“Armed robbery,” I told her.
Expropriation was logistically correct, since we needed a better way of financing ourselves than car theft. It was politically correct because it was an act of dispossession. It was tactically correct because it was proletarian, the method of people who owned nothing, who had no stake in the system. But our first attempt had gone badly wrong. For once, I hadn’t been directly involved. It was Sean’s project. Anna was out of the country meeting some of her Paris contacts and he’d put it together with Leo, whose idea of planning was as vague as his own. Accompanied by Ferdy and Quinn, two of Leo’s old friends from the Firm, they’d gone into a bank in Reading and held it up. Sean had fired a shot into the ceiling, cowboy-style. According to Leo, he’d even insisted on wearing a Stetson over his stocking mask. They’d gotten away with a fair amount of money, but somehow Ferdy was left behind, tackled by a passerby as they ran to the car. Though Sean had threatened to
shoot him, the man wouldn’t let go and Sean hadn’t been prepared to pull the trigger.
I told a version of this story to Pat. Though there was no chance of acquittal, Ferdy wanted to plead not guilty. We needed lawyers who could run a political trial, who could use the court to propagate our message; in that way we thought we could salvage something from a disastrous situation. Pat heard me out, jiggling up and down on the rug as she tried to soothe her baby. She told me she didn’t want any part of it. She didn’t believe there was anything to be gained from that kind of politics. She used the same words I’d heard from so many of our supposed allies. Adventurist, counterproductive. I argued with her for a while and eventually she agreed to write down some names, people she knew who might take the case. I gave her a phone number, told her she should ring if she changed her mind. I knew she wouldn’t. Why did she help at all? Out of friendship? To get rid of me? I suppose one could find some ambiguity in it, space enough for Miles to live and thrive. I next saw her when she popped up on TV some time in the early nineties and I discovered that she’d become an MP. The idea of a political trial soon faded away and Ferdy, who refused to name his accomplices, was sentenced to eight years in prison, without the question of his political motivation even being raised.
When I got off the train at Chichester I went straight to God’s and drank myself into a stupor, sitting in front of the gas fire with a bottle of supermarket Scotch. He must have come downstairs and found me, because when I woke up the next morning, feeling shaky and bleak, I found a blanket thrown over me and a glass of water and a foil strip of painkillers waiting on the desk. God wasn’t given to making conversation, least of all in the morning. As I tried to gather myself to leave, he shuffled around the shop and pretended to look for something in the theology section, working up courage to speak.
“I don’t like to pry, Mike,” he said gruffly, after several minutes of inner struggle, “but is everything all right at home?”
“Don’t worry, God. I’ll be — ne.”
He looked immensely relieved that I wasn’t going to force any intimacies on him. I was touched. I knew what it had cost him even to broach the subject. A great respecter of the private pain of others, Godfrey.
* * *
I must have fallen asleep, because when I open my eyes the sun is low and my skin feels hot and tight around my face. I sit up, watched suspiciously by a family of picnickers who’ve set themselves up elaborately on the riverbank, a small brightly colored complex of windbreaks and umbrellas and barbecue equipment. My head is swimming. I’m very dehydrated. I dress and pick my way back across the rocks and up the path to the car, where I change my shirt and gulp down half a bottle of warm water. Then I sit on a bench, listening to the buzzing of the flies round the overflowing litter-bins. The air is fragrant, heavy as lead.
I drive through the evening, passing Bordeaux just as the light fails. The radio chatters and spits out pop songs and the road climbs through foothills into the darkness. Little by little, my skin exhales heat and the bends sharpen into hairpins, dented metal barriers gleaming suddenly in the headlights. I’m close now. Only another hour to Sainte-Anne. I don’t feel ready. I want to swing the car round, to defer the moment when I’ll find myself face to face with Anna.
After the Post Office Tower, the conflict escalated. We began to hear rumors of other actions, ones we hadn’t carried out. Someone blew up a railway line in Ayrshire, near the Cairnryan ferry to Northern Ireland. They phoned in a warning to British Rail, told them not to allow their trains to be used as troop transports. There were attacks on electrical installations, airline offices, and embassies. Some of our friends were arrested, notably Alex Hill from the Sylvan Close occupation, who apparently had a copy of one of our communiqués in his flat. Many more had their homes raided and their possessions smashed or taken away for examination. I remember Sean remarking sarcastically that if having your record
collection trashed was sufficient to radicalize someone, a revolutionary situation would exist in Britain within weeks.
We responded with two further actions. Leo and Claire planted a bomb in a gambling club patronized by senior American officers, which demolished the entire rear elevation of the building, a mansion house in St. James’s. Because of Agent Orange leaching into the earth of Cambodia, because of white phosphorus burning through the skin of small children. Britain is not a safe haven for the strategists of extermination. Nowhere in the world will they be protected from the guerrilla, acting in support of the people of Indochina. We phoned in a warning and the place was cleared, though we heard the next day that two people had been hurt by flying glass. They were our first casualties, but I don’t remember any particular discussion about them. I think we blamed it on the police. A second bomb, placed outside an air force base, failed to detonate. It was suggested in the underground press that the attacks were the work of neo-Fascists, trying to discredit the Left. We read a dozen theoretical demonstrations of the objectively counterrevolutionary nature of our actions, a dozen more of the historical inevitability of our failure, but it seemed to us that history was on our side. Every week there were more strikes. Dockers, car workers. Ninety Soviet diplomats had been expelled from Britain, accused of spying. An anti-Communist panic was sweeping the country, which seemed to be completely polarized between those who were more terrified of Moscow and those who were more terrified by the binary madness of the Cold War. It was a question of gut feeling: you chose one kind of fear or the other. Not being afraid wasn’t an option.
A message to all those comrades who feel that revolutionary action is not appropriate in the U.K. because this is a place where the forces of reaction are strong. If you believe, as we do, that Imperialism is a paper tiger, then nowhere can be excluded as the site of struggle. You say we are
squandering revolutionary energy, that adventurism is a characteristic deviation in times of weakness. We say agitation and propaganda are insufficient. If that’s the sum of your ambitions, you should be ashamed.