Tippermuir

A light breeze, born in the mountains to the north, came down the hills and over the moor to cool an otherwise warm September morn. Though gentle it created enough lift to allow the banner to unfurl its folds and be held aloft to fulfil its intended role. This flag was fixed to two oak poles of some considerable weight. The length of the poles provided the height required for the banner to be seen all across the field of battle and most of the way along the Covenanter lines. The poles’ girth gave the strength and the stiffness required for purpose and dictated who among the fourteen men gathered around its shadow was charged with the task of holding it. There was no homogeneity between the poles; that on the left was slightly longer and smaller in diameter than its brother on the right. They were both cut from the same tree it was true, but being cut by man meant that as no two trees were truly alike, neither would their offspring be. Thomas Dundee, stockier and more solid than his fellow Glover, Alexander Kinnaird, held the right pole. It was a great honour to be given the office of protecting and displaying the Incorporation banner and it was awarded on merit. Not the merit that comes from achievement, but the type dictated primarily by nature and finalised by diet and exercise; Alexander Kinnaird and Thomas Dundee were the two biggest Glovers within the Perth Militia.
Many other banners and flags moved gently under the light wind. The colours of the Highland clans nestled together just beneath the Royal Standard in the west and in opposition to the Saltires in the east. On the point of the Robertson standard was fixed the Clan-Nan-Brattich; a small stone that granted to the clan invincibility in battle.
Thirteen men of the Ancient Glovers Incorporation of Perth had marched out onto the field that morning, all under the command of a professional soldier, Captain David Grant. All thirteen of them would sleep in their own beds that night; David Grant would no longer be of this world before the sun set in the sky.
Just after the break of day that morning these men had formed up with the rest of the Burgh Militia by the High Street Port and marched out of Perth as a contingent of the government army. It was a spectacular sight: six thousand well-equipped soldiers, cavalry and troops of cannon travelling westwards along Long Causeway through the Gin Field along the heights of Burgh Muir and out of the town by the Old Gallows Road, to form battle lines on a plain not far from Brook’s Den. If that force had continued at the pace they set in the short march, then they could have occupied the Graham estates of Balgowan and Inchbrackie and still have been in Crieff before the sun was halfway to noon. As it was, they stopped just three miles from Pitheavlis Castle and but four from the Glovers Incorporation Hall.
The rows of muskets, though dwarfed by the swaying pikes each three times the length of a man, held a greater menace to those that faced them. Drilled to perfection on Perth‘s North Inch, the musket companies could fire and reload in under a minute. It was the practice of the day to operate the counter-march and the government forces that stood guarding the road to Perth knew how to conduct that manoeuvre to perfection: Each company would form up six deep and after the first rank discharged their weapons, they would file round to the rear whilst each of the remaining ranks stepped forward a pace. The new front line then repeated the action, thus laying deadly fire at the enemy before them. But, as with each man who in his head can write as great as Aeschylus of old, the doing of a thing under the heat of scrutiny is a different matter. And so, before that day was won by the Crown, the massed ranks of musketeers and the companies of pike-men broke and ran to save their skins, only to be slaughtered in the rout.
On the first of September 1644, two armies faced each other across the width of Tippermuir; one army deployed between the church of Tippermuir and the Old Gallows Road that led to Perth and the other, the greater in size, across that road. In the morning prior to the commencement of combat, the leader of the smaller army paid a social visit to the minister’s manse that stood by the church. The meeting had been formal. A young lieutenant knocked on the front door and sent word via a maid that Lord Graham, Marquis of Montrose was in need of a glass of water. Alexander Balnevis, Tippermuir Parish minister of four years, brought the refreshment to the door personally. He had been totally unaware of the presence of this invasion until awakened from his bed-chamber. When he came out into the morning air, his pupils dilated by his recent slumber, gradually opened out and were filled by the sight of the Royal Standard informing him that he was in the presence of the Lieutenant-Governor of Scotland. A Cavalier dressed in the finery one expected from a Scottish Laird of noble birth and financial means dismounted from a horse less associated with such men. The minister’s eyes were drawn away from the Marquis; he was bewitched by the manky nag. Balnevis could see only two other horses. In the distance he spied many men and officers running around clearly arranging infantry deployments. A thought crossed his mind: if these few thousand Irish and their Highlander allies were the Royalist Army in its entirety, then the King’s cause was surely lost in Scotland. Balnevis uttered a short pray under his breath, thanking God for delivering Perth and the Covenant from the possibilities that a great Royalist uprising might have brought. By that stage, the Cavalier was fully dismounted and approaching the minister. Balnevis’s mind rapidly turned to survival and the correct decorum. He greeted Lord Montrose in the required manner and offered him the water with which to quench his thirst. Waiting firstly for Montrose to drink his fill, and then for the return of pleasantries, Balnevis boldly enquired as to the intention of this Lord and his men. No mention of war, fighting or battle was spoken in the following conversation. Instead the Lieutenant-General of King Charles’s Army in Scotland talked of his desire to see the people of Perth and Lord Elcho’s Army come over to the King’s Standard and end this division of the Kingdom. This was a message subsequently repeated by David Drummond. Master of Madderty, who acting as Herald to the Marquis, and before the battle proper, spoke before the Covenant line under flag of truce, saying that his commander, “was neither covetous of honours for himself nor envious of men’s preferment and had no design against the lives of his countrymen”. It was, later, a welcome moment, when in the evening after the battle, Madderty heard the key in his cell unlocked, and his leader and brother-in-law standing before him; a far more pleasant sight that of the hangman he had been promised.
A lesser force they may have been, but a determined adversary must never be underestimated. This army of Irish and Highlander, fighting for the cause of King Charles, soon showed that their colours ran red not yellow; red with the blood of their enemy. This force of highly motivated troops were drawn up for battle in a thin line near to the small stream known as Cowgask Burn. Between the new church of Tippermuir and the ridge of Cherrybank, men prepared themselves to kill, whilst remaining less prepared for their own death. Soon it did not matter. For although, Glovers only became Masters through the maintenance of years of high quality work, Death maintained the lowest of standards and never refused an apprentice. Shortly, a fresh and goodly harvest was reaped.
David Wemyss, Lord Elcho, the overall commander of the government levies sent to Perth to protect the Burgh, watched in total dismay, the debacle as his Forlorn Hope was bested in a fire-fight and driven back into the Covenanter lines. Not having great character as a soldier, Wemyss, had placed himself on his army’s right-wing. This might not have afforded him the best position to control his men, fencibles from Perthshire, Angus and Fife, across the field, but when the moment came for flight, his route to safety was but a gallop away. As Wemyss, hurtled along that road to continue his life, he passed on the southern side of the road connecting Perth and Glasgow, a small hamlet by the name of Needless. This hamlet was located at the mid-point of the line from the Castle of Pitheavlis and the end of Glover Street. In the time after the Battle of Tippermuir, a small gravestone would be placed to mark that spot where fleeing soldiers, stabbed in the back, fell and were buried. The stone, in a time later still would be removed from its place adjacent to several dwellings and the ninety men below left only with the kinship of worms.
When the front ranks in the centre broke, and broke they did in under ten minutes of combat, the roads to Perth, the narrow paths at the sides of fields, the hollowed tunnels that men forced with their desperation through the thickets, became dense with the bodies of frightened men and ran red with the blood pouring from holes made by dirk, axe and sword. Caught up in this one-sided Battle Royale were the townsfolk of Perth, who coming for sport and with picnics, to see men slaughtered, were themselves not discounted from the balance sheet of casualties presented to the Committee of Estates in the aftermath of defeat.
The symbol of the Glovers’ Incorporation of Perth was returned to its hall that night. Though Kinnaird and Dundee had disgraced themselves as men in the eyes of their Highland adversary, they had left the field alive. Both would die content in their beds, one aged seventy and the other more than four score years of age, Master Glovers of the Incorporation of Perth.

P.P.

A Spanish Tale

James Moir looked at his reflection in the hall mirror. Before him stood a boy in the final transition to manhood: a spotty face sat aloft a protruding larynx; puppy fat redistributed under the sinewy stretches of growth bursts creating the beginnings of a manly frame that pushed out from an unbuttoned open-neck linen shirt. This entire typical picture of youth’s ending was framed in ornate brass fixed to a wall distressed the lightest of blues. Only his eyes were wrong. They belonged to a later time. His pupils should have been the same distance from the mirror as he himself stood; yet, they were further back, much further.
Not wanting to be lost in the reflected despair of his intensifying disappointment with adulthood, James slowly shifted his gaze from his image to the boundary that contained it. He noticed the silver backing was fading round the edges of the mirror. He always noticed that detail. It was one of those things he did. There was no need to always make this mental note. It was just something he had got used to doing. Sometimes he thought that the sound-waves that emanated from inside him were eating the mirror’s lacquer. In the years that he stood before it, James had become familiar with its silvery contours. As his reflection changed with time so did the mirror.
No one else was at home that afternoon; 46 Craigie Road was empty, but for James and his intention.
Whenever there was something important to ask of his parents, James stood in front of that mirror, as actor on one side and critic on the other, iterating towards the words on which he would eventually settle. Once a sister had caught him in the act and giggled, but mostly the hours of rehearsal went unheard.
That evening James made his request to his father and mother. He repeated news reports memorised from the BBC, he passionately quoted from Daily Worker articles, supporting each argument with lines from the Scriptures, all the time taking care with his pitch and projection. Yet for all this perfection of performance, and despite the quality of script and accuracy of direction, his audience were unmoved. For the next two hours the Moir house filled up with shouts, tears and pain, and then, an overpowering silence as each bedroom door closed and the hurt sought sanctuary in the womb of night‘s slumber.
It was about four am when James heard the distant rumble of the Perth waterworks. Even though the family home was more than a mile from the Tay, the waterworks with its low hum connected Craigie to that silvery stream. James packed his case. In his pocket was a train-ticket. He left the house (no note was ever found) and was in a few minutes crossing St. Leonard’s Bridge. There was over an hour before the train was to pull into the station, but still he walked quickly.
The hour passed as slow as it could, but it did pass and at 5:35 James Moir took his seat on the steam train. Sitting with James in the carriage was a young man wearing a red scarf. It was not a woollen scarf that you might have supposed a grandmother had knitted, but a silken bandana tied with a small knot. James felt sure that this lad was on the same path as he. Yet something (later he understood it to be fear) prevented him from making an acquaintance, so James travelled in silence.
When London eventually arrived, James watched inquisitively as the scarf was propelled by its wearer along Platform 3 of St. Pancras Station. Through the locomotive’s steam, he could make out the silhouette of a family. They were waving. Within seconds the family and the red bandana were one group. How wrong he had been. The youth was not leaving his family, but returning to them.
James made his way along to a pre-arranged meeting at the Communist Party office in Lichfield Street, near London‘s Covent Garden. Robbie Robson, a party functionary, was standing outside the office building, waiting for the daily newspaper drop, when James approached the main doorway. Robson immediately recognised the scene. The sight of a young man obviously in awe of the big city and carrying a tell-tale package of possessions under his arm was always the giveaway.
Despite being interviewed by Robson for over two hours, James could not subsequently recollect either the questions posed to him or the answers he gave. All that his mind retained from the episode was a warning to be discrete in France. The French police had arrested some Brits recently, who were then repatriated to England. James knew that such an event could lead to his father dragging him back to Perth. He resolved to be discrete in France - a country he had never visited, but to whose shores he was now on route.
No-one ever occupied the outside tables of Paris’ Café Boulevard Jean Jaunes, where James was housed until his passage down to the border. The first time he arrived at the bar he was greeted inside by the owner and taken to an upstairs room where he lived with five other men for a week. In this room he took his meals, bided the hours, slept and learnt the true meaning of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that he knew that came from sitting through church services at St. Leonard’s-in-the Field, but the kind experienced by prisoners whose desperation for the end of sentence is mixed with the despair at its consequential loss of time‘s opportunities.
It was Monday evening around seven when train 77 left Gare de Lyons on its journey to Perpignan, a town close to the Spanish border. The journey was uncomfortable, but James nevertheless slept well enough. After arrival, the group over seventy strong in which James Moir was now only an elemental atom, were ushered off the train by officers and given quarters for a few hours in an old school building.
Some of the group struggled with the subsequent night hike over the Pyrenees, James who with his father had bagged many Scottish peaks, did not. As the party came off the treacherous slopes, James looked at his watch; they had been walking for fourteen hours.
The passage continued after three nights billet at the old fortress of Figueras, on rickety old trains, firstly to Barcelona, then to Valencia and finally to the railway junction at Albacete, where the now seasoned travellers were disembarked and ushered into a canteen. The air was hot and tasted of the bitter-sweet dust that made up the soil of this vast plain. James already knew something of Albacete. He had read about it in the Daily Worker and understood it to be a town famous for the manufacture of knives. In a recurring thought that first surfaced in this small Spanish town, James wondered if he would ever thrust a bayonet into the body of a man.
Four weeks of training later, James Moir found himself deployed on a small hillock that gazed down onto a valley floor across which vast divisions of men were advancing. The terrain was not unlike the farmland of Perthshire. Crops of corn and maize were only recently harvested and the ground was a bleached yellow that lightened as the sun rose from behind the distant smoke-ringed heights. The width of the advance might have been ten miles, yet the view was not unlike the movements of an ant colony. As a boy James had spent hours waging genocidal wars against various species of ant. The small black ants that lived in the family garden were his favourite enemy. The larger red and black wood-ants that built nests on Moncrieffe Hill were to be avoided. He had once been bitten by a wood-ant and the memory of that event had not left him. With the battle about to begin, James wondered if the Republican Army would bite the fascists as that wood-ant once bit him or whether they would be stamped upon as he so often had stamped upon the common garden ant.
Sometime into the fighting, James found himself lying behind a clump of boulders with two other riflemen. The offensive now in a lull, his companions cooked some breakfast of a few beans and drank a little of their remaining water. He had neither. The difficult ground, artillery barrage and constant air bombardment made bringing up supplies impossible. It did not matter. James had awaked that morning hungry, but could not eat.
He looked up at the ridge with its rocky outcroppings and pebble covering. The risen sun interacting with the barren slope had turned the soil the colour of sepia, making it appear as if it were not real, but rather a giant photograph or cinema screen across which an actor might play a heroic role: James charged upwards towards the fascist line. In front of him another soldier pushed away some undergrowth which spring-like flew backwards and whipped him as he ran forward. Further up he ran, only to be met by a low fence of steel. As he crawled beneath its barbs, the razor wire ripped a gash across his head and warm brownish blood flowed into his eyes. James’ rush continued and within moments he reached the enemy trenches where creatures determined to survive were locked in primitive combat. An enemy soldier struck James in the face with a rifle butt. The improvised club left its mark in the young Scotsman’s face, who in the next instant found one thought dominate his mind - praise for the steel of Albacete - as his bayonet pierced the fascist soldier’s throat and cutting the windpipe, felled the man like a paper tree.
The trenches along the sector were very soon captured. The heat was nearly a hundred degrees. James pulled himself into the lowest part of a ditch. A dead Nationalist was already occupying part of that place. The cool earth gave comfort both to the living and the dead. James’ eyes focussed on the bottom of the pit. An explosion, perhaps a mortar round, had unearthed a skull. He gazed into the empty sockets and lost himself in the mystery of the bony archive - a remnant of perhaps an earlier war.
Soon after, orders arrived demanding that the Company move up towards the crest and secure better positions. For the first time in a uniform, James felt fear. Mustering all the knowledge he had gained in training, James made his way up the heights, firing whenever he could. All the while lead filled the air around him. Several men a little to the left reached a hollow from where they fired upon a fascist machine-gun nest. Other men managed only to use their bodies to manure the ground.
James spied a small adobe wall less than eighty yards ahead: If he could get himself to that position it would provide a place where a soldier’s survival chances might be increased. Despite the chaos and the noise, James’s thoughts drifted homeward: It was Sport’s Day at Perth Academy. Knees bent and arms flexed he awaited the starting pistol. The gun fired and James took off. Just as he hit the sixty, he became aware that his vision was of an empty track. Could he be in front? He wondered. As the eighty marker came up, James thought that perhaps the race start was false and that maybe he should stop. At the hundred yard finish-line he stopped. The race was won and James Moir was the school hundred yard dash champion of 1933.
The ground between his position and the safety of the wall was covered by an enemy machine-gun that fired in bursts ten-seconds apart. James waited for the automated weapon to fire a salvo, then got up, and ran for the wall.
He did not know where he was hit. He lay on his back, ten feet from the shelter of the clay bricks, unable to move. The sun by this time had raised the temperature to over a hundred and ten degrees and without water a man lying out in the open would not last long. James Moir soon passed into unconsciousness. Later, he was buried by his International Brigade comrades where he fell, cocooned in a shallow grave, protected only by loose stones.

P.P.

A Day in May

According to newspaper reports from the time, on the 10th of May 1926, police sergeant Duncan McCallum arrested James McIntyre Black in Scott Street, Perth after David Stewart, a lorry driver and William Beaton, a lemonade and aerated water company sales representative reported an incident on the nearby Craigie Bridge to him. Despite the existence of no independent witnesses, James Black of 25 St. Johnstoun Buildings, Charles Street Perth was found guilty of threatening behaviour and fined £3 with an option of 20 days imprisonment.

“Is that you Jimmy?”
“Yes mother, it’s me. I have a four-hour break; don’t need to be back to the checkpoint until the back of two. How are you feelin’ this morning?”
“Don’t you worry about this old bag of bones. Tell me the news?”
“I’ll get to that soon enough. What have you eaten today? I left out some jam pieces; I can see there still here, bit worse for wear - but still alive. Did you eat? You know the doctor said you have to eat regular.”
“What a son you are. You know there’s no point feeding this dead body of mine. Cancers got me well and proper. I don’t care about that though. I don’t care if I can walk, I don’t care if I can dance or not. I can still think. As long as my heads good, I am going to keep breathing. When I start rambling, you finish me off with one of those coupe de glace things. Read me the passage Jimmy. Read it. Please!”
“Eat this soup first. Some of the railway men’s wives are doing the food now, all tastes a lot better than that church stuff. Eat up. Then I will read to you. Then I’ll tell you what‘s happening; we’re getting close ma.”
“Smells nice. All right. I am a bit peckish just now.”
“That’s my dancing girl. Love to see you eating proper. You need to take care of yourself ma; I need you to be well. I cannot be worrying that you are neglecting yourself when I have all this serious work to be done. No good your stomach being a counter-revolutionary. I’ll have to be calling it a scab.”
“I’ll never scab Jimmy, you know that. See I have had a whole plateful. Read me Marguerite.”
“One more spoonful. Then the world is your oyster.”
“What’s that bruise on your face Jimmy?”
“Right, here we go: ‘But this soul is above the law. By the witness of Truth, she is satisfied and filled. This soul says Love, takes account of neither property nor wealth, of neither anxiety nor ease, of neither love nor hate, of neither hell nor paradise.’ That‘s the bit isn‘t it?”
“Yes, that is the bit. The words of Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of the Simple Soul. Every woman has her book and that is mine. Got me through all these years; losing your brother at Ypres, losing your father to TB, losing in ‘21.”
“I know ma. However, ‘21 was five years ago. We are winning now; the leadership has no choice. We are in the lead. We are winning. Too many willing to stand firm, enough of us not ‘fraid of jail ma. I’m not afraid of jail.”
“Why would you go to jail? You are on the barricades. Aren’t you? Just checking permits, that is what you said. I believe Jimmy. I do believe in the fight, but not you, not you in jail.”
“Hush now. Getting silly ideas in your head again. Remember that yesterday you thought that you heard soldiers marching through the town. Perth’s not that important ma; the soldiers are all in Glasgow and Edinburgh!”
“I heard’em. Heard the pipes.”
“Nonsense. The fighting’s not here. The battles are taking place in Glasgow. Cavalry, batons and barricades just like Paris. We‘re all MacCommunards now. Even the railway lads are mostly operating in Glasgow. We have Perth sewn up - despite all those scabs. Should have seen how many lined up outside the Guildhall to get their Special Constable badges - Churchill‘s fucking boot-boys. Fuckers the lot. Farmers and students, the curse of this country of ours.”
“Swearin’s not allowed in my house. You know that.”
“Sorry. But fuckers are fuckers.”
“Jimmy!”
“Listen to this ma: ‘Take notice that England is not a free people till the poor that have no land have a free allowance to dig and labour the commons and comfortably as the landlords that live in their enclosures. And that not only this common or heath should be taken in and manured by the people, but all the commons and waste ground in England and in the whole world shall be taken in by the people in righteousness, not, owning any property but taking the earth to be a common treasury.’ That was written nearly three hundred years ago. Its taken time ma, but I think the class is going to get there. One week in and the bosses are scared, another week and we‘re have the capitalist bastards crawling on their bellies. If o’leaders dinnae let us down.“
“What’s that? Who’s letting us down? “
“No-one ma. We are solid. We just have to stand up and be counted. Die if necessary. Go to prison if needed. Just make the revolution. Our revolution. Your revolution. A worker’s state in Scotland. Imagine that ma.”
“Not my Jimmy in prison. I’ll not eat without if they put you in jail. Better to starve if your locked up.”
“Stop that nonsense. You will do what I tell you. You eat three meals a day, whether I’m here or not.”
“Where you going Jimmy? You leaving your old ma at last? Good. You met a lass? You need to meet a lass. Better that spending your time with a living corpse. I want you to be happy. You find a nice girl and make little weans. I do not mind if you leave. I am tired. What’s the news?”
“Strikes solid.”
“Tell me more. I know you have read that communist daily of yours - tell me what it says. Please Jimmy. It is my revolution too. And your dad’s. You‘re always telling me that.”
‘All together behind the miners: Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day.’
“Hah. Not a penny off the pay. Lovely words.”
“Seven warships came up the Clyde yesterday. As if that will do the bosses any good. Some of the Glasgow lads have been sneaking pamphlets aboard. Baldwin will get a bloody mutiny on his hands soon enough. We‘re hoist a red flag up the mast of our own battleship Potemkin.”
“That is a bruise. My eyes might be failing, but I can see when my boy has been scrapping.”
“Alright ma, I’ll tell you. I didn’t get the shiner on the barricade ma. Got this on Craigie Bridge: Ya ken that David Stewart; father was the butcher up in Scone until just after the war.”
“The one who got caught putting mutton in steak pies?”
“Aye, that thieving bastard. Well, just now I spied him driving a lorry across the bridge. Thought nothing of it at first; I know his been getting permits for essential supplies. Then he slowed down for some sheep on the road - a few obviously escaped his dad‘s grip.”
“That’s funny.”
“So I clocked a proper look in the back. Lemonade. God damn lemonade bottles. There is weans in this toun going without food and his transporting fizzy fucking lemon. I thought I am not having this; I strutted right up to his cab and asked to see his Strike Committee permit. ‘Oh’ he says, as nice as pie - nicer than his dad’s rotten pies anyway - ‘I have a permit to deliver essential milk supplies to the hospital‘. ‘Yes’, I say in my best voice; ‘your permit is fine. It’s the fucking lemonade that’s the problem!’ Caught out as the scab he is, he thought he would try his hand ma, having another fellow in the cab with him and all. Told me to sod off. Said that I and all my commie mates were just a bunch of treasonous swine and that what he carried on his lorry was his business.”
“What did you do? There were two of them.”
“I did what you and dad brought me up to do. I stood on the side of the class. I told Stewart and his pal that if they did not turn around I would throw them and the lorry off the bridge. Told him my brother died for this country, while his family were busy making profits selling woolly cows. I told him my brother‘s blood was shed to make a land for heroes, not a scab republic. Told him that the only traitor on that bridge was him - a traitor to the class whose pennies had dropped into his father‘s till and allowed him to grow a big fat pig face.”
“Quite right. Would have been hard to do mind.”
“What ma?
“Shove the lorry off the bridge.”
“I was fuming. I think I could have done it. The strength would have come from somewhere; not just me lifting ma, dad would have been there with me.”
“And me.”
“You too, ma.”
“Mind you, I would have grabbed a couple bottles of ginger for you first though.”
“I do like a drop of ginger.”
“So that’s that ma. Not much of a story really. Your everyday story of the Fair City‘s Scab class.”
“How did you get the bruise?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Jimmy!”
“Well, like I said, Stewart and his mate fancied their chances didn’t they. So when the two of them jumped out of the lorry, I swung on that scab Stewart first - got him right in the gut. I was just about to smack him again, when the other chap threw a bottle at me. Caught me just under the eye. But I’m no thief ma. It was not my bottle so I returned it to its owner. Broke it over his fucking head. Stewart by this time was clambering back into the cab - so I smacked the door right on his arse.”
“What’ll happen? How am I gonna manage if they put you away?”
“You’ll manage fine. Mrs. Duncan will look in on you and get your meals. Anyway. There were no witnesses. It’ll be fine.”
“The bosses don’t forget. They punished the miners for supporting Lenin’s lot. They’ll punish you.”
“Listen ma: another week or so and there be no more bosses. I told you, we’re winning. They cannot go on much longer, even with their stockpiles and their Emergency Corporation. Scotland will be a worker’s state before you know it. Ma! Even the Orange Lodge is coming out on the rallies. Think of that ma, a Loyalist flute band playing the Red Flag. That’s gotta be the death agony of capitalism surely.”
“I think you’re right. I hope I live to see that. Imagine a John MacLean leading this country. Imagine that.”
“No ma, don’t imagine. Just wait and see. Wait and see.”
“I’m feeling a wee bit tired now. Read me something. Then I can doze off with nice thoughts in my head. See all these lonely hours sitting in this big bed without you in the house Get some awful bad things in my head. Awful bad.”
“Like what?”
“About your sister.”
“You promised not to ma. She never lived but a day. How can you keep going on about it?”
“I don’t know. Lately, I see her all the time. Maybe soon, I’m gonna get the chance to wet nurse her at last.”
“Starve her more like. You might be passed your wet-nursing years ma. Sixty might be a bit late to be a new mother. Those old prunes can’t feed a mouse.”
“Not in heaven. Not in heaven. My breasts will flow with milk. You know that.”
“Here we go, this‘ll get your mind thinking: ’Good folk, things cannot go well in England, nor ever shall, until all things are in common and there is neither villein nor noble, but all of us are of one condition.’ You sleep now ma. I am just going to pop out for a quick pint. I will be back in an hour. I’ll bring you back some apples from the shop in South Street; they‘ve got a Strike Committee permit for fruit.”
“Don’t be late and don’t get in anymore bother.”
“Ok, ma.”

Within minutes of leaving the house James McIntyre Black was apprehended by the police. On the 12th of May 1926, with the strike solid across Britain and more workers coming out to join their striking comrades, the TUC (and STUC) called off the General Strike.

P.P.

Captain of Murderers

Yiannis Ioannidis was born in the Turkish quarter of the Old Town, in the Venetian apartments near the Mosque. He would never have called the neighbourhood Turkish of course; chauvinism and hatred saw to that. Aged forty-five, Yiannis was a thug and a killer, who had taken the lives of eleven British soldiers and beaten an old man to death with his fists. Despite little formal military experience, Yiannis had murdered his way up to a senior position within the right-wing guerrilla organisation, EOKA-B, acquiring far more wealth and property than the feudal society within which he grew up had intended for him. This ascension was the result of a growing love affair with the ecstasy he felt in the exercise of power, a romance with other’s pain that began twenty years earlier, when he married his neighbour’s oldest daughter. A slight dark-skinned woman, one of those people you occasionally meet with an adult head atop a child’s body, his wife, Androulla, had the mannerisms of a prisoner whose will to resistance was long crushed. Their union was an arrangement between the families that suited both patriarchs, neither love nor friendship factors in the pre-nuptial negotiations. Cypriot arranged marriages operate under a simple code: Educated boys marry wealthy girls; wealthy boys marry pretty girls; and, poor ugly boys marry poor ugly girls. Therefore, Yiannis found himself with a wife who looked upon him with the reflective gaze of his disdain. The conjugation required by the Greek Orthodox religion, driven by procreative necessity, began in their marriage with the normal missionary arrangements. The birth of a second son, nineteen months into the relationship was far more difficult than the first; those blood stains upon the sheets that morning less welcome than those once proudly inspected by a new husband. Soon after Androulla met the breeding quota he had set, Yiannis grew disinterested in the space between her thighs, so that when he took her, when drunk enough, he did so as an Arab takes a woman scarred by circumcision’s failure. Androulla was now no more to Yiannis than his other chattels, his house, horses, his land in Greece. His sons, Achilleas and Heracles, that was different. They were as gods.
A passionate hater of his own kind and those who were not, Yiannis had grown up on the streets of Nicosia a bully, thief and occasional rapist. Physically he resembled the man he was on the inside; his tall muscular body, decorated with the souvenirs of a low intensity war, was contained in a skin dried and acned by genetics and neglect. A combination of poor skin and pockmarks made Yiannis facially ugly. His younger brother and an older sister were similarly externally defined. Yet, although genetics was the arbiter of their collective physical fate, their responses to this dice throws were distinct and diverse. Yiannis loathed his siblings. His younger brother had taken refuge from the world in the bosom of his mother. So demanding was that relationship, that in Yiannis’ mind, nothing maternal remained for him. Maria, his sister, chose not the affection of her mother to hide from the gaze of pity, but her mother’s affection for the Church. Maria’s deeply religious life disgusted Yiannis. Only his father, tall, strong, ultra-nationalist, did he wish to please.
On the Sunday mornings of his childhood, when his mother and siblings left the house to climb the hill to the cathedral, Yiannis ran into his father’s workshop, where political soldiers of the Right gathered around their leader, and where a small boy could sit unseen under the large circular table around which self-appointed generals discussed battles waged in alleyways and streets. For the next three hours, Yiannis’ ears would burn with tales and plans of conspiracies and murders. His mind would wrap the precious stories and political intrigues in its protective folds, to be brought out repeatedly, as a mantra, to fill the lengthy time between each Sunday, like lessons in a Catholic catechism. Slowly as the months and years passed, Yiannis learned the crude expressions used to denounce the Communists. He memorised the arguments of the Right - the call for enosis with Greece, and he waited for the time when he a soldier of EOKA would receive his orders.
Each time his mother, Maria and Nicos returned from church, his feelings towards them grew more bitter: Not because their return signalled the end of the sacred hours, nor because his mother chastised him for missing the service, but, because he was now forced to join the company of those who placed idle priests and an effeminate Christ before the Motherland. There were three categories of people that Yiannis learned to loathe above all else, three hatreds instilled within his psyche on those Sunday mornings under his father’s guidance - Communists, the Religious and Turks.
Yiannis’ power as a leader and accomplishment as a political cadre lay in violence. If his fists or revolver could talk he was on top of the world, But Yiannis had a dread that his strength and his physical courage could not overcome. Yiannis feared the intelligent; his self-image relied on the physical act: the mental world left him unarmed and vulnerable. At a street meeting, in early 1963, a young left-wing activist cleverly denounced some remarks made by Yiannis as banal and trite. Within a few sentences a man, barely twenty years old, had bested Yiannis in debate. Yiannis caught up with the youth that same night in the centre of Limassol; trapping his prey in a small alleyway, knowing what was necessary, and, without fury, acting with the instincts of a surgeon, he cut out the offending tongue. Before his oral castration, the young socialist quietly spoke a prophecy: “You are doomed, you Captain of Murderers”. It was meant as an insult and a futile attempt to maintain an equality of power between a butcher and the carcass upon which he worked. Years later, Yiannis discovered the quote was from a British anti-fascist propaganda film of the 1940s. Nevertheless, he took pleasure in the words. That was his position in the liberation organisation. He was a Captain of Murderers.
Two events had been the final additions to his personality and determined the man Yiannis now was. The loss of his father from pancreatic cancer at the age of fifty-three made him aware that destiny cannot wait for the right time; it must be seized at any opportunity. The birth of his boys further added to his burden and obligation to accomplish. In this race for recognition and fame, Yiannis had but one measure, one scale upon which he weighed his worth and its units was fear.
Although there is usually a bond between those who have shared beatings, torture and imprisonment, an attachment between hunted men who have for weeks on end slept together huddled in dirty barns, such experiences gave him comrades, not friends. Yiannis trained himself not to trust even the man who today risked his life for him, knowing that tomorrow the same man might still betray. Yiannis’ acquaintances, his relationships, were always of the present, of the moment. Women were to be bought or taken when desire dictated. He longed to relive those moments in the inter-communal fighting of 1963 when he had forced himself into three Muslim women, one after the other.
When he wanted to relax, Yiannis would play American jazz records. He did not understand why such arrhythmic sounds pleased him, when his life was a demand for order. Despite an inability to comprehend the truth of the matter, jazz brought out the final kernel of humanity that existed within him, not yet extinguished by hatred. On Sunday evenings, Yiannis sat on the rear balcony of his house with Art Pepper and Miles Davis filling the twilight with audible illumination, and the sweet smell of jasmine wafting in the waves of cooling sea breezes making their way inland. Yiannis frequently broke off a small piece of a jasmine shoot from the bushes his father had planted at the back of the house thirty years previous, and placed it behind his ear or rubbed the pure white petals gently between his fingers. Fellow cadres, whilst they never spoke their thoughts on the subject for fear of retribution, could not help wonder at the contrast between the brute they knew and the flower often held in the hand he dressed with four heavy gold sovereign rings bearing the image of a British queen. Yiannis liked jasmine; he did not care for jewellery. Yiannis, nevertheless, appreciated the effect that those stolen rings had on the human jaw.
Today was going to be the pinnacle of his achievements, the ascent of his Olympus. His enemies might have described Yiannis as coming from the bottom of the barrel, but today the barrel was turned on its lid. This was the day of the Coup D’etat and Yiannis had an important role to play. He was to lead the assault on the Presidential Palace, and, it was his finger that would rid the country of the devious priest, the Archbishop who occupied the highest office of the state. Thoughts bubbled up in Yiannis’ head, doubts about whether this was the right moment to act, doubts that he would be successful in his mission. Why at this time was he denied the comfort of a father‘s affirmation? The density of his fury against his mother only rivalled the intensity of Yiannis’ longing for his father’s guidance. If she knew of his intentions, his plan to murder Christ’s bishop, she would have spoken words that would destroy his manhood; words she had used before, words employed against her own flesh in the moments after her husband’s grave was anointed with oil and water. Yiannis remembered standing at his father’s graveside. He recalled the bitter taste of olives, the saltiness of the ewe’s cheese and the texture of hard bread. He recalled a mother’s description of a half-man, a man without wits or culture, a man trying to live in the shadow of a tyrant. He spat on the floor. A pellet of spittle hit the floor and merged with the dusty surface to create a small black crystal that for a brief moment caught his attention.
Yiannis took his revolver out of its British Army holster. The face of its previous owner flashed before his eyes; a boy soldier, no more than twenty-two, his smooth-skinned face half melted, half-gone, the effects of an improvised grenade packed carefully with screws, bolts and washers. Yiannis emptied the barrel of its bullets. With a small knife, he used to peel fruit he began to score the end of each shell. Experience had taught Yiannis that in the confusion and chaos of any assassination, in the space between a killer and his victim, many things could go wrong. Even if only one bullet could bless the Archbishop‘s body, Yiannis was determined that bullet would be enough to send the priest into the oblivion that all men of God secretly knew was the void between this existence and the nothingness of its end. The Captain of Murderers stood himself to attention, saluted his father’s photograph that hung above the small wood-burning stove and left the house. It was the 14th July 1974.

PP

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A Better Day than Most

Tim Kelly was middle aged and married when the miners’ strike ended. He was widowed and an old man now. Sometime between these two historical markers, he lost his faith in the masses, especially the younger generation. He had witnessed the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the rise of consumer capitalism and wished the world would go fuck itself. One morning, the forward march of labour ended, he got out of bed, made himself a generous fry-up of dippy eggs, black pudding, two beef sausages, Ayrshire bacon and fried white bread, all drowned in vinegary brown sauce. Halfway through the meal, he decided that no one gave a damn anymore, so neither would he. That decision over, he made two resolutions: to have baked beans with his fry-up in future and to see out his days in quiet contemplation and maintain in good order his collection of militant labour and trade union archives; until such time that he passed away and the pamphlets, badges and papers could be donated to Glasgow’s Peoples’ Palace. It was somewhat ironic that Tim Kelly had chosen a Tory to be the trustee of his last will and testament. However, his neighbour, Richard Gordon, was an organised and fastidious man, who certainly could be trusted to follow every line of the will to the letter, even if he was the class enemy. Sometime between losing his belief in the proletarian revolution and the receiving of his gift by the curator of the Peoples’ Palace, Tim Kelly experienced a better day than most.

One very fine summer’s day, an old man got out of bed and began to assemble the ingredients he required to make his daily fry-up. Eggs, black pudding, two beef sausages, Ayrshire bacon, white bread, and brown sauce were placed on a Formica-covered kitchen bunker adjacent to a two-ring gas cooker. In amongst this unhealthy gathering was a gap: there were no baked beans and although there was sufficient food to fill the hungriest of bellies, this old man had resolved to have beans with every cooked breakfast and by heaven, he was not going to break another covenant. A trusty well-worn grubby Macintosh raincoat was soon slipped over a pair of stooped shoulders and the old man left his two-bedroom cottage in search of the missing staple. It was a gorgeous day outside, one of those occasional moments in Scotland when one actually believes that holidaying abroad is a complete waste of money. Nevertheless, the Macintosh was worn fully buttoned-up, keeping the outside and the inside very much apart.

On the route to the corner convenience store was a small common area, usually home only to empty Buckfast bottles and discarded cans of Special Brew, an open grassy space that sat directly in front of the housing office of the local university. A scout jamboree would have created the same visual impression to any passer-by and that is exactly what the old man perceived the collection of small coloured tents that stood before him to be. Except that apart from the odd ex-member of the Woodcraft Folk, the vast majority of the tents’ occupants knew nothing of camping badges and countryside codes. There was something innocent and child-like created by the vibrant palette of multihued canvasses.

Occupied though he was with his own thoughts, the old man could not leave the scene without enquiring as to the strange choice of location for a scout camp. Just at the moment that he made his mind up to take a closer look at the site of the rainbow Bedouin encampment, an attractive girl holding an old-fashioned clipboard, not yet twenty he guessed, came purposefully towards him and speaking Edinburgh English with just the faintest of hints of a French accent, asked of him: “Would you like to sign our petition?” An old man cast his eye over the girl’s form. She had that slender feminine shape that most young French women still managed to maintain despite capitalist adulteration of the food industry; her bust and hips sat in symmetrical proportion to each other as bookends above a small-waisted firm stomach. The old man was saddened by what he perceived as the end of that body form in his native land. In his opinion all the Scottish girls that lived in his city (and he had no reason to believe that this was not a national picture) were either the skinniest of anorexic waifs, or chunky heavy-breasted pear-shapes for whom puberty triggered by the consumption of hormone-infested poultry and beef had begun as early as their sixth year of life.

Tim Kelly gazed at the girl and in a dismissive fashion returned her question with his own, trying desperately to bathe his eyes in the visual beauty before him, whilst doing his damnedest not to be caught out as some lecherous old sod. “What’s all this for? I don’t have a bank account dear, so you can forget about signing me up for your charity.”

“This is not one of those charity scams. I know where you’re coming from though. You see them every Saturday, in every high street, gangs of clipboards held earnestly aloft by earnest types who beg you to support Shelter, Oxfam, or Greenpeace by donating a wee £3 a month. They tell you how important that charity is to them and how essential your £3 is, all the while thinking only of the £2.50 bonus they receive for getting another sale. And do you know, the next time you’re in the high street, there they are again, this time pious converts to another charity. Yeah I agree, don’t bother with all that nonsense; charities are just businesses - next thing you’ll see is Christian Aid and the Lifeboat Institution floating on the Stock-market. However, that’s not us; we’re LowRentsNow! The university is planning to destroy the last two remaining low-rent accommodation blocks in Edinburgh in order to let some thieving developer build its sub-standard battery-student flats and charge three times what we pay now. That’s the housing bureaucracy of the university over there, we know there’s a meeting going on now with the Rector, and so we are here to embarrass them. Got some bourgeois press coverage, but we are also doing our own - you know: ‘Don’t moan about the media. Be the media.’ All this is going out on a live-feed across the planet via Indymedia. So sign here, the revolution is only a signature away! Oh, and smile for the webcam - you‘re being broadcast globally as we speak. I know what you are thinking, how come some lassie is telling me how to run things. Well I had great teachers. My father was a coal-miner from Lanarkshire - an NUM steward all through ‘84 and ‘85. He met my mother when he toured northern France as part of a striking miners‘ delegation. My mother is an artist and a communist. When the miners lost, he took his redundancy money and went to live with my mother in St. Malo; together they opened a small craft shop. He is dead now, but she continues to run the shop. She‘s still a communist, but I‘ve no time for all that Statist stuff. I‘m an anarchist - democracy by consensus; mutual aid; self-organisation; rejection of hierarchies. Times have changed now. The old answers are gone. The revolution is everyday. Indymedia will televise the revolution, and the revolution is every act of defiance, every petition and every withdrawal from the status quo. Most people cannot see that the way the world is, all this hierarchical stuff, buying and selling, commodities, it’s not natural; it‘s socially constructed and it‘s crap. Go on - Sign the petition! A Lutta Continua!”

An old man stood in awe as the words emanating from a child half a century his junior brought tears to his eyes. He signed the petition and then with hesitancy slowly moved his liver-spot freckled face towards her right cheek. The girl frozen to the spot by this unexpected action could only focus on the tears that were by now dripping onto the grass below. Lips that had made no contact with a woman in two decades became now blushing pilgrims that tenderly caressed the high cheekbones of a beautiful girl. Partly because she was taken aback by the moment and partially because in the tenderness of the act the girl understood the purity and honesty of the gesture, she stood motionless as her cheek was kissed.

“A Lutta Continua”, an old man said to a young girl who he had just kissed as he walked away. “A Lutta Continua”, a young girl answered an old man who having just kissed her was walking away.

The old man soon arrived at the convenience store. He looked in the shop-window, considered the 3-for-2 offer on baked beans, and then proceeded to walk away from his home. An hour passed before his arrival at the Forth Road Bridge; a place he often took himself to think. He marvelled as he always did at this feat of human engineering and accomplishment. As he crossed the metallic symbol of human achievement, he stroked the massive circular supports, which like him daily withstood the highest of stresses without a movement or a moan. In the touch of the warm metal, the old man felt a union with the labour held within the structure. For him, no truer picture of Marxian labour-value could be seen than in this magnificent crossing. When he reached the very centre of the bridge, he stopped and gazed out to sea. As a youngster, he had briefly contemplated a life at sea, but the pull of the mine, the need for the extra family income, had been too strong. For nearly sixty years, this momentary desire for the ocean had lived in some quiet corner of his memory, only now to make its way back to the surface. He welcomed this thought like some prodigal son returning to the fold and let himself drift out mentally across the world’s great seas. He stood on the bridge for hours. His spirit sailed out from the east of Scotland, around the northern coast of his beloved Alba and down past the west coast of Ireland, like some latter-day Spanish Armada blown off course by fierce winds. As he journeyed south, the air became warmer and the seas bluer: the inlets of Portugal, gave way to the open stretches of the salty southern Atlantic Ocean before merging into the peaceful waters of the Pacific. Some hundred miles west of Chile’s rocky coastline, an old man floating gently on lapping waves approached a small island. As his sea voyage neared an end, the old man spied two figures waving at him from a golden beach: the first a woman a few years younger than he, one with whom he had shared his bed for the best part of thirty years, and the other that of a girl he had met a few hours earlier.

Tim Kelly was thirty-one years of age when he watched the opening of the Forth Road Bridge. He was seventy-five now. Sometime between these two historical markers, he first lost his faith in humanity and then found it again. In the summer of 2008, he experienced a better day than most, spoke the words, ‘A Lutta Continua’ and met someone who gave a damn. That day almost over, he made two resolutions: not to have a fry-up anymore and to see out only one more day. Until the time for his death arrived, Tim Kelly spent his remaining time gazing at the sun‘s reflected light as it bounced off the sea. The rays of golden energy pored through his clothes and warmed every bone in his body - no armour, let alone his raincoat was strong enough anymore to keep out the world; he had stepped outside again. He stood motionless on the bridge whilst the sun continued its daily relativistic journey; a journey that took the fiery disc from below the horizon, across the sky until it disappeared from view once more. Sometime between sunrise and sunset that day, Tim Kelly felt the eternal cold of the Firth of Forth overcome him completely.

A Cereal for Excellence

Richard the Retired Rector (3Rs) sat at his breakfast-bar. He was a tall man with a full set of real teeth and hair whitened by a combination of age and genetic bad luck. He was not overweight, but nevertheless owned a paunch that hung under his belt and gave him the look of a man much older than his fifty six years. 3Rs was not happy. Things did not go well yesterday at breakfast; the cereal became soggy early into the meal, was over sugary and the lipids in the milk fell foul of the chemicals added by the manufacturer to the bran flakes. 3Rs was determined that today would be a better day. After considerable pondering on the matter he now knew that what was required was ‘A Cereal for Excellence’.

The first task was to replace his normal cereal with a new mix of his devising. 3Rs went upstairs to the attic room. This was his domain - his work and play room. On the walls were framed newspaper clippings of letters and articles written about him or by him and featured in a myriad of educational publications and local journals. 3Rs never tired of reading the headlines that encased that chamber. Sometimes 3Rs thought he would like to be buried in this room, like a pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, with all that he might need for the future life. A coffin would not do for a man who had achieved so much. There would be no room even in the largest of commercially available coffins for all his successful Inspection reports. He resolved to re-write his will tomorrow to include his new burial requirements and then continued at pace with the task at hand.

3Rs went down on his knees and began to rifle through the first of the filing cabinet drawers. Even though he knew what he was looking for, the process was still slow. Each file brought back memories of new ideas and strategies that, like Moses, he had brought down from the mountain to the masses assembled below. After an hour and a half, 3Rs had selected several key documents. These were nearly all located in either the first or last drawer. 3Rs was puzzled at that occurrence; gradually the truth began to emerge. The vast majority of his files were personal matters that related to grievances taken out against him, or complaints that he had made against staff members. 3Rs was disturbed on one level that so many such files existed and on a higher level satisfied he had prevailed on almost every occasion. For a moment, a thought passed across his mind. The reason why a man in his prime was at home and not at his post. For a brief second his mental guard came down to allow in the realisation that a series of successful grievances against him was the catalyst for the granting of an early retirement package. 3Rs gathered his thoughts together. This was no time to dwell on other people’s errors.

Armed with a pile of planners, draft documents, reviews and other papers 3Rs began work creating his new cereal. A very fine porcelain bowl rimmed with gold leaf that curled up on one side into his initials was chosen as the correct receptacle to receive the new culinary construct. Very slowly 3Rs cut out the most important words from each document: curriculum; planning; review; reflection. Some of the words were his own invention. Plan-view was one of those words, being the clever joining of the planning process with the review stage. 3Rs was always at a loss to understand why that word had not become popular within educational academia. Within an hour the bowl was filled with the most delightful of word-flakes each one nuttier than the crunchiest crunchy nut. And, each one proven to be capable of creating more stir than any snap. crackle and pop.

The next and final task was to find a replacement for the milk. 3Rs put on his thinking cap for this part of the process. He considered whether a sub-committee should be set up to propose and test various liquids. But each time he presented the idea of a sub-committee to himself, he found that he immediately rejected the idea of devolving the power to make decisions to another group, even if that group was to comprise only himself. If this problem was tractable, only he by himself was capable of solving it.

It was soon time for lunch. 3Rs’stomach gave notice of its disapproval at the length of time the breakfast was taking to be prepared. 3Rs seeing the potential for dissent within his body summoned his stomach into the other room for an informal chat. Before his stomach had a chance to rumble an apology, it received a torrent of bile tasting personal abuse. Seemingly, or at least according to 3Rs, the stomach had not been pulling its weight for some time and 3Rs had documentary evidence to back his case, which he would show at a disciplinary if required. Either the stomach needed to come into line, do what it was told and stop complaining and criticising, or its competency was to come formally into question. The choice was clear, the stomach apologised, though it managed to get away with mouthing an acidic remark under its breath before returning with 3Rs to the kitchen.

Over the next two hours, 3Rs went through and tested dozens of potential milk-substitutes. The ‘Milk of Human Kindness’ was rejected as too idealistic before it even hit the bowl; the ‘Tears of a Clown’ were too expensive; and the ‘Water of Life’ too alcoholic for the morning. At last, just as 3Rs was feeling that a Nobel prize was slipping from his grasp, it struck him.’ A Cereal for Excellence’ needed the sweat from his brow to fuse the word-flakes that were the product of his mind’s vigour, with his body’s endeavour.

It was 3pm and the breakfast was ready. 3Rs thought he heard his stomach groan, but after raising a disapproving look was satisfied that all was still in order below. The silver spoon pierced the surface of the word-flaked filled sweat soaked bowl, but when 3Rs raised the spoon to his mouth it was empty. Time and time again 3Rs attempted to eat the cereal and despite employing a range of utensils from teaspoon to ladle all was in vain. The cereal kept slipping away from his lips. In hindsight 3Rs realised that just before his mouth reached the utensil his hand gave a little twist to the left of sufficient torque that the cereal was spun off.

Suddenly, 3Rs’ stomach sent a wave of acidic burps up his oesophagus and into the mouth. 3Rs was furious. He ordered his stomach back out of the kitchen; there would be a reckoning in the living-room. But, something else was wrong, 3Rs could not move. Every time he tried to get up from the breakfast-bar-stool his legs gave way. 3Rs ordered his stomach to go on without him and await a disciplinary email later that day. His stomach refused and explained, that the reason that 3Rs was pinned to the stool, was that his fellow union members, both legs and the right arm were supporting him in pursuing a case of bullying and harassment under the new ’Dignity at Work’ legislation. 3Rs was by this stage in a rage. This was to be his finest hour. He had just invented ‘A Cereal for Excellence’ and would without doubt became internationally renowned for doing so. Yet, three of his limbs and the most stupid of all his organs were operating against him. Undaunted 3Rs worked out a quick fix and applied it without hesitation. He took the sharpest of his kitchen knives and though it was rather painful and a long laborious process, with the help of his left arm, which was called a scab by the striking limbs throughout the process, hacked off the offending protrusions from his trunk. His stomach quietly awaited its fate. 3Rs who prided himself on his great intellect, held back from cutting out his stomach, knowing that the organ served a need within the ’A Cereal for Excellence’ reporting and review process. He laughed out loud, another set of underperformers had been seen off and he was still Headmaster in his home.

First and Last Breath

I was not present during the middle of this story, so that some of the details I recount below are imagined. The truth, I can assure you, will not be far away from my words. To start this testament, I will describe their way of life before things fell apart.

It is 1982, a comfortably off middle-class Scottish family live within commutable distance to Glasgow, in a six-bedroom house located on a quiet new-build gated-estate just outside Dunblane. At the centre of their existence is their faith and each other. They include Emma, a woman lovely in both feature and temperament; an angel cast out of heaven by a jealous God whose outer light hides an inner darkness. Time and circumstance has not withered her fairness or her commitment to her religion, though it has mine. Emma was once a talented and successful solicitor, whose career was paused seven months after a microscopic tadpole-like creature swimming against the current penetrated a tiny egg, located within her now problematic plumbing system. This process of fertilisation was repeated four more times, the results of which are Fraser, Leonie, Alexis and a headstone in the centre of Stirling Burial Ground upon which is carved the name Alana and a date of birth identical to that of Alexis, the twin that survived the mistake made by a junior doctor later struck-off for incompetence. Fraser and Leonie are both at Edinburgh University studying Law. Alexis the oldest child (she is twenty-three years of age) remains a resident of the family home whilst completing her training as a primary school teacher at Stirling University. There was someone else in that happy family home: Alastair Douglas, Sheriff Court Judge, golfer playing off a handicap of four, elder of the Trinity Church of Christ in the World and once a lawyer in a firm of solicitors whose Glasgow chambers included an office-suite, on the door of which was the name Emma Mackenzie; a colleague he firstly represented in a successful five-figure compensation claim against a hospital trust, and subsequently married. All is well at Allanwater View, lemony sunlight pores through traditional box-sash windows as three generations of the family (we now include Emma’s mother and his father) gather on a typical Sunday afternoon after church and family Bible study class, to break bread together before driving to Stirling’s main cemetery in order to lay sweet-peas in remembrance of a child whose first and last breath were one and the same. It is a sequence of events repeated the first Sunday of every month and one all involved with professed their willingness to continue. The Douglas family were well liked by their neighbours, peers and colleagues. Alexis especially, had been given a place of fondness in many hearts. An entire class of nine-year olds cried when her recent school placement came to an end and several refused to come to school for a few days in protest. Facially Alexis is the image of her mother - except for her eyes, which resemble those of another - in this regard, she differs from her siblings who possess all the features of their father. In short, Emma and her family were content with themselves, happy in each other and brought joy to those around them.
One ordinary autumn day, this state of affairs came to an abrupt end. It may yet come to be, that the past as I have retold it, will resume in the future; this is not something I will ever know.

Six months ago, Alexis felt poorly, then she fell ill and slowly with each passing broken night’s sleep, her health deteriorated until her life-essence stood at the boundary between this world and the heaven in which she believed. The doctors, consultants and second opinions all concurred that no cure could be found for her failing lungs; only the possibility of a yet experimental lung transplant gave any hope. It seemed that the defect created by the result of an anaesthetists’ blunder, the same error that led to the death of a newly born babe some twenty-three years previous, was in another a much slower yet equally fatal condition. Money was not the problem; the family were willing to sell their substantial share holdings to pay for the surgery. No, the sticking points were locating a suitable donor - only a very good tissue match, say that of a family member was likely not to be rejected - and the Government’s refusal to grant the ethical go-ahead for such surgery. This is where I re-entered their lives.

I am not a great reader of the dailies; my work is so textually intensive, that I find no great pleasure in reading during the working week. Sundays, well they’re different. I will do anything to make those long Sabbath hours of solitude pass quicker. My normal routine for that day is to sleep in a single-malt induced coma until the back of twelve, run four miles on a treadmill-machine, shower, and dress, make scrambled-eggs and smoked salmon, then settle down to read every tedious word written by The Sunday Times’ team of allegedly talented journalists. I am a creature of habit, because I know through experience how long each routine action takes. The thought of varying my programme feels me with dread - the likelihood that a temporal gap might appear and there be nothing to occupy it with except my own thoughts is too much to bear. No, I have my schedule and it works. Moreover, before you ask, and everyone does, I had neither woman nor child to share my life.
Near the end of a not yet unusual Sunday, I read in my newspaper a report detailing a case of medical ethics being pursued in the High Court. The lawyers undertaking the action were part of an excellent and expensive Edinburgh firm; a great company to employ if your undergoing a divorce, murdered your boss or been caught with a 10kg of heroin - not the best choice for challenging governmental rulings on medical practice. No, the best selection in this circumstance is me. It was not difficult contacting the family in question, I know both husband and wife; we had worked together in the same team many years ago. The husband was reluctant at first to except my offer, until his solicitors advised as to my reputation and success with medical research ethics. The law is as dusty as the books wherein it lies, so I’ll not trouble you with the details of my case handling - only to say that the hearings went to plan and the ruling exactly that which I required.
If you recall, I mentioned two sticking points concerning the lung-transplant operation. The first, the legal side, was totally now in my control, whilst the second, well you will see soon enough.

Lungs are not like other organs, the transplant of such a huge part of human tissue requires an incredibly close match to avoid rejection, which in turns relies on a donor related directly to the patient. What do you think that the chances of one person’s need for a new lung occurring simultaneously with the tragic death of a near relative who also happens to hold an organ donor card? It is never going to happen! Is it? The only serious option would seem to be the donation of a lung by the living; someone who will not only put themselves at great risk in surgery, but also live in a fragile and incapacitated manner for the remainder of their no doubt shortened existence. This was spelled out to the family by the medical team: “Either one of you donates a lung, excepting the consequences and risks, or Alexis will die.” The judge said that he would without hesitation give his life for Alexis, but to live with only one lung would be to become as the helpless defendants stood before him daily in court. In his escape, he was joined by his two children, for both had too much to live for they pleaded. Even the grandmother fearful of the loss of perhaps a few years of the life before her, ran from her duty, claiming that it was against God’s will to sacrifice one life for another. All the time they deliberated, Alexis grew weaker and her time in the next world drew nearer. Only one came forward, she that had given life to the child would so again resolutely and without sorrow.
On the day of the High Court deliberation, Emma took leave of her family and her body was made ready for the dangerous surgery; her left-lung prepared for relocation into the needy chest of her daughter. Ten miles away, the three judges’ joint deliberation was in complete agreement with my prediction; my plan had worked like clockwork. As the legal side of this tragedy wound-up, the locus of my control switched to that of the organ donation itself. To summarise the two-hour deliberation by the judges is a very easy task: Lung transplantation became enshrined in law as a legal and ethical medical procedure, but only when the lung donated came from a deceased person from whom previous written consent had been obtained. So there it was, yes to lung transplants, but only from the dead. The operation could not go ahead. I cannot explain in words how happy I felt at that verdict. Death, who is just God in another guise was driven from the bedside of the woman I love and he was soon to lament the loss of the other spirit he intended to steal into the darkness.

Earlier on in this deathbed confession, I made the following statement: “I had neither woman nor child to share my life.” You may have noticed in this sentence the use of the past tense of the verb ‘to have’ and possibly mentally corrected a grammatical mistake. Well reader, I made no error. Before this moment, I had neither woman nor child dependent upon me, now I do. Moreover, now I have a chance to save the woman and child I love, the longing for whom has tortured every idle moment of my life for more than two decades; the desire for whom has thwarted the development of any long-term relationship with another, and, as I stand before oblivion, I have at last an opportunity to breathe life into the broken lungs of the baby I never held.
Alexis and her sister’s births occurred out of wedlock, a not unique situation for the late 1950s, but the beginning of a tragedy suggestive of ancient Greece. When we lay together and created twin seeds of life, Emma saw our love as a reflection of God’s love for the world. The extinguishing of one of those lights informed her of God’s anger at the breaking of his word and his intention to hold the life of the other as hostage to the future obedience of his will. Emma begged me to go away, leave her to bear the load herself, as punishment for sin. This, I was not minded to do, until a promise that one day she would allow me back into her life. That part of the story, I have already told, only the ending remains for me to create.

As I write these final sentences, I am filling a syringe with a drug sourced from a Dutch euthanasia clinic; one that I know will close down all my bodily functions within minutes, whilst leaving my organs undamaged. I have alerted the police as to the location of a suicide, faxed the hospital my lung donor certification and DNA analysis. With my final breath of life, I intend to curse the God who drowned my daughter in her own blood and then laugh at his impotence as the eclipsing of my life thwarts his desire for her sister.

Puppy Love

This is a tale of woe and a warning to others, who tempted by doleful eyes and hang-dog looks, may consider passing this way. It begins early, very early, on a Monday morning in November. A day in which the weather was cold and rainy. A fact very poignant to the story.

Most adults set an alarm clock to wake them up in the morning. Some of these souls subsequently reach a point where the clock becomes redundant. Their own body-clock, so used to the tyranny of time in this post-modern age, brings them out of the clutches of Morpheus just before any electronic device can issue its wake-up call. I no longer fit into this category of humanity. Woof, Woof and Woof. That’s all it takes to wake me these days. His Master’s Voice. We have a puppy, and me, I am dog tired.

Cocoa is a good-looking cocker spaniel about five months old. I know he is attractive, he turns heads in the street and women, usually older women, stop me and play with him. One night walking the dog around the streets of Perth, I passed a drinker standing outside a pub. He had just lit a cigarette. “Hold on,” he called with a strong powerful local voice before dashing into the pub. It must be important I thought, as he threw his cigarette away without a second puff. I waited, and in a few moments a woman in her late thirties, accompanied by a cute looking King Charles Spaniel, came out of the pub with the same chap a few feet behind her. “What a darlin! How ould is she? Christ, she’s gorjess. That‘s a luvlly bitch.” “He is about three months,” I replied, emphasising the he pronoun, but to no avail. The man now realising the potential danger of introducing his girlfriend to a good-looking fellow with a gorgeous dog in tow, chipped in. “See that doug. She’s a babe magnet. Yor nah be single for lang son. Good luck.” Then before I could say something about being married and having three children, the chap whisked the woman and her dog back into the pub. The Stagger Inn was the name of the pub. I remember thinking that the name is really the wrong way round - The Stagger Out surely is more appropriate.

Five am I woke that day, just like I had been doing for several weeks. We take the puppy to training classes at the weekend, but its me that’s been trained. Actually, to be fair to the dog, he is very good at the classes. One week, Cocoa won the prize for the best ‘sits’ and has recently learned to offer up his paw on demand. That’s at the classes. At home, he jumps up, bites, attacks furniture, pees at will and howls like a banshee.

Three woofs and I am up out of my scratcher. Surely, you’re thinking a grown man can resist the feeble cries of an immature animal. Cries, I can resist. But the power of a puppy lies not in its jaws, rather in its bodily functions. Slowly, day by day my life has become dominated by my dog’s movements. The reason that I run downstairs at five am is because I am desperate for him to learn to pee outside. So this is my routine: I open the back door of the kitchen; fill his food bowl with little processed pellets of chicken derivatives; fill his water bowl; grab a small lump of cheese from the fridge with which to tempt him; and, go to the back-room of the house where the beast sits in his puppy crate. Now timing is crucial. Any hesitation will end up with a puddle on the floor, an act guaranteed to send me into rage. I open the cage, he picks up a doggy teething toy with his teeth - he has learnt that this will please me more than biting my toes. And reader, if you had my toes with their combinations of in-growing toe-nails, corns and fungal nail infection you too would train your dog to leave them be. Quickly, I let him sniff the cheese and I run towards the kitchen. He follows, every second is crucial now. Through the hall, into the living room, to the kitchen, to the backdoor where I toss the cheese out into the back courtyard. “Yippee!” I exclaim as he takes the bait and dashes after the Scottish coloured cheddar. I peer through a glass panel of the door. Cocoa, now in the small paved courtyard area at the back of the house, recognises that space as his correct toilet area. The back legs are stretched out, the hips widen, the torso and head of the dog pull forward and a trickle of yellow liquid appears on the floor. My heart lifts. “Only a poo to go,” I mutter quietly to myself. Go on I gesture, “do your bizzies.” Then my heart sinks, it is starting to rain. “There maybe trouble ahead,” I sing to myself in the manner of that series of TV adverts of a decade or so ago.

I am forty-four years old. For thirty years I have been politically active on the Left - I first read the Communist Manifesto at the age of eleven; in the bath of all places. What eleven year old boy can claim to have done that in the bath? I now describe myself as an anarchist and still convince myself that I am a revolutionary. Yet, the reality is somewhat more depressing. My life now revolves around this gun-dog. I’m a vegetarian (an ex-Vegan even), so what kind of dog do I get. One that was bred for sniffing out woodcock, so that some farmer could shoot the poor things for the pot.

I suppose that his first motion of the day was not so bad. It took about fifteen minutes between getting up, getting the dog sorted and going back to bed. Round 2 will not be until seven am. A century of minutes pass without any more sleep taking place, I am too focussed on the next round of excretal activities.

Seven am arrives. Woof, Woof and Woof. His Master’s Voice. I get up, go downstairs, open the back-door, get the puppy out and then start making the children’s packed lunches, as well as put away dishes, tidy up and involve myself in my current obsession: I like everything clean and tidy. How I got this way I do not know. As a student my bedroom wall was covered with pictures of Lenin, Marx, Guevara, Bakunin, Gramsci, Voltairine de Cleyre, Rosa Luxemburg, Ho Chi Minh and other revolutionary heroes. Perhaps with hindsight, I would have replaced them with images of Domestos, Fairy Liquid, Dettol, coal tar soap, mops and those lovely throwaway duster wipes you get these days. Let me add that in-between dealing with the dog and preparing the children’s food, I wash my hands and apply gallons of that anti-bacterial gel that “kills 99% of known-germs.”

It is almost eight o’clock and I have to make a decision. The children are up and getting ready for school. My partner Mary has left the house and is making the six minute journey to the train station to catch the ten past eight to Glasgow. But, I need to shower and dress for work. The dog has not moved either his bowels or bladder and the weather conditions mean I cannot just leave him outside. I go upstairs and ask my eleven year old daughter Leah if she can take the dog out in a few minutes time. She answers stridently, “I’m doing my hair. I’ll take him out in ten minutes.” So I shower, dress, brush my teeth and hair, and, go back downstairs. It is twenty-five minutes past eight. Leah is almost ready for school, she just has her shoes to find. Rosa, my youngest, is behind schedule. She does not like the cardigan left out for her, it is a hand-me-down. “Where is the dark grey one? I hate this one,” she says almost in tears. I do not answer. There are bigger fish to fry. Cocoa has peed in the middle of the living-room and having trod on his pee is running towards me desperate to jump up. Yep, not only have we not taught him proper toilet manners, he is still jumping up for attention. Now the superhero in me takes over. It is twenty-seven minutes past eight. The deadline for my car pulling out of the drive is eight forty-one; I need fourteen minutes to deposit my youngest at her primary school, cut through the back streets of Perth and get to the High School before the bell goes at five minutes to nine.

I grab the bitter apple spray, depress the nozzle just as the dog is about to lunge at my newly dry-cleaned suit with his pee saturated paws, spin around grab him, lift (remembering to support the rear) and take him to the utility room sink. Paws washed, the dog is delivered back to the puppy crate. Finally, I descend on the puddle. As a good environmentalist, I recycle everything, and religiously attempt to re-use and reduce. However, since getting the puppy, I buy kitchen roll by the tonne - rolls and rolls of the stuff. Within a few minutes the pee is wiped up and another kitchen roll done in. Then I run to the back-door and grab the mop and bucket kept permanently on standby. I mop the floor with pine disinfectant, enjoying every whiff of its sweet smelling cleansing aroma. It’s all going well, I am moving like an Olympic athlete, cleaning, moping, locking doors, grabbing briefcases and then I blow it. All of a sudden I lose control of my mouth. Before I can grab my worry-beads - a little trick for reducing life’s stress - I am shouting at the children. “I told you to take him out. See if that bloody dog is not sorted in two weeks his getting dumped!” Leah, older, wiser and more used to my outbursts puts her ipod ear-pieces in her ears. Rosa, younger and less experienced in the daddy madness moments, begins to cry.

This verbal domination of a nine year old does not exactly fit with my professed libertarian philosophy. And it exposes me to the following self-criticism: Given that as Slavoj Zizek states that beliefs or convictions are not what we feel or think, but what we do and our most intimate or interior sensation is actually only materialised in our social activity, then, if I behave like a autocrat, I must believe in the validity of the autocratic ideology. I apologise to Rosa for my outburst and I make my peace with my inner-self for my failures and promise both that no reoccurrence should be expected.

The car travels down South Methven Street, then North Methven Street and I make my usual comment: “Look there is another hairdressing salon that has just opened.” The next eleven minutes proceed perfectly. Rosa is dropped at school, then, shortly later, Leah and I arrive at the High School. It is nine fifty-three. “Great!,” I exclaim to myself, “still got two minutes to make a cup of tea before registration.”

Suffragette

There are voices that originate outside our minds. These come from conversations we have with others, or which we overhear. This is the First Voice. There are dialogues we have only in our head. This is the mental life and is what makes life ultimately bearable - this internal voice is the Second Voice.

When my father was dying his overworked body failed him slowly over a period of a year. He did not welcome this progression, but adapted to the new reality and continued to live. Once he was hospitalised and could no longer walk, he excepted this next stage stoically and still continued to be in this world. Finally, when he found it too difficult to maintain his mental life, he told me “Bavlos, as long as I could see my memories and think about the past, my life was worth living; they are beyond my grasp now: I see my thoughts bubble up in my mind as they have always done, yet, when I try to hold one, possess it again, it pops, too fragile for my clumsy mind too handle”. There were no emotions in his voice when those words were uttered; this was a clinical judgement of the situation, an acceptance of fate. He died soon afterwards. For him the Second Voice stood loftily above the First.
Although his body fought for every breath of air until his lungs were incapable of any further movement, his mind I imagined channelled all its last energy into one or two final internal conversations. I wonder to this day, what were the content of those conversations. Sometimes, I plan my final thoughts, a covenant of the mind.
There is the Third Voice: that of the mental life of another. I have heard this voice. I am not a religious man; I am an atheist. I am not a spiritual person; I am a materialist. Yet, some how I have heard the Third Voice. That other was a suffragette.
Just before the First World War, Perth was a major focus of the militant suffragette movement. Many of its activists occupied cells in Perth Prison undergoing hunger strikes and being force-fed. One of the most exceptional of these militants was Frances [Fanny] Parker, the Women‘s Social and Political Union organiser for Dundee. She had been arrested and imprisoned many times, each time emerging from jail more determined to attain the goal of female enfranchisement and liberation. In June and July of 1914, whilst the suffragette prisoners were held inside, thousands of women lay siege to the prison and maintained a picket outside.

In 2004, ninety years to the day of the night of the greatest protest it was by design, not fate, that I stood by the smooth concrete walls that keep society away from those who in an unjust system have in the main have erred against property. Something, maybe someone, had drawn me to Perth Prison to acknowledge, remember and celebrate the anniversary of the suffragette radicalism in Perth. It is the same force that takes me to Jeanfield cemetery every month to lay flowers at the foot of a grave inscribed with a tribute to an International Brigade volunteer. That night outside the gaol, I stood in the cooling air and gazed up at this symbol of state power. In my hand were some lines from the Bard and a speech made by Christabel Pankhurst; of the four Pankhursts, Christabel was the true radical. My intention was uncomplicated. I began easily enough, the Scots words flowed off my tongue in reasonable approximation to their expected sounds and no security personnel appeared to see off this strange foreigner uttering his alien mantra. It was then that I heard the voice.

Fanny Parker was speaking. She was not speaking directly to me. I believe that which I heard was her own mental voice from long ago. Fanny was a militant suffragette. In fact, an extremely militant suffragette. Amongst her actions are probably included the burning of Perth Cricket Club Pavilion and arson attacks on two Crieff villas; she certainly was arrested for concealing herself in a hall in Dundee where Lloyd George was scheduled to speak, poised to attack the less than liberal leader. Fanny was arrested several times and imprisoned in various jails. In common with the Women’s Social Political Union policy of the time, upon imprisonment she immediately went on hunger strike, The British State’s response to this tactic was force-feeding. Perth Prison with its hospital wing and experience of hunger-striking was the obvious place for the suffragette prisoners. So Fanny and her comrades ended up in the Fair City having tubes pushed down their throats or forced up their rectums as the means of supplying their frail bodies with nutrition.
The content of that I heard initially surprised me. I did not hear her screams as she gasped for breath while gruel was leaking from the feeding tube and accumulating in her lung. I did not hear her doubts as to the suffragette strategy, her feelings toward the Pankhurst family or, her hatred of male dominated society. The conversation that had lingered over the ninety years was a profession of love. Fanny spoke to me of her love for a girl in the Movement.

Fanny Parker sat in her prison cell. It was a warm summer’s day and a slight welcoming breeze made its way through the tiny cell’s glassless window that was just beyond her reach. She had tried to lift herself up to catch a view of the outside world, but she was too short. The window was simply designed for ventilation and no thought had been given in its placement to its conventional use as a visual portal. Though she welcomed the movement of air through into her stuffy cell, Fanny was disappointed she could not look out and see her sisters protesting outside the prison. Their songs wafted in day and night and the verses of Scots wha Hae were a welcome break to the monotony of prison life. Before the protest started, Fanny found herself in the strange position of looking forward to the sessions of force-feeding. At least those episodes gave a break from the boredom and more importantly an opportunity to re-connect with the struggle for the liberation of women.

That day, the force-feeding bout was over. She had not resisted as well as the day before, but she had still refused to eat and shackles were employed to pin her down to the hospital bed. This gave her enough satisfaction to rest easily in her thoughts. Fanny wrestled with guilt. Despite her establishment background, she was in all probability the most militant Suffragette in Scotland. Having Lord Kitchener as a an uncle was no advantage to a revolutionary whose very being was intended to oppose male hierarchy. When her uncle used his influence in government circles to have her released from prison, although Fanny welcomed the chance once more to be with the movement and people she loved, something was wrenched from her being. It was as if William Wallace had excepted a parcel of land from the Hammer of the Scots, Longshanks himself.
Now that Fanny’s revolutionary balance sheet was in credit, she could allow her mind to wander; her body’s needs could now dominate. So Fanny lay on the stone slab somewhat incredulously called a sleeping platform. Her small frame shifted so that the straw mattress gave the most support to her trunk and she pulled her arms under the Hessian blankets, gaining both warmth and access to her desires. For the next hour Fanny Parker’s mind and being slowly flowed like a convection current rising from a heat source. Her mental life, her inner voice sang sweetly and drifted through the cell window, along C Hall and across the grounds were once seven thousand French soldiers - prisoners from the Napoleonic Peninsula Wars - slept out in the open, and down to the gates of the gaol where assembled several thousand women, some dressed in the finery of the day, sang hymns and songs of their venerated Burns.

When at that spot I stood nine decades later, Fanny Parker’s thoughts; dreams of love and pleasure; her guilt; and, the physicality of remote contact entered my head as if they were my own. If I could that day hear her internal voice, then perhaps someone else might still hear my father’s last conversation with himself. It might be possible to go the ward of the North Middlesex Hospital where he passed away and listen. I resolved to make that trip.

Captain of Murderers

Yiannis Ioannidis was born in the Turkish quarter of the Old Town, in the Venetian apartments near the Mosque. He would never have called the neighbourhood Turkish of course; chauvinism and hatred saw to that. Aged forty-five, Yiannis was a thug and a killer, who had taken the lives of eleven British soldiers and beaten an old man to death with his fists. Despite little formal military experience, Yiannis had murdered his way up to a senior position within the right-wing guerrilla organisation, EOKA-B, acquiring far more wealth and property than the feudal society within which he grew up had intended for him. This ascension was the result of a growing love affair with the ecstasy he felt in the exercise of power, a romance with other’s pain that began twenty years earlier, when he married his neighbour’s oldest daughter. A slight dark-skinned woman, one of those people you occasionally meet with an adult head atop a child’s body, his wife, Androulla, had the mannerisms of a prisoner whose will to resistance was long crushed. Their union was an arrangement between the families that suited both patriarchs, neither love nor friendship factors in the pre-nuptial negotiations. Cypriot arranged marriages operate under a simple code: Educated boys marry wealthy girls; wealthy boys marry pretty girls; and, poor ugly boys marry poor ugly girls. Therefore, Yiannis found himself with a wife who looked upon him with the reflective gaze of his disdain. The conjugation required by the Greek Orthodox religion, driven by procreative necessity, began in their marriage with the normal missionary arrangements. The birth of a second son, nineteen months into the relationship was far more difficult than the first; those blood stains upon the sheets that morning less welcome than those once proudly inspected by a new husband. Soon after Androulla met the breeding quota he had set, Yiannis grew disinterested in the space between her thighs, so that when he took her, when drunk enough, he did so as an Arab takes a woman scarred by circumcision’s failure. Androulla was now no more to Yiannis than his other chattels, his house, horses, his land in Greece. His sons, Achilleas and Heracles, that was different. They were as gods.

A passionate hater of his own kind and those who were not, Yiannis had grown up on the streets of Nicosia a bully, thief and occasional rapist. Physically he resembled the man he was on the inside; his tall muscular body, decorated with the souvenirs of a low intensity war, was contained in a skin dried and acned by genetics and neglect. A combination of poor skin and pockmarks made Yiannis facially ugly. His younger brother and an older sister were similarly externally defined. Yet, although genetics was the arbiter of their collective physical fate, their responses to this dice throws were distinct and diverse. Yiannis loathed his siblings. His younger brother had taken refuge from the world in the bosom of his mother. So demanding was that relationship, that in Yiannis’ mind, nothing maternal remained for him. Maria, his sister, chose not the affection of her mother to hide from the gaze of pity, but her mother’s affection for the Church. Maria’s deeply religious life disgusted Yiannis. Only his father, tall, strong, ultra-nationalist, did he wish to please.
On the Sunday mornings of his childhood, when his mother and siblings left the house to climb the hill to the cathedral, Yiannis ran into his father’s workshop, where political soldiers of the Right gathered around their leader, and where a small boy could sit unseen under the large circular table around which self-appointed generals discussed battles waged in alleyways and streets. For the next three hours, Yiannis’ ears would burn with tales and plans of conspiracies and murders. His mind would wrap the precious stories and political intrigues in its protective folds, to be brought out repeatedly, as a mantra, to fill the lengthy time between each Sunday, like lessons in a Catholic catechism. Slowly as the months and years passed, Yiannis learned the crude expressions used to denounce the Communists. He memorised the arguments of the Right - the call for enosis with Greece, and he waited for the time when he a soldier of EOKA would receive his orders.
Each time his mother, Maria and Nicos returned from church, his feelings towards them grew more bitter: Not because their return signalled the end of the sacred hours, nor because his mother chastised him for missing the service, but, because he was now forced to join the company of those who placed idle priests and an effeminate Christ before the Motherland. There were three categories of people that Yiannis learned to loathe above all else, three hatreds instilled within his psyche on those Sunday mornings under his father’s guidance - Communists, the Religious and Turks.

Yiannis’ power as a leader and accomplishment as a political cadre lay in violence. If his fists or revolver could talk he was on top of the world, But Yiannis had a dread that his strength and his physical courage could not overcome. Yiannis feared the intelligent; his self-image relied on the physical act: the mental world left him unarmed and vulnerable. At a street meeting, in early 1963, a young left-wing activist cleverly denounced some remarks made by Yiannis as banal and trite. Within a few sentences a man, barely twenty years old, had bested Yiannis in debate. Yiannis caught up with the youth that same night in the centre of Limassol; trapping his prey in a small alleyway, knowing what was necessary, and, without fury, acting with the instincts of a surgeon, he cut out the offending tongue. Before his oral castration, the young socialist quietly spoke a prophecy: “You are doomed, you Captain of Murderers”. It was meant as an insult and a futile attempt to maintain an equality of power between a butcher and the carcass upon which he worked. Years later, Yiannis discovered the quote was from a British anti-fascist propaganda film of the 1940s. Nevertheless, he took pleasure in the words. That was his position in the liberation organisation. He was a Captain of Murderers.
Two events had been the final additions to his personality and determined the man Yiannis now was. The loss of his father from pancreatic cancer at the age of fifty-three made him aware that destiny cannot wait for the right time; it must be seized at any opportunity. The birth of his boys further added to his burden and obligation to accomplish. In this race for recognition and fame, Yiannis had but one measure, one scale upon which he weighed his worth and its units was fear.

Although there is usually a bond between those who have shared beatings, torture and imprisonment, an attachment between hunted men who have for weeks on end slept together huddled in dirty barns, such experiences gave him comrades, not friends. Yiannis trained himself not to trust even the man who today risked his life for him, knowing that tomorrow the same man might still betray. Yiannis’ acquaintances, his relationships, were always of the present, of the moment. Women were to be bought or taken when desire dictated. He longed to relive those moments in the inter-communal fighting of 1963 when he had forced himself into three Muslim women, one after the other.
When he wanted to relax, Yiannis would play American jazz records. He did not understand why such arrhythmic sounds pleased him, when his life was a demand for order. Despite an inability to comprehend the truth of the matter, jazz brought out the final kernel of humanity that existed within him, not yet extinguished by hatred. On Sunday evenings, Yiannis sat on the rear balcony of his house with Art Pepper and Miles Davis filling the twilight with audible illumination, and the sweet smell of jasmine wafting in the waves of cooling sea breezes making their way inland. Yiannis frequently broke off a small piece of a jasmine shoot from the bushes his father had planted at the back of the house thirty years previous, and placed it behind his ear or rubbed the pure white petals gently between his fingers. Fellow cadres, whilst they never spoke their thoughts on the subject for fear of retribution, could not help wonder at the contrast between the brute they knew and the flower often held in the hand he dressed with four heavy gold sovereign rings bearing the image of a British queen. Yiannis liked jasmine; he did not care for jewellery. Yiannis, nevertheless, appreciated the effect that those stolen rings had on the human jaw.
Today was going to be the pinnacle of his achievements, the ascent of his Olympus. His enemies might have described Yiannis as coming from the bottom of the barrel, but today the barrel was turned on its lid. This was the day of the Coup D’etat and Yiannis had an important role to play. He was to lead the assault on the Presidential Palace, and, it was his finger that would rid the country of the devious priest, the Archbishop who occupied the highest office of the state. Thoughts bubbled up in Yiannis’ head, doubts about whether this was the right moment to act, doubts that he would be successful in his mission. Why at this time was he denied the comfort of a father‘s affirmation? The density of his fury against his mother only rivalled the intensity of Yiannis’ longing for his father’s guidance. If she knew of his intentions, his plan to murder Christ’s bishop, she would have spoken words that would destroy his manhood; words she had used before, words employed against her own flesh in the moments after her husband’s grave was anointed with oil and water. Yiannis remembered standing at his father’s graveside. He recalled the bitter taste of olives, the saltiness of the ewe’s cheese and the texture of hard bread. He recalled a mother’s description of a half-man, a man without wits or culture, a man trying to live in the shadow of a tyrant. He spat on the floor. A pellet of spittle hit the floor and merged with the dusty surface to create a small black crystal that for a brief moment caught his attention.

Yiannis took his revolver out of its British Army holster. The face of its previous owner flashed before his eyes; a boy soldier, no more than twenty-two, his smooth-skinned face half melted, half-gone, the effects of an improvised grenade packed carefully with screws, bolts and washers. Yiannis emptied the barrel of its bullets. With a small knife, he used to peel fruit he began to score the end of each shell. Experience had taught Yiannis that in the confusion and chaos of any assassination, in the space between a killer and his victim, many things could go wrong. Even if only one bullet could bless the Archbishop‘s body, Yiannis was determined that bullet would be enough to send the priest into the oblivion that all men of God secretly knew was the void between this existence and the nothingness of its end. The Captain of Murderers stood himself to attention, saluted his father’s photograph that hung above the small wood-burning stove and left the house. It was the 14th July 1974.

The Retired Person’s Guide to Urban Guerrilla Warfare

A housefly adheres to a wall. The wall is perfectly smooth, yet the fly finds no difficulty in defying gravity. The fly’s compound eyes take in a wide field of vision. I am that fly and this is my watch. Presently, I am silent and motionless. I am content to observe.

A heavily built elderly man with unkempt grey hair sits at an oak dressing table in front of a mirror bordered with lights. It is the kind of dressing table you would associate with a 19th Century theatre, except, that the man is no thespian and this is not a theatre. On a superficial level the room is not unlike a typical bedroom of a new-build house sitting at the end of a cul-de-sac in a middle class suburb; which it is. There is the collection of IKEA furniture, several mass-produced framed photographs of flowers and WICKES laminate flooring covers the lowest face of the perfect cuboid room. The temptation to add a dado rail and fake mouldings has been overcome. We do not know if the neighbours have been as resolute in their defence of featurelessness. The walls are painted with Natural Wicker, part of the DULUX range of tasteful safe bets. Although we cannot see into the equivalent bedroom of the adjoining property, we are confident that this room bears some striking differences. The windows are shielded with blackout curtains. Two CCTV cameras peer down at the occupant of the dressing-table stool whilst their respective images are displayed on separate wall-mounted televisions, and, the two doors that lead off from the room - the first to the en-suite bathroom and the second into the upstairs hallway - are shielded with multiple layers of plastic sheeting. The first camera captures the face of the man and the second the back of his head. The images are not recorded; the cameras are there to display the present. If the moment that was the present four hours ago could be seen again, the room would look the same, a man would still be seated at the dressing table. Yet, one thing would stand out: this man is unlike the first. Four hours ago, the stool supported the weight of a younger and slighter male. If I imagine the image contained on a non-existing video recording of the scene earlier in the day, I might also manage to press an imagined PLAY button and witness the merging of the past with the present. In this film, I would see the transformation of a man into another. However, I cannot do that and so my eyes see only a portly grey-haired gentleman and not a muscular good-looking man of about fifty-five. Without the facility to rewind, I will miss the subtle change in eye colour created by the wearing of blue-tinted contact lenses, the Marlon Brando like bulging of jowls by the packing of the lower jaw with cotton wool and the bulking of frame created by layers of clothing. All I can do is keep staring at the room looking for clues. The dressing table is fertile ground in this regard: make-up and other theatrical paraphernalia litter its surface.

Without the ability to press PLAY, REWIND or FAST FORWARD I am unable to observe all the changes in appearance, dress and height. However, my glimpse of the past, imagined though it was, is sufficient for me to be convinced that the earlier man bears no resemblance whatsoever to the man of the present. Both cameras testify to the completion of disguise.

The disguised man stands up and after carefully moving the plastic sheeting to the side, opens the door, and enters the en-suite bathroom. I need to be rather quick now to get through the gap in the plastic barrier before it swings back into place. Fortunately, I am a fast and furious young insect.
The man is standing in a sizeable bathroom. There are two doorways: the one I came through and another that leads into the hallway. As with the portal through which I have just passed, plastic sheeting protects this second doorway. Around the bathroom are a great deal of cleaning fluids; bleach being the most common. He does not waste time in the bathroom and as before moves the sheeting before exiting again. Predicting this move, I buzz past him and into the hallway. This room and the rest of the house, which I quickly tour around, is more in keeping: clean tidy rooms and mass-produced furniture all in tasteful colours and finishes. The man leaves the house.
After a forty-five minute stroll along tree-lined streets, the image of the man is picked up on a monitor in the city centre’s CCTV monitoring base. Slowly, the camera operator zooms in on the man and then pans past him to a group of teenagers on the other side of the road. The camera operator concerned that the youths might cause this frail looking old man some grief, keeps the camera on him until he gets on a bus. Despite the lack of road traffic, keeping up with the bus is no problem for a young fit fly and before long I witness the subject get off the bus, cross over the road, enter a mini-cab office before getting into a Vauxhall Vectra Estate. Within minutes, this vehicle travels back along the same road upon which traversed the bus, even going past the bus-stop at which the first journey began. However, the car does not stop at this place; it continues through dozens of London streets for some twenty miles. Eventually, it stops outside a railway station - Kings Cross. This is not journeys end. Another bus journey precedes two more rides in taxi-cabs and finally after another forty-five minute walk, the man is standing outside a splendid looking town house just off Kensington High Street. During this rather circuitous trip, no fewer than thirty-nine CCTV cameras have caught the image of the grey-haired chap. As he approaches the door of the house - a solid black door with very shiny brass fittings - camera number forty records his arrival and places the digital images on the hard drive of the house’s security computer. So occupied with the man himself and his changing transport modes, I have up until now missed the fact that he is carrying a brown leather holdall, about the size of pillow.

A housefly perches on the remains of a Beef Bourguignon. I appear very engrossed in this French classic, and yet in reality, as I have been trained to do, I remain fully alert to my surroundings.

In the corner of the restaurant, a man and a woman are chatting over dessert. The man we have met before. He is the gentleman who only earlier on in the day planted a bomb outside the house of the MP for Kensington, John Chalmers, a junior minister at the Department of Work and Pensions; a man considered to be the architect of the government's new anti-trade union legislation. A day before the bombing, a letter typed on an old Corona typewriter began its journey to the BBC declaring:

Last night John Chalmers got it. We’re getting closer.
Communiqué 4. Angry Brigade.

This is the first time that the two have met, yet their conversation suggests intimate knowledge of each other. The couple have been corresponding via an internet dating site for the over 50s for several months. Dinner in this little French bistro was a brave move for both of them. Internet chat sites allow rapid communication between people if they so desire: sentences and words can be abbreviated, grammar and syntax abandoned and content replaced by smileys and half thought out statements. However, the technology also allows for contemplation, spell checking and research to inform any intended text. Like chess, internet dialogue can be of the speed variety or it can be a very slow correspondence game. In this particular courtship, the game was long and reflective. Questions about favourite novels or opinions as to the merits of works of art were not answered lightly. Each sentence was written with care and in some case hours of rewriting. Only in political discussions were there are lapses in the extended cognitive process and consequently, sometimes these chats got very emotional and went on long into the night. From the very beginning of their dinner date, the real world mirrored the virtual - all that time I watched, motionless, noting every detail of language, spoken and unspoken.
The couple read the menu, then conducted their meal in the fashion of a well-established chess 'Opening': both studied the restaurant wine menu before arrival - "I think a mature Chablis will work well with the fish. I suggest the 2000 Valmur." "Maybe, but the Meursault with its rich dryness will outperform it, even if it is overpriced at that level." Both had read several reviews of the new Pat Barker and both disagreed with its favourable response amongst literary critics, finding the novel formulaic, predictable and lacking in any political depth. Only towards the end of the main-course - she chose the Braised Halibut Provencal and him the Snapper en Papillote - did political discussion begin and the 'Middle Game’ commence. The conversation was intense and it yielded evidence of the strong attraction each felt for the other. Nevertheless, both were guarded even in their most fluid and dynamic moments. Now, over dessert, as the conversation turns to feelings and the development of the relationship, I observe a poorly played 'End Game‘. The confidence of rehearsed lines and ideological positions cemented by experience provide no help to these two potential lovers despite their combined century of lived years. It is not as I suspect any inadequacy in either's ability to form physical and emotional relationships. Only future hindsight will enable the true picture to emerge. In his case, there is a suspicion that she is working for the security services as a honey-trap; he has after all been involved in a bombing campaign that has carefully copied that of the Angry Brigade from the 1970s. She on the other hand is the university lecturer she claims to be and has no link to MI5, MI6, Special Branch or any other instrument of the State. Her difficulties lie in several failed relationships and her generally poor track record in choosing partners. She does not suspect that the man sitting across from her is a one-man urban guerrilla group pursuing the downfall of the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois state.

A fly attempts to wrench itself off a piece of flypaper hanging above the kitchen of an 18th century weaver‘s cottage. I fail and resign myself to my fate. Below me, a retired married couple sit at a rustic farm table drinking fine wine and eating grilled turbot. Their story has many years to run. My watch is almost over.

The second Angry Brigade campaign ended several months ago. Its instigator could never decide whether the woman he shared his bed with was an agent of the British State or simply a university lecturer with whom he had fallen in love. It was this inability to fathom the truth that assisted his decision to abandon the guerrilla campaign. If she was part of the security services, the very fact that no bombing mission ever suffered interference led him to conclude that his actions suited the needs of the state. On the other hand, if she was not, continuing the campaign could only risk losing her. He opens another bottle of Chateau Batailly 2001 and they drink a toast to their co-authored novel: The Retired Person’s Guide to Guerrilla Warfare. The book is sitting at number 3 in the Sunday Times non-fiction chart and is remarkably accurate in its descriptions of making and planting bombs.

Digging for Victory

Stanley Wingerard is a teacher of history in a large secondary school in the Scottish town of Perth. He has taught history for twenty-five years. The history he has taught has invariably been the Scottish wars of independence and Nazi Germany. During this time, Stanley has harboured a desire to teach the 17th century: Cromwell and the civil war and most of all the Levellers and the Diggers. Today is Friday the 3rd of April 2010, it is the start of the Easter holidays. On this day, this Scottish teacher of history will turn the world upside down.

A man is leaving the school in which he works. As he walks past the grey Renault Clio that is registered in his name, he tosses the keys to that car into a hedge. He has no further use for an automobile. He has begun a new journey. He walks to a Sainsbury’s Homebase located on a nearby industrial estate. This is a medium size DIY store, but sufficient for his needs. The man is Stanley Wingerard. He fills a shopping trolley with three forks, three spades, three rakes, three watering cans, three Dutch hoes, dozens of seed packets, three large bags of fertiliser and a wheelbarrow. After paying for the goods with cash, (earlier that day Stanley withdrew all his savings from his bank) Stanley attempts to place all his purchases in the wheelbarrow. The shop assistant who has just served him asks, “do you want a hand out to your car?” Stanley replies that he has no car, but needs to get the equipment across the Tay and up Kinnoull Hill, for it is his intention to farm the common land of Perth. He explains to the assistant, whose name badge reveals that he is called Oliver Campwell, that no one has any right to buy and sell the earth, for it is a common treasury for all. Oliver places two twenty pound notes in the till to which he is assigned and gets another wheelbarrow. With two wheelbarrows, the two men have no problem transporting the equipment across the Queen’s bridge and up Kinnoull Hill, a distance of about two miles.

Two men are unloading two wheelbarrows in the shadow of a small rich man’s folly on the top of a wooded hill that overlooks the Scottish town of Perth. The folly is that of a ruined castle built in the German tradition and is meant to create the illusion of a castle along the River Rhine. It does this task reasonably well. As the two men start to dig, a woman walks past with a young cocker-spaniel and asks, “do you have permission to dig here?” Oliver Campwell answers her very direct question by explaining to her that no one has any right to buy and sell the earth, for it is a common treasury for all. And, it is their intention to turn Kinnoull Hill into a cooperative farm. The young pup, its name is Cocoa, urinates on both wheelbarrows. The woman takes off the dog’s lead and commands it to go free and hark the call of the wild. A spade, fork, Dutch hoe and watering can now pass into the hands of this woman who in her first conversation with the two men explains that she goes by the name of Jenny Monk. Very soon all three strangers are hard at work preparing the ground for planting.

The night is bearing down and the temperature is dropping. Three neophyte peasant farmers are realising their error in not sorting out a shelter before ploughing the slopes of a hill. This most sensible and pressing of tasks has completely escaped their thoughts intent as they are on planting a common treasury. The remains of the mock-German castle seem an obvious key-stone for a farm house, yet they all agree any building work will require suitable materials. All three resolve to purchase such materials tomorrow. As this conversation completes, a forest ranger comes upon the scene alerted by some local residents. There have been problems of late with young people drinking Buckfast and leaving their empties scattered around. Observing that the group of people before him are neither young nor in the throws of a Buckfast swilling session, the ranger modifies that which he has to say a little. “What the ’ell are you lot doing up here at this time of night with those spades and wheelbarrows?” he asks. His name, he introduces himself later, is Stuart Charles. Ms. Monk, as she prefers to be called, explains that as no one has the right to buy and sell the earth, then Kinnoull Hill is a common treasury and as such can be planted with crops by the people of Perth, for the good of all. The ranger quickly leaves the scene and returning an hour later brings along, not the police that Stanley, Oliver and Ms. Monk expected, but instead several tents and sleeping bags. The tents and sleeping bags are carried by a woman about the same age as the ranger and three freckled children, whose ages are between five and nine. The woman speaks, “my partner explained about the common treasury so we have brought the children. Oh and my name is Moll, Moll Lilburne.”

A cold night is ending and a new day beginning. A group of people that include three freckled children and a medium-size dog are starting their descent of a hill. There is a chill in the air, yet the day promises much. The dog is the cocker-spaniel that was set free yesterday, it has been unable to hear the call of the wild. All the way down the hill, the dog urinates on hedges, bushes and trees; his attempt at marking his own territory is at odds with the collective spirit of his fellow travellers. This collection of people are the new residents of Kinnoull Hill and now call themselves Peoples’ Co-operative Farm Number 1 - Digger 1 for short. Just outside the settlement of Perth, by the harbour, is a small industrial area, home to several builders’ merchants and the perfect place to supply the building materials that a farm house will need for its construction. By pooling all their finances, Stanley, Oliver, Ms. Monks, Stuart, Moll and the three freckled children succeed in purchasing a vast amount of lumber, cement, brick and all manner of other vital supplies for their new home.

Over a hundred people are forming a snake-like chain along the shallowest side of a hill. Using wheelbarrows and old-fashioned brawn a centurion’s care of workers are transporting a vast array of equipment and building materials up a hill. The group’s numbers have swollen since this morning with the inclusion of the entire workforce of a builders’ yard and all the builders that were visiting that yard when Peoples’ Cooperative Farm Number 1 arrived to do business. The builders’ yard workforce and visiting builders had enquired of the motley crew of persons buying materials that day as to their intentions and three freckled children had answered, “no one is allowed to buy planet Earth and that they were going to build a big farm on the hill and share the harvest and that it was something to do with digging and levelling, whatever levelling was.”

An unsightly building with a huge communal kitchen, communal dining room and communal sleeping quarters is standing aloft a small hill overlooking a Scottish town. A council eviction notice is being delivered by a postman. He subsequently takes off his uniform and joins one of the weeding squads. The notice cites references to anti-terrorist legislation. This causes more bemusement than alarm amongst the New Digger Community - the term of common usage on the hill for Digger 1. This is not the only change in language on the hill. Time now acknowledges the establishment of the New Digger Community: dates before the arrival of Oliver and Stanley are given the description BD or Before Digger, and those after the founders’ arrival are termed AD or After Digger. Other new expressions slip easily into common usage: ‘Good Day’ is now ‘Good Digger’ and ‘How’s it Going’ transforms seamlessly into ‘How’s it Levelling‘. Within the space of another week, the population of Diggerville (names and words are very fluid on the hill) swells to a thousand, assisted by the website and blog set up by a member of the new community, Colla MacAlasdair.

Hundreds of bailiffs wearing yellow vests bearing the name Roundhead Security are making their way up a hill at 4am. They are followed by a similar number of police officers, many sporting riot gear. The people on the hill are not putting up any resistance to the destruction of their homestead and newly planted crops and vegetables. Only a cocker-spaniel makes a physical attempt to curtail the wilful destruction of home and hearth. He runs up and down the lines of police and security men urinating on protective boots and wellies. The dog is given a kick up the arse for his troubles. One of the security men asks a young man with a webcam to put his camera away. The web-cammer, it is MacAlasdair, tells the security man that “no one has any right to buy and sell the land on Ebay or any other shopping site and that the hill was a treasure common to all.” With the assistance of two hundred burly security men, Diggerworld takes less than five days to be rebuilt and expanded. As the cliffs of the hill and large trees restrict the outward expansion of the original building footprint, the new construct takes advantage of the soft terrain and grows in a downward direction. Everyone is in agreement that Diggerworld is a bit of a grand title for the place, but as no one can think of a better one, the name remains for several more weeks. It is subsequently replaced by the title Digger City I.

Internet news sites are informing the inhabitants of Digger City I that similar communities are being established across Britain and that the authorities believe that the whole Digger movement is being orchestrated by Osama bin Laden who is hiding in Western Australia. Apparently, the term Digger is a secret code word amongst the British Dighadist farmers in the various Digger towns and cities that acknowledges their leader’s undisclosed hiding place down under. The web further reveals that the British Government, now in hiding in Suffolk, just outside Ipswich, is preparing its remaining air force to strike deep into the Al Digguaida heartlands of Kinnoullistan. On Kinnoull Hill a collective decision is made: to suspend farming and to shelter in the lowest levels of Digger City I or DC Alpha as it is now termed on the increasingly popular internet site, www.digger-life.co.dc. As the first Tornado fighter-bombers fly over the hill, the residents of DC Alpha are comforting each other thirty feet or more underground. When the first brave souls climb back out into the light, the devastation caused by the napalm is total. Not one tree is standing on the hill. Stanley Wingerard is the first to speak. He says to his fellow Diggernistas, “bloody marvellous; would have taken us years to get that lot clear. Now, we can really get going and make this white-coloured hill a real common treasury for all.” As he completes his sentence, the top of the hill is filled with countless new arrivals, some of whom are waering Royal Air Force uniforms and are dragging spent parachutes.