The Storytellers (2 page)

C
HAPTER

S
t JAMES'S PARK looked grey. A watery sun was failing to free its frosted trees and probably wouldn't succeed any better on that day than it had on all the previous ones, stretching back to an autumn Londoners had forgotten. Strands of mist furrowed the lake's water top, will-o'-the-wisps, entreating passers-by to join them. Unimpressed, ducks and geese stood huddled together like spinsters around a dance floor, content to watch, their playfulness long drained. The cold, invisible, penetrated everything. Winter was in control.

Harvey had passed from Westminster along a path christened Birdcage Walk by locals after King James I, on his accession in 1603, ordered the marsh there drained to form a landscaped park with an aviary along its southern edge. But the park took its name from an ancient hospital for lepers, dedicated to St James the Less, which once stood nearby. The narrow lake that Harvey now hurried by, his coat pulled tight, gathered water from the little River Tyburn before it spilled into the Thames near Downing Street.

The village of Tyburn had been a short distance north, close to where Marble Arch now is, once a place of execution. The first recorded was in 1196 when William Fitz-Osbert, a charismatic
champion of London's poor, had his limbs pulled off by horses before being hung there for stirring up trouble, along with nine of his accomplices. In 1537, Henry VIII used Tyburn to dispatch a number of those opposed to his suppression of Catholicism. A clever innovation, allowing for multiple hangings, increased the popularity of the spectacle considerably. On a June summer's day in 1649, a delighted crowd was treated to twenty-four simultaneous killings: twenty-three men and one woman. The last official lynching to take place at Tyburn was of John Austin, highwayman, in 1783. The maintenance of order was seen by the authorities as their special responsibility and sending rebels to dance the Tyburn jig an essential deterrent.

Harvey was a glutton for London history and his mother a firm proponent of capital punishment. ‘Too many liberties are taken these days, Harve,' she would often say. ‘Examples need to be made.'

As he hurried towards the slender Blue Bridge, which crossed the lake, where he expected to meet Peter Betsworth, he imagined a clutch of union leaders hanging, like Abel Meeropol's strange fruit, from a Tyburn tree.

The park was largely deserted as he stepped onto the overpass. Just a few, like him, going from A to B, hurried to their business. The summer melee of prams, picnickers, joggers, strollers and duck feeders ignoring signs urging them not to, were absent. Parks were healthy things, he thought, in all respects. They brought high-born and low, young and old, eccentric and coy, lovers and lonely, the under-dressed and over-dressed together in a space that belonged to no one and everyone. Even the police, who passed through from time to time on horseback, looked on their best behaviour, far removed from the game of cops and robbers that frequently corrupted their weaker brethren. Parks reflected society as it wished to be: temperate moments before and after the struggle to survive.

Harvey checked his watch. It was not yet ten. He had some
minutes to spare, although it was not a day on which to be early or late. He clasped the handrail, as if to take in the view. It would be another twenty years before the London Eye would turn slowly in the distance and he could envy any who had made it into one of the pods: a mobile cave with an ever-changing view – mankind's advance.

“Mr Mudd?”

The man addressing him was nondescript, as he imagined his father had appeared to most people. Only to Sylvia was her husband a knight in shining armour, a description her son felt strengthened with each year of widowhood.

“Yes,” Harvey acknowledged. “Mr Betsworth?”

The man ignored the question.

“Now I want you to understand something,” he said. “This meeting is not taking place.”

Harvey was used to ‘off the record' briefings, when someone wanted to raise an issue and not be identified as having done so. But the assertion that a meeting which was taking place was simultaneously not taking place stretched even his journalistic imagination.

“So you shouldn't be speaking to me?” Harvey replied.

But again, his interlocutor disregarded the question.

“Let us walk a ways,” Mr Betsworth said instead. “It is far too cold to be standing around.”

With that Harvey heartily agreed and started walking beside the stranger in the direction from which he must have come.

“What do you know about communism?”

The inquiry surprised Harvey and he half-wondered if he had slipped into a version of Alice's Wonderland, where Peter Betsworth was part unsmiling Cheshire Cat, able to appear and disappear at will, and part Mad Hatter, intent on asking unfathomable questions, such as why was a raven like a writing desk, to which he himself had no answer.

“A certain amount,” was his guarded reply and as he offered it up,
he realized how little he knew.

“Well, all you need to know,” his walking companion instructed, “is that communism is an ideology used by those who badly want it, to steal power from those who already have it, by persuading those without it that they will be better off in consequence.”

“Power to the people,” mouthed Harvey and as quickly wished he hadn't.

“Quite,” snorted Peter Betsworth acidly.

“Like early Christianity before it was co-opted by the Roman Empire,” Harvey added in an attempt to advance his intellectual game.

“Hardly!” exclaimed the unsmiling Cheshire Cat. “We are a Christian nation and it is our values they are trying to undermine.”

“They?”

“Communist infiltrators,” came the reply, which was the first straight answer to a question Harvey had so far received. “And believe me,” the nondescript man added with unexpected passion, “they exist.”

“You have evidence?” Harvey asked.

As George Gilder had beaten into him from the start, to be presented as a probable fact, an assertion had to have support from at least two unrelated and credible sources. Naturally this was not always easy to come by and an attributable quote could often be used to smoke out the truth, as well as – unfortunately – to muddy the waters. Journalism was no exact science and to imagine it ran without an agenda was wishful thinking. But if his editor thought Peter Betsworth was sitting on a story that affected the nation then he probably was.

“The present Chancellor of the Exchequer and the recently retired leaders of the Transport and General Workers' and Amalgamated Engineering Unions were all members of the Communist Party,” Peter Betsworth continued in a tone so dry, he might have been listing
soiled items for the laundry. “Did you know that?”

“I had heard that the Chancellor fought the nationalists in Spain as a young man,” Harvey conceded, but the raw announcement shocked him. Three of the most powerful men in the land, ex-communists! The standing joke in recent years was that the unions ran the country and with some 2 million members, the TGWU was the largest.

“And the problem goes far deeper than young men's fancies, I am afraid,” his companion continued. “Communism and its variations are rife within the union movement.”

“To what end?” Harvey asked. “I can't see the point.”

“You do have a lot to learn,” Peter Betsworth snorted, clearly startled at
The Sentinel
journalist's obvious lack of grasp. “Did you not study communism at university?”

“Not in any depth, I am afraid. I do recall something about the inevitability of capitalism destroying itself and the workers' paradise that would follow. But to be honest, I never did grasp the inevitability argument or, for that matter, understand what an earthly paradise might consist of. Free beer seemed like a good place to start back then, and free opera tickets.”

“Opera tickets!”

Peter Betsworth's tone indicated disbelief that the highbrow and lowbrow – opera and journalism – could possibly mix. The man next to him was clearly suspect. Had he not had satisfactory dealings with George Gilder in the past, he would have terminated the conversation then and there.

“I like opera,” proffered Harvey, undeterred. “It explores the full range of human emotion.”

“But communism is not about individuals, Mr Mudd. It is about movements.”

“An individual wrote the textbook though, didn't he?” Harvey countered, dredging Karl Marx from the recesses of his mind where, until then, he had been content to leave him.

“Well it's true that Marx constructed a formidable argument about why change occurs and why the monetization of everything in capital-based economies is merely a phase through which societies pass, but it is those who seek to hasten the demise of capitalism that we are talking about and they are a movement.”

“Like the Christian movement,” interjected Harvey, returning to an earlier theme, “underpinned by the inevitability of the Second Coming and God's judgment of all men.”

“Hardly,” harrumphed the intelligence officer, which Harvey had concluded Peter Betsworth obviously was. “The Communist Movement is not content to wait until capitalism fades, but is attempting to grab power by claiming to promote Marx's vision.”

“Just as religious movements do when they promote the vision of their founders,” murmured Harvey, adding, “before getting hijacked by the merely power hungry.”

“I suppose there are similarities,” conceded his companion. “The Communist Movement is being orchestrated from the Soviet Union. But it's the shop stewards who are doing the damage and the union top brass is unwilling or unable to rein them in. They stop production at every opportunity. It is chaos, frankly. If the public knew what was really going on they wouldn't stand for it. Our government might then have the guts to cut the unions down to size. That's where you come in.”

Harvey could hear his mother saying, ‘and amen to that.'

“You say orchestrated by the Soviet Union. What do you mean exactly?”

“Oh, just little payments here and some encouragement there; the ambition of men does the rest. Surely your opera has taught you that?”

“But can a handful of power-hungry shop stewards really do that much damage?” Harvey questioned.

“In the right atmosphere, yes they can.”

“Right atmosphere?”

“Well what you've got to understand, Mudd, is that in the last war we fought against fascism and if that German madman hadn't turned against the Soviet Union, the continent might have been dominated by two totalitarian states, one communist, the other fascist and frankly, in terms of ghastliness, there would have been little to choose between them. But the Soviet Union ended up as our ally and there were a good few on the left of British politics who considered that evil empire one step away from paradise. Easy to do, I suppose, when you are sitting on an armchair in St John's Wood.

“Anyway, the thing is, there was a good deal of sympathy towards the working man after the war. The Labour Party was tied to the unions and even the Conservatives, under Harold Macmillan – a Tory patrician if ever there was one – did not want to interfere with the collective bargaining process. This permissiveness emboldened the unions and weakened management. By the time Wilson realized things were getting out of hand he and his Labour Party were hopelessly compromised. There was little they could do and now Callaghan is in the same pickle.”

“The Conservatives, under Heath, had a go,” proffered Mudd.

“Yes,” the secret agent acknowledged wistfully, “but the public was not yet ready to bite the bullet. And besides, Heath tried to appeal to the union leaders' good sense and there was just no way individuals like Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon were going to do business with a Conservative. These men were not cocktail party socialists, like so many in the Labour movement. They were the real deal. For them, the shop floor and its stewards came first.”

“Before the country?” queried Mudd.

“Yes, before the country. At least until the country had been torn down and rebuilt in their image.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“George Gilder tells me you are a tenacious reporter and have a nose for corruption.”

Harvey shrugged. “I've unearthed some bad practices here and there.”

“You should go to Longbridge,” Peter Betsworth insisted. “There's a fifty-one-year-old communist shop steward there who has been causing no end of bother.”

“That's a British Leyland plant?”

“Right. And their Cowley plant is even worse – riddled with Trots.”

“Trots?” Harvey queried.

“Trotskyists. Followers of the Russian, Leon Trotsky, who argued that the proletariat working in large factories could be radicalized and made aware of their predicament in a way a dispersed peasantry could not.”

“Predicament?”

“That they were forced to accept the subsistence wages the owners of capital, in place of the landowners, elected to pay them. It was these toilers' ongoing task to overthrow the capitalist system and bring about proletarian government. The bourgeoisie, or capitalist placemen of the ruling autocracy, as he thought of them, had to be swept away so the ongoing revolution could bear fruit. He believed the engine of change would be a network of workers' councils in capitalist factories around the globe.”