4

Kingsway Hall, London, 26 October 1936. With his pixie-like frame, hatchet face and long mane of dark hair dragged unwillingly across his large skull, the radical MP James Maxton was tuning the crowd to the required angry pitch. His long and bony arms clawed aggressively at the smoke-filled air before the grand backdrop of giant organ pipes, from which hung the huge scarlet banner of the ILP.

Eileen, whose idea it had been to come, took the cigarette from her mouth, leaned over and put her lips almost to his ear. ‘I’ve just figured out who this Maxton fellow reminds me of. You’ll never guess.’

‘A clue?’

‘From a children’s fable.’

‘Rumpelstiltskin.’

‘Uncanny, isn’t it?’

Maxton was reading out a speech which was to have been delivered by a Spanish revolutionary leader, who had at the last minute been turned back at the airport. Amplified through loudspeakers, his metallic voice screeched with the usual slogans – ‘fascist nightmare’, ‘imperialist dreams’, ‘crimes against working humanity’, ‘stand side by side’ – riveted together with facts about the recent massacres in Badajoz, the reporting of which had incensed Orwell and Eileen as it had every socialist in Britain: the reason she had suggested they come. The impression was of a disturbing clanking noise, grinding away like some industrial machine badly in need of oil. With a slightly altered message, and some of the words rearranged, he figured, he could have been back in Barnsley, listening to Mosley; and yet he didn’t care. The fascists, no matter what faux sympathies they professed for ‘the people’, had no interest in ending the miseries of the workers in Wigan; he now realised they simply had to be stopped.

As Maxton worked himself into a near delirium for the peroration, it occurred to him that although the man hadn’t written the speech, and indeed its author wasn’t even English, it would have been almost impossible to tell.

‘Workers of Britain! Workers of all political sections in Britain! Comrades – brothers! Our party, the Worker’s Party of Marxist Unity, has dedicated itself under this banner: “Unto the end – conquer or die!”’

This was met by wild cheers and the raising of fists, the most enthusiastic of which came from the ILP’s youth section.

‘Where did he say he was from, darling?’ he asked Eileen.

‘The POUM. Anarchists or some such, I think.’

‘Already some of our heroic comrades have died. If it is necessary that we should all die to gain the victory, then die we will! Workers, comrades, brothers – help us! Help us against fascism, help us against war, help us for the complete emancipation of the workers!’

From up in the gods of the grand theatre, they looked down through the thick blue smoke to see the crowd heaving, yelling slogans that could be heard with difficulty against the stamping of feet: ‘Fascist swine!… Revolution!… United front!’ The speech was complete. Wild, angry applause went on.

Maxton, who was the chairman of the ILP, gave way to the general secretary, the taller and better dressed Fenner Brockway, whose round spectacles glinted like mirrors in the footlights, obscuring his eyes. ‘Comrades, I have a resolution,’ Brockway announced, waving a sheet of paper, and the crowd bayed at him to read it. Brockway set it down on the lectern and adjusted his glasses to the end of his nose in a characteristic gesture. The audience quietened.

‘This meeting believes that the threefold duty of the British workers is: One – Action to support the Spanish workers in the struggle against fascism. Two – Action to prevent capitalist intervention to destroy the Spanish workers in favour of capitalist liberalism. And three – Action to resist any war of rival capitalist imperialisms.’ He was stopped by applause.

Orwell groaned. Something about it sounded vaguely contradictory, but it was difficult to say just what. Why couldn’t these people just speak normal English, the way the workers did?

‘Comrades, if carried, this pledges us to intensify our efforts to send shipments of food, medical supplies and other necessities to Spain. We have already sent money and an ambulance. Give of yourselves, comrades! Give!’

Young men wearing Spanish-style berets (he had noted this fashion taking hold in the last month) began moving through the audience carrying buckets, which they shook up and down.

‘What about fighting, Fenner?’ someone yelled out. ‘What about troops? Arms!’

‘Tanks!’ screeched another, to wilder acclamation.

Brockway hesitated, thinking no doubt of the police informers who were almost certainly in the hall, but, carried away, he soon continued. ‘Comrades, the National Administrative Council has voted to raise an armed labour battalion of socialist volunteers to fight on the front lines. Comrade Bob Edwards is developing the plan. We will begin advertising for willing fighters shortly.’

The room erupted, and all around the younger party members – too young to have seen the trenches – raised their fists even higher, smiling in happy anticipation of being spattered with somebody else’s blood.

He looked at them. A good old-fashioned fight, against someone truly worthy of hate, smashing their faces in with clubs, kicking them in the genitals, breaking teeth, blowing their children up with thermite – that’s what socialists really wanted, when it came down to it. In that, they were just the same as the fascists. He had thought his book about the workers’ lives in the north would attract the sort of literary attention he craved. But, overnight, Spain had changed everything, altering everyone’s priorities. Unemployment, hunger marches, poverty, slums and bedbugs – the very things that had constituted the political struggle until then – had dissolved as issues, leaving him with a half-written book about yesterday’s news. He had visions of it covered in dust, in piles out the front of bookshops, where no one really cared whether or not it was stolen. Other writers, firing off war dispatches from luxury hotels in Madrid, would get the front-page reviews and the runaway book sales, leaving him once again a failure.

He looked around at the audience members, seeing a young woman in blue overalls and a bright red headscarf yelling slogans in an educated voice. Who wanted to read about bedbugs anymore? No one.

‘I shall take it as carried, comrades,’ Brockway concluded.

With the exception of a scattering of cardigan-wearers – pacifists, he suspected – who determinedly remained seated, the audience stood, fists raised and eyes closed, as if in prayer. The organ sounded and a Scottish voice at the microphone – Maxton – began singing: ‘The workers’ flag is deepest red …’

Although he was unsure of the words, he found himself singing along, humming through the bits he didn’t know. Eileen joined in too – with an enthusiasm that suggested seriousness rather than the irony he had expected. The Spanish business, with its suspiciously neat choice between good and evil, its bayoneted children and raped nuns, had had that effect on seemingly everyone he knew. He doubted there was a thinking person in the whole of Britain who hadn’t taken sides. It was even funny, in a way, listening to himself taking part so fully, when six months earlier he had barely given socialism or even politics a thought. It occurred to him that, along with Eileen, he was probably the only person among the two-thousand-strong crowd who didn’t think about Marx more often than about beer or sex, and yet this act of joining in still seemed, somehow, the right thing to do. Fascism had to be stopped if socialism was to have a chance.

This, he now saw, was what he must write about. Any fool could see that there was only one issue that mattered, and only one place where a writer could really make his name: Spain.