Attlee, Bevin and the New Jerusalem

The next UK government will inherit a mess, but not as bad as Clement Attlee did in 1945. Yet the Attlee government not only coped. It made Britain better. Meanwhile his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, played a key role in forging the Western security framework that has endured to this day. Who were these men, and what were they really like?

Attlee takes power in 1945 (Leslie Priest/AP)

When Labour came to power in July 1945, Britain was broke. Much of its gold reserves had been spent on the war, and the US had insisted, as part of its postwar loan agreement, that sterling be convertible within a few years. This was a huge financial bomb waiting to go off. Meanwhile the occupation of the British Zone of Germany was also costly; it was in a terrible state, not least because of Britain’s own bombing. 

At home, labour shortages in the mines restricted coal supplies and would immiserate everyone in the awful winter of 1947. There was a huge housing crisis; about 2 million houses had been destroyed or badly damaged across Britain, and an estimated 750,000 new houses were needed – quickly; according to the Royal British Legion, a staggering 4.2 million service personnel were to be demobilised by December 1946. Meanwhile there were about 400,000 German prisoners in Britain, and large numbers of Polish and other servicemen whose countries were about to come under Stalinist occupation. It was becoming clear that they would not be able to go home.

Abroad, India was ready to explode but the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, could not get Indian politicians to agree a path to independence. Britain was also still fighting in Greece, where left-wing forces could have taken the country into the Eastern bloc along with its neighbours. There was armed conflict in Palestine, which was still under the British mandate. In 1948 the emergency in Malaya would start.

Not all these problems would be solved. Some, especially Palestine, would leave a toxic legacy. The houses wouldn’t all be built. But in six years, Attlee would build a social democracy in which people’s basic needs mostly would be met. Abroad, despite some failures, his remarkable Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, would play a leading role in the postwar global order and in forging the Atlantic alliance. At home, he would guard Attlee’s back against rivals in Cabinet and keep it stable.

Who were these men?

***

Francis Beckett’s biography Clem Attlee was originally published in 1997 but reissued in an updated edition in 2015. It’s not alone; there are a number of well-regarded Attlee biographies, notably John Bew’s Citizen Clem and Michael Jago’s Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister. But I think for most people Beckett’s will be all the Attlee they need.

Attlee has been seen as an accidental Prime Minister who was in the right place at the right time. In the schism and electoral rout of 1931 many of Labour’s ablest people either crossed over to the National Government or lost their seats or both. Attlee was one of the few survivors. Otherwise, it’s said, he would never have been deputy Labour leader and would not have become leader when Lansbury stepped down in 1935.  Biographer Michael Jago thought this was nonsense. Beckett agrees. Attlee, he argues, rose to the top on his considerable political skills and the strength of his beliefs. He was anything but an accident. Reading Beckett’s biography, I partly, but only partly, agree with this. Throughout his leadership, rivals such as Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton would deride him as a grey man and insist Labour needed a more charismatic leader (e.g. them). Without the events of 1931, he might have been a capable Minister but never Prime Minister; the post would have been filled by one of his “charismatic” rivals. It is our good fortune that it wasn’t, for the grey man did rather well.

Clement Attlee was born into a large middle-class family in Putney in 1883. His father was a Liberal barrister and Attlee himself went into the law after Oxford. But it bored him. One night in 1906 his younger brother took him to visit a club for disadvantaged boys in Stepney, then a very poor part of London where he would not normally have gone. The visit transformed his life and he ended up living in the East End as a social worker and campaigner, becoming involved in left-wing politics. In 1914 he joined the army and served with some distinction in the Gallipoli campaign and in the Middle East. In the former, he caught dysentery and was almost the last Allied soldier to be evacuated. In the Middle East he was badly wounded. Beckett says he felt strongly that the army and navy had mismanaged the Gallipoli campaign but that Churchill’s strategy had been sound. This would matter in 1940, when Attlee would bring Labour into Churchill’s wartime coalition.

Beckett obviously covers Attlee’s part in the wartime coalition and his subsequent premiership. He takes a broad-brush approach. I don’t think that’s a bad thing; the minutiae of long-ago governments do not always tell us much. Beckett does show that Attlee played a crucial role from the beginning, backing Churchill against Chamberlain and Halifax, who wanted to negotiate with Hitler. He also demonstrates that Attlee could restrain or influence Churchill, and did – but tactfully; he would have ‘a word with the PM’, rather than row with him in Cabinet. Beckett quotes several examples, not least Attlee’s defence of de Gaulle, who Churchill and Roosevelt loathed – not always without reason. But Attlee realised they had no right to remove him. At the same time Attlee quietly chaired the main committees concerned with postwar reconstruction, which helped him set the agenda for the government he would soon lead.

He was not to regret his part in the coalition. He later acquired the original of Low’s famous 1940 cartoon (“All behind you, Winston!”) and according to Beckett it was on the wall of his living room when he died in 1967.

***

Beckett takes the same broad brush to the postwar government. Here a little more detail might have been welcome, and there are some omissions, or matters covered briefly. The latter include the fuel problems that beset Britain in the very bad winter of 1947, and the constant plotting of Attlee’s rivals for the leadership – they are there but not in depth. Beckett may be right not to get into the weeds. Still, he could have said more about the pension and social security reforms, which were to have a huge positive impact, and their prime mover the Minister of National Insurance, Jim Griffiths. A Welshman who had left school at 13, he is largely forgotten now. But his work in that Attlee government had a positive and lasting impact on millions. He seems also to have been a likeable and capable figure.

Ellen Wilkinson
(Bassano Ltd./National Portrait Gallery)

What Beckett does bring out is Attlee’s magnanimity in government. Besides leadership rivals like Morrison and Dalton, he also brought in Aneurin Bevan, who had been a fierce critic throughout the war years, and Ellen Wilkinson, who was apparently Morrison’s mistress and had been involved in multiple plots against her new boss. (Beckett says she had a Damascene conversion about Attlee as soon as she was in government.) These decisions have sometimes been seen as wily plots to neutralise opposition. The reality, according to Beckett, was that Attlee felt all the best people were needed in government whether he liked them or not. 

And for the most part they did well. This was especially true of Bevan, although he could be difficult; and of Wilkinson, who implemented the important 1944 Education Act. Beckett covers her role fairly well. But he says little about her death in office in 1947, possibly by her own hand but more likely of an accidental overdose. This was a poignant episode; a charismatic woman with a gift for friendship, she was mourned on both sides of the House. Morrison did not attend her funeral.

There is one episode of Attlee’s premiership that was very grave, and about which Beckett is perhaps a little generous to him. This was India.

By 1945 it was clear that Britain could not keep control in India much longer. There was a Secretary of State for India and Burma; this was a Cabinet-level position in its own right, occupied by Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, a long-time Labour figure. However, he was by then 76 and besides, Attlee seems largely to have directed India policy himself – a legacy perhaps of his service on the Simon Commission in India in the 1920s. Early in 1947 he sacked the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, who had tried hard but failed to get Indian politicians to agree with each other on the shape of the transition to independence. Attlee replaced him with Lord Mountbatten, telling him to get the British out quickly and leave India as a single nation if possible but if not possible, to partition it. Mountbatten was given plenipotentiary powers to this effect. He chose Partition, and brought the date forward to just six months hence.  Attlee let him do it. Should he have done? It led to a huge, unplanned exchange of populations – something that might have been predicted. This left a million dead and is a difficult part of Attlee’s legacy.

Beckett is with the defence. By 1947, it is argued, Britain could not keep order and any delay would make things worse. This might be true. But perhaps Attlee should have given the same authority to Wavell when he came to power two years earlier. Wavell’s diaries were published in the 1970s and they do suggest that, given the same freedom of action as Mountbatten, he might have negotiated an agreed path to a united India.

But history is full of what-ifs; in the end they take you nowhere, and maybe Attlee was right. His support of partition may have sprung from his realisation, decades before others, that the Western model of democracy could not always be exported. In May 1943 he had circulated a remarkable paper to Cabinet in which he argued that in certain situations – Palestine, Ireland, South Africa – two groups might so distrust each other that one would oppose governance by the other under any circumstances, at least without an outside referee. Perhaps Attlee believed that in such a scenario the two parties must go their separate ways altogether. If so, Partition was the logical step. But the price was high, and it was not the British who paid it.

***

Attlee shaped Britain as no other single person has in modern times. But what was he like?

He lived quietly – and modestly; when he went to the Palace to kiss hands in 1945 it was in an eight-year-old Hillman 14 driven by his wife Violet, and the couple used the same car in the 1950 election campaign. For 1951 they had upgraded to a Humber Hawk, but Beckett says this was still prewar (other sources do say it was new). His wife Violet usually drove him on his election campaigns. He was moderate in his personal habits. The family home was a semi in Stanmore, north-west London, and he returned there whenever he could during the war years. He had married at nearly 40; the marriage seems to have been a devoted one, and lasted until Violet’s death in 1964. They had four children.

Outside the home, Attlee was a quiet, undemonstrative man. He was also almost weirdly calm and self-controlled. His years in government, as deputy and later Prime Minister, were the most crisis-ridden in modern British history, but he seems to have been completely unflappable (even when chauffeured by Violet, which is said to have been terrifying). He was also quite able to detach himself when the day’s work was done however crisis-ridden it had been, and read a book or write letters. He was concise to the point of abruptness; he never used two words where one would do and never used one word when he could grunt instead. He had little small talk. Ministers who did not perform were dismissed perhaps not rudely, but certainly without ceremony. One imagines that Ministers and civil servants might have respected rather than loved him.

There was however a more jocular face to Attlee’s government. This was his closest ally: his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. He, too, is now the subject of an accessible and absorbing biography – by a more recent Labour minister, Lord Adonis.

***

Ernest Bevin was born in Somerset in 1881. His mother was a widow; his father’s identity has never been known (though Adonis has evidence he was a local farmer). His home was very poor but not unhappy; however, his mother died when he was eight and at 11 he left school and worked as a labourer. By the age of 13 he had had enough of this, and went to Bristol, where he became a drayman and, in time, a Baptist lay preacher and union organiser.

Bevin: a 1945 portrait by
Thomas Cantrell Dugdale

In the latter role he did well and his influence grew. He started to travel, building links with trade unionists in Europe and elsewhere. During the First World War he visited the USA, where he had a cordial meeting with the powerful labour leader Samuel Gompers, who had helped found the American Federation of Labor.  Eventually Bevin founded Britain’s own first ‘super-union’, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). By 1940 he had for some time been the country’s most important union figure. Distrustful of Labour intellectuals after 1931, he decided that Labour’s taciturn and business-like new Deputy Leader, Attlee, was the horse to back. The two men were a contrast; Attlee a silent ascetic to whom many found it hard to relate– and Bevin, big, bluff and sometimes a bully, forged in the furnace of labour negotiations and union politics. He was genial and ruthless.

In 1940 Attlee and Churchill found Bevin a seat and brought into the wartime coalition as Minister of Labour, believing this to be the best way of mobilising the workforce behind the war (wisely, they seem to have realised this was not a given). As wartime Minister of Labour, he played a key role in uniting the labour movement behind the war effort – something Churchill, no friend of the unions, could not have done without him. Finally, as Foreign Secretary from 1945, he was at least partly responsible for forging the US-European alliance against the USSR. Bevin was thus the father of the modern British union movement, a key pillar of Attlee’s reforming government, and a key architect of the postwar global security settlement.

Given that these three legacies are now under threat, a new look at Bevin is timely. It arrived in 2021: Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill, by Andrew (Lord) Adonis, a strong New Labour figure and himself a Minister in the 200s. I have some reservations about this book (not least the title). But it is well worth reading. It isn’t the first Bevin biography; there are several, including Alan Bullock’s mighty three-volume account. For the casual reader, there’s Mark Stephens’s short book Ernest Bevin, written to mark Bevin’s centenary. However, Bullock’s would probably be too much for most readers. Stephens’s book is concise, but it was published by the T&G itself and is not especially critical (though it’s not a hagiography – and it is very well-written). Adonis’s book is short and lively enough to be readable. And it’s even-handed; Adonis clearly admires Bevin, but he is sometimes very critical, especially of Bevin’s period as Foreign Secretary.

The book is mostly not based on primary sources. Adonis draws heavily on the previous biographies (including Bullock’s) and other books germane to the period. I think that’s fine. He’s clearly trying to project a readable image of Bevin, not find out what he had for breakfast on a given day. Now and then he does rely rather heavily on one source. One chapter is partly an extract from the memoirs of Nicholas Henderson, who worked for Bevin at the Foreign Office and was later Ambassador to Washington. Adonis will certainly have sought permission for this, and it does add important background. But although he is scrupulous about quoting sources, they are sometimes hard to check as there is no reference list – an odd oversight.

Adonis credits Bevin with a great deal. The early parts of this book depict a determined man who was not expected, by background, to amount to much, but whose determination, occasional ruthlessness, showmanship and humour helped build a truly national trade union movement where none had existed. Then he became wartime Minister of Labour, and later the first postwar Foreign Secretary – both crucial roles at a time when things could have gone very wrong. In Bevin’s hands they mostly didn’t. Adonis also shows us someone who, although ruthless, could be very loyal. He always was to Attlee, and did much to buffer the rampant egotists in Cabinet who would have liked Attlee’s job – one which Bevin himself never sought. He must thus be credited at least in part with the stability and success of Attlee’s government, the more so as Attlee’s own personality sometimes did not help him.

Adonis also states that Bevin stiffened Western resistance to Stalin more or less alone, getting – he says – little help from a rather supine Truman administration. There is probably much truth in this. Truman’s Secretary of State was James F. Byrne, a Southern Democrat who had had a long and ambivalent career. He had been a segregationist in his native South Carolina but had also crossed swords with the Klu Klux Klan, and would do so again as the State’s Governor in the 1950s. He had also been a New Dealer and had opposed isolationism in the 1930s. But he was indeed ‘soft’ on Stalin; other sources also confirm this. In fact, Truman himself was worried about this himself, and sacked him in January 1947. Still, Adonis is very persuasive in arguing that Bevin helped forge a united Western front against Stalinism. He argues that Bevin’s background in union activism greatly influenced the way he saw Hitler in the 1930s and later saw Stalin, as his international union contacts meant he could see what fascist governments did to unionists in the 1930s. But was also keenly aware of communist tactics in the union movement, and loathed those as well.

I wonder if Bevin’s instant distrust of Stalin was also just native shrewdness. Bevin was no fool and knew a stinker when he met one. Also, Adonis doesn’t really discuss the poor relationship between the UK and the US immediately after the war and the US dislike and distrust of British imperialism. But they were important context for what happened in 1945-48. Even so, I think Adonis is on the money. Not all Labour MPs were happy with what they saw as Bevin’s warmongering, but his contribution to Western peace and security was immeasurable.

But Adonis is hard on Bevin in some respects, noting again that he did not like opposition. He is also very critical of some aspects of Bevin’s tenure at the Foreign Office. He takes a rather black-and-white view sometimes. Thus he is merciless in judging Bevin’s handling of Palestine. It is true that, on Bevin’s watch, Britain’s mandate over Palestine ended very badly. People in the region are still paying the price. But it is not always clear what Adonis thinks Bevin should have done. After all, the problem preceded Bevin and has not been solved since.

Adonis is also highly critical of Bevin’s imperialism. It’s true that Bevin regarded the colonies as an ongoing resource and neither he nor Attlee was interested in decolonisation. In Africa it would take a remarkable Conservative Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod, to force the pace some years later. Again, I think Adonis has a point here. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Arthur Creech-Jones, was a Cabinet minister in his own right and had a long-standing interest in colonial affairs. It may be that he would have liked to move faster and that Attlee and Bevin frustrated this.  (Bevin did not have responsibility for India.)

The Potsdam Conference, 1945; Attlee and Bevin had taken over
from Churchill and Eden during the conference itself.
Front row, Attlee, Truman and Stalin; at rear,
Truman's Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy; Bevin; Secretary of
State Byrne; and Stalin's Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov
(US National Archives/NationalMuseumof the US Navy) 

Last but not least, Adonis deprecates Bevin’s lack of interest in the nascent European Union, in the shape of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) formed in 1950. It is true that Bevin was negative towards British participation, partly because he wanted to protect Britain’s own coal and steel. 

But as he left the Foreign Office early in 1951 and died a few weeks later, he may be excused for not understanding just how consequential the ECSC would be. One could in fact argue that Britain’s absence from Europe was not culpable until its failure to attend the Messina Conference in 1955, a decision made by Anthony Eden’s Tory government, not by Bevin. And as Adonis himself records, Bevin had close contacts with European as well as American labour movements and travelled widely in Europe in the 1930s. But Adonis is right; Bevin failed to understand how Europe would develop and how important it was to be at its heart.

So did Attlee. He did not want Britain involved, then or later. Shortly before he died in 1967, he gave a brief speech in support of anti-Marketeer Douglas Jay. “The Common Market,” he said. “…Very recently this country spent a great deal of blood and treasure rescuing four of ’em from …the other two.” These attitudes were common in Britain then and have not disappeared. There is a contrast here with the graceful pragmatism and foresight shown by France and the Benelux countries, who understood the need to bury the hatchet forever. To be sure, Adonis – angry perhaps, like a lot of us, about Brexit – is judging Bevin from our own time; things looked different then. But his criticism is at least partly fair.

***

I would have liked Adonis to convey more of the private man. The chapter drawn from Henderson is quite vivid, and now and then Adonis does give us a glimpse into Bevin’s family life. We do learn that he lived for many years in suburban contentment in Golders Green – but didn’t mind a little luxury and some good booze. And Adonis quotes a splendid comment by a contemporary that Bevin, a very large man, both looked and dressed like an overstuffed sofa (pictures suggest this was accurate.) But something about the man is elusive here. His wife Flo appears in the book very little, although they had a long marriage. Neither do we really learn much about Bevin’s siblings, who like him were born working people and unlike him remained so. Still, Bevin came from a time when one’s private life was not on display, and maybe his remains hidden.

Adonis does tell us what Bevin was like to work with. His ally Attlee was decent to others but as we have seen he never dissembled, and used very few words, even in public; one imagines he could be a strain. Bevin, by contrast, was bluff, friendly and fun, fond of a good glass of wine and capable of great warmth and kindness. To be sure, he was ruthless with those who crossed him. But those who didn’t do so liked him, and his civil servants thought him a fine minister.

***

These books are both worth reading. They do contain some odd omissions, and Adonis is too swift to judge in some areas. But Beckett’s is a readable and thoughtful portrait of Attlee. He shows us clearly why Attlee succeeded where others might have failed. As for Adonis on Bevin, he provides an accessible picture of a remarkable man, and his book should be essential reading for anyone interested in Labour history.

And both books are a window into one of the most effective governments that Britain has ever had – one we should all try to understand. For all its flaws, it steered the country through one of the hardest periods in its modern history, played a key role in building postwar global institutions, and left the British with universal healthcare, social security and proper pensions for all. They had had none of these before. One of the most moving passages in Beckett’s comes in his discussion of Attlee’s Minister of Education, Ellen Wilkinson, who introduced free milk and school meals.

Before the war, private school children were noticeably taller, better built, healthier and stronger than state school children, because they were properly fed. …In the Fifties this was no longer the case, due to the provision of free school meals and school milk.

These were not perfect men, but they had the courage to make things better. It seems now we are too scared to try.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: A sideways journey

A little flash fiction...

“We’ll go to Nidden for the summer,” my wife told me. “You can write your paper there. We can swim in the Baltic and you can draw inspiration from the artist’s colony.”

My paper is important. I am a metaphysicist and believe I have intuited an important facet of time: that it is not a single continuum but a series of parallel progressions between which, in theory at least, one might cross, by accident or design, to enter a reality that may be radically estranged from one’s own; or much the same, but rendered subtly different by some slight accident of history; a battle lost, instead of won; a weapon that wasn’t forged, a prince who lived when he had died.

A.Savin/Wikipedia

“I suppose we might,” I conceded. I do like the Curonian Spit with its light and air; it is conducive to one's intellectual process. Before I could change my mind, she had opened her computer and booked our tickets online. 

So now we sat in the departure lounge. We became aware of an elderly man, dressed in a suit but without a tie; he looked quite distinguished. He was staring at his ticket and at the signs over the gates. He seemed confused.

My wife stood up. “Are you looking for your gate?” she asked politely.

He looked at her. “Yes,” he said. “I thought it was announced. I am on the Easyjet flight to Bratislava.”

Now my wife looked confused. “Easyjet?” she said, “I do not know them. Where is Bratislava?”

“Bratislava. In Slovakia,” he said. “I am going to attend a conference. I am giving a paper. On philosophy.” He laughed nervously. “I am a logical positivist. But it seems one must use intuition to find one’s gate.” He pointed at the gate sign for our own flight. “Surely that sign is a joke.”

My wife frowned. “Might I see your ticket?” she asked. She studied it, then nodded briskly. ”Ah. Look, that is this gate, here.”

“You are sure?”

She nodded, and took his arm and guided him to his gate. He thanked her, but seemed uncertain. Beyond the window I could see the tail-fin of his jet, with the big red-and-white flag, the familiar crest offset a little to the left of centre. She walked back to me.

“What on earth is logical positivism?” I asked. “I suppose it may be one of these wretched modernist movements that question the use of intuition. And where is Bratislava?  It sounds vaguely Bohemian.”

“I really don’t know, dear,” she said. “But his ticket was for Austro-Hungarian Airlines Flight 470, Pressburg via Lemberg.” She glanced at me a little mischievously. “I wonder,” she said, “perhaps he has strayed, by accident or design…”

“Oh, do stop,” I said. Ahead lay the Baltic, sun, sea and the warm sand of the Curonian Spit. 

I smiled; she smiled back.

“Last call,” said the Tannoy. “Last call for Imperial German Airways Flight 1918, Königsberg via Breslau and Danzig.”

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps
A question of human geography

Hiraeth
A yearning…

Strange Places
A spirit in the sky 

Displaced
Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging
Do you? Where?

Leaving Home
A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: Displaced

A short story

Grandpa’s 90. He doesn’t move much anymore. He sits in his dressing-gown by the window and looks out on the street. He used to read but he finds it hard now. We have the TV on but he likes the sound turned down. My kids treat him like a piece of furniture mostly but he doesn’t mind, he looks down at them, and now and then when he doesn’t know I’m looking I see him smile at them.

This month’s been cold. Really cold. It set in the day after Christmas. It’s the 15th now. The cops just went round the subway and rounded up all the bums. You stay here, you’re gonna die, they tell them. You’re coming to the shelter. Right now. And today it’s snowing heavy, early lunchtime, and Grandpa’s looking out the window at the cars going up and down East 94th Street and the new snow building on the heaps already there by the side of the road.

“I ordered pizza for lunch,” I called.

“Yeah pizza!” The kids beat the carpets with their hands. The youngest starts jumping around. “Pizza! Pizza!”

US Customs and Border Protection

Grandpa just smiles. He’s looking at the TV. Then he looks less happy. I go in there wiping my hands on a dishcloth and I see he’s watching a news program and first it’s from the border and there’s this reporter and there’s the Rio Grande behind her and there’s these people getting onto pickup trucks and these guys in uniform, from Border Patrol I guess, and the strap reads ‘500 more cross river in last three days’, then there’s a Congressman being interviewed. I know who he is, he’s young and he has this bouffant hair and a check jacket and the sourest face you ever saw, and the DoJ just questioned him on suspicion of sex trafficking.

“You want I turn the sound up?” I ask.

“Nah,” says Grandpa. “I know what he’s sayin’. He wants them all shot in the water.” He’s bellowing. Grandpa always speaks loud because he can’t hear so well now. Says, “That guy’s creepy, you hear me? That guy’s a major-league creep.”

“Take it easy, Grandpa,” I say. I look over his shoulder into the street. There’s this guy coming up it on a bike, one of those wrecks the pizza parlours use, with all the tape stuck round them make them less worth stealing. He’s a short and squat with a dark complexion and he wears a parka with a baseball cap worn back-to-front. On his back he has a big square box. The guy’s nearly at our door when he skids on the snow, must have been some ice beneath it. Over he goes and lies there a moment and a yellow cab brakes behind him and skids a little and blasts him with its horn and steers round him. Then he picks himself up and brushes the snow off and he’s coming up the stairs and I open the apartment door and his face is a mask. “Mrs Blaskowitz,” he says.

“Yep. One 12-inch cheese, and an 8-inch Meat Feast.”

“You got it.” He slides the hot pizza boxes out the satchel and hands them over. Then I hear Grandpa bellow, “Hey son. You OK? Saw you took a fall off that bike of yours.”

“Sir, I’m fine.” He isn’t really. His face is grazed. I reach in my pocket for a $5 tip. I add one online but I know the pizza joints don’t always pass them on.

“Where you from?” asks Grandpa.

The man hesitates. You don’t ask these guys questions like that. Undocumented, I guess.

“Guatemala, sir.”

“How are things down there, son?”

“They’re not too good, sir. No rain, no corn. And trouble. Gangs. Narcotraficantes. Everywhere trouble.”

Grandad nods slowly. He reaches in his dressing-gown pocket and pulls out three $5 bills. He starts to get up but I take them and I give them to the pizza guy. “Thank you, sir,” says pizza and turns to go and then Grandad bellows out:

“I came from a shithole too, son.”

The guy blinks.

“A real shithole. The houses were wood and the roads were mud and they hated Jews.”

There’s silence for a moment then Grandpa bellows:

“You hang on in there, son. You’re gonna make it here. You’re gonna make it.”

The guy gives a sort of bow and mutters, “You take care, sir.” And he turns and goes down the stairs, he’s still got snow on his sneakers and he leaves a trail of moisture on the steps and I catch sight of his face and I think his eyes are glistening a bit. Then I pull the door shut and Grandpa’s sitting at his table with his chin on his hands and his sleeves have slipped down and I can just make out the number on his forearm. 

More flash fiction

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps
A question of human geography

Hiraeth
A yearning…

Strange Places
A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey
Things might have been different

Belonging
Do you? Where?

Leaving Home
A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: Belonging

The theme for the writing group this time was "Belonging". The others wrote some rather nice poems. I'm a lousy poet so I wrote this. 

It's quite deeply felt.

Belonging

Frank ended the call.

He looked straight ahead through the windscreen. She looked across at him. “I hate automatic wipers,” he said. “There’s not enough rain for them. Look, they’re smearing.”

She didn’t reply for a moment.

“He shouldn’t have rung you,” she said finally. “You’re not at work today. And he wasn’t very polite.”

“Paul never is. I’ve never liked him.”

“It’s always like this then?”

“Yes, Sue. He’s always like this.”

“Tell him to stuff his job.”

“I can’t retire, not yet. Got to get the boys through Uni first. And” – he tapped the BMW’s steering wheel – “we’d have to replace this thing.”

“You hate it though. The job I mean. Please, Frank. It’s – it’s… It’s gnawing at you.”

He didn’t answer. She glanced across at him again, but his face was closed.

“Well he can sod off today,” she said, “because this is our Sentimental Journey.”

He chuckled. “Gonna take a sentimental journey,” he warbled. “Gonna set my heart at ease. …Who the hell sang that, anyway?”

“Doris Day,” she said. “Before she was a virgin. Darling, I think this is the turn into Farm Avenue.”

“It doesn’t look familiar.” They were passing through a modern suburb; a health centre passed on the right, a small row of shops on the left. “There was nothing here. 40 years ago, was there.” But he swung left. “Hang on. This is it, dammit. Our turning’s down round the bend, isn’t it?”

“It was number 47.”

“So it was.” He slowed right down. It was raining more heavily now. The houses were unfamiliar, all modern detached buildings with garages and big drives; now and then there was a small car and a large SUV parked in them together.

“These houses are all wrong. This can’t be it,” he said.

“It is,” she said. “But what have they done? Where’s your house? It was just after the bend.”

He stopped. “Can’t be it,” he said. “It was one of those postwar council houses, wasn’t it. Semi with an alley up the side. I kept my bike up there and I had to remember to tuck my trousers in my socks before I rode away. I remember I forgot once when I came courting you, and I fell off. True love, that was; you try riding a bike in flares.” He squinted at the new house. “It’s gone. That’s where it was, where that horrid modern detached house is with the Audi.“

“You sure this was it?”

“Yes. Look, there’s that post-box. And the litter bin, still there.”

“Good Lord, so it is.”

“Our poor house is gone,” said Frank. “Our poor little house. Dad painted that. He got on a ladder and he painted it and we all laughed because it rained straight after and he said I’ll do it again, and he was so proud. He had roses in the front.” He thought for a minute. “Mind you he was a crap gardener.”

“I wonder if our oak tree is still there? You know, the one on that patch of waste ground where we tried to carve our initials and your penknife broke.”

It wasn’t there. The waste ground had been built on and there was a bank of council bins where the tree had been.

“But there’s the river, Frank, where we swam.”

“It was a ditch really, not a river.” He put the gar in gear and they glided away. “The cows used to wade in that muddy patch. I suppose we were swimming in cowshit.”

He drove two or three miles; neither spoke. At length he drew up on a bridge. To their left was a low meadow adjoining a small river. There were machines on it now, behind chain-link fences; as it was Sunday they were not working, but there were placards on sticks advertising Riverbanks, a new development with 3- and 4-bedroom homes.

“Looks like the cows have gone,” he said. “But for God’s sake, it’s a flood plain.”

“Ha! Yes. …Frank, there’s not much left of our world, is there?”

“Shall we see if Mrs Carey’s shop is still there?” He drove up the hill on the other side of the river and up to a T-junction where there had been a small shop and a petrol station. Both had gone, replaced by a Tesco Metro.

He pulled up in the car park beside it.

“Looks like Mrs Carey’s Liquorice Allsorts are no more, Sue.” He stretched and sat still.

His stomach rumbled.

Andrew Bell/Wikimedia Commons

“I’ll get us some pasties or something,” she said. “Tesco Metro has its uses. It’s about lunchtime, anyway.” She came back a few minutes later with some sausage rolls and two scotch eggs. They ate them cold, The World This Weekend on the radio.

“They could have left something. Something.”

She turned towards him, taken aback by the savagery in his voice. He bit into his sausage roll. “There’s nothing left. Nothing,” he said. “We don’t belong here anymore. We don’t belong anywhere, do we? Because that’s it, that’s all there is. England in the 21st century. We must have come from somewhere, but this is our world now. The supermarket checkout, cardboard fries, motorways, and the smell of petrol in the rain.”

He screwed up the wrapper and crushed it in his fist.

“And Pauls. Lots of effing Pauls. And I don’t effing belong anywhere.”

“Yes you do.” She stared back. “You belong where I am, you silly sausage.”

It was still raining. Her face was soft in the diffused grey light from the wet windscreen.

“We’ll manage, you know. We can downsize. We shan’t need the space with the boys gone. And we don’t need a car like this. Call him now.”

“What, Paul?”

“No, Princess Diana, you idiot. Yes, Paul. Do it now and tell him to sod off.”

He leaned towards the touchscreen, selected his phone and hesitated a moment; then he pressed dial. “Seven, that's the time we leave, at seven,” he muttered. I'll be waitin' up for Heaven.”

As he waited for Paul to answer, he felt her hand close round his.

More flash fiction

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps
A question of human geography

Hiraeth
A yearning…

Strange Places
A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey
Things might have been different

Displaced
Encounter on E94th Street

Leaving Home
A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: Leaving Home

I haven't posted fiction on this blog; I haven’t written many short pieces that would be suitable. But I have just completed a short story for a writing group. The set title was Leaving Home. 

My contribution was prompted by a recent house move. My new home was built in 1888, and I have been thinking of those who were here before and what became of them. Hence this story. I noticed today’s date, and thought I’d share it.

Leaving home

I wish he wouldn’t make that bloody row, thought Priscilla as Martin dropped one tool on another in the bedroom across the hall. She winced at the clang and tried to refocus on her screen. The rain streaked the window behind her monitor; grey clouds scudded past outside.

Martin let out an exclamation.

Dammit, how am I supposed to mark a bunch of crappy first-year essays with this old clown working next door.

She stood up and crossed the corridor. The fitted carpet in the bedroom was peeled back so Martin could get at the broken floorboard; it was just beside her bed so she always stepped on it in the night. He had pulled up the broken board, but was now squatting on his haunches, the claw hammer on the carpet beside him.

“I wish you’d make less noise,” she said. She regretted it at once; her voice sounded tense, uptight.

Martin seemed not to hear. He held a small square piece of paper.

“I found something,” he said. “Old photo. Under the floorboard.”

He passed it to her. It was rather small.

“Why print a picture that size?” she said, puzzled.

 “It’s a contact print from an old-fashioned negative,” he said. “Six centimetres square, I think. I have a friend who likes mucking about with old cameras and he makes those.”

She turned it over in her hands. It was brownish and faded and showed a youth in his late teens and a girl who looked a little younger. The girl wore a dress with a rather prim collar. Her hair had been done with care and was formed in a high roll above her forehead. The youth wore uniform; he had a narrow cap without a peak that came to a point at the front, rather like a ship’s stem.

“Why are they sticking their tongues out at the camera?” asked Priscilla. She frowned.

Martin chuckled. “I reckon their mum and dad made them go and have their portrait done,” he said. “And they didn’t fancy that much and they took the piss out of the photographer.” He looked over her shoulder at the little square of photographic paper. “Look, it’s got PROOF embossed on it. I reckon that’s how they did it then – the studio gave you a load of contact prints and you chose which one to have enlarged.” He turned it over. “Look, there you go. It’s the studio’s stamp. Pringle’s, 31 The Broad. I remember them, just. Where MacDonald’s is now. They closed when I was a nipper, back in the 70s.”

“What on earth has she done to her hair?” asked Priscilla.

“Victory Rolls, they called them,” said Martin. “The Hollywood stars had them apparently.” He peered at the picture. “Royal Air Force,” he said presently. “Not an officer I don’t think. Look, he’s got a half-wing.” He pointed to the man’s breast. “Air gunner or navigator maybe.”

 “Oh.” She handed the picture back to him. “I wonder who they were. Anyway, you can pop it in the rubbish I suppose.”

He frowned. “I think I’ll keep it,” he said. “Someone might know something. My mate Josh, he likes local history, he’s one of those blokes digging up the old City Station up near Halfords. He knows how to look at the old census returns and he can see who lived here.”

“Please yourself,” said Priscilla. “I have 20 essays to mark before lunch.”

She went out. Martin looked at the picture then up at her retreating back. And stuck his tongue out. Then he chuckled, tucked the picture away in his jacket and went back to work.

Priscilla went back to her study. She did not hear the front door close or feel the faint breeze as a middle-aged woman in an apron and sensible shoes descended the stairs behind her.

In the front room a man with a pipe and cardigan looked up from the Daily Sketch as his son and daughter came in.

“Did they get the proofs?” called his wife as she turned into the kitchen at the back of the house. “Ted, Sarah, is that you?” She went on into the kitchen, filled the kettle and put it on the range. “I’ll make a cup of tea.”

“Don’t make tea if we haven’t the coal,” her son called out. “You’re spoiling me, Mum, but you’ll need it when I’m gone.”

“Don’t worry, Ted. We’ve got a hundredweight in hand, and we’re allowed more on the first of the month.” She came into the front room, wiping her hands on her apron. “Let’s see these pictures then. Oh, they’re lovely, aren’t they?”

“They’re not bad, eh?” Her husband smiled up at her. “And old Pringle on his own now, with his son in for the duration, as they say.”

“He’s back on leave,” said Ted. “Mr Pringle told me. He’s been in Egypt, he said.”

“We’re not supposed to say where people are,” his father said.

“I don’t think as we’re going to lose because someone knows where young Pringle is, Bill.” She took the proofs from him and leafed through this one, then stopped. “Oy! What’s happening here!”

“It was Ted,” said the girl. “He sticks his tongue out and before I know it I’m sticking mine out as well. Let’s get Pringle’s to blow that one up.” She giggled.

 “Oh no we won’t. You can have that one, you cheeky monkey,” her mother said, and handed her the proof. “Dad and I’ll choose one for the mantelpiece. Ted, you must get ready, you’re off in half an hour.”

“I’ll help him pack his kitbag,” said Sarah. “He’ll scrunch up his shirts otherwise. Boys are so messy.”

They rushed up the narrow stairway of the small house and their footsteps could be heard from the master bedroom, where Sarah had laid out her brother’s clothes ready for folding.

“I reckon this is the one we’ll get blown up,” said Bill, and looked up at his wife, who looked at him then let out a sob that she tried to stifle.

She tried to dry her eyes on her apron but couldn’t because it was tied at the waist so she untied it, sniffing and laughing at the same time. “Oh, I am silly,” she said.

“Try and hide it, my dear. It won’t make it easier for him, you know. And he’s left home before. Remember he went off to basic training, then the gunnery school on the Isle of Man, and now he’s just going off for more training.”

“Oh, I know. It’s just that I have a bad feeling about this,” she said. “As if he’s leaving home for the last time.”

“Well he probably isn’t,” said her husband, a little shortly. He was silent for a moment, then said: “Don’t fret. Sit down and let’s listen to the news, eh?”

He got up and twisted the bakelite knob on the wireless. The dial took on a soft, old-gold glow and the sound started, softly at first then growing louder as the set warmed up. The Home Service filled the room, an emollient voice reading the six o’clock news.

Upstairs, Ted sat on his parents’ bed and watched as his sister folded his shirts.

“I want to do something too,” she said. “I’m going to join the Women’s Land Army.”

“Not yet you’re not,” he said. “You’re only 17.”

“I’ll be 18 at Christmas,” she said.

“But you have to be 20, don’t you? Anyway, you’d be dead useless shovelling manure. Or catching rats. Imagine you catching rats. They’d take one look at you and you’d scream your silly head off.”

She gave his leg a pretend slap with the back of her hand. She went back to folding and smoothing the shirts. He watched her deft movements as she said: “Dad says you’re going for more training.”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, sort of. I’m posted to No. 12 OTU at Chipping Warden in the Midlands. It’s near Banbury I think. An OTU is an Operational Training Unit.”

“Does Operational mean what I think it does?”

“Yes. But it shan’t be much. Just minelaying off the coast and stuff I expect. You mustn’t worry.”

“Oh.” She thought for a moment. “Do you remember when I was 10 and Roy from No. 6 pulled my pigtails?”

“No, I don’t,” he replied. “Did he really? What a rotter.”

“Yes, and you boxed his ears.”

“Oh, I think I do remember. Did I box his ears? I thought I gave him a Chinese burn.”

She sat still, looking down at the shirt. A silence grew heavy.

“Look, we all have to do it,” he said. “Everyone’s leaving home. Dad did last time. Roy’s gone, come to that.” He paused. “Have you got that proof Mum gave you? Give it here.”

She did, and he knelt down where there was a creaky floorboard, just beside the bed so their mother always stepped on it in the night. He pushed the small square of paper down between the cracks.

“There,” he said. “When it’s all over and I’m home, we’ll pull that floorboard up and get that picture, and we’ll have a giggle about it and I do think I’ll go down to Pringle and get it blown up.”

“And if you don’t come back, I’ll leave it there,” she said. “And maybe in 70 or 80 years’ time, someone’ll find it and wonder who we were.”

“That’s it. But I’ll be back.”

“Hope so.” She looked at him.

“Ted,” his father called up the stairs. “It’s 6.30. You ready? Where you going from anyway, City Station or Thorpe?”

“Thorpe,” he said. “They bombed City Station.”

His sister finished folding shirts and he clattered down the stairs with it and took his greatcoat and gas-mask case from the coathooks.

“I can go with you,” said Sarah.

“Don’t,” he said. “Station’ll be bedlam. So many trains going now. ’Spect I’ll get a cuppa on the platform though, the WVS ladies have a canteen there when it’s busy.”

“I’ll come some of the way with you though.”

“Just to the corner, all right? We can say goodbye there.”

Her father was looking at her as she put her coat on. He leaned towards her. “Leave him at the end of the road, my dear. Let him be. They need to be alone with their own thoughts a bit when they go,” he whispered.

She nodded and waited while her brother gave his mother a peck on the cheek and shook hands with his father; then they went out into the street. It was nearly dark. The blackout was complete, but the moon was nearly full and a bright light caught the beginnings of a frost on the pavement. She walked with him to the end of the street, where it joined The Avenues. To the left the road ran downhill, in a straight line; then it climbed to a junction about a quarter of a mile away. There the road joined another and swung round to the right. They didn’t say anything, but he paused a moment and grasped her shoulder and squeezed it with his hand, and seemed to want to say something but didn’t; then he turned abruptly and trudged away. She watched him for several minutes, the moon making a stark figure of him, standing out against the glitter of the frosted pavement. Then he rounded the bend at the top of the hill. He paused for a moment and she thought he looked back, the moonlight catching his face; but he was too far away to see really, and then he was gone.

___________________________________________

More flash fiction

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps
A question of human geography

Hiraeth
A yearning…

Strange Places
A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey
Things might have been different

Displaced
Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging
Do you? Where?

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.