'Terrorism? No One Talks About How Governments Inflict Terror. They Cut Budgets Because Of Political Maliciousness And Force People Into Miserable Existences So That The Wealthy Can Make More Profits'
In part 13 of Good Guys Lost, Thatcherism is heading for its zenith, factories are shutting down and anger is growing. To make it worse, there is bad news about Duke
Read part 12 of Good Guys Lost here
IN THE AUTUMN of 1981 my grandmother died. She was a large woman, with whom I’d never established a connection. This was a shame. It would be a decade more before I heard about the night of Duke’s birth and her widowhood. No one spoke of the past when I was growing up, except to tell bizarre, generally inconsequential stories. Important, emotional events only slipped out by accident, it seemed. History was a luxury the poor could not afford.
Duke arrived for the funeral accompanied by two prison officers and was handcuffed to the most physically imposing of the duo. The requiem was at Holy Cross. St Bridget’s, my grandmother’s preferred church, was long gone. Our Lady’s, further north along Vauxhall Road, was closer to her old stamping ground but she had a ghetto snobbery. The nearer to the city centre the better. Eldon Street, and Our Lady’s, was perilously close to the border with Liverpool 5 and people beyond Burlington Street were out-of-towners in her mind.
We went to Ford cemetery again. I did not see Billy in the church but I noticed him lurking at the back of the crowd around the grave. We had not met since the Green Man but I heard there was a buzz around the new band he had formed. They were drawing crowds to pubs from Cantril Farm to Crosby.
He looked ashen. It was the first time he had seen Duke in person since that fateful incident four years earlier. Sensibly, he kept his distance but when the two men whose lives had changed completely that night made eye contact Duke’s sadness lifted for a moment and was replaced by a dazzling smile. Billy put his head in his hands.
We went back to the dining room in Gulliver’s club on London Road. Duke and his guards sat down at the back of the seated area and my uncle beckoned me over.
“Get a drink for my mates,” he said with no hint of sarcasm. They wanted halves of lager and were grateful for the beer when I returned. Duke held up a wrist. “I need the toilet. Any chance?” The men looked at each other and exchanged an imperceptible nod. Unlocked, Duke stood up. “You keep them occupied while I jump out the toilet window,” he whispered to me. He laughed at my horrified look.
“Go get these gentlemen some food,” he said loudly. “They’ve been very good to me so treat them well.” He walked off. “And where’s Billy?” I pointed to the bar.
To be completely honest, I was nervous while he was in the toilet. His escort was not. When he emerged a few minutes later he gestured across to the guards and indicated that he was going to the bar. They nodded assent. He went straight to Billy and hugged him. They spoke briefly and then Duke returned to the table. He held up his wrist and said: “We’ve got a long journey back. Whenever you two are ready.” Billy was sobbing at the bar.
“Go and do your goodbyes,” one of the screws said. “We’ve got a few minutes.” So Duke went and hugged his wife and little boy again, but not before detailing me to refresh his mates’ drinks. Billy was nowhere to be seen.
* * *
If you don’t want to wait for the next extracts, the paperback is available here
The Manchester Street Wine Lodge was a truly awful place but we felt comfortable there. It was a long, thin bar with wooden floors and furniture that showed the rips and burns of two decades. The back entrance opened onto Preston Street, next door to the Ministry rehearsal rooms where Billy was working on his own material. This was not with the band. He was trying to revive the songs of the previous decade.
“I had to leave,” he said about the aftermath of the funeral. “I couldn’t bear to see him handcuffed again. And watch him say goodbye to the little fella. I know what it’s like not to be around your kids. It breaks my heart. That poor little boy. It was my fault."
It seemed safer to get on to a different subject. “I’ll have to come and see the band,” I said. “All the boys love you.”
“It’s cover versions,” he said. “It’s good. The money’s rolling in. I’m a bit disappointed you haven’t been to see us yet.”
In truth, I did not like what I’d heard about Billy’s most recent career turn. The group played an eclectic mix of crowd pleasers that ranged from Genesis songs to Country Music classics. Gushing Scallies had told me that when they played Duelling Banjos or the theme from the Beverly Hillbillies the venues went wild. There was bedlam. It was like punk gigs, they said. To me it felt like punk had never happened.
“I’ve been too busy,” I said. “All the Young Socialist meetings, trying to get people behind the council. That and the match.”
Billy saw through it. He laughed. “I’m old, I know. But come and see us if you get a chance. You’ll be on the guest list.”
I changed the subject. “You seeing anyone?”
“A few,” he said without boastfulness. “They come and go.”
“You never really got over Marie,” I said, the fixed image of the photograph having lodged itself in my memory. He looked at me aghast. “You on the Bismarcks before I came in?” He laughed.
“I never got into Marie. It was a mistake. A blunder. If it happened today we would never have married. It was just that mad world we lived in where people were more concerned with appearances than what made us happy. I was forced into that marriage, she was forced into it. From what I hear she’s made a go of it with Larty. My only regret is I don’t see my kids. They’re his now.” He went the bar. Two Guinness, two Bismarcks. Shit, I thought, I’ve blundered into deep waters.
“It’s the one in London I think about,” he said, downing the fortified port in one bilious gulp. “She took me to places I’d never been before.”
He saw my eyes widen. “Punk clubs, dirty ticket. She opened me up to a different way of approaching music. She may have been the love of my life. I killed that when I killed the Divvy.”
“Did you look for her again?”
“Yeah,” he said sadly. “Had another go a couple of months ago. I went to the area she was from but I never got the name of her street and couldn’t recognise the house. No one knew where Eileen went. She disappeared off the face of the earth. Even tried to find out exactly who died in that fire in the club we went to.” There was silence for a moment.
“I vanished, too,” he continued. “I wonder whether she looked for me? No one knew where I was, I suppose. She probably just thought I was one of those fellas who…”
There was little more to say. And I did not want to get into it again. Big issues – the politics of millions of people and the great philosophical battles of the age – were the things I cared about. The emotions of the human heart, the feelings that crush and curse an individual, I dismissed as self-indulgence. They embarrassed me. I liked it when we laughed, sang loud and channelled our intensity into anything except personal, emotional pain. I was willing to die for a cause. But not for love.
* * *
Billy’s return was just about the only good thing about 1981. It started badly. In January Tate & Lyle shut. The long swathe of factories that stretched along Vauxhall Road stopped belching out sugary smoke and nearly 2,000 people were thrown out of work.
Turbaned women with their blue and white chequered headscarves poured out of the buildings after the final six-till-two shift with the excitement of college graduates on commencement day. They flocked into the Glass House, the Castle and the Green Man and drank with abandon. They burnt their turbans over ashtrays and all along Vauxy the festivities ran late into the night. When everyone woke up the next morning, unemployment in the area had leapt from manageable levels to more than 70 per cent. You wouldn’t have noticed.
Holidays to Benidorm were booked, three-piece suites purchased. It was as if the final redundancy paycheque was a bonus and another job would be along any moment. Those days were long gone.
The older generation had worked all their lives. They had been insulated against the decline in the city’s economy in the sugar refinery. Where the school leavers of my vintage had emerged from their education with the awareness the job market was shrinking terminally, many of the Tate’s workers had imagined that the desire for sugar would keep them employed until retirement.
It was heartbreaking watching them. Men in their fifties who had come of age during the war and toiled relentlessly in rebuilding the nation now had nothing to do. They had lived through the boom years of the 1960s and their sense of self was tied into work. Now it had been removed. Some went the pub and betting shop. They were the minority. Most had families to worry about.
Their pride was linked to employment. One man came out every day and brushed the landings and stairs on his block. He wanted to be busy. You could feel the bewilderment and sadness with every sweep of the brush. I watched with narrow, unsympathetic eyes. His efforts would never impress the wealthy, the powerful, those with a vested interest in writing him, and us, off as lazy and feckless. His outlet was the hopeless task of maintaining a decaying tenement that was rotting into a slum.
Perhaps us young men did our elders a disservice. They could not comprehend what was happening and we sneered at their confusion. We implicitly understood the direction the nation was taking. It was in revolt against traditional Toryism and the class system was mutating in front of our eyes. The ‘you’ve never had it so good’ ethos of the ruling class was about to be destroyed. One-nation Conservativism had ceased to exist. The age of patronage was over.
It was a two-pronged uprising. On one side there was Thatcherism. On the other the Militant Tendency. They were two faces of the same coin.
There was a rejection of cap-doffing Toryism across the political spectrum. On the left, we wanted opportunity and the chance to advance as far as our talents allowed. There was an awareness, though, that a safety net was necessary for the most vulnerable people in the community.
To the right, they were looking for a similar route of advancement. The grammar school generation wanted to get to the top and not be held back by barriers erected around notions of class. The problem was that the right-wingers believed their responsibilities were only to themselves. There is no society, said the cocktail-party philosophy of people who drove the thinking of Margaret Thatcher. James Goldsmith, a huge influence on the greengrocer’s daughter in No 10, said: “When you see signs of vulgarity it means that new people are breaking through. Vulgarity is a sign of vigour.”
The Vulgarists were in power. They cared nothing about anyone else. No society. History is over. All that mattered was they were able to sit at the top table. The rest of us were left to fend for ourselves. Their Tory predecessors spoke of their ‘duty’ to the poor. It was mere lip service but at least they recognised a connection with the lower orders. With vulgarism it was every man for himself.
It got worse. This political ideology was vindictive. We did not know in that tense summer after the riots that in Downing Street they were discussing the “managed decline” of our city; that they were considering deliberately depriving an entire metropolis of resources despite the misery it would cause hundreds of thousands of people. We suspected it. But even those who were supposed to be on our side thought we were mad.
* * *
Terrorism. Everyone falls back lazily on Mao’s quote about the purpose of terrorism being to cause terror. It’s stupidly simple. Actually, most of what we call terrorism is intended to apply political pressure. It’s a gruesome form of public relations; politics by fear and negotiation by violence.
Few consider how Governments inflict terror. I saw it first-hand. Most do not mix with people who are terrified wondering whether their meagre income will stretch to the end of the week. Or understood the fear of a parent whose child has no prospect of work when they leave school and can’t gather the resources to ‘get on their bike’ and look for employment at the other end of the country. The terrorists who cut budgets through political maliciousness and force people into long, slow, miserable existences so that the wealthy can make more profits are as morally obscene – maybe more – as anyone who has ever set an explosive device to go off in a crowd. The complacent, comfortable, smug proponents of vulgarism brought so much fear and despondency to Britain that it created a philosophical civil war.
You might imagine that we were wallowing in misery and digging mental trenches as 1982 loomed but that would be the wrong impression. Liverpool was abuzz. The pubs were full, bands were springing up everywhere and vibrant debates were commonplace. The Daily Mirror, talking about the city, said “they should build a fence around it and charge admission. For sadly it has become a showcase of everything that has gone wrong in Britain’s major cities.” It did not feel like that. At least in town.
The musical doldrums of the late 1970s were over. A new class of bands were beginning to make an impact. Once again, Billy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Echo and the Bunnymen, Wah, Dead or Alive and Frankie Goes to Hollywood were storming the charts. Billy was playing other people’s songs. He was becoming a Scouse icon but that’s something very different to the pop star he dreamt of being. London had no interest in what he was doing. He could have been a metaphor for the city.
* * *
I disappointed Duke. University was a disaster. The teachers at school downplayed my chances of getting the qualifications needed to earn a place in higher education. They were fond of telling us that only the top two per cent made the grades. When the A level results came out I’d got the passes I needed with ease.
For the first time being poor became an advantage. I received a full grant. Suddenly I was richer than everyone around me, or so it seemed. My student contemporaries complained that their suburbanite parents could not afford to top up their meagre public allowances and whinged about their penury. I provided the drinks until I exhausted the grant. At that point the people for whom I’d bought round after round discovered a cache of money they had never admitted to before. Few of them expressed any interest in filling my empty glass. Again a lesson: the poor rarely cry poverty, the affluent often do.
That was not my biggest problem. I had been led to believe I would be mixing with the best and brightest (within reason, for even someone as naïve as I was knew this was way down the rung of universities). It turned out that the middle classes were not very intelligent at all. They were more polished, more superficially articulate – they could pronounce words I had only read and never heard spoken – but as thinkers they were a disappointment.
It was disillusioning. And being a cocky young fool, I believed I could breeze through with little effort. That might have been true. If I had kept my head down and gone through the motions, that is.
Instead, I used the grant to travel to every Liverpool match I could get to. Tutorials? They could wait. I just about got away with disappearing to Paris in May 81 for the European Cup final. A trip to Bulgaria for the quarter final against CSKA Sofia 10 months later was probably the tipping point. It was a double whammy: we got beat and I got sent down that summer.
I avoided visits to Wakefield. I would hear stories, though. The Monday work party was met outside the prison with two bottles of whisky for Duke. He had passed his exams for the Open University and was beginning to write a memoir.
The possibility of parole was not too far away. He was coming up to his seventh year inside and that was the standard for a crime of this nature.
Unexpectedly, staggering news arrived. He had cancer. Like his brother, illness hit hard and quick. It was in his brain, spine and liver. There were plans to send him to a half-way house, then home. Then, out of nowhere, he was placed in a hospice. Before any arrangement could be made to get him back to Liverpool he was dead. He was 43. The same age as my father. After months of grief it occurred to me that now, at the age of 22, I was the oldest living Moran male.
Next: Duke’s funeral and the last breaths of a dying culture