The Blackpool Highflyer (12 page)

'Well,' said the long-haired fellow, 'I'd better start at the
beginning of you're asking that.'

'Will you step in here for a pint?' I said, nodding towards
the Evening Star.

The long-haired man shook his head. 'Don't drink,' he said.

'Would you not have a lemonade or something?' I said, and
his eyes fairly lit up at that, so we stepped into the pub.

'It's been so hot out there today,' said the long-haired fel­low, putting his
hat
and his papers down on the edge of the
red billiard table. But it was no cooler in the pub, of course:
just a different heat, with beer smell and cigar smoke mixed
in.

Looking across at the papers, my eye caught the words
beneath 'The Socialist Mission'. They read, 'Formerly "The
Anarchist Dispatch'".

I had a glass of Ramsden's for myself, and the socialist mis­sionary took his lemonade, which he drank off in one. Then
he fell to looking at me, sideways, like, half trying to see
round his hair, and half hiding behind it.

'You're anarchists as well as socialists, are you?' I asked. I
was talking as if there were many, but before me was just the
one fellow.

'The two go along a little way together,' he said, and then
he was off, talking at me, but not
looking
at me once.

He started, as threatened, from the beginning. It was all
about how the liberal-labour men had not improved the con­dition of the working man as they had promised, and nor had
the trade unions, and so a new type of organisation was
wanted. What was needed was the socialisation of the means
of production. 'We must have a straight-aiming struggle,' he
said, and 'Alan Cowan believes that class war is its most effi­cient locomotive.'

Well, at that word I cut in: 'Where do you stand on the rail­ways?'
The long-haired fellow moved his hair about for a while,
steeling himself to say something. He had rather long, fine
fingers, and I thought: he's never done a hand's turn. He was
not part of the working life himself, but a kind of shadow, or
echo of it.

'Railways
...'
he said at last: 'Run by crooks, and should be
nationalised.'

'And as to Blackpool and wakes and holidays, and so on?'

'Blackpool?' he said. 'Well, I don't call that a very worthy
holiday place. The working people go there and what hap­pens? They loiter on the sands by day, suffocate in some
cheap place of amusement by night.'

'Been to Blackpool yourself, have you?'

The socialist missionary gave a kind of shrug, as if he
didn't
knozv
whether he'd been to Blackpool. 'What's that got
to do with it?' he said at last, and with a little more of the
brass neck to him.

'If not Blackpool, where might they go instead?' I asked
him.

'Well, they might get out into the country once in a while,
but that's not
...
I do wish Alan was here because he puts it all
over so much better than I ever could, but the question is: does
Blackpool help the working class fight or does it hinder?'

'I don't know,' I said.

'Take this town, Halifax,' said the long-haired fellow. 'It's
like a bottle with the stopper in. Fifty-one weeks of the year,
everyone's cooped up in the mills, prisoners of the wage slav­ery. Then for one week - wakes
-
the stopper comes off and
it's the mad dash to the seaside. Now if that didn't happen
there's a fair chance the bottle would explode.'

'Why?' I said.
'Why
would it explode?'

He sighed, looked down sadly at the empty lemonade
glass. 'I forgot to say the bottle is a bottle of selzer, or maybe
beer. Something volatile, any road. Something
likely
to
explode. Alan has it right but I can't remember exactly how
he puts it.'

'Selzer will not expand in the bottle in any circumstances,'
I said, finishing my Ramsden's.

'Well,' said the socialist,'... we'll see about that.'

I put down my pint pot. 'So you're dead set against Black­pool because folk like it?'

'In a way yes,' said the long-haired fellow, who now brushed
his hair right back from his face as if he'd suddenly lost all
patience with it. 'Everything that increases the dissatisfaction of
the working man must push him in a revolutionary direction.'

'And what do you think of Scarborough?'

'That's another . . .' And here he muttered something I
couldn't catch.

'Another what?' I said, and he came out with it this time,
for he was a fellow who warmed up by degrees.

'Another
latrine,'
he said.

'Well then,' I said, 'would you blokes in the Socialist Mission
ever stop a train that was carrying working people to Black­pool or Scarborough? Would you ever wreck it, I mean?'

At this, he walked over to the billiard table and took up his
newspapers again. 'Why do you ask that?' he said turning
around, the newspapers once more under his arm.

I told him.

'Well,' he said. 'You must come along to our meeting to
know more, and you must speak to Mr Cowan himself. But
I'll tell you here and now that one difference between us and
the standard run of liberal-labour idiots is that we under­stand there is a fever for action in the mills and factories of all
the working towns in the country, and if the workers won't
rise of their own accord they must be pushed to it.'

I stared at the fellow, with the happy ringing of the till in
the background. Had he just owned up to murder?

'But no,' he went on. 'We didn't wreck your excursion.' He
half smiled in a way I didn't much like; I'd seemed in a funk,
and that had galvanised him in some way. The smile changed
as I watched, though, becoming something a little pleasanter.
He was only a kid; good-looking, in a way; and Clive Carter

would have killed for that hair of his. He should have been
out courting on a Friday night like this.

'What's your name?' he asked me.

I was tired of being asked for my name, for I felt I was being
written down in all sorts of bad books, but I gave it him any­way. 'Jim Stringer,' I said.

'Jim Stringer,' he repeated. You felt he wasn't given a name
very often, and that when he
was,
he made the most of it.

'What's yours?' I said.

'Paul,' he said. And he nodded to me before walking back
out into the street.

I took up the paper he'd passed to me and read it over a lit­tle. It was all a lot of big, windy promises: 'There will be a
general expropriation of vast proportions'; 'All distinctions
between classes and nations will be lost', and so on. Half the
articles were headed: 'Alan Cowan writes', others were 'by a
comrade'. I knew there was something queer about it from
the outset but for a little while I couldn't say what. It was like
looking at a night sky and slowly working out that there was
no moon. Somewhere or other, there should have been a little
complicated dull part where you were told who it was
printed by and where, and how you might get in touch with
the editor. But there was no such thing to be seen.

I was too late for Early Doors at the Palace, and too late for the
start, come to that, but I was let in after the first turn.

I was put into the one seat left, which was in the stalls and
directly in front of the orchestra. As I sat down, I knew I'd
made a bloomer in coming, for I could hardly breathe. There
were too many hot, red people in the theatre and not enough
air to go round.

The sweat began rolling off me as a board was put up
announcing a dog circus. The fellow in charge of the dogs
wore a tailcoat and high collar. He had long hair flattened to
his small head by Brilliantine and sweat. He stood still and
sweated, swaying slightly as his dogs jumped about him. He
looked like a tadpole, and his dogs would leap and hang
quivering in the air like jumping fishes. At the moment that
any dog made a jump, the fellow with the big drum, who was
about four feet away from me, would hit the biggest of his
cymbals, worsening my brain ache by degrees. Why can't
those damned mutts keep down, I began muttering to myself.
And why would the old fellow next to me not keep still?

After the dog circus came six men who were a German or
Hungarian band. Oompah music. As they played, the orches­tra played along, doubling the noise and doubling the heat;
there was a lot of cymbal stuff from the drummer, and I
would have liked to belt him with one of the bloody things.
The band played against a painting of a pale-blue mountain;
the colour dazzled, and I could not look at the mountain top,
which was blinding white.

The bill-topper was the ventriloquist, the one I'd come to
see, but he turned out to be the sort I don't like: the kind with
a walking figure.

As the floods went up he was leaning on the figure, or the
figure was leaning on him. It was an English Johnny, or
Champagne Charlie. You could tell by the tailcoat and high
collar. The head was weird: round, white and lumpy, like the
moon or some great fungus, and the grey eyes seemed to be
sliding to the side, as if the figure was sad and ashamed at
having a perfectly round head. The ventriloquist was also got
up like a toff: frock coat and top hat. He was breathing
deeply, trying to get a breath in the heat like all of us, and
preparing for the walk. The doll, of course, was not breathing
at all. Any sort of weather was nothing in
his
way.

The walk started, and as usual a great cheer went up at the
same time as the walking music started up. It was as if a
famous cripple had got to his feet and taken his first steps in
years. The ventriloquist's left hand was at the figure's back,
and he was working the levers that swung the legs. The figure
moved by a forward jerk of the left leg, which woke up the
right one, and brought it swinging along behind, and the left
arm rode up towards the chest every time this happened. The
doll's right arm was in the hands of the ventriloquist.