‘Piffle,’ said Hope. ‘Leosach whinge.’
‘My father’s not a Leosach,’ said Hugh, in a slow, deliberate way.
‘No, but the iron got into his soul. And the rain rusted it!’
Hugh laughed. ‘Spoken like a Leosach yourself,’ he said. ‘All right. But it wasn’t from Lewis he got that about the marching. It was from London, when he was young and marched against the war.’
‘The war?’ Hope asked. ‘It hadn’t even started then.’
‘The war before this one,’ Hugh explained.
‘Oh!’ said Hope. ‘Ancient history. Anyway, it’s not that kind of march. It’s May Day. It’s a celebration.’
‘Hands across the sea,’ said Hugh, again with the Lewis face. He scratched the balding patch towards the back of his head. ‘Oh well. Take care.’
‘Of course I’ll take care.’
But he’d left her worried. Her first morning sickness, the following day, hadn’t helped.
Now, however, out on the street and into the swing of it, Hope felt quite different. The brisk walk soon warmed her. The flurries of snow ceased. The brass band up at the front was blaring out something martial but bouncy, and a few dozen rows behind her a Jamaican steel band on a truck was playing a different tune and different music altogether, whose rhythm snaked around and intertwined with that of the band.
The local contingent swung around the corner into Stroud Green Road, past helpful police in no riot gear whatsoever, and slotted into a gap in the main march coming down over Crouch Hill. Now they were part of a column of thousands. Hope glanced over her shoulder, and along to the far front of the march, entranced.
‘Wow!’ she said, impressed despite her doubts. ‘There’s so many of us.’
‘That’s nothing,’ said Fingal. ‘Try your glasses.’
Hope opened her shoulder bag awkwardly, one-handed, as the banner pole tilted and recovered, and put the glasses on. Something local and eager pulsed in a corner of the sky. She blinked it up. The shopfronts and shoppers and trees of Stroud Green Road were rendered as a faint, pencil-sketch overlay, through which to her right she could see nothing but crowds all the way to the horizon, with red banners and balloons and long dragon puppets bobbing above their heads: Beijing, earlier in the day. Elsewhere, more or less in front of her, a similarly huge demonstration filled Tehran’s Revolution Square. From Mumbai and Calcutta came more recent images, of streets a mass of red flags, a sea whose every shore was pebbled with the black helmets of the police, and fringed with long black sticks beating down relentlessly and rhythmically on every head they could reach. Way off to the left, and almost in real time, a smaller march in Moscow was holding out against the traditional baton charges and tear-gas rounds, red and grey smoke intermingling merrily above the skewed flags and hurled placards. By late afternoon the view would no doubt include the gigantic May Day parades in Washington, Chicago, NYC and LA, but for now the Americans were mostly still abed.
It got dizzying, and Hope took the glasses off and put them away. Despite herself, despite her lack of interest in politics (‘but politics is interested in you’, some earnest lad at university had once told her, a remark she now recalled with a belated shiver, instead of the dismissive laugh she’d given it at the time) and in what she’d called, to Maya, all that, meaning all that justice and equality and progress stuff that the Prime Minister banged on about – despite all that, Hope found herself uplifted and enthused by the feeling, no, the perception of being part of something huge, worldwide, hands across not just the sea but across the stormy fronts of the Warm War. Her eyes, too, could sting to the tear gas in Russia; her shoulders could flinch and her feet stumble under the lathi slashes in India; and likewise, her feet could skip and dance along with all those enjoying the day in the parts of the world where they were free to celebrate it in peace.
America, Britain, Germany, Iran, China… she could see, she could literally see why they called the New Society countries the Free World.
On they went, down past the station and around the corner into Seven Sisters Road, and then into the broad open green space of Finsbury Park. Past the small enclosed patch of sand and swings and shelters where the One O’Clock Club had given her such a respite and Nick such fun when he was too young for nursery. Out on to a wide, sloping green, already dotted with stalls and fronted by a stage and sound system. As she and Fingal stopped, two women from the branch who’d walked behind them offered to take the poles.
‘Thanks,’ said Hope, letting her shoulders slump and arms hang loose. Her biceps ached. She looked at Fingal.
‘Well done,’ he said. He might have winked. ‘Be seeing you.’
He wandered away, but after a few steps into the crowd struck off in a purposeful stride. Hope looked around. The march, which had filled a main thoroughfare more or less from side to side and from end to end, now looked a small huddle in the wide-open space. Around its edges stood a scatter of stalls, some selling political literature and merch, others snacks and soft drinks. Faint smells of candy floss and veggie burgers drifted and mingled. Stray balloons floated up through the steady drift of apple and cherry petals and soared and sped through the silver sky like UFOs. The park was busy with its predictable public-holiday crowds, couples and kids and families and picnic parties braving the stiff breeze, and few of them paid any attention to the compact mass of the march. The latest hit of some local trash band that had made it big and daringly called itself Urban Heat Island thudded from the sound system. Police and park attendants – it was hard to tell which was which – patrolled the edges of the gathering and now and then, in an apparently random but (Hope did not doubt) algorithmically choreographed pattern, elbowed their way through it, sniffers and other sensors prominently deployed.
Hope headed for the front of the crowd, wending her way between clusters of people around various banners, avoiding eye contact with anyone who offered her leaflet, journal or chip. She arrived just a few rows away from the front of the low stage as the music stopped. The band filed off to loud applause and the dignitaries filed on, to lesser applause. The Mayor and her wife, the chair of Islington Council, a couple of other councillors, a trade union speaker, Deirdre, and Jack Crow, MP. Crow was a wiry man in his thirties who wore a leather peaked cap, a denim jacket, corduroy trousers, black yellow-laced Docs and a pointed ginger beard. He was greeted with louder applause than the band. He waved his thanks and sat down on one of the folding stools on the platform. Hope had a bit of grudge with Jack Crow. He hadn’t answered her letter. She ignored him and smiled up at Deirdre, who nodded and smiled back.
The Mayor took the mike, thanked everyone, and hastened to assure them that the speeches would be short. By her standards they probably were, but not by Hope’s; after twenty minutes she had resorted to putting her glasses on and catching up with her mail. Nick and Hugh had sent her pictures from Hampstead Heath, where they were flying a kite that Hugh had somehow magicked up from scrap plastic and an old fishing line. Hope found herself shame-facedly jealous and idly curious as to when Hugh had ever been fishing… he couldn’t have been more than, what, fifteen, when the sport was banned?
Deirdre’s voice cut across Hope’s reverie. She let her attention snap back, and put the glasses away.
‘Now, we’ve all heard what Louella, our sister here from Unite, has been saying,’ Deirdre announced, with a sisterly backward wave to the previous speaker, ‘and I find it hard really to add anything to what she’s so eloquently told us, so I just want to reiterate and emphasise how important this Safe Work for Women campaign is for all of us. More and more women are finding it difficult to work outside the home because of health hazards in the workplace. So we need to ensure that workplaces are safe for women – and that means safe for men, too, as well as safe for children. And if they’re safe for children, we could even have workplace crèches! And why not? Our mother’s generation had crèches –in a borough like ours, at least. We should build on that and take it forward again.