Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: The White Dove, The Potter’s House, Celebration, White - Rosie Thomas - Страница 14

Appleyard Street, just off Bloomsbury Square. That was where Tony Hardy had said they were going. Amy peered out of the grimy window of the bus as they rumbled past Selfridges. The lit-up windows were full of spring fashions, print frocks and little straw hats, although the daffodils were barely out in Hyde Park and a week’s icy rain and high winds had already flattened them to the grass.

Outside the front doors in Bruton Street, Amy had stood poised on the steps, automatically expecting Tony to wave to a cab. But he had taken her arm and steered her briskly towards Park Lane.

‘Only a twopenny bus ride to Appleyard Street,’ he said.

‘Yes, of course.’

Amy could almost count the number of times she had been on a bus before. Past Selfridges she turned to Tony. He was smoking and frowning over a sheet of typewritten paper.

‘What’s the meeting about, exactly?’

‘Oh, the usual sort of thing. Welcome to new members of the group. A paper, read by one of the old guard. This month’s is entitled “From Dialectic to Daily Practice. A Pan-European Approach”. Then a guest speaker. Tonight’s is Will Easterbrook from the Trades Union Congress Executive. He should be interesting. And then there will be a discussion of arrangements for the hunger march.’

Seeing Amy’s blank stare Tony began to laugh. ‘You did ask to come.’

‘Hunger march?’ she asked quickly. ‘What’s that?’

‘Don’t you know? This one is one of my friend Jake Silverman’s projects. You’ll meet Jake tonight. And you’ll hear plenty about the march.’

Not wanting to betray any more ignorance, Amy went back to studying the Oxford Street windows. The shops were familiar but she felt that she was travelling past them into new territory. It was if by simply stepping on to the bus she had set out in a new direction. She was looking forward to what the evening would bring, with an eagerness that she hadn’t felt for a long time.

When the bus reached High Holborn, Tony rang the bell and they jumped off together.

Amy had never penetrated into this corner of London before. She peered interestedly at the shops, mostly small grocers, and bookshops with pavement display cases emptied and locked up for the night. There was hardly anyone in the streets, and no traffic at all, but the lights behind curtained windows over the shops spoke of tiny flats full of people.

Appleyard Street was exactly like the others. Tony stopped in front of a bookshop with a smeared window crammed full of haphazardly arranged books. A violently lettered poster stuck to the glass commanded UNITE. FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS. Tony rang the side door bell and then pushed the door open. The hallway and steep stairs facing them were completely bare, and lit by a single bulb with a cracked glass shade.

Tony waved her inside with an ironic flourish. ‘Welcome to the Centre for Socialist Studies. First floor. Jake has a flat at the top, where we shall adjourn later. Shall I lead the way?’

Amy nodded. She was very cold, and annoyed to find that she was disconcerted by the bleakness of their destination.

The big first-floor room had three uncurtained windows overlooking the street. It was packed with rows of upright wooden chairs, most of them occupied. At the front was a table covered with a red cloth, with another half-dozen chairs arranged behind it. The room was warm, heated by a glowing gas fire. At the rickety card table beside the door Tony stopped to sign his name in a register. Underneath it he wrote ‘A. Lovell. Guest.’

‘It’s not a public meeting,’ he told her. ‘You have to be a member, or an invited guest.’ Then he guided Amy to a pair of empty chairs, mercifully close to the fire. It welcomed her with a gentle hiss.

Tony smiled at her as they sat down, acknowledging her sense of disorientation, and mocking her a little for it. Amy peeled off her suède gloves and he saw that her fingers were white with cold. ‘Poor Amy! Where have I dragged you to?’ He took her hands and rubbed them in his own warm ones, and Amy was sorry when the circulation was restored to her fingers and he laid them gently back in her lap. She made herself stop looking at the way his fine, rather long hair fell over his ear, and turned her attention to the rest of the room.

Her first reaction was relief that she didn’t look too conspicuous. She had been right not to come in her dinner dress. Amy had dined alone with her father, and as soon as Gerald had left for his club Amy had gone upstairs again and exchanged her dress for a cashmere sweater and a tweed skirt. With a plain woollen coat, low-heeled shoes and a soft hat pulled down to cover her hair, she imagined she looked exactly like any of the girls in Tony’s office. If anything, she thought now, she was conspicuous for her ordinariness. A girl just in front of her was wearing her hair wound up in a brilliant green turban with a big fake emerald pinned to the front. Her eyes were shadowed in the same green as the turban. She was talking to another girl with a mass of black curly hair and big brass earrings that jangled as she shook her head. Her skirt was a tight tube of scarlet flounces and her legs, hooked casually over the chair in front of her, flashed stockings in the same colour. Another woman, grey-haired, in a raincoat and a rakish velvet beret, was smoking a man’s cigar. The men, much more numerous, had nothing in common from their appearance. One or two, in blue suits and stiff collars, might have been bank officials. Others were clearly working men, with red faces and flannel shirts. The rest were like Tony, somewhere between the two, with an occasional touch of flamboyance. Not a single person wore evening clothes, although it was well after nine o’clock.

Amy’s feet were beginning to thaw out, and her interest revived with them. She was looking around the room again when without ceremony a big man stood up and went to the table. He was young, Tony’s age or a little older. He had a full black beard that made his lips look very red, a big nose, and glittering dark eyes. He was wearing a red and black plaid shirt, with a red handkerchief tied at the throat.

‘Comrades,’ he said quietly. Silence fell immediately. ‘The meeting is called to order.’ He nodded at two or three other men, and they filed up to join him behind the table.

Tony nudged Amy. ‘Jacob Silverman,’ he whispered. His manner, and the attention given to him by his audience, told Amy that Jacob Silverman was someone to be reckoned with. He welcomed them all briefly to the meeting, greeted new members by name, and added that other guests were welcome too. As he looked along the rows his eyes fixed briefly on Amy, and she knew that Jake Silverman would miss nothing.

A patter of applause met the first speaker who stood up and began to talk, very fast and rather loudly. He had none of Silverman’s quiet, commanding fluency. Amy tried hard to concentrate, but her attention drifted away to the rest of the audience, and then to Tony beside her. He was frowning a little, and there was a sceptical twist to his mouth that indicated he didn’t think much of the speaker either. It was nice being here with him, Amy thought. The warmth of the room and the monotony of the speaker’s voice grew soporific, and she lost herself in comfortable dreams.

The second speaker was a blunt, brusque little man who launched himself into an analysis of trades union power bases. Amy’s interest quickened again, in spite of the happy reverie she had fallen into. She knew in theory that two or three extra shillings were important enough so that bargaining over them could go on for weeks, but she had never exactly thought what those shillings would mean every week to a man and his family. Much of the talk was beyond her, but it made her think for the first time about the right to work, its rewards, and the deprivation of those who had none. The memory of her own petulant behaviour on the night of Isabel’s wedding made her feel faintly uncomfortable.

The speaker moved on to talk about the power wielded by strikers, making Amy think back to her vague memories of the General Strike. Adeline had gone out in her silliest hat to serve soup to the strike-breakers. The sons of family friends had driven buses, and it had all been regarded as tremendously good fun. Tonight, surrounded by these intent faces, she saw it in a different light. Her feeling of discomfort deepened into shame, and she wriggled lower in her seat. Suddenly she was conscious of the diamond clip fastening the soft brim of her hat.

Before the last part of the meeting, Tony turned to grin at her. Amy saw that he was challenging her, and that the whole evening’s expedition was a challenge. He was more or less expecting her to be bored and uncomprehending. How would he judge her when he discovered that she wasn’t? Amy was aware that her perceptions were shifting slightly. She wanted Tony to approve of her, but she also wanted to know more about what she had heard tonight for its own sake.

Jake Silverman stood up again.

‘Thank you, Comrade Easterbrook,’ he said. ‘Now. I want to call for the meeting’s help in connection with the hunger march. The response from workers between South Wales and here has been excellent. The march will last twelve days, and we have been able to plan overnight stops in places where a school hall or something similar will be made available for the marchers to sleep in. The problem, ironically, arises when they reach London. Accommodation for men without money is harder to come by in this great city of ours. There will be several hundred men by the time the march reaches here, possibly a thousand or more. Even if every comrade here and in the movement offered his home, there would be barely enough room.’

‘Kingsway Hall?’ someone suggested.

‘Salvation Army hostels?’ another man said.

‘They deserve proper accommodation, and a reception after the petition has been presented,’ someone else shouted.

‘There’s time to raise the money,’ the girl in the turban called. ‘Let’s do them proud.’

Jake Silverman was beaming. He produced a hat and waved it. ‘Very well. We’ll begin here and now.’

‘There’s nothing Jake likes better,’ Tony whispered, ‘than orchestrating enthusiasm.’

The hat was passed along the rows and money clinked into it. When it reached the end of their row Amy fumbled in her crocodile-skin bag for her purse. There were two pounds in it. Never, Adeline said, leave yourself without money for a cab ride home. The hat reached her and she stuffed the notes into it.

‘Will you see me home?’ she asked Tony.

He winked at her. ‘Of course. It’s only a twopenny bus ride back to Bruton Street, after all.’

The meeting proceeded to heated discussions of where the marchers could be most comfortably and honourably accommodated, and how the money was to be raised to do it.

At last Jake Silverman waved his red and black plaid arms. ‘Thank you, all of you, very much. Our comrades in the South Wales Miners’ Federation deserve every effort. The meeting is closed now. Join us upstairs, if you can.’

At once, the crowd began to surge out of the room, which had grown uncomfortably hot. Amy had been engrossed and hadn’t noticed it, but now she pulled her hat off and shook out her hair. She saw the girl with the brass earrings looking at her.

Some people were clumping back down the stairs to the street door, but most of them were heading for the flat above. Tony and Amy were carried along with them.

Jake Silverman’s flat was a series of small, low rooms crowded with books, pamphlets and people. The jabber of talk hit them at the door. Hands were waving and gesticulating, voices were shouting each other down and clamouring to make a point before anyone else could refute it. Amy edged through the crowd in Tony’s wake and came to the kitchen. Jake Silverman was standing in the middle brandishing a wine bottle.

‘Come and get it,’ he shouted and a forest of empty glasses was thrust at him. He looked across at Tony. ‘Wield a corkscrew, Tony, will you?’

‘Jake, this is my friend Amy Lovell.’

Jake put down the bottle. ‘Pour it yourselves,’ he called out, and held out a hand to Amy. ‘Any friend of Tony’s is welcome here,’ he said simply, and took her hand in his large, warm one. Amy could almost believe that she felt the crackle as he touched her, he was so charged with energy. Jake’s arm enveloped her shoulders and he turned her to where the girl with the scarlet stockings and the earrings was frying sausages over a corner gas ring.

‘This is Kay Cooper.’ Jake kissed Kay enthusiastically on the mouth. ‘And Angel Mack.’ That was the turban girl. ‘This is Tony’s friend, Amy Lovell.’

Kay waved her sausage fork, and Angel said, ‘Hmm. Tony’s friend, eh? What did you think of the meeting?’

Amy glanced from one to the other. ‘Just that. It made me think.’

Suddenly, both the girls were smiling at her.

‘Have a sausage.’

‘And a glass of wine. Guaranteed to turn your tongue jet black.’

‘Thank you. I will.’ Armed with food and drink, Tony took Amy away into the throng. He introduced her to everyone in sight.

‘Wait!’ she protested. ‘I’ll never remember who everyone is.’

‘You wanted to meet different people,’ he reminded her. ‘What do you think so far? Changed your social perceptions, has it?’

He was teasing her again, but Amy looked straight back at him.

‘Do you know, I think it has, a little.’

She was enjoying the smoky, crowded rooms and the lively babble of talk more than the grandest society party she had ever been to. She thought that she had never met such opinionated people in her life. Or no, that wasn’t quite true. Peter Jaspert was opinionated too, but his opinions stood at the opposite pole from those expressed here. She had never found Peter Jaspert particularly congenial, yet she felt perfectly at home here tonight.

Was this, then, where her sympathies lay? For some reason the idea excited her. By listening very carefully to the talk, and by putting it together with what she already knew from newspaper reports, Amy understood that the hunger marchers were miners from the Rhondda, out of work now, who were marching on London to deliver a petition at Downing Street. Sixty per cent of men were out of work in the valleys.

Amy stared at Kay, whose black curls shook with her passionate recital.

‘This Depression can only get worse. We’re cushioned from it here, you and me and all the rest of us, by our education and because we live in prosperous London. But out there, in the mines and the rest of industry, people are suffering every day.’

Amy thought, who could be more cushioned than me? Bethan came from the valleys, but she had never so much as mentioned these terrible things. How much more don’t I know about? How much more have I never thought about, or bothered to enquire about?

‘Hello again.’ It was Angel Mack, with a jug of wine. ‘More of this stuff? Or there’s beer, if you’d rather. No cocktails or champagne, I’m afraid.’

Was it really so transparently obvious where she came from, then? Amy wondered.

‘Wine, thank you,’ Amy said firmly.

‘I’ve never been to a party like this before,’ she added. ‘Where everyone seems to have so much to say to everyone else.’

Angel laughed. ‘Oh yes, there’s always plenty of talk. That’s half the trouble with armchair comrades like us. Too busy talking about what’ll happen when the revolution comes to actually do anything about making it happen.’

‘Can it happen without you?’

‘Most definitely,’ Angel said. ‘And what about you? Are you on our side?’

Amy thought suddenly of Chance and the cedar tree shading the cool grass, and of the hunger marchers sleeping in village halls on their endless walk to London. And then of Peter Jaspert and his fluent talk of trade tariffs.

‘I’m not on the other side,’ Amy said at last. ‘Although I’ve only just discovered that.’ At once, she felt that she was a traitor to everything she knew. Quickly, to cover up her own uncertainty, she asked, ‘Does Tony Hardy come here a lot?’

Angel glanced curiously at her. ‘Tony comes and goes. Got his own fish to fry, as they say. As far as all this goes, he’s less committed than some but his heart’s in the right place. Does that tell you what you want to know?’

Amy wasn’t sure what she wanted to know.

‘What about Jake Silverman?’

‘Yes, everyone always wants to know about Jake. He’s probably much more like you than you would think. His father and the rest of his family are in the garment trade, rather prosperously so. Jake turned his back on all that when he was eighteen. I think he’d describe himself as a full-time political activist now. He supports himself by working in the Left Bookshop downstairs, and writing the odd article for the quarterlies. He lives here with Kay.’

‘Kay’s his wife?’

‘No,’ Angel said coolly, ‘not his wife. Kay doesn’t believe in marriage.’

Amy began to laugh, so that Angel stared at her even harder. She was thinking of Johnny Guild and his friends, and Peter and Isabel in St Margaret’s, Westminster.

‘I don’t think I do, either,’ Amy said.

‘I imagine not, if you’re going about with Tony Hardy. Here he comes now, looking for you.’

In the next room, someone was piling records on to the ancient gramophone. The music was very loud and very crackly, and there was hardly room to move, let alone to dance. Tony bowed gravely and held out his arms.

At once Amy lost track of the evening’s progress. She had the impression that the party was in full and noisy swing, and that a telephone had been ringing insistently somewhere. She was startled when Jake crossed the room and turned the music off.

‘Sorry, everyone.’ Jake grinned at them. ‘Complaints department. Either the row stops or the police arrive.’

Tony found Amy’s coat for her, and the hat that had been rolled up and stuffed in one of the pockets.

‘Good night,’ Jake boomed from the top of the stairs. ‘See you next time, Tony. And you, Amy Lovell, whoever you are.’

Amy smiled to herself. She wanted to come again. She definitely wanted to come again, and not just because of Tony Hardy.

Out in the darkness she began to walk briskly the way they had come, back towards the bus stop. Then she realized that Tony was still standing at the kerb, and that he was laughing at her.

‘D’you imagine that we’re going to catch a bus at one in the morning? This way. We’ll have to look for a cab towards Oxford Street.’

‘You’ll have to pay,’ Amy reminded him. ‘I put my taxi money in the hunger hat.’

‘I think I can manage. You may do it next time.’

They found a cab, and Tony handed her into it. In the familiar stuffy interior Amy leaned back in her seat. The wine she had drunk and the relaxed atmosphere between them made her ask, without thinking very hard, ‘Angel Mack said something odd. I told her I didn’t think I believed in marriage, and she said something like “I’m not surprised, if you’re going about with Tony Hardy.” What did she mean?’

Amy thought she saw Tony’s head jerk round, silhouetted against the street lights rolling past outside. But then he was so still that she thought she had imagined it.

‘I’ve no idea,’ he said smoothly. ‘Possibly pique because I’ve never made a play for her myself. Practically everyone else has. But I shouldn’t pay too much attention to what Angel says. She works very hard at being modern and hardboiled, and a good deal of it is just for effect.’

‘I liked her,’ Amy said.

‘I like her too. But it doesn’t mean I have to trust her, or believe what she says.’

The silence that followed was awkward, and Amy wished fervently that she had kept Angel’s remark to herself. In the end Tony said, with his old lightness, ‘My views on marriage are the same as yours. So we don’t need to mention it again, do we?’

‘No. Why should we?’

But neither of them could find anything else to say, and the cab rumbled to a stop in Bruton Street. Tony paid the driver, and they got out and watched it rattle away again.

‘Don’t you need him to take you home?’ Amy asked. ‘I don’t even know where you live,’ she added sadly.

‘Not far from Appleyard Street. I’ll walk back. I like walking at night. It’s my thinking time.’

In the shadow of the front doors, Amy fumbled in her handbag.

‘Don’t you have to ring to be let in?’

‘Not after midnight. I agreed it with Mother. It isn’t fair to Glass and the footmen. I’ve got my own key. Father doesn’t know.’

Tony put the key in the lock for her, and the door swung open. He didn’t even glance inside at the cavernous hallway.

‘You do have quite a lot of freedom, you know. You shouldn’t complain.’

‘I’m not, any more. Good night, Tony. Thank you for this evening.’

Amy turned to him, and Tony saw the curve of her cheek, and the shadow of her eyelashes under her hat brim. He kissed her, very quickly, just brushing the corner of her mouth with his own.

‘Good night,’ he answered.

Amy felt a faint, vanishing flicker of disappointment. But what else could she expect from him here in the front doorway?

‘Next time I take you out,’ he added, ‘we’ll do something more orthodox. Dinner, perhaps?’

‘Yes, please.’

He was turning away when Amy called after him.

‘Tony? Are you a Communist?’

He chuckled. ‘There are a number of shades of opinion to the left of Peter Jaspert, you know. No, I’m not a Party member. I belong to the ILP. The Independent Labour Party. Good night, Amy Lovell.’

Amy closed the big door quietly behind her, and made sure that the bolts were secure. Then she walked slowly up the great curve of staircase. On the first floor, where in the daytime a high glass dome brought light spilling down into the well of the house, she stopped under a line of portraits. The King’s Defenders, back over the centuries. Would Gerald, she wondered, take up the ceremonial sword to defend his Sovereign against Jake Silverman, and Kay and Angel and even Tony Hardy, when their revolution came? And on which side of the barricades would Amy Lovell be standing?

‘I’ve no idea,’ she said aloud to the row of impassive faces. ‘I’ve no idea at all. I should start thinking about it, shouldn’t I?’

Upstairs, Amy saw that the light was still on in the old night nursery. Bethan was sitting in an armchair beside the fire, knitting. She pursed her lips when Amy came in.

‘It’s very late, lamb. I was beginning to worry.’

Amy knelt down beside her and put her head on Bethan’s shoulder. Bethan hugged her as she used to do when Amy was little.

‘Don’t worry about me so much. Bethan … I wanted to ask you something.’ The thought of the Rhondda, and the things that Kay Cooper had told her about the way people were living there, was vivid in her mind.

‘What’s that, then?’ Bethan was rolling up her knitting. Usually Bethan looked to Amy exactly as she had done for fifteen years, ever since she had come to Chance as a sixteen-year-old nurserymaid. She was plumper now, but her round, plain face was as cheerful as it had always been, and she moved with the same quick energy. But tonight Amy saw that her eyes were heavy and dark, and her shoulders sagged. It was almost two in the morning, and Bethan was exhausted with waiting up for her. She realized that she had never glimpsed that tiredness before, and she frowned at the recognition of her own selfishness.

‘It doesn’t matter tonight,’ Amy said quickly. ‘You go to bed now. I don’t need anything. Bethan?’ The maid stopped in the doorway. ‘Thank you for looking after us all.’

‘Go on with you now.’

Nick Penry reached up for the old khaki kitbag that had been stowed away on top of the wardrobe. He shook it out, and began carelessly stuffing a few pieces of clothing into it.

Mari had been watching in silence, her chapped hands gripping the brass bed-rail, but now she said, ‘Let me do that. You’ll mix everything up.’

Silently he handed the bag to her. Mari refolded the two shirts and the darned pullover and socks. Her eyes were blurred with tears and she shook her head angrily to clear them. Nick sat down on the edge of the bed, staring at the faded linoleum with his hands hanging loosely between his knees.

They had been arguing again.

They had always argued, right from the beginning, but they had always been able to make it up again, fiercely or gently, in bed.

But they couldn’t do that now, or almost never. Mari had changed from the rosy-cheeked provocative girl she had been when she married into a white, frightened woman. She was afraid of anything worse happening to them, afraid of anything that might disturb the fragile equilibrium they lived by. She was afraid of another handicapped baby. She was afraid for Dickon, now and in the future when the two of them wouldn’t be here to care for him any longer. She was afraid of Nick turning on the Means Test man, who came to peer insultingly at their back kitchen in search of any unexplained luxuries that might point to money coming in beyond the bare minimum they existed on. If there was any hint that they earned money elsewhere, their tiny unemployment benefit would be cut off. She was afraid of any of them falling ill, because there was nothing spare to pay for that. And she was newly afraid of Nick’s convictions, the flaring beliefs that made him revile the soft options, the ‘company unionism’ that was threatening to spread in the hard times, and despise the owners and the government for their agreement that increased the miners’ hours to eight a day underground again, instead of seven and a half. She was afraid that Nick would never get a job again. He had stepped too far out of line. His name was known to the owners and their agents.

And all her fear seemed to trigger off the very opposite in Nick, as if he had to stand firm for both of them. He clung harder to what he believed in, to the socialist ideals that earned the nickname ‘Little Moscow’ for their corner of the bleak, depopulated valleys. It made him angrier, and more determined, and somehow less knowable. It didn’t make him any easier to love. And now he was setting off to march to London, and she was afraid of being without him.

With a sob, she dropped the bag and went to sit beside him. He put his arm around her, warm and protective.

‘Have you got to go?’

‘You know I do. If I don’t, why should anyone else bother? It’s something we can do to make people across the country look at us, and think about us. If we can just get public opinion with us, Mari. The Miners’ executive are meeting MacDonald again, to try to win him over, make him understood what we want, and why. He’s not to be trusted, but Henderson is on our side. The march might make the difference.’

Mari’s face was wet with tears. She hated the words. They were too familiar, too impersonal.

‘Can’t you let the others go for once? Stay here with Dickon and me. We need you more than they do.’

Gently Nick let her go. ‘You know I can’t do that. It’ll only be two weeks. I’ll get a ride back somehow.’

He took up a blanket wrapped in a gabardine cape that had belonged to his father. He strapped it beneath the bag, then swung the bag on to his back. It hung there, tellingly almost empty.

‘Best to be travelling light,’ Nick said. ‘It’s time to be going, love.’

They left the room in silence. It was very early, hardly light yet, and Dickon was still asleep in the other bedroom, no more than a cupboard at the stairhead. Nick stooped in the doorway and knelt by the low bed to kiss him. When the child was asleep he looked like any other little boy, the liveliness briefly rubbed out of his face by oblivion. Nick looked at him for a long moment, hopelessly wishing.

‘You’d better have something before you go,’ Mari said flatly.

She went down to the icy kitchen and stirred the fire under its blanket of coal dust. With a horseshoe of solidly twisted newspaper she coaxed up a brief blaze and set the kettle on it. Then she brought the heel of a loaf out of the pantry and sliced it, spreading it carefully with thick dripping out of a blue-glazed bowl.

‘I don’t need that,’ Nick said. ‘You and the boy have it.’

‘You’ve left us more than enough money,’ Mari said.

That was true. Nick was setting out to walk to London with hardly more than a shilling in his pocket. He sat down in the armchair to pull his boots on, glancing first at the oval patches worn almost through, and the split already gaping between the sole and the upper.

‘You could have done with new boots,’ Mari said.

He smiled at her suddenly. ‘So could every man setting out this morning, I dare say.’

Mari handed him his tea, in the precious china mug that he had bought for her long ago at Barry Island. The tea was sweetened with a hoarded tin of condensed milk. Dickon could finish the rest. He loved licking the thick yellow stuff off a spoon.

Nick drank gratefully, looking at her over the rim of the mug. ‘Remember that day?’ he asked, and she nodded. It had been their day together, and the day of the explosion too. There was no happiness without an equal or deeper seam of sadness, Mari thought bitterly. Even if he were to walk twice round the world, Nick couldn’t change that.

He was anxious to be off now, like a small boy before an adventure. He bit impatiently into one piece of bread and dripping and wrapped up the other to go into his bag.

‘Here,’ Mari said. From a drawer she produced two flat bars of chocolate and slipped them into the bag too. She had put by the money for them secretly, buying less food for the week and doing without when Nick was out of the house. Nick didn’t try to protest. He understood the gesture and the price of it. He smiled crookedly instead, then put his arms round her and kissed her.

‘I’ll eat a square a day, and think of you,’ he promised. She felt light in his arms, birdlike, and small for the weight of responsibility that he felt towards her and Dickon, dependent on him. Nick suddenly thought of saying that he wouldn’t go after all, that he would stay because she wanted him to. But the men were waiting for him at the bottom of the hill. He had to go. He had to act on what be believed in, otherwise how could he justify the belief?

‘I won’t come down with you,’ she whispered. ‘Because of Dickon.’

Nick kissed her again and they shivered, held against one another. Then he lifted the bag and the blanket bumped awkwardly.

‘Two weeks,’ he promised, and walked out into the dark, dripping entry. Someone had scratched WORK, NOT WALKS on the bricks.

Mari listened to his steps receding into silence, and then stared round the kitchen at his empty mug, and the imprint of him in the armchair where he had bent to lace his worn boots.

It was so cheerless without him that she was almost crying again. When he was here they quarrelled, repetitively and wearyingly, and when he was gone she couldn’t bear it.

Upstairs Dickon began calling her. ‘Mam. Maa-am.’ He had only a few proper words. The others that he used most were ‘Dad’ and ‘More’. Even Dickon was beginning to understand that there usually wasn’t any more, but his endless repetition of it was one of the day’s painful refrains. Mari sighed.

‘I’m coming, love,’ she called up to him.

Nick squared his shoulders beneath the straps and set off down the hill. The wet slate roofs of the houses shone like mirrors, and smoke from the chimneys already hung like greasy bunting over them. The air smelt of coal as it always did, gritty and rough at the top of his lungs, cut through with the rival scents of damp and, very faintly, of frying food. The streets were deserted. Those who had work were already there, and it was too early yet for the knots of aimless men to gather and talk on the street corners.

The arranged meeting point for the Nantlas marchers was the old pit gates. It had never reopened after the explosion, and the heavy padlocks and chains on the gates were rusted over.

As Nick came over the humped iron bridge spanning the railway and the river, he saw that most of the twenty-odd marchers from the village were already there, waiting for him.

Two or three of them waved cheerfully at him, and called out greetings.

‘Feeling in good leg are you, Nick boy?’

‘Pack up your troubles in your old kitbag …’ someone else sang in a fine, resonant tenor, and there was a ripple of ironic laughter.

Nick was counting the heads. Two more men joined them, making the full complement. He took a deep breath. It was the setting-off point at last. There had been weeks of planning, with the Fed at first wary of then, finally, co-operative with the National Unemployed Workers Movement and with the idealistic young men of Appleyard Street, London. Letters of encouragement had come from Jake Silverman, and funds had been sent by the Communist Party of Great Britain. Jake Silverman had even followed his letters to the Rhondda, and Nick had listened to him talking about the coming of the glorious revolution to a roomful of unemployed miners.

His colleagues on the Federation executive recognized that the hunger marches were as good a way as any of drawing public attention to the mass of unemployed. But Nick himself was more interested in marching the one hundred and fifty miles straight to London and confronting the Prime Minister with the Federation’s demands. He had volunteered himself as a march organizer unhesitatingly, with that goal in mind. He had been proud of the idea that he would be part of the deputation of miners that would march on from Trafalgar Square to Downing Street. And yet, now that the moment had come, he felt the wrench of leaving Mari and Dickon. The crowd of men was growing restive. They jostled one another and called out their impatience.

Nick lifted up his arms to quieten them again.

‘That’s it, lads. Shall we make a start? Don’t want to keep them waiting down the valley, do we?’

They shuffled awkwardly into a column. Half of the men had fought in the War, and remembered the discipline of marches. The rest lined up behind them, grinning in embarrassment. There was a ragged cheer of encouragement from the wives, children and old men who had gathered against the railings to watch them go.

‘Good luck, boys. You tell ‘em, up in London.’

Amidst the renewed cheers, the uncertain column began to wind away along the valley road. At the back of the line two boys were carrying a roll of canvas. They looked at the waving hands, and the erect shoulders in front of them, and then glanced at each other. At once they dropped the canvas roll and unwrapped it. Inside was a green silk banner. It was gaudy with gold threads and the scarlet of a huge dragon, its tail curling back over its head. Nantlas, Rhondda was embroidered on it in big gold letters, and the initials SWMF. They slotted the supporting poles quickly together and hoisted the banner between them. The wind tugged at the gold fringes and the silk bellied out, making a riveting splash of colour amongst the drab greys.

It was like a signal. From windows and doors up the terraces heads appeared and the cheering was carried up the hillside in thin, insistent waves. Nick glanced back from the head of the line and saw the banner glaring bravely behind him. The march, setting out in hunger and despair, was suddenly festive, like the Galas of the old days. He lengthened his stride and the marchers swung along behind him in the pride of the moment.

The singer was next to him. He looked back too, smiling, and then began to sing again.

Hello, Piccadilly, Hello, Leicester Square,

It’s a long, long road up from the valleys,

But we’ll march, right there.

Nick joined in, and the song was taken up all along the line until they were singing and marching and the waving and cheering followed them all along the road until the corner took them round the fold of the hillside and out of sight.

The road ran on in front of them, flanking the railway line with its empty, rust-red trucks shunted into deserted sidings. The slag mountains towered on either side of them, and the black scars of the workings bit into the green hillsides. No one glanced at the scenery. Strung out down the valley were more towns and villages like Nantlas. More men would join them from all these places, and they would march on to meet the miners who had come down from Rhondda Fawr, and the others from across the entire stricken coalfield. At Newport, when they were all together, they would turn on to the London road.

And they would walk and walk until they reached Downing Street. It was a long way.

Around him, Nick heard the singing dying away as one voice after another was silenced by the road stretching ahead. They were solemn now, and the sudden burst of high spirits was over. The two boys in the rear let the banner drop again and wrapped it in its protective canvas before running to catch up once more.

‘We’re on our way, then,’ Nick said quietly.

‘May it bring us something more than blistered feet,’ the singer said beside him, with an absence of expectation that was ominous to Nick.

Tony was as good as his promise. He took Amy out to dinner in Soho, to a cheerful restaurant where Italian waiters with striped aprons wriggled between the close-packed tables, and the owner came out with his magnificent moustaches to sit at the tables of the most favoured customers. Amy ate the highly flavoured food from the thick white plates with clear enjoyment, and drank quantities of Chianti from bottles wrapped in a raffia shell.

A trio of violinists in red shirts came and played insistently between the tables, and Tony and Amy winced and laughed at each other before Amy put a shilling into their held-out plate to make them go a little further away.

‘I like this place,’ she told him, and Tony smiled.

‘I like taking you out. You have the knack of enjoying uncomplicated things. Rather unusual for a girl like you, I should think. I had imagined it would be hopeless if I didn’t know where to buy orchid corsages or belong to exclusive clubs.’

‘Does that mean you’ll go on doing it?’ she asked him. ‘I’d like to go to Appleyard Street again.’

Tony looked at her. ‘I don’t know,’ he said with deliberate vagueness. He had been evasive when she had mentioned Appleyard Street before.

‘When?’ she pressed him, and he sighed.

‘Look, Amy. Appleyard Street isn’t really a suitable place for you. I took you as a once-off expedition for interest’s sake. See how the other half, and all that. If I’d thought a bit harder, I wouldn’t have done it at all.’

‘Why can’t I go there?’

‘Peers’ daughters with connections like yours don’t generally mix with Communist sympathizers. It would make a nice little item for some newsman. Think of it from your father’s point of view. Or your brother-in-law’s.’

Peter Jaspert. Isabel and he would be back in two weeks’ time. Amy had begun to admit to herself that she was hurt by the stilted quality of the letters and cards from her sister. She told herself that of course she wasn’t expecting detailed descriptions of married life, but she still felt that the closeness that had always existed between them was being denied by the pages of guidebook enthusiasm for Tuscan hillsides or Michelangelos.

The truth was that she was missing Isabel badly. If she saw more of Richard, Amy thought with a touch of sadness, perhaps she wouldn’t feel it so much. But even when Richard was home from Eton, although he was as amusing and affectionate as always when they did meet, he was increasingly busy with his own mysterious affairs and he seemed to have no time to spare for Amy. ‘Haven’t you got a dozen Guards officers to take you dancing?’ he would grin at her.

When she protested that she didn’t care for officers he would stare at her, mock-surprised.

‘Don’t you?’

She sighed now and turned her attention back to Tony and the question of Appleyard Street. ‘Yes. I see that you can’t be responsible for taking me there. Sorry. It’s odd, you know. I felt … comfortable, there.’

‘You made an impression. Angel Mack was asking about you the other day. I didn’t tell her anything, of course. Never mind, Amy.’ Seeing her face, Tony reached out and covered her hand with his own. ‘We’ll go somewhere else. Poetry and music at the Wigmore Hall next week? One of my poets is reciting his work. Very avant-garde, I promise you.’

‘Can I come with you to the hunger march?’ she persisted.

‘No. For different reasons, but definitely not. It might not be safe, for one thing. What about the Wigmore Hall?’

Amy submitted to the diversion. She could perfectly well see the hunger marchers alone, after all.

‘All right,’ she grinned at him. ‘Avant-garde verse it shall be.’

His hand rested lightly over hers. Amy liked him touching her. It was odd that she disliked what other men tried to do to her, yet she definitely wanted Tony to kiss her and he never even tried to. It wasn’t because of who she was, Amy was sure of that. They were friends, on a clear footing that had nothing to do with social position.

She looked at him now across the table. Tony leaned back in his chair and the sputtering candlelight made dark shadows under his cheekbones. Amy thought that he looked intriguing. Not handsome, but romantic, and clever, and enigmatic.

She was suddenly breathless, and she opened her mouth to breathe more easily. Tony looked back at her, as if he was waiting for her to say something.

Daringly, she tried out the words in her head. Tony, I love you. Did you know? At once she felt her cheeks redden. She turned her hand so that her fingers laced with Tony’s and pressed them.

He returned the pressure lightly and then laid her hand gently back on the cloth. She felt scattered breadcrumbs rough under her wrist.

‘Time to go,’ Tony said.

Outside the restaurant the night air was cool.

With his hand at her elbow Tony steered her to the kerb and into a cab. They sat side by side in the darkness watching the lights flick past. Amy’s face was turned away and Tony saw the disappointed hunch of her shoulders.

‘What can I do?’ he asked, wishing there was something.

‘Kiss me,’ Amy answered without hesitation.

‘Oh, Amy.’ There was a faint breath of exasperation in his voice and something worse, amusement. But he leant forward and touched her mouth with his own.

I didn’t mean like that, Amy thought miserably.

She looked away again, out into the street. At the beginning she had been interested in Tony for the doors that he promised to open. But now he attracted her in a different way that made her feel hot, and awkward, and unsure of herself. He was certainly fending her off. The realization embarrassed her, and she felt her face grow even hotter.

Tony said, ‘You aren’t very happy, are you? What is it?’

Amy shrugged. She couldn’t, in her embarrassment, recite her loneliness for Isabel and Richard and her feeling of uselessness to the world.

‘I told you at the wedding,’ she said, as lightly as she could. ‘I feel a little lost. But I should solve that for myself. Don’t you agree?’

The cab was turning in at the end of Bruton Street. Amy looked and saw the warmly lit windows of her home. Adeline had been giving a dinner party tonight, but by now they would all have moved on to the Embassy Club.

‘I hope you will find some way of being happy,’ Tony said, with odd formality.

The cab drew up. The driver sat stolidly behind his glass panel, collar up and cap pulled well down over his ears.

‘Isabel will be back in a day or so, won’t she?’

‘Yes,’ Amy answered. ‘Isabel will be back.’

‘Until next week, then. At the Wigmore Hall.’

They said their good nights, and Amy went up the steps and into the house alone.

Isabel’s new home in Ebury Street looked as clean and shiny as if it had just been unwrapped, Amy thought. The maid showed her into Isabel’s drawing room on the first floor. It was full of pretty pale chintzes and bowls of fresh flowers. There were tranquil watercolours on the blue walls, and a tidy little fire in the polished grate. Silver-framed pictures of Peter’s family and of herself and Isabel as children stood on the grand piano at one end of the room.

The door opened and there was Isabel. Amy ran to her.

‘Oh, Bel, I’ve missed you so much.’ The girls hugged each other, smiling wordlessly.

Then Amy stood back, holding her sister at arm’s length. Isabel was wearing a pale blue dress that matched her room, and her hair waved flatteringly over her ears and was caught up at the back of her head. She looked more elegant than ever, but there were faint, blue shadows under her eyes.

‘Bad journey?’ Amy asked sympathetically.

‘Oh, the night sleeper isn’t so bad. But we were glad to be home.’

‘Where’s Peter?’

‘He went to his office for a couple of hours. I think he might be back now. He’s probably dressing. Lucky the House is in recess, or he’d have dashed off there too. He was getting very restless, the last few days.’

Amy sat down on one of the sofas near the fire, and Isabel settled herself opposite.

‘Well?’ Amy asked. ‘How was it?’

‘Would you like a drink?’ Isabel reached out for the bell. The maid came in with the tray, and the sight of Isabel enjoying her hostess role made Amy feel more cheerful for a moment or two.

When they were alone again she said, ‘Tell me about it. You’ve been away for six weeks.’

‘Didn’t I, in my letters?’

‘Not really. I could have got exactly the same news from the Guide Michelin. Are you happy, Bel?’

Surprisingly, Isabel laughed and the shadows disappeared. ‘Oh, I’ve missed you too. Amy the insistent. Yes, darling, of course I’m happy.’

‘Is it what you expected?’

‘Rather early to say, after only six weeks. And not very typical wedded weeks, either. It’s more than I expected, I think.’ Isabel looked down at her wrist, turning her bracelet so that the stones caught the light. ‘And it takes a little getting used to, you know. You’ll find out for yourself, when the time comes.’

‘I expect so,’ Amy said noncommittally. She was relieved, in a sense, that Isabel wasn’t making wild claims of perfect happiness. Marriage would take some getting used to. Isabel looked tired, and she seemed a little withdrawn, but she appeared to be reacting with all her old calm, common sense. Perhaps the fears that her letters had aroused in Amy were unfounded, after all. Isabel was moving gracefully around the drawing room now, using the refilling of their glasses as a pretext for adjusting an ornament and straightening a cushion. Suddenly she looked every inch the proud new wife, and Amy smiled.

‘Not a lot has happened to me. I’ve been out two or three times with Tony Hardy.’

‘Mmm? I saw him briefly at the wedding. I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.’

‘I think he is, now. He took me to a political meeting because I was complaining that I never met anyone different. Almost everyone was a Communist.’

‘Amy, for God’s sake don’t say anything about that to Peter. He thinks they should all be clapped into prison.’

They looked at each other apprehensively and then they started to laugh, just as they had always been able to do.

Peter came in. His hair was brushed flat and sleek and he looked even healthier than he usually did, if that was possible.

‘Oh dear,’ he said genially, ‘the terrible twins. Giggling, just like always. How are you, Amy m’dear?’

‘In the pink, thank you Peter.’

There was the faintest of suppressed snorts from Isabel.

‘I really don’t understand you two, you know,’ Peter said. He poured himself a whisky in a crystal tumbler and splashed soda into it from a siphon on the tray. He crossed the room to where Isabel was sitting and stood behind her sofa, one hand resting on her shoulder. Amy saw her sister glance up at her husband. It occurred to her that there was a kind of wary anxiety in the look.

Whatever there was, Peter didn’t see it.

‘Have you had a good day, darling?’ Isabel asked him. His hand moved, lightly, to stroke her neck.

‘An excellent day.’

They faced Amy now, both smiling, and she thought how handsome they looked. Mr and Mrs Jaspert, comfortably at home.

Amy felt a frown gathering behind her eyes with the sense, still persistent, that everything was not quite right, for all the external harmony. But Isabel went on smiling and Peter’s hand tightened affectionately on her shoulder before he moved away again.

They were extolling the beauties of Tuscany, reminding one another of sights and improving on one another’s descriptions, when the maid appeared to show in the other guests. Two couples came into the room, exclaiming conventionally at its prettiness. There was another Tory MP, senior to Peter, and his ambitious wife, and a sharp-eyed City man with whom Peter went into a huddle at one end of the room while his wife talked about horses at the other.

A moment or two later Amy’s partner for the evening arrived.

She had been vaguely expecting someone in the Johnny Guild mould and the blond young man who shook her hand surprised her a little. He looked hardly older than herself, twenty or perhaps twenty-one. He had a gentle, unassuming manner and Amy could see that he was shy in Peter Jaspert’s house. But when, at length, his eyes did meet hers his blue, direct glance seemed at odds with the rest of him.

‘Amy, may I introduce Charles Carew? Charles, this is Miss Lovell, Isabel’s sister.’

They found themselves sitting together on the sofa, isolated by the conversations on either side of them. Glancing up, Amy saw Isabel talking animatedly to one of the wives about the arrangement of her drawing room. She looked proud and happy, and Amy felt her anxiety dissolving. Following her gaze Charles Carew said quietly, ‘It must be strange, finding oneself married.’

His perception startled her and she asked, absurdly, ‘So you aren’t married, Mr Carew?’

He laughed, and then tried to smother the sound. For a moment he was so like one of the ‘suitable’ boys who had been invited as dancing partners to Miss Abbott’s school that Amy looked down, half-expecting to see Charles Carew’s knobby, adolescent wrists protruding from his shirt cuffs in just the way that theirs had done. But his cuffs were long enough to hide his wrists. She saw that his hands were well scrubbed with long, square-ended fingers.

‘No,’ he said, his amusement under control. ‘I’m a doctor.’

He must be older than he looks, then, Amy thought.

‘I’m almost entirely dependent on my father. Surgery is a long training. A wife and family’s a long way in the future. If it happens at all, that is.’

They found themselves smiling at each other.

‘I think I feel the same,’ Amy confided.

When they went down to dinner, Charles took Amy’s arm politely, with old-fashioned manners.

The dining room was filled with more flowers. Isabel must have spent the whole day arranging them. The table was a polished oval reflecting the candlelight and the pink, white and gold of Isabel’s wedding china, and the faces around it looked pleased and relaxed. Isabel herself was beaming with pleasure at the success of her arrangements.

Amy felt herself relaxing too, with the laughter and talk and Peter’s elegant claret. Suddenly she was enjoying being in Isabel’s house, amongst her own generation. It was quite different from being at Bruton Street, or Chance, or one of the formal dinners before a dance. And because of his seeming youth, and his shyness, and the memories that he’d stirred in her, Charles Carew seemed more like a childhood ally than a dinner partner.

Amy looked from Isabel at one end of the table to Peter at the other. Perhaps this was what marriage was. Being in your own house, with your own friends. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising at all that Isabel looked strained after six weeks’ travelling. Being at home would make all the difference.

If I marry, will it be like this? Amy asked herself. She tried to imagine Tony Hardy at the other end of the polished table, but the picture eluded her. Chianti and sardines at Appleyard Street were the things that went with Tony. The thought of him made her smile.

‘Will you share the joke with me?’ Charles Carew asked her softly. He had been watching her, she realized.

‘I’m sorry, that was rude of me. I was just thinking of a friend of mine and trying to imagine him here.’

‘And could you?’

‘Not really.’ The idea was irresistibly funny, but Amy suppressed it because it seemed inappropriate to be talking about Tony, however obliquely, to this shy, polite boy. To deflect him, she asked, ‘Are you an old friend of Peter’s?’

‘My father was in India with his, years ago. The Jasperts came home when Peter’s grandfather died whereas we stayed, but the families have kept in touch. Otherwise my world doesn’t exactly touch on Peter’s.’

‘What is your world?’

‘Medicine,’ Charles said, as if he was surprised at her need to ask. ‘Once I’m qualified as a surgeon I’m going straight back to India. I can be useful there, you see. There’s a lot to be done.’ The mild expression had vanished.

‘I envy you,’ Amy said simply, and once again she was aware of Charles Carew’s appraising, direct gaze.

She had to turn away, then. On her other side the MP, Archer Cole, was asking her something.

It wasn’t until the end of the evening that Amy and Charles spoke directly to each other again. Charles was the first to leave, and he came across the room to say good night to her. They exchanged good wishes and then, thinking of her vacant days, on impulse Amy asked him, ‘Would you be free to come and have tea with me at Bruton Street one day?’

She was still thinking of him as a family friend, and also perhaps imagining that he would fill in, in a brotherly way, some of the emptiness that Richard’s elusiveness created.

Charles thought for a moment. Then he said, ‘I’d like to, very much, but I don’t think I can. I’m doing my theatre practice in the afternoons, you see. I have surgery lectures all morning, and at night there’s cramming to do. I don’t have any free time, really.’

‘Never mind,’ Amy said cheerfully. ‘I’m sure we’ll bump into each other again.’

They shook hands. Peter was waiting, and Charles followed him out of the room and the door closed behind them.

Amy didn’t think about him again.

Amy was the last to leave. She had stayed behind after the others had gone to have a nightcap with Peter and Isabel.

‘I did enjoy myself,’ she told them, stretching out on the sofa with a sigh of pleasure. They beamed their satisfaction back at her. Peter took Isabel’s hand and held it, and Isabel murmured, ‘I thought it went rather well, too. I must tell Cook how pleased we were.’

The fire had sunk to a red glow, warming their faces and making the silver picture frames reflect back a coppery light.

Isabel let her head rest against Peter’s shoulder. Her eyes were closed and Amy couldn’t guess what she was thinking, but her face was smooth.

It’s all right, Amy thought.

She wanted to slip away and let the maid see her out, but they jumped up when she stood up to go, and insisted on coming downstairs with her.

At the street door Peter hailed a taxi for her.

‘I hope there will be hundreds more Ebury Street evenings like this one,’ Amy said.

‘Of course there will,’ Peter answered, and Isabel echoed him. ‘Of course there will.’

As the cab pulled away Amy looked back at them. They stood side by side framed by the light that spilled out of their front door and down the steps. They lifted their hands and waved to her, in unison.

There was a wonderful, tantalizing smell filling the dusty hall.

The men came filing in, too tired to joke any longer or even to talk, and dropped their bundles against the walls without looking at them. But the smell drew them to cluster round the open door at the end of the hall.

‘This way, lads. That’s right.’ It was the catering contingent who had gone on ahead of the marchers from stop to stop, and had been waiting for them with hot food at the end of every day. Silverman and his friends on the Organizing Council had done well, Nick thought. The soup was being ladled out of big pans into a medley of cups and bowls. Nick was ravenous, but he waited until he had seen all his Nantlas contingent into the line before joining the end of it himself with the other march leaders.

It was the last night.

They had reached the outskirts of London, where new factories were springing up along the Great West Road and rows of neat, suburban houses in their square gardens stretched to the north and south of them. On every street corner here there was a little grocer’s shop or a tobacconist’s, windows and walls bright with coloured signs. The long column of dirty, exhausted men had tramped silently past the homeward-bound workers, men coming out of the shops with the evening newspaper under their arm and packets of cigarettes in their pockets, and women in bright, spring-like clothes carrying baskets of food.

There had been cheering supporters lining the route, more tonight than on any of the others because the London Workers had turned out to greet them. But in the tranquil streets behind them the ordinary people going about their business had stared in surprise. London looked prosperous, different from any of the other places they had been through. Nantlas with its empty shops, grey streets and hollow-faced men and women, might have been on another continent. Another world, even.

The soup queue in the parish hall inched slowly forward. All around, men were sitting on wooden chairs, intent on their steaming bowls. When he reached the table at last one of the catering volunteers filled Nick’s bowl for him, and gave him two generous hunks of bread. It was vegetable soup, thick and delicious. Nick carried his away to a corner as carefully as if it was a bowl of molten gold. The first spoonfuls, so hot in his mouth that they almost burned him, spread warmth all through him.

Along the endless road, and in the villages and towns where they had stopped, there had been surprising support. During the day the farmworkers in the fields and most of the drivers of the cars and lorries that rumbled past them, splashing them with filthy water from the potholes in the roads, had stared and then, when they understood, there had been encouragement and coins dropped into the bags marked ‘March for Work. March for Food.’

At nights, when they stopped dead tired in the town halls and even, once, in a huge barn still stacked with hay bales, people had brought food. Sometimes it had been local union representatives, bringing cash donations and messages of support as well as thick sandwiches and urns of strong, sweet tea. But sometimes it was different people, prosperous, middle-class and not workers, as the miners described them. These people looked shocked and sympathetic, and murmured ‘We must all do what we can to help,’ and they brought exotic pies with rich, crumbly pastry and, on one memorable night, a huge baked ham. He had been eating much better than Mari and Dickon would be doing back in Nantlas, Nick thought painfully.

He finished his soup and the last of the bread, and then reached into his rucksack. He had given most of the chocolate to a boy with a terrible cough who had been struggling to keep up almost ever since they had left Wales, but there was one square left. He had been keeping it to have as a celebration when they reached London, and he unwrapped it now and ate it slowly, thinking about Mari.

It was right that he had come, even though he had had to leave her, Nick was sure of that. The march was running under its own momentum now, already a success. Out of the seven hundred men who had left Newport eleven days ago, only a handful had dropped out, in spite of the official labour movement predictions that the miners would never make it. Even those men had had to be ordered to stop marching because their torn feet or exhaustion were holding up progress. Their dogged determination to reach London was a testament in itself, because the marchers had deliberately been chosen, by Nick and the other organizers, from the poorest and weakest of all the thousands of unemployed men across the coalfield who had wanted to march. Any man still receiving the meagre unemployed benefit or the Poor Law relief had been excluded, because no one could guarantee that he would be able to claim the money again on his return. None of the march organizers wanted to claim the responsibility for another destitute family.

Only those who had nothing were chosen, just because they had nothing to forfeit. Nick put aside the thought that he stood to lose his own benefit. That was something he would have to reckon with if and when it happened. It would have been impossible to act as a spur to the other men and not to march himself.

And the march was a success. People were with them, no one could deny that. The food, and the money in the fighting fund proved it. Best of all was the support that had come not only from workers, often in defiance of their own right-wing unions, but from the secure, middle-class people who need never have bothered to think about unemployed miners. If we can reach them, Nick thought, not the politicians, or the coal-owners, but ordinary decent people with money in their pockets, then perhaps we can get something done for us all.

He unstrapped his blanket once more and found a space to unroll it. The floor was draughty bare boards, but to Nick it felt as welcoming and comfortable as a feather bed. He wasn’t hard with working muscle any more after the months of enforced idleness, and the general shortage of food had taken its toll, but he was still fit and strong enough. Yet his legs ached all the way up into his back, and his calves and feet felt leaden with the endless walking. He rubbed the complaining muscles and reminded himself that he was comfortable compared with the older men suffering from pneumoconiosis, and the thin boys transparent with undernourishment from babyhood.

Nick carefully unlaced his boots, afraid that they might fall apart if he handled them too roughly. The sole of the left one had parted company from the upper and the two halves were bound together with rag. Yet some men didn’t even have that, and their progress had slowed to a shuffle that threatened to hold up the whole march.

He smiled suddenly. They had looked like the last tattered remnants of a defeated army long before reaching London, but the fire of spirit had burned stronger and stronger all the way. At first the sheer distance had overwhelmed them, but as the days and miles slid past they had begun to sing again, the old songs remembered from Flanders and the Somme, and the favourite hymns from the chapels in the valleys. They had talked, too, endless fiery discussions of political theory, literature, and even philosophy. Most of the men had brought books in their packs. Reading seemed to satisfy a kind of hunger when there wasn’t any food.

Nick himself had brought a fat, black volume of Paradise Lost borrowed from the Miners’ Welfare library. The magnificent, stately rhythms of the verse soothed him even though the thread of meaning was sometimes lost to him. He took the book out now, thinking that he would read a little while there was still light. But he had hardly begun when from down the crowded hall came a low, bass humming, rising and falling like the sea. Nick put his book away again. There would be singing tonight, instead.

The visiting vicar sat down on one of his wooden chairs, and the men in the kitchen stopped clanking the pans and crockery. The hall grew dark while the singing went on, and somebody brought in oil lamps flaring behind their smoky gas mantles.

The final hymn was the one that was always left until last. The singing rose and filled the hall, and drifted beyond it out into the suburban night.

Bread of Heaven, Bread of Heaven, Feed me till I want no more, want no more, Feed me till I want no more.

There was no more, after that. The hall was just a crowded, stuffy room full of tired men turning on their thin blankets ready for sleep.

Nick was smiling when he fell asleep. Tomorrow they would do what they had come to do, and then they could go home.