The Storytellers (15 page)

Driving to the station in his own car, a young police officer gets stuck in traffic on Brixton road. A large group of youths appear in front of him from Ackers Lane and start gutting an electrical goods outlet. He crouches down, removing his uniform and prays for the traffic to move.

When looters approach Temples, a white-owned store where
blacks buy their fancy clothes, the cry goes out: “No, man, don't hit dis shop cause dat's where we get our clothes, right.” So Temples is spared.

* * *

Harvey gets a call from George Gilder around 5.30 p.m., telling him to go to Brixton pronto: riots are in progress. He wonders if 364 economists had been right after all, at least in one respect, or is it just that forces, pent-up over decades, have been goaded into life?

At 6.15 p.m., a police van is set alight. A young fireman, newly qualified, drives his truck to the scene with no idea what to expect. He is waved through the police cordon without a word of warning. As he approaches the hostile crowd he hears a loud thump on the side of his vehicle. Worried that he might have hit someone, he draws to a halt. His station officer yells at him to drive on and not to stop under any circumstances. A hail of missiles hits them. A concrete slab flies through the windshield rupturing his spleen. The ambulance carrying him to hospital is pelted with bricks.

Harvey arrives to find the place ablaze. There is now open warfare between the police and several hundred youths.

Brixton police call on other forces across London for assistance. Men assemble in the station yard and are issued with heavy plastic shields. Their helmets are wholly inappropriate and the shields not fireproof. Even the vehicles they must use have no protection and the radios frequently fail.

At 6.30 p.m., from the back of a squad car, Harvey sees that some members of the community are trying to intercede between the rioters and the police.

“The only way to defuse the situation is to decrease the presence of the police in this area at the present time,” one black man urges. “The police are the target.”

“I hear what you say,” the senior officer in charge answers, “and I appreciate what you are trying to do. But there is no question of me withdrawing police from here.”

By 8.00 p.m., all attempts at mediation have failed and the rioters go on a burning rampage. Harvey sees Molotov cocktails being thrown for the first time. Later, he discovers that this is also the first time these homemade firebombs have been used on mainland Britain.

Two pubs and twenty-six businesses are set alight while scores of residents are blocked in, either by rioters or police. A white family in Mayall Road is robbed at knifepoint and a young woman raped by an intruder nearby.

By 9.00 p.m., over a thousand police have been assembled and start to squeeze the rioters out of Railton Road. By 11.00 p.m., they have regained control of the streets. With his clothes now reeking of acrid smoke, Harvey returns home, in no doubt that he has been witness to a war.

* * *

Olga's wedding reception had been abandoned. When she returned on Sunday the food was still there, but had started to smell, and all the drink was gone. Over 2,500 police officers had now been brought into the area and by Monday the last of the rioting had fizzled out.

Both Chris and Sheldon joined the rioters on Saturday night. Years later, Sheldon would admit that doing so ‘had felt really good'.

On Sunday night, Harvey wrote his least inspired piece, in spite of Sylvia saying that the whole thing was disgusting.

The national papers were full of Brixton, of course. As one of a great many, Harvey's report on the riots seemed irrelevant. Even George Gilder couldn't be bothered to pass comment on his conclusion that violence was just an extreme form of communication and that if we wanted less of it, we should communicate better.

C
HAPTER

“R
AISE YOU TEN.”

Charlie studied his cards for a long time. He already had a pound on the table which he was loathe to give up, especially to Martin, but his hand was looking less good than it had at the start.

“Fold,” he said, as if choking on the word.

“Sorry, Chuck, I didn't catch that.”

“Give him a break, Marti,” pleaded Dave who had dropped out at the start. “That's the fifth time this evening you've walked him up to the trough and not let him drink.”

Martin overcame his hearing problem and scooped the winnings into his corner.

“You're sure to get me soon,” he said.

“Here, have a splash of this to cheer you up,” comforted Pete, pouring some of what he called his little pick-me-up from a flask into Charlie's mug of tea.

“One day you'll get caught with that,” warned Charlie, while not refusing the offer.

Martin and Dave both declined and Pete tucked the flask back into the inside pocket of the blazer hanging over the back of his
chair.

“I swear it's the only reason you wear that thing,” taunted Martin, handing the pack to Dave who started to deal.

“You going anywhere this summer, Chuck?” Dave asked as he handed out the cards and everyone added their ante to the pot.

“Ballycastle.”

“Isn't that where you went last year?” Martin noted, with as straight a face as he could muster.

“And the year before that,” Charlie confirmed, as Martin already knew, “and as many ‘before thats' as I can recall.”

“Not time for a change then?” goaded Dave.

“I suppose it's somewhere exotic for you?” Charlie grumbled, looking at Martin and adding to the pot.

“We thought we'd try the Algarve this year. I've heard there are some good golf courses.”

“Fold,” said Pete discarding his cards. “That won't please Margaret, surely?”

“Actually she's becoming quite keen,” Martin told him as he peered at his hand. “I'm folding too.”

“That's you and me, Charles,” Dave noted, adding to his stake, “and I'll raise you.”

“You should all try Ballycastle,” Charlie told them. “It has a fine little beach and the most lovely view across to Rathlin Island and the Mull of Kintyre. Come in August and you might catch the Lammas Fair.”

“Now what are you going to do?” Dave asked.

“You know it was Fergus of the Scotti people who sailed from Ballycastle in the sixth century, conquering the Picts and taking control of Argyll and Bute,” Charlie expounded, increasing his bet by the fixed limit their rules allowed, “and I'll call you. That's why Scotland is Scotland.”

“You're a fount of information, Chuck,” mocked Martin. “Now
let's see what you've got.”

Dave had already laid his three fives and two eights face up on the table, but quickly saw that he'd been topped by Charlie's four sixes and a random ace.

“Well I suppose you've got to win sometime,” conceded Martin, with as much bad grace as he could muster as Charlie shovelled the meagre pot to his side.

Just then the door opened and Rolland put his head round the door.

“It won't be long now,” he said.

“Why don't you join us?” invited Pete, patting the jacket on the back of his chair. “It's not as if there's much you can do.”

“You don't think we should be doing something?” wondered Dave, as he had wondered many times before.

“Strictly hands off,” intoned Martin. “Those are our orders from on high.”

“And a damn good thing too, if you ask me,” said Charlie as he took his turn to deal out the cards, “especially after what happened at Bundoran.”

“Well, I'll see you boys later,” said Rolland, adding as he closed the door behind him, “The press Johnnies will be all over this I dare say.”

“Decided yet where you're going, Pete?” Martin asked, anxious to keep everyone's mind off what was going on only a few yards away. “And I didn't see your ante.”

“Oh, sorry,” said Pete, pushing his stake forward. “I think I'll visit my sister in Norwich.”

Pete's marriage had crumbled many years previously and holidays were always a testing time for him.

“Fold,” he said after giving his cards a cursory glance.

Martin increased his bet, as did Dave.

“Do you see much of Megan and Ryan these days?” Martin asked.
“Or are they off limits?”

“Shona remarried, as you know,” answered Pete – which they all did, “and Michael, her husband now, seems to get on well with the kids so there doesn't seem much point.”

Martin added to his bet and so did Dave.

“Well you should try to see them,” prompted Charlie. “They are your flesh and blood, after all. I'll raise you.”

“The wind's in his spinnaker now,” observed Martin sardonically.

“Match and raise again,” said Dave.

Suddenly the puff blew clean out of Charlie's sail. “Fold,” he said, looking crestfallen.

“Ah ha, a contest at last!” crowed Martin. “Raise again.”

“OK, Marti, I'm calling you,” announced Dave as he pushed the appropriate sum into the pot. “What have you got?”

The eyes of the other two were fixed on Martin, hoping for a bluff to be exposed, but Martin laid down five spades.

“Got you!” he crowed, reaching towards the pot as Dave pulled a sorry face. But the face was a bluff.

“Not so fast,” Dave chortled, laying out three fours and two sevens.

Martin's ever-eager hand hovered over the little pile, appearing reluctant to withdraw.

“I think he's got
you,
” Charlie corrected with undisguised relish.

“I wish that had been my play,” said Pete.

“Nicely done, Dave,” Martin conceded, pulling himself together and making out that the little people deserved a round occasionally. Besides, it was on Charlie and Pete that he relied to supplement his income. Young Dave was becoming a threat.

The four men played on for a while until Charlie had reached his limit, which he regarded as the price of friendship, and Pete had become so morose at the state of his life that Martin worried another losing hand might have consequences. A cow was to be milked, not
butchered, after all.

To enliven the mood, Charlie pulled a folk song from his compendium of local knowledge about a man who brings a lobster home which he plans to give his wife the following morning. As a holding operation, he parks the crustacean in their chamber pot. Naturally a call of nature intervenes during the night and the poor woman is grabbed by her private parts. During his frenzied attempt at rescue, the man is then grabbed by his. The fate of the lobster goes unrecorded.

When Rolland reappeared, all four men were splitting their sides with laughter. Pete had tears streaming down his cheeks, tears which he had been longing to shed anyway, but manliness forbade. Even Martin could not resist, although doing so was tantamount to acknowledging that Charlie had attributes besides an unfailing ability to lose at poker.

“What's so funny?” Rolland asked, angry at them for having such a good time while he had been confronting a different reality.

The seated men turned towards him like schoolboys caught in the middle of an illicit prank.

“You'd better pull yourselves together,” Rolland chastised. “He's gone. I've told the governor.”

One by one, their laughter dried up. Like professional undertakers anticipating the imminent arrival of the bereaved, they adopted a suitably sombre air, with Martin, the least affected, the most sombre, and Dave the most affected, hardly sombre at all. While Pete slipped back into his personal darkness, Dave's manner was one of almost childlike bewilderment.

“Why do we do these things to each other?” he asked, addressing no one in particular.

“Because we are sodding human beings who haven't learnt to do anything better,” growled Charlie with a passion that surprised them all.

* * *

The Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone had starved himself to death aged just 27. Few in the English establishment were sorry. Airey Neave, a close associate of Margaret Thatcher and one of the few to have escaped from Colditz, had been blown up in his car outside the Houses of Parliament by Irish republicans two years earlier. The murder of Earl Mountbatten and two boys, one his grandson, while out fishing in the Bay of Donegal five months later, was still seared into the English public's imagination: a republican double.

Oh,
the troubles
as they were called! Even Britain's great liberal Prime Minister, William Gladstone, had been unable to push through Irish Home Rule in 1893 against the wishes of Irish landowners (most of whom had come to consider themselves Anglo-Irish or British), and the descendants of those Protestant families who had populated the north during England's cultural domination of its Irish colony. In the end, all but these northern counties secured their freedom from London's political control, but it left Catholics living in those counties at the mercy of a Protestantism made rabid by its fear of abandonment.

One such had been Bobby Sands, the MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. All his life he had endured second-class status, being forced from jobs and homes by Protestant bigotry. Frustration led to violent protest, and this, over time, led to his arrest. Inside Northern Ireland's Maze prison, he and those like him pushed for political rather than criminal status, and went on hunger strike until it was granted. It never was.

As Harvey left the Maze prison with as depressed a group of journalists as he had ever encountered, all of them were wondering how the cycle of violence could ever be ended. The British government's policy had created a martyr and world opinion was divided. Some
regarded the Prime Minister's intransigence over such a small issue as status barbaric. Others felt the rule of law had to be protected at all costs. But one thing was certain: a very ordinary young man from an insignificant part of the world had called the authorities' bluff. In doing so he had attracted worldwide attention, leaving them with a pot full of still more anger and still more questions. Even Martin might have turned up his nose at that.

When Harvey wrote his piece for
The Sentinel
he concluded with a question: Hadn't the British Government a responsibility to every one of its citizens in Northern Ireland to enforce integration and stamp out bigotry in all its flag-waving forms, just as Lee Kuan Yew had done in Singapore between ethnic Malays and ethnic Chinese? He was rather pleased with this insight, but George Gilder cut it out.

“It is often better to be part of the problem, Mudd,” he said “than part of the solution.”