COMMONWEALTH 1965
"A Day in the Life of John Tennyson"
Roseanna often had a look in the window of Tom Ninian’s bookshop as she left the cafe, waiting to cross the road and return to her desk in the administrative building of the Nottingham Regional Council. Over the two years she had worked for the council, the sequence had become something akin to a ritual: a sweep of the titles on display in Ninian’s window, then up to the edge of the pavement and – right, then left – two quick glances to check for oncoming trams or buses.
Roseanna was not, as a rule, a superstitious person, but this idiosyncratic routine gave character to her days, and the changing of the book covers was as much a marker of the passing seasons as the colour of the leaves on the trees in the park across the square. She had become so accustomed to her daily pattern of looking that it had slipped out of the realm of conscious action, and on some level she felt that, if she ever crossed the road without carrying out her checks – if she were even able at this point to override what must have been muscle memory – then she would surely step into the road right into the path of an oncoming vehicle!
Nonsense, of course, she reminded herself, realising all at once that her morbid imagination had distracted her from taking in the selection on offer in Ninian’s. Would this count against her, spiritually speaking? Roseanna couldn’t decide. She had never paused to consider whether it was simply the raw act of looking that, theoretically speaking, kept her from meeting her doom halfway across the road, or whether the arrangement, such as it was, required a more active engagement on her part. She decided that she would play it safe and cast her eye back over the window display. Call it insurance, she thought. It was like one of those games children play, where they can’t touch a crack in the pavement for fear of upsetting the spirits: entirely arbitrary and not entirely conscious, but, once noticed, a matter of the highest significance, such that any eccentricity could prove fatal. Next month would be Roseanna’s twenty-fifth birthday. She wondered how many other people her age still indulged these sorts of compulsions.
Old Market Square, Nottingham, c. 1970.
More cars in this picture than there would be in the Commonwealth, and the scene is dominated by the Neo-Baroque Council House, completed in 1929. Work began on the Council House in 1926, when the old
Nottingham Exchange was demolished, which means that ITTL the construction process is exactly contemporaneous with the revolutionary period. Whether this would influence the design, I'm not sure. My own view is that any alterations would be practical responses to the reality of building a monument civic building in the middle of a protracted general strike. Hiding behind the frankly absurd portico and under the belfry, which looks more in proportion from the street than it does in elevation, is a fairly reasonable neoclassical building, which with some restraint might be completed under the CPGB regime.
The books in Ninian’s window did not change very often, mostly every month or so. Only when he received a new blockbuster did he go out of his way to change things up, preferring usually to give a general impression of the sorts of things a passing pedestrian could expect to find in the shop – which was a lot. Tom Ninian himself must have been almost seventy: easily a hanger-on from the Victorian age, Roseanna thought, although she had never actually asked him. Truth was, she hardly ever went into the shop itself. It existed to her as a facade, and only occasionally did she see people inside browsing for books. (Must be the time of day, Roseanna imagined idly.)
Halfway along the top row of books in the window, Roseanna noticed a cover that had not been there the day before. This was not, in itself, unusual. But something about it kept hold of her attention, and for whatever reason she found herself unable to scan across the rest of the display as if this one book was immaterial.
Without thinking, she turned away from the pavement edge and took a half step towards the glass, almost pressing her face up against it to get a better look at the cover that had so captivated her attention. It was not altogether extraordinary: a white jacket with a black and white face, in close up, surrounded by concentric circles in bright colours – as if in the middle of a target, the left eye in the bull position, staring right back at the viewer – at Roseanna herself. Why could she not shake the idea that she knew that face?
It was impossible; no one she knew would have had any business on the cover of a book, much less a book now given pride of place in the window of Ninian’s shop. But the more she looked, the more sure she became that this was a face from her past: someone she had not seen for almost a decade.
She let her focus slip down towards the bottom of the cover, where the title was. It read
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JOHN TENNYSON
and then the author’s name:
JOHN BERGER
That was a name Roseanna recognised, from art programmes on the CBC, although the fact that Berger’s was a name she knew only made it odder in her mind that she should recognise the face as well. What would the two have in common? How could they possibly have met? And who was John Tennyson? That was not a name Roseanna knew – and it certainly wasn’t the name that went with the face on the cover.
A Day in the Life of John Tennyson. John Berger, 1965.
Points to anyone who can spot the fairly unsubtle source material, as well as the link between it and the Solzhenitsyn.
From the other end of the square, Roseanna could hear what she knew was the quarter-to-two tram to West Bridgford, travelling via the train station. Fifteen minutes until she had to be back at her desk. Time enough to give the Berger’s book a closer inspection.
Roseanna’s entrance to the bookshop was heralded by the ringing of a small bell above the door, belying the gingerness with which she had decided was necessary for her task. Tom Ninian, eating a sandwich behind the counter, looked up immediately. He finished his mouthful and smiled. He greeted Roseanna with a Good afternoon, and asked how he could help her.
That book in the window, she said, the new one: A Day in the Life of John Tennyson. Can I have a look at a copy?
Oh yes, said Ninian. I thought that one would be popular. Raised a bit of a fuss it has, with the Domestic Bureau as I understand it. If you believe some of the magazines, they tried to stop it from being published – until Lewis intervened, that is.
This Roseanna had not been expecting. She didn’t quite know what to do with the information. Evidently, her face must have reflected this, as, wordlessly, Ninian reached under the counter and retrieved a book, recognisable at once from its white cover. He handed it to Roseanna, who held it out in front of her in both hands, inspecting the portrait on its front as if casting an eye over an ancient artefact newly uncovered.
Now that she had it up close, Roseanna was less certain that the face confronting her was one that she knew. Once, she had read something in a magazine about how the subconscious was unable to make up new faces, so everyone in a dream had to be someone you had seen at some point in your past. Maybe the familiarity of her looking game had tripped a switch somewhere in her subconscious, and her whole expedition into the bookshop had been nothing but the extension of a momentary dream?
Ninian had gone back to his sandwich, content not to hover over Roseanna as she turned the book over to read the synopsis.
John Tennyson was eighteen years old when he was arrested by the secret police on charges of sedition, accused of having taken part in a protest against the government’s nuclear weapons programme. Sentenced to four years imprisonment at an institution for young offenders, John is confronted head-on by the cruelty and the brutality of the Mosley regime – exposed now in print as never before!
Drawing upon the testimonies of real victims of the Mosleyite terror, John Berger’s unforgettable depiction of the life of a political prisoner presents a devastating account of the true cost of Mosleyism.
Roseanna turned over the book again and scrutinised the cover image. Maybe her mind had not been playing tricks? She handed the volume over to Tom Ninian and asked him to run it up on the cash register. As he took Roseanna’s money, he made a remark about getting ahead of the crowds. Roseanna thanked him and exited the shop, her usual routine by now entirely shot to pieces. Outside on the pavement, she looked twice in each direction before crossing the road.
A Nottingham trolleybus, c. 1970.
Like other cities in Britain that had tram services before the Second World War, Nottingham moved to a trolleybus system in the post-war years. This is in essence a bus service that draws its power from electric cables over the roads, as with a tram. As far as I can tell (and I wonder if
@El Pip may be able to shed more light on the situation) there is no major difference between the two systems other than capacity – trams able to take more people due to their multiple carriages. Conventional wisdom seems to suggest that trams and trolleybuses can co-operate within one mixed system, so I see no reason why that can't be the case in the Commonwealth – although I reserve the right to change my mind if I later find out that this would be a redundant, logistical-nightmare-inducing decision to take.
* * *
On the tram that evening, Roseanna took an empty set of seats halfway down the carriage. She was surprised at how empty it was for home time. Some days it was a choice between standing room only or waiting seven minutes for the next car – hardly a difficult decision, but a necessary one nevertheless. Roseanna wondered whether she had got her timings wrong and slipped onto a later tram instead. Mr. Pickering had kept her back for a minute or two at the end of the day to make a point about formatting on some minutes she had typed up at the last committee meeting. Had that been enough to knock her off kilter?
It didn’t matter. Roseanna was thankful that she would be able to start her new book free from the ambient disturbances of the end of the day crowd: rustling newspapers and clearing throats, and low conversations between older men about football or their wives. She reached into the bag Ninian had given her earlier that afternoon and retrieved the white-covered volume. The portrait on the cover was looking familiar again. Had it just been the atmosphere of the bookshop that had caused her certainty to drop – a heightened sense of occasion bringing her to doubt herself? In her hands now, under the dim electric glow of the car’s interior lighting, the resemblance was so profound as to make her feel crazy for ever having questioned it. It was definitely Ted, encircled by the primary-coloured cockade. Older, certainly, and showing it – but it had been seven years since she had last seen him, and goodness knows he’d been through it in the meantime. But there he was, looking right at her – and she, burning a hole through the page staring right back at him. *
…
* According to documents currently held in the archives of the Bureau of Domestic Affairs, due to be made available for viewing by the public in January 2008, Edward John Targett (b. March 8 1940) was one of thirty-eight protestors arrested by agents of the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence following an anti-nuclear march in Nottingham on December 29 1957. The BDI made the arrests on charges of sedition, as well as other various charges of conspiracy and public order offences. The thirty-eight protestors, aged between 16 and 28, were collectively tried in camera on January 6 1958. Each was convicted and sentenced to a term of between four and eight years imprisonment.
Ted Targett served just under five years of a six-year sentence in an institution for young offenders. He was released under a general amnesty of political prisoners in September 1962, almost a full year after the accession of Aneurin Bevan to the premiership.
…
(Roseanna, meanwhile, had known Ted in secondary school. They had become very good friends after being sat next to one another in Geography in lower sixth. During the first Christmas vacation after the Windscale fire, Ted had invited Roseanna to join him and some other friends on a march against the government’s nuclear weapons programme. She had agreed, but on the day of the march she woke up with a bad cold and was confined to her bed.
Ted and his friends went ahead without her. The last time Roseanna ever saw him, it had been from her bedroom window as he stood at her front door coming to pick her up. As the tram got within two stops of home, she remembered how she’d heard her mum’s voice coming up through the hallway as she explained that Roseanna has woken up ill. She won’t be able to join you at the library today – that’s where they’d said they were going – but with any luck she’ll be back on her feet tomorrow.
You tell her I say get well soon, won’t you Mrs Kirby? That was the last thing Roseanna would ever hear him say. After her mum had shut the door, Roseanna knocked on her window, catching Ted as he began his walk towards the tram stop. He looked up to see her standing, waving in her nightgown. He laughed and waved back, then the tram came and took him off into the centre of town.
A march of protestors from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, c. 1958.
As you can see, a crack squad of dissidents more intent upon destroying the state one would be incredibly hard pressed to uncover.
When the New Year came and Roseanna went back to school, it had been a week since she had heard anything from Ted. He had not come round the day after the march to ask if she wanted to study together. A couple of days later, all trace of her cold having disappeared, Roseanna had called in at Ted’s to find out if he was okay. His mum met her on the doorstep. Ted’s not in, she said. No, she wasn’t sure where he’d gone. She didn’t know when he’d be back.
After a week or so, Roseanna had a new seating partner in Geography. Ted had moved to do his exams at another school, the teacher said, nonsensically, when pressed, her eyes betraying the lack of substance of her lie.
That summer, Roseanna sat her exams. Her marks were good enough to enrol at secretarial college, and after getting her diploma she took a job as a typist, first at the factory where her dad worked making aircraft engines, and then after a couple of years in the Department of Public Health at the Regional Council. That was in 1962.
Ted, throughout all of this, had faded towards absence. In time, Roseanna too had joined the silent, guilty class of people whose lives continued free from the burden of knowledge – suspected but never interrogated – of just what did happen to those who, one day, without warning, moved to sit their exams elsewhere.)
…
Overhead, a bell rang to signal Roseanna’s stop. Outside the light had disappeared. Ted’s picture on the book cover was visible only in the fuzzy orange glow of the carriage light, the eyes jumping out from the stern face framed within its circle. Roseanna took the book and put it neatly back in the bag Tom Ninian had given her, slinging it over her shoulder as she stood up and made her way to the front of the carriage.
Minutes later, on the walk back to her flat, her shopping weighing unusually heavy as she carried it home, it took all of Roseanna’s effort not to cry.