The Storytellers (27 page)

* * *

For the next several hours, members of the fire service worked to secure the building, locate the dead and wounded and lead survivors to waiting ambulances or to safe areas nearby. Mrs Thatcher and her husband were escorted to the police station where their statements were taken and at 4.00 a.m., the Prime Minister agreed to be interviewed by the BBC's political editor, John Cole. The Conservative Party Conference would go ahead as planned, she told him with the verve the world had come to expect. The Conservative
Party treasurer, Alistair McAlpine persuaded the head of Marks & Spencer to open his Brighton store early so that all those without garments could be reclothed.

Five Conservative Party officials were found dead, four of them women, and the trade and industry secretary, Norman Tebbit, lay trapped under rubble next to his severely-injured wife. Cameras captured his dust-covered face and pyjama top and he later told reporters how comforting it had been holding the hand of a fireman while masonry was carefully lifted from his body. The remainder of the cabinet had escaped injury.

* * *

At 5.00 a.m., Harvey filed his first report under the headline,
Outrage! Thatcher Defiant
. As the only eyewitness to the explosion, his account was one of the best that morning, but he needn't have worried about photographers: they were everywhere. Much of the media was already in Brighton for the conference and now the rest had moved there en masse. The greatest difficulty was finding a free telephone. The new mobile version had not seemed that appealing until then, but he made a mental note to have a fresh look.

* * *

Frances Graham turned on her radio shortly after 6.00 a.m. The excited tone of the newsreader alerted her to the fact that an unusually newsworthy event had taken place, but its content did not become clear until after her visit to the bathroom and the word ‘Brighton', which would pepper the airways like machine-gun fire for the rest of the day, had penetrated her own consciousness. Besides, she was too busy recalling the pleasure of the night before. It was the first time she had broken cover to show off the new man in her life, at least to
her closest friends and family. She thought Harvey had gone down well although was not sure how much he himself had enjoyed being inspected.

But when her rekindled hopes came face-to-face with Brighton and sudden fear, the juxtaposition pulled her earlier equanimity apart. She paced around the bedroom holding the radio to her ear, hoping that, amongst the flood of commentary, speculation and editorial indignation, Harvey's well-being would be revealed. But it wasn't. So she continued her pacing downstairs, switched on the kettle and emptied two scoops of Brazilian coffee into her cafetière. While the kettle boiled, she telephoned
The Sentinel
, but only got a recording thanking her for contacting the nation's largest circulation broadsheet and informing her that the switchboard would open at 9.30a.m.

“Damn you, Harvey,” she said out loud. “Don't you dare get yourself killed,” and then realized that he might already be dead.

“It is believed five persons were killed in the blast and at least thirty-seven injured,” the host of the morning's current affairs programme was announcing in a tone adrift from his normally measured delivery. “No names will be released by the police until next of kin have been informed,” he said. “What we do know, however,” he now told his listeners, in a voice of renewed steadfastness, “is that the Prime Minister escaped injury and has insisted that her party's conference will go ahead as planned.”

I am not even ‘next of kin',' she thought. So what am I? What are any two people who have found one another within the topsyturvy maelstrom of life and now inhabit that private, peaceful space reserved for lovers, away from social recognition and the claim of others? She had even been wary about dinner. As nice as it was to share her happiness with those closest to her, mightn't something have been lost as well as gained?

She looked at her watch. It was only 6.30. But she called
The Sentinel
again for want of anything else to do. This time she heard no
recording, just a gruff “Sent'n'l” from Jim, the cleaner, who happened to be passing and interpreted his duties rather widely in the interests of job satisfaction. “Switchboard's closed,” he then announced.

“Yes, I know. Don't hang up,” Frances pleaded. “I just want to know if Harvey is all right.”

“Friend of yours then?” Jim enquired, alive to the sound of a lady in distress.

“He's in Brighton, you see,” she said, “and with the explosion and everything…”

“Brighton's a big place, dear,” Jim soothed. “Harvey, you say? Does he work here?”

“Yes, he's the deputy editor. He was supposed to be staying at the hotel that's exploded.”

“Hotels don't generally explode, love. But I'll ask downstairs. If the newsroom doesn't know anything then it hasn't happened,” Jim assured her with a degree of confidence she found strangely reassuring. “Now don't go away, dear. What's your name?”

“Frances Graham,” she told him and at that point she would have confided her life story and thrown in a few sins, such was the unexpected power of this electronic confessional. “I am a friend of Harvey Mudd.”

“All right, Frances,” Jim allowed. “Now I'm going to try and put you on hold, sweetheart. It's a bit of a complicated system this–”

There was an ominous click and Jim was gone.

She hung on, and on. The act of holding convinced her she was doing something. The minutes passed, but still she held, drinking coffee with one hand, pressing the phone to the side of her head with the other until her ear hurt and arm ached. The pain was almost pleasurable, born out of sound homeopathic principles, she imagined – a little controlled pain to counteract the pain that couldn't be controlled. And then for no accountable reason, her mind wandered off to the Marquis de Sade and sadomasochism…

“Hello? Hello?”

Out of nowhere a different voice was addressing her.

“Yes, hello,” she answered.

“Frances Graham?” the voice asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh thank goodness you're still there. Harvey told me to call you but I must have taken the number down wrong. He's fine by the way. But Brighton's bedlam right now and every phone line's been commandeered by some journalist or newsman.”

“Was he in the hotel?” she asked.

“No. He was approaching it when the bomb went off – and we do think it was a bomb now, probably another calling card from the IRA. Look, I'm most awfully sorry I didn't call you. Harvey was insistent that I should when he filed his report, but it's also pretty good bedlam inside
The Sentinel
right now, I can tell you.”

“Who am I speaking to?” she asked.

“Henry Smart, the night editor, which is just a grand title to persuade some junior like me to sit up all night in the newsroom in case something turns up – which it hardly ever does. Harvey will crucify me for not having called you.”

“Don't worry, Mr Smart. We're talking now. But who was that who answered my call?”

“That was Jim, our cleaner. We're forever telling him to leave the switchboard alone because we have direct lines into the news desk. But he says what if someone just calls?”

“Well, today they just did,” laughed Frances. “So will you thank him?”

“You bet I will!” agreed Henry, as much now in Jim's debt as was Frances.

Suddenly she felt happy again – inordinately so.

* * *

The atmosphere in the hall was electric when the Prime Minister approached the lectern. She looked fresh and perfectly coiffed despite having endured a night in which friends had been killed or injured and she and her husband had narrowly escaped death.

She commenced by condemning a cowardly act against innocent people intended to cripple a democratically elected government. She thanked and praised the emergency services and offered up, on behalf of everyone present, her sympathies to all those who had suffered. Then it was down to business.

She praised the conference chairman's organization in spite of her having had little sleep and she praised the contributions made by party members from the floor as having been ‘an outstanding example of orderly assembly and free speech'.

She reiterated her government's determination to bear down on taxation at both a local and national level and reminded conference that thirteen major enterprises had been denationalized since 1979 and said she looked forward to seeing British Airways and British Telecom soon pass into private hands.

She reminded conference of her government's support for pensioners and the National Health Service and stressed that efficient and competitive industries were needed to pay for both. Efficiency, she said, was ‘not the enemy, but the ally, of compassion'.

She compared her government's stand on defence with that of the Opposition and reminded her audience of Winston Churchill's dictum that giving in to aggression merely courted more of it. Her party, she said, had no truck with Marxist notions of class warfare. What counted was not your background but what you could do for your country.

She mentioned her government's satisfaction with the terms under which Hong Kong would be returned to China and praised Geoffrey Howe's ‘skill, hard work and perseverance in this regard'.

On Europe, she claimed satisfaction with the new level of Britain's contribution to the community budget, forcefully negotiated, she added, to much laughter, and stressed her government's determination to bear down on surplus food production and other wasteful expenditure. But now she hoped the European Community would ‘use its energies and influence to play a greater part in world affairs'.

Turning to the still-vexed question of employment, she conceded that having 3 million people unemployed was undoubtedly bad but refuted accusations that it had been used as a ‘political weapon'. She also disagreed with those who, while accepting her government's sincere wish to deal with the problem, disagreed with its method. The problem, she said, had run very deep.

In 1944, she told the delegates, a seminal White Paper had been drafted on how best to ensure full employment. And she knew this document rather well, she explained, to much delight, because as Margaret H. Roberts she had been one of those who had helped draft it.

The problem, she told them, was that successive governments had cherry-picked the easy parts and ignored those parts that were harder. Not only had the warning that government should not weaken people's resolve to be enterprising and fend for themselves been ignored, but so had the paper's warning that ‘without a rising standard of industrial efficiency, you cannot achieve a high level of employment combined with a rising standard of living'. Now, of course, she conceded, this means that old industries will die as new ones are formed, not by governments, it had to be stressed, but by individuals searching for better ways to meet people's needs and improve their own standing, and all this caused disruption.

What governments could do and should do to ease these transitions was underpin redundancy payments, make payments to individuals while they looked for new work and help with the
costs of retraining. What made no sense was for taxpayers to prop up uneconomic industries. Instead, government should keep taxes low, inflation tame and regulation minimal so that new businesses could form and new jobs be created, all of which, she stressed, her government was seeking to do.

“May I now turn to the coal industry?” she stated rhetorically and her audience was more than ready for her to do so.

She pointed out that for over seven months the country had been living though an agonizing strike.

“Let me make it absolutely clear,” she said, “the miners' strike was not of this government's seeking nor of its making.” The annual losses being compounded by the coal industry were enormous, she said. £1.3 billion in the previous year and the money had to come from somewhere. That amount, their party leader explained “is equal to the sum we pay in salaries to all the doctors and dentists in the National Health Service”.

The present Executive of the National Union of Mineworkers, she pointed out, was making demands that could not be met. Why? Because, she maintained, an organized revolutionary minority within the union was intent upon the destruction of democratic parliamentary government. To those who told her to give them what they want to stop the violence, she drew on a quotation from Rudyard Kipling – “We do not pay Danegeld.”

The true heroes of this dispute, she said, were those miners who still went to work each day in order to support their families and keep their mines open in spite of threats and intimidation, and the wives who had to put up with their husbands being branded scabs. ‘Scabs?' she almost shouted. “They are lions!”

“The nation faces what is probably the most testing crisis of our time,” she said, “the battle between the extremists and the rest. We are fighting, as we have always fought, for the weak as well as for the strong. We are fighting for great and good causes. We are fighting to
defend them against the power and might of those who rise up and challenge them. This government will not weaken. This nation will meet that challenge. Democracy will prevail.”

The audience rose and clapped as they had seldom clapped before. Harvey wrote at the foot of his notes:
Concluded at 3.30 p.m. Brilliant – a political master class!

* * *

Up in Yorkshire, the mood was glum. Jack Pugh had been ecstatic when news of the Brighton bomb broke. He and Mona had been out late clubbing and were listening to the first sketchy reports as they came in. His excitement had been intense.

“This is it,” he had confided to her, “the revolution is under way!”

“Did you have something to do with it?” she had asked, secretly appalled by what was being reported.