs felt rubbery. He stood looking up at the man, whose cheeks were covered in stubble, his eyes glassy with drink.

‘Dad?’

Joey didn’t need to ask. He knew who it was, that hunched back which had moved away from them all along the entry that cold morning.

‘Dad, it’s me. Joseph.’ He had to struggle almost to remember his name. It felt a long time since he had been Joseph Phillips. ‘It’s Joey.’

The man’s gaze swivelled towards him. At the blankness in his father’s eyes, Joey felt something give way inside him.

‘Dad!’ He grabbed the man’s arm, pulling at it in a frenzy. ‘Dad, it’s Joey! You’re my dad – and Lena and Kenny and Pol’s! Dad –
Dad
!’ Sobs choked out of him. ‘There’s no one else, Dad – I dunno where they’ve all gone!’

Wally Phillips jerked his arm violently, sending Joey tripping and stumbling backwards. He landed on the hard step and jarred his back.

‘Get off of me, yer little bugger! What’re you playing at? Go on – gerroff!’

And Wally staggered off up Digbeth, cursing and shouting.

Joey watched him go, his back disappearing again.

And then he couldn’t see. Trying to look out through his tears was like looking through the blur of the murky pub glass.

S
UMMER
H
OLIDAYS

Thirty-Five

Gwen didn’t see the
Daily Worker
until Wednesday, the first day of the summer holidays. She read Monday’s edition in the party offices, sitting near Daniel as he banged away on a typewriter, scowling with concentration. The room was abuzz with activity. The nationalist uprisings against the republican government in Spain had galvanized the party into action in a way none of them had seen before. New members were joining at an unprecedented rate.

‘ANSWER TO THREAT ON SPAIN’ read the banner headline. ‘THOUSANDS CHEER POLLITT’S CALL TO ACTION.’

Most of the news was about the London demonstrations. Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party, had been speaking in Trafalgar Square.

‘You not only have to reckon with the people of Spain,’ he had told the huge crowd, thundering a challenge to the fascists and militarists. ‘You have to reckon with the people of every land where democracy is in existence. Behind the Spanish people stand millions of men and women of all political parties who are not going to stand idly by, while your gang of parasites, moral perverts and murderers get away with it.’

Gwen read the report about the march on Tonypandy, swelling with pride. They had been part of this great movement, making things happen!

‘Sixty thousand of us, it says here!’ she exclaimed to Daniel.

He looked round at her, his face intense. ‘That’s just the beginning. Our time’s come. We’ve got to carry it through now.’

She could never have foreseen how totally their lives were about to be taken over by the party. What had begun as a nationalist uprising in Spain quickly turned into a civil war, and the Communist Party seemed to be the movement responding most promptly and vocally for the republican cause.

Gwen spent almost all her time now with Daniel and the other party workers. Daniel was in constant demand as a speaker.

In the early days of the war in Spain, it looked as if cooperation between the Communist Party, the Labour Party and the Birmingham Council for Peace and Liberty would be possible. ‘About time they saw sense,’ Daniel said. ‘We can’t afford divisions now.’

Of course they all had to work together to fight the evil of fascism! There were to be joint meetings and rallies all round the city, public addresses in parks and halls and at factory gates in support of the workers’ organizations in republican Spain.

The party offices were in a constant fever of activity: organizing meetings, printing leaflets, organizing speakers and ‘chalkers’ to announce them. Now the holidays were here, Gwen was free to throw herself into the work, caught up in the emotional intensity of it all. A national committee was formed, the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, especially to support the republic.

All of them were caught up in a cause bigger and more important than their own needs and lives. Gwen found herself feeling ashamed of her petty jealousies about Esther Lane. She didn’t much like Esther whose bossy ways grated on her, but she could see her genuine commitment to the cause. And Daniel was far too busy to be paying Esther any attention. The truth was, he was almost too busy to pay any to Gwen either, but she swallowed down her periodic feelings of rejection and neglect. They were working for the party, for the revolution, compared with which individual feelings were as nothing.

One morning when Gwen arrived, the offices were already very busy. Esther was talking on the telephone in a loud voice to someone from a church group supporting Spanish aid, party workers were moving busily to and fro and a collection of cartons was piled just inside the door.

‘What are these?’ she asked Daniel, who was poring over a paper on a desk with Jim Crump, one of the main party officials.

‘Pamphlets. From King Street,’ Daniel said, without looking up. ‘Can you get some of them out? We’re going to the works along Bradford Street today – we’ll start with them there. We’ve asked them to send more for the sixteenth.’

King Street was the party’s national HQ. Gwen reached into the top box and pulled out a handful of red pamphlets. They were titled simply,
Spain
. The party was planning a special demonstration in the Bull Ring.

By the late afternoon that day she went out with Daniel and some of the others to Bradford Street in time for the end of the factories’ afternoon’s shifts, carrying bundles of the
Daily Worker
and the
Spain
pamphlet. Daniel had his big canvas bag slung over his shoulder. Gwen walked beside him, though he felt remote, caught up in his work. And Herbert began needling him again about the Catholic Church and its role in Spain. How could he be a Catholic when the Church was officially backing the nationalist cause?

‘Don’t start,’ she heard Daniel say tersely. He was frowning and she could hear the tension in his voice.

The Fernandez household was full of anguish over this. Theresa read the Catholic paper, the
Universe
, which was full of reports about Catholic neighbours killing one another, churches being burnt, nuns and priests being dragged out and shot by republicans, the very people whom Daniel was ardently supporting and she frequently said so. Gwen knew that Daniel, like many Catholics on the left, was torn in two by the dilemma and she was tempted to tell Herbert to shut up and leave Daniel alone.

They reached Bradford Street just before the factory bulls began to go off at the end of a shift. When the men streamed out of the works they were waiting with their pamphlets and papers. Sometimes a sympathetic factory worker would take a copy of the
Daily Worker
and leave it in the factory toilet, so others could get a look at it. Gwen handed the
Spain
leaflet into dirty, workworn hands. Some men appeared interested, but others said, ‘No, ta,’ with tired indifference, while others called them ‘bloody reds’ or walked straight past, ignoring them.

‘There’s a meeting in the Bull Ring – every Sunday evening,’ Daniel kept telling them. ‘Come and join us, comrades. Unite the workers. Together we are strong!’

By the evening, Gwen was off with Daniel on the speaking trail. Some evenings he did several, one after the other, and they had to have a car to get the speakers from one place to the next. Tonight there were only two meetings: Saltley followed by Alum Rock, and for once Esther needed to be elsewhere. Gwen sat in two drab halls, her stomach rumbling with hunger, while Daniel spelled out to his audience with apparently tireless passion the iniquities of the National Government and the means test, the betrayal of the working class by the Labour Movement, the plight of the Welsh mining towns and the Spanish republican causes of justice, collectivization and the power of workers’ movements. In the car on the way back he was still full of life.

‘I could see it in some of their faces tonight,’ he said, on fire with his own oratory. ‘They were hearing me. Really hearing. It’s no good, see, thinking you can just go out and feed people propaganda. It’s like Comrade Lenin said – the people have to have the political experience
for themselves
. They have to be
reborn
politically. They have to feel it in their
blood
.’

Gwen listened, leaning against his chest, tired and hungry. She could feel when he took a breath, the strong muscles of his chest. She leaned round and looked up at him.

‘Do we have enough money for fish and chips? I’m ravenous.’

Daniel laughed, though she could sense his impatience with her. He wanted response, debate. ‘You don’t leave the ground for long, do you?’

‘Well.’ She was determined not to rise to this. ‘An army marches on its stomach – that’s what they say. Anyway, aren’t you hungry too?’

‘Come to think of it, yes.’

She looked solemnly up at him. She was longing to spend some time with him. Although they were so much in each other’s company, they were seldom ever alone these days. She put her lips right up to his ear.

‘Are you coming back to Millie’s?’

Both of them knew what she meant. That they would sneak up the dark stairs, make love in the dip of the old bed. That she would hold him close, longing for a day when he would not have to get up and creep out again, to the dark streets, but that day had not come, nor could she see that it was going to. She would have to be content with being left to sleep alone.

‘D’you want me to?’

‘I wouldn’t have asked otherwise, would I?’ She kissed the tip of his nose.

‘You’re a very forward woman.’

They were both whispering, trying not to laugh and attract the attention of the party worker who was driving them. She
was
forward, she thought. Sometimes she felt like someone different altogether. Who was the person who had lived in Worcester and had been going to marry Edwin Shackleton? Did she miss her? No – scarcely ever. In those moments she was perfectly happy because Daniel had come back to her again, to be close, and that was all that mattered.

Daniel squeezed her. ‘I’m coming with you all right.’

Going back to Millie’s now felt like retreating into a different and increasingly irrelevant life, and the more caught up she became with the party the more glad Gwen was to stay out, even though it made her feel guilty.

Millie was seven months pregnant and was feeling huge and ungainly. Now the heat of the summer was here she was suffering with swollen ankles. The doctor had told her to rest and keep her feet up as much as possible, so she was no longer able to escape to her mother’s as often as she had done. Her face was puffy and her hair hung limp and straggly so that she looked quite altered. She was always complaining about her hair, of which she had been rather proud until now.

‘Why don’t you go and get it trimmed?’ Gwen had asked the day before, trying to be patient as she bustled about, just in from the party offices. There they were, she and Daniel, involved in making the revolution happen and all Millie could think about was her hair. ‘It’d make you feel better.’

‘Oh, it all feels too much effort.’ Millie was sprawled along the couch, sipping a cup of tea. ‘And Lance will keep on about me spending money. You know what he’s like. There’s some tea in the pot if you want it.’ Reproachfully, she said, ‘Where’ve you been again? You’re never in. I thought now school had broken up you’d keep me company more.’

‘Oh, I will – I’ll try.’ Gwen took her tea and sat on the chair opposite.

‘You’re always with Daniel, I suppose?’

Gwen felt her face light up at the mention of his name.

‘Mostly, yes.’ She managed not to make a face at the tea, which was lukewarm and bitter.

Millie sighed and looked at her. ‘I don’t understand you. I thought that Edwin chap of yours seemed very nice.’ After Edwin’s arrival and Millie and Lance having to look after him, Gwen had had to explain what was going on.

‘He
is
nice. I just don’t feel for him the way I do for Daniel.’

Millie almost glared at her. ‘You’re really
in love
, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Gwen was aglow.

‘What does that feel like?’ Millie pushed herself up a little on the cushions. Her ankles were mottled and puffy. ‘What does being “in love” really feel like?’

All Gwen could feel was a deep stirring inside her. How could you ever put that into words?

‘I’m not sure I can tell you. I just know I am.’

Millie sighed, putting her cup and saucer on the table. ‘Better you don’t tell me, anyway,’ she said grumpily. ‘I’d better not know what I’m missing. I’m not going to have the chance to find out now, am I?’

On 16 August there was a Communist Party weekend for Spain in Birmingham with a rally in the Bull Ring. Gwen stood out in the sun selling the
Spain
leaflets, looking over the sea of heads at the CP and BCPL banners and straining to hear the speakers as they railed against the neutral stance Baldwin’s government had taken on Spain. Between them they sold five hundred pamphlets in the centre alone, and there were other meetings scattered round the city.

As Gwen patrolled Spiceal Street that afternoon with her leaflets, a figure came towards her from the crowd whom she suddenly recognized. Small and urgent looking and dressed in a baggy cream frock patterned with huge blue roses.

‘Hello, dear.’

‘Oh!’ Gwen was startled. It was so strange to see another of the school staff in a different place. Though with Lily Drysdale it seemed less strange. ‘Hello, Miss Drysdale . . .’ Her mind raced. Lily Drysdale was here at the rally. Had she just come as an interested bystander or could it be that she too was a party member?

‘I’m a supporter of the BCPL,’ Lily Drysdale announced. Lily’s dress had short sleeves and with her soft, rounded arms protruding from them, she looked rather attractive. ‘Are you a Communist? A member, I mean?’