Mr Royce said the bonfire had galvanised the community. Cathy and I took this as a good thing. Now, he said, it was a case of turning that good will into action.
Mr Royce set about organising the farm labourers. They would demand better pay. The landowners round here had been holding them in check with the threat of shopping them for benefits fraud, but Mr Royce said if enough of them stuck together, with good evidence that the bosses were complicit in their activities, their threats would come to nothing. The landowners would try to hire work from elsewhere to fill the gaps. The potatoes needed sorting, the fruit needed picking, the summer months were here and harvest was approaching. The fields could not be left unworked.
They met in the mornings at the usual pick-up spots but instead of climbing into the vans, they handed their foreman a sheet of paper on which they had written their demands. Mr Royce had helped them with this. He had experience from the miners’ strikes, though this was a smaller group, and I heard Mr Royce admit quietly to Daddy one evening that it might be too small a group to make a difference and that the work they did was too easily replaced.
It was hoped that the withholding of rents would make more of a difference. More families could participate in this. People who lived in houses that the council had built and once owned but which Mr Price or his friends had since bought up. The rents were higher than most could afford and everyone in the neighbouring villages – old pit villages – had accrued debts with Price and the others. Debts that they feared could be called in at any time, in any number of ways.
Daddy went with Mr Royce to each house in turn. Many had been there with us for the bonfire and those that had not had heard of the plans through other avenues. Daddy and Mr Royce told each one that everyone was going to stop paying their rents, and instead the money they would usually give over to Mr Price or the other landlords would be collected into a central fund. This was to help people in times of need and Mr Royce said in private that it would be good for just in case. Just in case things did not go their way and in the end everyone had to pay up anyway. Again, he did not admit this to the group, just in discussion with Martha and Daddy, to which Cathy and I always listened in.
Daddy got drunk on cider one evening on the fat grass outside our house. He said to us or to himself or to the house or to the trees or to the birds in the branches that we were all fools. He said it was all just vanity, that it was Ewart’s vanity for thinking this sort of thing could still make a difference and that it was his vanity for thinking he could protect them all, while still keeping us safe, along with our house on the hill. These were old dreams, he said, and should have been left as just that.
The next morning, however, he got up early and made his usual rounds of the villages, to reassure people, to see if there had been any mischief, to make sure that these people knew this man was still on their side. He was gone for more than three hours but when he returned his mood was optimistic. ‘We might just be able to break bastards,’ he told us.
Mr Royce’s mood varied as well. Sometimes when he came up to visit us or we went down to him in the village he wore a glum demeanour, a deeply stifled terror. But usually he was hopeful about the operation and spoke at length about the positive responses he had had, and about how all the signs were, for the moment, positive.
News came that Gerald Castor had already raised the men’s wages. Mr Royce had gone along with the labourers to the pick-up point in the morning and argued the case with the foreman himself. Gerald Castor had come down from the farm to speak with them. ‘My arguments got better of him, dindt they?’ Mr Royce said. ‘He were unprepared and he got spooked when I started talking about law. That’s thing. You just have to seem official, seem like you know what you’re talking about – well I, as a matter of fact, I do know what I’m talking about, but unfortunately seeming like you do is often just as important – and, yes, then they don’t know what to do with themselves. That’s how it were. Castor were taken off-guard and said that if men come next day they’ll be paid what we agreed – what all landowners should be paying their workforce. These farmers and landlords have clubbed together, led by Price, but without him and each other they’re nothing. That’s what we must remember.’
We congratulated Mr Royce and had some of the men round to ours for a drink. It was a kind of celebration but it was also to make sure they connected this victory in their minds with our house, and the words that had been spoken here at the bonfire weeks before. It would be no use if they went back to work but forgot to remember the other people they were fighting with and the other people they were fighting against. Mr Price was the real enemy, Daddy always said, but perhaps that only really applied to us.
He did tell Cathy and me one evening that though he cared deeply about everyone else involved in this, he could not help but fixate exclusively on my and Cathy’s house. That’s how he sometimes referred to it, as Cathy’s and mine, like he did not truly inhabit it. It was like he forgot to say that it was ours, as a family, or like he forgot he could live in a home, like he forgot about his need to settle and live comfortably and be looked after by my sister and me.
He told us that was why he was really in on all of this. To protect us, to get our house for us, and to keep our lives within it safe forever. He said that this was very bad, and that we were not to let anyone know, but if it came down to it he would do anything to see us right. ‘The others be damned,’ he said once, very quietly.
The good news continued. A few days after the incident with Gerald Castor, Mr Royce came up to see us with news that another farmer had accepted their demands, Jeremy Higgins. And then a couple of days after that, there was another.