The Ned Wood Archive

Intelligence, A Swiss Army Knife, and Charm

The winter was setting in.  It was February.  Loads of games were getting postponed in the league.  Which was a good job cos we’d lost our last two.  Forest were fifth, even though we hadn’t played for years.  We’d been knocked out of the Cup by Southampton.  In a replay.  Denny had been crowing about a bet he put on the first game that it was going to be three nil.  Somehow the number three seemed right to me, not that I’m psychic or anything, just that I thought – yeah, it could easily be three nil.  I mean, we’d beaten Bristol Rovers six nil in the 2^nd replay.  We’d beaten Fulham three nil the week before.  So I went for a bet too.  I got 60 to 1 which I thought was an amazing victory because Denny, who bet on the horses all the time and was a pro only got 50-1. The Forest Southampton game ended three all.  We went down to the replay, Denny, me, and a few of his mates.  Forest were never in it.  We lost 2-1, but it could have been more.  Oh well, we’re still in with a shout of promotion.

Like I say, it was getting cold.  At least as cold as it ever got down in Southampton.  It never managed to snow in the three years I was there, but it was still chilly enough in Mary’s front room.  She’d cut up a sheet of see-through plastic she’d got from somewhere – maybe it had been used to wrap something.  Then she taped the cut-up bits over each of the windows.  You couldn’t see out too clearly, but it cut out a lot of the draft.  I offered to give her a hand opening up the fireplace, but she’d already had a look and decided not to as it was bricked in pretty solidly.  Anyway, most times I was round there, we sat in the kitchen, where the gas stove made it seem warm like at home.

How I loved those evening classes.  She’d set me down at the table and stand by the cooker.  A small gas cooker with two rings, but two were enough.  One would be boiling water for some spaghetti she’d bought, the other would be frying some meatballs for the sauce.  In the far corner, there was a little cupboard in which she kept her magic ingredients.  They must have been spices or herbs or whatever – I dunno – I never was too hot with cooking.  Whatever they were, she always managed to make the meal amazingly tasty.  And different.  She’d stand there next to the stove, lecturing, gesturing with this wooden spoon as she talked.  Sometimes she’d be interrupted.  Sometimes just to close the tap more firmly to stop it dripping.  Sometimes to chat to one of her housemates who happened to pass through.  She’d invite them to stay for the meal and occasionally they would.  Then she’d pick up her argument again.  And we’d both sit round the table, me and Mary’s friend, both of us listening to her wisdom.

She told us the difference between Socialism, Marxism, and Communism.  Let’s see if I can remember.  Socialism means equalising the income of everyone, Communism is the next step, being controlling not just income, but distribution so that everyone gets just what they need.  Marxism is the theory that the only way to get Communism is for the Working Class to take it by force.  Mary was, probably still is, a Socialist.  She told us how every so often the Labour party stumbled onto Socialism, but more typically lurched into what she called Trade Union Capitalism.  Meaning that the Union leaders didn’t want equality, they wanted the biggest share for themselves, or at least for their supporters, so that they’d stay in power as head of the union.  Hence you got all of these strikes for so many percent more that the other lot got.  At the time that’s what I thought politics was all about – a tug of war between the haves and the have nots. 

She didn’t have much time for folk she called revolutionaries, by which I think she meant the Marxists. Or the Socialist Workers, which is what the Marxists called themselves.  She said that the working class knew better than the middle class what needed to be done and she could never get by without digging at my class.  But she said that Marxism was too divisive.  And she also said that if you take something by force, what you end up with is not what you set out to take.  Which is why she hated Stalin.  Up till then I’d thought that all lefties really wanted to go and live in Russia.  Apparently not.  Isn’t it amazing that you can go through life not really understanding the choices you have to make?    

She told us about the Fabians, folk who believed that to change the world you’ve got to change it gradually.  She told us about the Labour governments of the past.  The early ones that didn’t really know what they were doing.  The pre-wars years when they had to choose between pacifism and anti-fascism.  Not that many of them chose, apparently most of them spent the thirties agreeing with the Tories.

She told us about the war in Spain.  I still find it incredible and embarrassing that at the time I didn’t know there’d been a war in Spain.  The first I’d heard of it was a few weeks earlier when I bumped into Mary’s old pal Tim and he invited me back to his room at Glen.  He had just scored this album by a geezer called Al Stewart and wanted to play it for me.  There was this track about a woman who has a baby then marries another guy.  He kept playing it, saying he heard new twists to the story every time he heard it.  It was OK.  I ended up buying that album and a better one with stuff about Nostradamus on it.   Anyway, there was this other song that he played, I can’t remember which album it was on, with a line that went “Have you heard the news from Spain”.  And I’m thinking what news from Spain?  Tim said it was about the civil war.  It isn’t about the civil war.  Tim doesn’t really know much about Al Stewart, but he knows more than me about the Spanish Civil War.  It’s unbelievable.  I did history for six years at school.  I knew stuff like … Well, what did I know?  Most of what we’d learnt was about Napoleon.  I knew about Nelson and Wellington and the like.  I’d forgotten lots of rubbish about monarchies.  At least about our monarchy.  But I didn’t know there was a Civil War in Spain twenty years before I was born.  I didn’t even know Spain was a dictatorship when we went there for our holidays.  I don’t know enough.

Apparently, lots of folk from this country went to fight against the fascists.  Mary’s Mam’s sister went to be a nurse.  She was quite a bit older than her Mam, Mary said.  Could you do that? I wondered.  Go and fight in a war if you believed in it.  Remember this was 1977, before the wars, when those of us at University were protected from all of that.  We’d seen Vietnam on TV when we were younger and knew that war was bad and nobody liked it.  I think most of us had decided that we wouldn’t do it, ever.  But Mary was saying that sometimes you have no choice.  She said she’d go.  Of course, she’d be a nurse or something easy.  Us blokes would be the ones doing the killing.  Somebody told me one day that I was officer material, meaning that I was from the right background, I think.  I dunno.

And Mary would tell us her creed.  How the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of exploitation.  Exploitation of the earth, its minerals, its flora, its fauna, and its people.  That this exploitation, which was once the cause of such misery in this country, was running rampant throughout the rest of the world.  Driven by greed, the earth was being raped and scarred, its resources reduced to waste piles, its plants burnt, its animals butchered, and its people starved, poisoned, and forced to live in unbearable poverty. 

The engines of this destruction are the large multi-national corporations.  Big industry building factories in the Third World, polluting the countryside without a care for the locals.  Western companies draining the under-developed countries of its oil and leaving nothing but oil slicks.  The banks forcing debts on developing countries and making them give up their local agriculture for vast monocultivation vulnerable to the whims of the western market, and forcing them further and further into debt and poverty.

And the only way to stop this senseless waste of all of nature, and by nature including the land, the animals, the plants and man, is to take the means of exploitation, take the means of production, out of the hands of the few, the greedy, the avaricious, the grasping, and place them in the hands of all of us.

And this doesn’t mean simply nationalise industry and let the state, grey and distant, run everything, but to enfranchise every single person by devolving the decision-making to the lowest possible level.  And while this would, in some instances, mean taking decisions at a national or global level, like sharing out the earth’s treasures, some decisions would be best taken at a regional or local level.  Like where to build hospitals and schools and how you route your buses to get the kids to school.

And this local democracy would allow us to open up more opportunities to everyone.  You can go to college if you want.  Or stay home if you want.  You don’t need Daddy to put his hand in his pocket.  There’d be no privilege, just equal opportunity for all. 

And once we’ve given people a little more control of their own lives and more control of their environment; and once they see that their efforts are affecting themselves directly rather than some distant greedhead capitalist, then maybe, just maybe, they’d even enjoy what they were doing.

And because the greed feeds upon itself to create more greed,  because wealth corrupts, and absolute wealth corrupts absolutely, to try to reset the balance of the past few hundred years during which time most of the planet has lived in poverty while the few have lived in luxury, we’re going to tax the rich.  Just a little.

Until that day comes, Mary would wage a ceaseless war against poverty, tyranny, and social injustice.

And I’d sit there listening to these words, eating my beautiful dinner, learning, enjoying the warmth of her kitchen, wondering whether to join her.