Chapter 4
I didn’t cross paths with Siobhan for
some months after Roberto had run out on her.
I heard what had happened and decided she was best left to her own
devices, as my shoulder had never been a comfortable place to cry, and my
sympathy was best left for the most deserving cases, notably my own miserable
plight.
It was therefore in the most unexpected
of circumstances that she reentered my life.
At that time in the early 70’s I didn’t attend many ‘Party’
meetings. The ‘Workers Struggle’ Party
had mostly gone the way of the catholic church, flirtations with Buddhism and
the Canadian army exercise regime, into that capacious bag that I labeled
‘tried and found wanting’. I had all but
given up politics as a bad job.
My ‘Kronstadt’ moment had been on a mass lobby
of Parliament when a group of young Geordie miners had pushed me against a
police line and the stark reality of direct action’ had hit me via a police
baton. After months of bathing in the romantic history of the overthrow of
Tsarism or the tragic heroism of the Spanish civil war I was suddenly and
alarmingly confronted by the reality of personal danger that the books had
failed to engender. This terror slowly percolated in my bowels and later that
year, at a party summer camp, in a moment of sublime illumination, I had risen
to declare in a trembling voice to the thousand or so comrades that I couldn’t
be part of any organization which advocated the violent overthrow of
capitalism.
I had drifted in a political vacuum for
a couple of years, but as with the Jesuits and young catholic minds, the Party
still had a grip on my imagination. So
events, like the worsening situation in Ulster, or more improbably, the
struggles of Bolivian tin miners would inevitably draw me to the Party paper
‘The Flame’ self styled ‘organ’ of the central committee of Workers Struggle to
see what the party ‘line’ was.
I had seen a flyer advertising a meeting
with speaker Joe Hagan, Political secretary to the central committee, at the
Fighting Cocks pub in Moseley. The title
of the meeting was the ‘coming revolutionary period’ ….. How could I
resist?
As I fought my way through the immense line of embittered proletarians in the corridor of the Fighting Cocks, (two
students and a drunk) I wandered into the upstairs parlor.
There in the middle row sat Siobhan
sitting alongside a young black woman.
Her long hairstyle had been replaced with a cropped bob that gave her a
sweet gamin air. This impression was
somewhat undermined by the navy denim canvas dungarees and ‘bovver’ boots. As I sat down at the back she turned
recognized me and gave a clench-fisted salute.
Joe Hagan rose slowly from his seat at
the top table. Joe was the latter-day
Lenin of the British left. His formative education had been at the hands of the
Christian Brothers in Co Wicklow, and it had left an indelible mark. I had once heard the Party described as the
Plymouth Brethren of the political spectrum, and if so Joe was its high priest
with his own brand of hellfire and damnation.
One of his proudest claims was that as a young man having ‘broke’ with
Stalinism he had been taken to Mexico to meet the ‘old man’ Leon Trotsky. This rite of passage had been Joe’s damascene
conversion and he had returned to Britain with the unbroken tablets of stone
handed down from Karl Marx himself, to proclaim imminent revolution to all and
any who stopped to listen. I harboured a
soft spot for Joe as in my judgment he was nearly alone on the left to have had
a working class upbringing, the rest being middle class academics and assorted
luvvies of the chattering classes.
Hagan was a short set, heavy jowelled, pug
of a man. Thick black glasses sat
improbably on his squat nose and his face was set to a permanent scowl. He began to speak. Almost inaudible at first, he slowly sucked
his audience in with small bits of theatre, making a minute adjustment to his
glass of water or shuffling his notes to give a slight emphasis to his opening
comments. He built up his cadences very
slowly but after 5 or so minutes he was ranting.
‘ Comrades’ he shouted in his inimitable
London Irish brogue ‘ the biggest obstacle to revolution in this country is not
the capitalist class, not the bankers or the army, not the establishment or the
royal family. It’s not the Television
with its ceaseless propaganda, nor the press with it’s lies’ he paused and
wiped his sweating brow with a large white handkerchief ‘The biggest obstacle to revolution in this
country is not the timidity of the working class, our history is littered with
heroic working class struggle, neither is it religion with it’s pie in the sky
when you die crap, nor is it the education system which sucks young workers in
with the promise of glittering careers if they obey the rules’ he paused again
now he was screaming.
‘Comrades the biggest obstacle to
revolution in this country,
…………… are the reformists in the trade
unions and Labour Party and their Stalinist lackeys in the Communist Party with
their Parliamentary Road to Socialism.
Our historic mission is to replace these traitors with a genuwinelee Revolutionary
party, the British section of the Fourth International……. The Workers Struggle.
He stopped to drink a sip of water and
as the audience of thirty or so people burst into applause Siobhan jumped to
her feet cheering the loudest. As she
did there was no hiding the fact that Roberto had not left her alone, the swell
of unborn life was plain to see under her faded dungarees.
Later as we sat in the downstairs lounge
with her friend Carmel I took her hand and asked ‘what happened to all the
hippy peace and love?
She smiled like an angel
‘Roberto took all that when he packed
his Fender Stratocaster’
