The White Dove

‘Be warned! Be warned!’

It was a chant now. Under the trees the band began to play again. Dimly Amy recognized The Red Flag, and at the same time, quite close to her, she heard another shout.

‘Commie saboteur!’

‘Kike! Kike! Fuck off to Russia if that’s what you want!’

The surge of the crowd towards it half-turned her around. She saw a big man with a red face ducking away, and the smooth flanks of a police horse as it wheeled sharply in front of her. The horse blocked her view for an instant, and when she looked again a space had opened in the crowd. The margins of it were held back by lines of police with their arms linked tight.

Amy was suddenly cold. Something ugly was flickering here, behind the police helmets and in the London faces milling around her. It might not be safe, for one thing, Tony had said when he had refused to let her come with him. What was it that wasn’t safe, amongst these people and the half-understood rhetoric of their slogans?

Part of her was detachedly aware that the rain had stopped, and that towards the west beyond the ragged edges of the clouds there was a faint, pale blue line. But with the rest of herself she was listening to the crowd noise, and waiting fearfully for that flicker of ugliness again.

There was more shouting from the roadside now.

‘They’re here!’

The police, with their arms still linked, were easing the crowds further apart so that a wide aisle opened between them. The cheering and shouting died into an expectant silence and the band sounded much louder.

Amy stood on tiptoe, craning to see. A fat man in a coat much too small for him grinned at her, showing black teeth. ‘‘Ere y’are, my love. Get in ‘ere in front.’

In the sudden breathless silence, between the square shoulders of the policemen, Amy saw them coming.

It was a long, black column, with lights bobbing on either side of it. The miners were in ranks of four, swinging smartly along as if they had only set out that morning.

As they came closer, the leaders turning in between the held-back crowds, she saw that the impression of blackness came from their dark, sodden clothes and from their physical likeness. They were small, hunched men with dark faces under their caps. And the lights were miners’ lamps. Each man carried his lamp, lit up and swinging to his step.

She was struck by something incongruous about the column as it drew closer. The men were marching like an army, and the band was playing them on. But there was no triumphant ring of well-drilled boots on the metalled road. Amy listened, and the sound she heard caught at her throat and sent a shiver deep inside her.

There was only the muffled flap, flap of hundreds of pairs of broken boots, boots tied up with rag and shored uselessly against the rain with newspaper.

It was the flap, flap that cleared Amy’s head and drove her forward against the wall of policemen. She found her voice and she was shouting, shouting the same welcome and greeting that rose in a deafening crescendo around her. She stretched her hand out past the uniform shoulders and waved and shouted as she had never done before.

If men could walk so far in boots like those to ask for help, how badly must they be in need of it? And in her own cupboards at home, polished for her and brushed and carefully stored in bags, there were dozens of pairs of shoes in crocodile skin, soft suède and supple pastel leather.

In that instant Amy knew, with as much certainty as she had ever known anything, which side she was on. She was with these men, with their proud lights and their thin, drawn faces and their terrible boots, and she was with Jake Silverman and his friends. With Tony Hardy, wherever he was. Amy felt as if she had just come home, and yet as if she had cut herself off from everything she loved and understood. Gerald Lovell and Peter Jaspert, Adeline, and even Isabel, didn’t belong in this new home because they couldn’t or wouldn’t see what was happening here today.

Amy was gulping for air that tasted of wet wool, sweating people and horses. Were these people her friends and family, she thought wildly, looking at the strangers surging and shouting around her?

The column of marchers was still passing.

Amy saw a green banner with a red and gold dragon. Nantlas, Rhondda it proclaimed. Bethan’s home village. Bethan was having a rare day off today. Was she here in the crowd too? Why hadn’t the two of them come together? Amy felt dizzy, as if her world had suddenly tilted to one side and changed all her perspectives. Under the Nantlas banner she saw a man much taller than his companions, bareheaded like Jake Silverman and with his black hair flattened to his head by the rain. He was looking over the heads of the crowd and smiling, pleased with what he saw. Amy had time to think, There, there’s someone who knows he’s right, before the man had passed and was swallowed up into the black ranks beneath the platform.

The tail of the march arrived and the aisle held open in the waiting crowd was filled with miners.

There was one brief speech from the platform and then Jake was speaking again, not shouting yet his voice carried to the back of the huge crowd.

‘The last lap now. We’ll march together to Trafalgar Square. Let’s tell our friends from South Wales that we’re proud to march behind them.’

There was a great burst of cheering, but there were other shouts too and Amy struggled to hear what the raw voices were threatening. The police horses wheeled round again and the miners raised their banners once more. The dark-faced men in their black clothes turned and led the way along Oxford Street with their lamps swinging and the band, playing behind them. Amy let herself be carried forward in the press as the police chain broke to let them through and then she was walking too, past the familiar shopfronts and the curious, staring faces of shoppers on the city pavements. For one odd, hallucinatory moment she thought she saw herself and Violet Trent among them, faces blank under their smart little hats. The gutters were huge puddles after the heavy rain, and Amy’s shoes were unsuitable for walking any distance. Her feet and trouser legs were soon soaked, but she was oblivious. She felt as proud as Jake Silverman could have hoped, and she cheered and sang at the top of her voice with everyone else. The fat man with the tight coat was still at her side, and he winked at her. ‘We’ll show ‘em, eh?’ He was holding one side of a placard that read National Unemployed Workers Movement.

I am unemployed, that’s true enough, Amy thought wryly.

They passed Oxford Circus. The police were holding up the traffic and she glimpsed Regent Street choked with stationary buses. At the far end of Oxford Street they turned and streamed down Charing Cross Road. Amy’s right shoe had rubbed her heel into a blister, and she thought again of the hundreds of miles from South Wales in boots tied up with rags.

At last they reached Trafalgar Square. There was another, bigger platform here, draped with banners that read ‘London Workers Welcome the SWMF Marchers’. The square filled up behind her and Amy found herself pushed closer to the front. Just ahead of her and to the right, on the steps between Landseer’s lions, she saw Jake and Kay again. There were still more policemen here, on foot and on horseback, and another brass band playing outside the National Gallery. The cheering and shouting was deafening, and the crowd surged and swayed in pulsating waves, suddenly much bigger. More people must have been waiting for the marchers to arrive in the square.

It was difficult to hear the speakers and Amy strained to catch the words of one after another of the march leaders and organizers. ‘This government … be made to see that the failure of private enterprise in our industries … chronic poverty and destitution among unemployed men … persistent pit closures … repeal of the Eight-Hour Day Act … iniquity of the not seeking work clause …’

Then, as she struggled to hear through the din, she caught the sound of different chanting.

‘Commie scum! Commie scum!’

The crowd bulged around her and swayed towards the sound with a sudden, ominous life of its own.

‘Dirty reds! Dirty reds!’

Amy glimpsed Jake Silverman hoisting Kay out of the way on to the steps and then plunging forward. The chanting broke up into urgent shouting. Four police horses and a dozen bobbing helmets converged on the spot where Jake had disappeared. From somewhere ahead of her Amy heard a woman’s scream, and then as if at a signal the boiling crowd erupted into violence. Right beside her a man’s fist came up and smashed into another’s face, and a spurt of blood sprang from his nose before he fell backwards under the trampling feet. Amy heard her own scream rising with the others, and then she was propelled violently forward by the fighting breaking out behind her. She stumbled forward, catching at clothes and arms to stop herself being pushed over, and almost fell over another man lying on the ground with his arms up to protect his head and face. Then the high brown flanks of a police horse loomed over her and she saw the great polished hooves only a foot or so from the man’s head. She ducked down to try to help him but be was already being hauled to his feet by his friends.

The crowd from the back of the square was still pushing forward to the steps, and Amy felt an instant of pure, panicky certainty that she would be crushed to death or suffocated in this dense, heaving mass of bodies.

The steps, she told herself. Try to reach the steps where she had seen Jake lift Kay up. The next blind surge carried her forward, and she saw that she had come up against the solid phalanx of miners in front of the platform. A lamp was still swinging in someone’s hand. The steps were only a few yards away.

Then, right beside her, Jake Silverman was fighting to pull away from two men who held his arms pinned savagely behind his back. A mounted policeman was just behind them with his stick raised. Amy saw the leather thong wrapped around his gloved fist. Then there was a third man right beside Jake with something short and heavy in his hand.

A lead bar. A length of piping. Whatever, it was for Jake.

Amy opened her mouth to scream but he would never have heard the warning. As she watched, frozen, the bar came up and then down. The dull crack of metal against bone and skin made her feel sick to the pit of her stomach. Jake’s head flopped forward and he fell like an empty sack.

Horror gave Amy strength. She thrust past the men blocking her way and knelt beside Jake. His face was as white as candle wax and his eyes were closed. When Amy looked up again to scream for help the three men had vanished and there was nothing in the world except trampling feet and swaying bodies that threatened to topple over them. In feeble desperation she tried to pull at Jake’s coat and realized that she would never be able to drag his weight to safety. Then someone else was pulling her aside and stooping beside Jake. She saw the blue scars on the hand turning Jake’s unconscious face, and the lamp hooked to his belt.

‘Murdering bastards,’ the miner said.

Then he bent and scooped Jake up. He hoisted the dead weight over his shoulder as if it was nothing, and began to strike through the tangle of people. Amy looked wildly around for Kay or another familiar face, but there was no one. The police were moving through the crowd in blue lines now, and the violence was ebbing away. Most people were standing still, bewildered, with their arms hanging at their sides. A little path opened in front of the miner with his burden and Amy ran after him, almost sobbing with relief.

He didn’t stop or look round until they were clear of the mass in the square. In front of St Martin-in-the-Fields he glanced back over his shoulder and then very gently swung Jake down and put him on the pavement. His face was so white that Amy was afraid he was already dead. There was a tiny trickle of dark blood at the corner of his mouth.

‘Are you his friend?’ the miner asked abruptly.

Amy nodded.

‘See to him, then. I’ll run for the ambulance. Bloody First Aid Post’s the other side of the square.’

He was gone immediately.

Amy knelt down beside Jake. He must still be alive if that man’s gone for help, she thought stupidly. She undid her coat and took it off, wrapping the soft folds over the crumpled body as best she could. Then she untied her silk scarf and put it under his head. He was so heavy, and there wasn’t a flicker of movement.

‘Jake,’ she whispered. ‘What can I do to help you?’