Crusaders (35 page)

At some point this logic had carried such clout with Joe that he binned his Labour card and joined the Tyneside branch of the
International Socialists. And it became the particular ritual – the very badge of Joe’s beliefs – that he and his fellows should sell the
Socialist Worker
paper all round Newcastle, in the commercial thoroughfares, the environs of the university, even outside the gates of the works. On certain evenings after school Martin would tag onto these rounds with his dad, who seemed glad of the
company
, and the chance to expound.

‘This is how you build a party, son. You get out and sell your papers, by
hand
. That way, something gets passed on, between people. It’s like, “Take this, pal, read it, think about it, pass it on …”’

Martin didn’t mind loitering in draughty precincts, was
happier
still casting an eye over female undergraduates. But what he liked best was following Joe through the doors and into the fray of the rowdy saloon bars of Byker and Battle Field. There, Joe’s exhortations were usually met by ribaldry and shouts for a pint. ‘Gerrit doon ya, man, it’ll dae ya good.’ But other times there were sharp words, even outright inebriate hostility. Martin enjoyed watching how his old man handled himself – manfully, patiently – when explaining to some rubicund loudmouth the fine points of the IS position. ‘Naw, naw,
listen,
will ye? We’ve got nee truck wi’ Soviet Russia. We call wor’sel Trotskyist. And that’s nee small thing to live up to.’

Joe could then segue with ease from how the struggle for a fair wage on Tyneside was much akin to that of the Viet Cong against the US imperium, or of blacks against tyranny in Rhodesia and South Africa. Martin saw the pictures on the news, he knew there were violent things afoot round the world. It impressed him that his dad seemed wise to them. It bothered him but slightly that no one else’s dad held anything like the same set of views.

It was not uncommon for them to trudge back to Heaton
without
a paper sold. But Joe never took the bottom line as his judge. ‘It’s sad, really it is, son, to see working people sat supping their wages, arguing against their own interest. I mean, look about you, eh? Even
you
see what the problem is, aye?’ Martin nodded. One night in Battle Field was sufficient to observe the dismal lot of
working people. It offended the eye no less than the spirit of
fairness
, and someone, clearly, needed to do something about it.

Martin couldn’t deny that he liked the look of himself. Encouraged by what the mirror dependably showed him, he developed a crisp diction, a certain bearing, a style of looking down his nose at less able adversaries – all of which he shared with Jenny. She made no claim over her son’s endowments, yet seemed to exude satisfaction in the handsome figure he cut. Joe, though, more or less openly regarded his son as a crude work-
in-progress
, to be coaxed and fretted over, albeit with patience.

If Jenny was Martin’s first female devotee, she was soon
supplanted
. Come 1971 the grammar school and the neighbouring Girls’ High underwent a shotgun marriage, a line of air-raid
shelters
between the two torn down so they might merge as a
comprehensive
. This was no great novelty to Martin – reliably surrounded by lasses from his early teens – other than that he and his then-
girl-friend
, a darkly pretty thing called Pamela Stark, now walked together to the same gates rather than parting with a juicy kiss on Jesmond Park Road. In sharing a classroom, though, Martin began to brood on Pamela’s deficiencies – the slackness of her jaw, not to say her mind, and the frayed state of her jersey and skirt. ‘You’re well away from that one, pet,’ Jenny observed after Pamela stopped calling round. ‘Her
people
, Martin, they’re not our sort.’

He knew in his boots he would always have girls on the go, for he was both a fancy footballer and a natural leader for the lads – Titch Harwood, Tony Charnley, Mike Tweddle – who were game to duck out at lunch hour to the pub by Jesmond Dene. There, a rogue’s gallery of underage drinkers, they supped Tartan Bitter at half a crown and hogged the table football, drawing a mute but giggly female audience. Martin began to tailor his swagger to their gaze, affecting a silver chain and a long sleek shag for his dark hair. He squired selected girls to see the Who at the Odeon, Roxy Music at City Hall, Rod and the Faces at the Mayfair, and in the sultry aftermath he generally found they had much the same thing in mind as he.

Flushed with erotic success, his appetite for kitchen-table dialectics waned. He agreed less readily with his dad, and tired of arguing the toss. For one thing, Joe didn’t
like
anyone – with the qualified exception of Keir Hardie (‘After about, 1911? He was sound. Didn’t treat his family so well, but neebody’s perfect.’). Otherwise, Joe’s general line was that someone, somewhere, was forever selling out the good old cause. It wasn’t sufficient that the union movement had grown, for history warned that the bigger unions put their own interests before their class. It wasn’t enough that working men be MPs, for their heads, too, were all too easily turned.

‘If that’s how you really feel’ – Martin groaned, the devil his advocate – ‘then why don’t
you
bloody well stand for election?’

‘It’s nee small thing, standing candidates, son. They don’t
make
it easy.’

But who were
they
? The boss class, in league with Satan? Martin’s considered response, on turning sixteen, was to join the Labour Party. He didn’t much warm to the chore of branch
meetings
, nor could he persuade Titch or Tony or even his most
compliant
girlfriend to join him. But it seemed a step further to being his own young man.

As if in spite, Joe’s militancy grew yet more entrenched. He had always thrown a slice of his wage into a union pot for men made redundant, but now he was donating to some clandestine ‘dispute fund’. Jenny was tight-lipped about the shrinkage to the pay
packet
, and Martin would have known no better, had it not been for a slow Sunday afternoon when she blew up at Joe within his earshot. ‘What about the boy? Do you not think you’ve a duty to him? His prospects? Have you thought of that? Or are you only bothered for your mates? I hope they’re bothered for
you
.’

‘That is the whole bloody
point
, Jenny. Martin’ll be right as rain.’

Joe then sought out his son in the quiet of his room, and they sat uneasily on his bed beneath the tacked wallposters of Led Zeppelin and
A Clockwork Orange
. ‘There’s a sort of a
conservatism
you get in women, son. It’s almost an instinct. They get so
bothered
for hearth and home – and I don’t mean to say that’s nowt.
But it does mean they’ve not always … got the heart, you might say, for fighting a tough corner? On principle, like?’

Martin remained in two minds. The spiel might have carried more clout had it been uttered within his mother’s hearing. As it happened, Jenny did not stew in her own juice. Rather, she set about refreshing the shorthand she had last purveyed at age sixteen, and obtained a secretarial job at the giant Purves-McArthur Pharmaceutical. Each morning she would commute to a site in Longbenton where the firm’s cleverest men conducted
leading-edge
research into new types of washing powder and sanitary towel. Joe made no fuss, enquiring respectfully of Jenny’s day when the family convened for tea, though he was partial to some sharp asides about low union take-up at the Purves plant. Jenny confined herself to a few quietly glowing remarks about her boss, Dr Colin Honeyman, PhD, whose dignities she carefully observed. New social opportunities came her way, she took up invites to dinner parties and dances, and Joe escorted her without gusto. Some nights they returned in silence, Joe in a high colour, Jenny heading directly upstairs. Martin felt for the slow decline in his father’s manly charm. But he could see where Joe had let things slide. He remained sure that his own brand could carry all before him.

Newcastle had begun to feel a little too small for him – dreary, fatally deficient in bright lights and crackle. The idea of London gained a foothold in his daydreams. There were trains leaving daily and nightly from Central Station. What if he just climbed aboard one? Similar fancies were perhaps the undoing of his
concentration
that day on the wintry school sports field when he raced for a fifty-fifty ball with an advancing keeper, realising far too late – committed to his slide – that he would come up badly short. Before he bit the turf, his ankle was wrecked – a blow for the First Eleven, but an outright sickener for Martin Pallister. ‘I hope you’ve got hobbies, bonny lad,’ said the doctor who cast his foot. ‘Or it’ll be whist for you every Saturday night ’til new year.’

With renewed application he hobbled along to Labour branch meetings, now convened at the Corner House pub, and there,
amid the drear standing orders, he found himself stuck on one thought. This Party liked to boast of a thousand members per
constituency
, yet if Martin’s branch were typical then there could hardly be two hundred in all Heaton & Wallsend. Ten-to-a-dozen was the monthly average, no more than two or three so-called ‘activists’, and they seemed active mostly on their own behalves – garrulous blokes, who had pressed for the move to the pub, the better to suit their favoured level of brow-beating (‘You’ve not a bliddy clue, you’). By a little and a little Martin asserted himself, for he sensed that one need only open one’s mouth and keep doing so. He was not anti-machismo – he simply preferred his own brand. One night it happened that one of those bluff activists – the joiner George Manton – told him without nicety to go fetch another plate of the cut sandwiches the landlord had laid on. On his return Martin tossed the paper plate and its fare into old George’s face, and held his ground as others then held them apart. ‘Aye! Aye! And you’re an ill-mannered
twat
,’ he shouted across the flailing arms.

By the time the Tories went to the country in February of 1974, Martin was off his crutches and running. He dogged and heckled the rabbit Tory candidate all round the constituency. On election day he was out the door by six in the morning, the better to
marshal
fellow volunteers, take polling-card numbers outside the
stations
and ferry old folks to vote in his second-hand Morris. Joe showed no more approval for his son’s vigour that day than he did for Labour’s victory. And that, frankly, boiled Martin’s piss.

He was the first Pallister to get to college, a reader of History at Newcastle. He had daydreamed awhile of the London School of Economics, but the living looked expensive, whereas this way he could live at home, whatever vexation was entailed. Joe made some leaden cracks about ‘middle-class playgrounds’ and indeed Martin felt uneasily favoured, what with Titch off to clerk at Barclays Bank and Tweddle vanished through the gates of Swan Hunter shipyard. But he couldn’t spurn his mother’s cash when it helped him out and into a shared flat. He cruised his courses, and
made a lightning ascent within college politics and the National Organisation of Labour Students. On a platform he had looks and delivery, he didn’t shy from popularity contests, and was firmly of a mind that he could win them.

He was less assured of how to finesse his relations with Joe, an ever more prominent face in hard-left circles and the vanguard of his party, now calling themselves the Socialist Workers. Martin could not always demur from the motion that Labour was a
wash-up
and a sell-out. And yet it remained the pony on which he was minded to bet. His own investment in marching causes was to join CND and the Anti-Nazi League, neither of which gave him offence. There were, perhaps, too many herbivore hippies in the former, and in the latter too many fans of the scrofulous punk rock. Gamely he tried, nonetheless, to stay abreast of new
readings
in anarchism and feminism, while keeping up his general studies in the opposite sex. A dilemma arose, in that all too many young women at Newcastle were well-bred and well-mannered southerners, to whom his doggishness proved catnip. It was a treat, he found, to fuck upwardly – to give these debutantes a taste of the North. It was also less bother, on the whole, for unlike his dad Martin was unwilling to take the raw edge of any female tongue. Ladyloves came and went, for many were the nights on the lash when he couldn’t restrain his thirst, turning red-faced and lecherous or outright unmanageable. Becky Markham from Kentish Town was the one who suffered longest and yet stayed. Her fair hair pinned up like a nurse, her dark hooded eyes so authentically serious, she betrayed a true concern for his welfare. He realised that she loved him, and he was mildly chastened.

In the spring of 1978 he and Becky took a train to London for a big Rock against Racism concert in Hackney, Martin keen to
sample
the atmosphere and ready, in principle, to give a fair hearing to the Clash. They stayed overnight with her parents Rodge and Pip, in a darkly shuttered terraced home of bare floorboards, littered with Pelican paperbacks and unpainted furniture, its outer walls assailed by ivy. Rodge and Pip were secondary-school teachers both, and though Martin would have genuinely liked for them to
like him he soon quit trying, for he had to adjudge them dour and patronising people. On their kitchen wall they made a proud show of a pair of old miners’ helmets, hung from nails, though clearly no one in the house had ever worked with anything
heavier
than a pen. Martin thought it risible – worse even than the
mining
museum at Beamish in Durham, where the staff clarted about in period pit-costume. The sacred relics were being collected while the industry still drew breath.

In the morning, after toast and stewed tea, Rodge sent the youngsters on their way with a clenched fist. ‘Stick it to the fascists, you two.’