The Volunteers E-Book

Raymond Williams

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A worker is killed in the striking coalfields of south Wales. Some months later a government minister suspected of being connected with the death is shot. Lewis Redfern, once a radical, now a political analyst and journalist, pursues the killer, a lonely hunt that leads him through a maze of government leaks and international politics to a secret organization: a source of insurrection far more powerful than anyone could have suspected. A compelling thriller, The Volunteers is also an engrossing reminder of the conflict between moral choice and political loyalty for through his obsessive pursuit of justice, Redfern finally encounters the truth about himself.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title PageFOREWORDPART ONE12345678PART TWO1234567891011PART THREE1234567891011About the AuthorCopyright

FOREWORD

The coalmining strikes of 1972 and 1974 helped to bludgeon British politics into a crisis as intense as any it had experienced since Suez in 1956. In 1978, when Raymond Williams’s The Volunteers was published, the success of the National Union of Mineworkers’ strike actions caused swathes of trade union leaders to conclude that if the miners could take on and defeat one of the world’s biggest industrial employers, then so could other workforces.

The Labour Party found itself besieged by mad, ultra-left factions and activists who assumed that they could ride to power on a wave of industrial unrest, a surge of millennial syndicalism that would sweep away tiresome bourgeois politics. The Tories, initially bewildered at the damage wreaked on the Heath government by the miners’ actions, quickly pulled themselves together and started planning how best to defeat militant trade unionism in its strongholds.

By 1978, when The Volunteers was published, Jim Callaghan’s Labour government enjoyed little respite from the debilitating effects of financial crises, coupled with impossible public and private sector wage demands. The so-called Winter of Discontent heightened the atmosphere of crisis, and it became clear that public opinion was swinging behind the Tories in their determination to curb trade union power. Just months later, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister.

The Volunteers was published a decade after the events of 1968 which had nurtured a generation of unconventional political activists, often from middle-class backgrounds, among student bodies in France, Germany, America and Britain. Ten years on, many of these activists still yearned for fundamental change, though never agreeing on change to what, exactly. Each of their factions tended to loathe each other. They expressed their feelings by hurling allegations that their rivals were Stalinist or Trotskyite or Maoist or any one of a score of other deadly isms.

For the Labour Party, the deadliest of these was entryism. Incrementally, political activists would capture positions of influence within Labour and trade union branches. Their strategy was to replace social democracy and the ‘mixed economy’ with revolutionary politics and ‘public ownership of the means of production’, though they argued endlessly with each other about whether or not ‘public ownership’ constituted socialism or state capitalism.

Living and working in Cambridge as one of that university’s most distinguished and accessible academics, Raymond Williams was well aware of entryism as one more manifestation of the internecine warfare and sectarianism that the British Left wallowed in. The Volunteers sees him exploring the prospect of entryism taken to another level: one that entailed a secret infiltration of revolutionaries to positions of power in the civil service and into the political establishment itself.

He builds the rationale for this tactic slowly and carefully. The novel opens with what appears to have been an attempted assassination of a government minister at St Fagans Folk Museum, near Cardiff, perhaps as revenge for the killing by soldiers of a striking worker at Pontyrhiw, a South Wales coal depot that resembles Saltley Gate, the scene of a celebrated NUM success in the 1972 miners’ strike.

As Williams’s cynical, hard-bitten journalist and narrator, Lewis Redfern, investigates the links between the events at Pontyrhiw and St Fagans, he begins to wonder if the attempted assassination was little more than an extravagant ploy by some unseen revolutionary group to remind militant leftists everywhere that ‘adventurism’, in any form, has led only rarely to political aspirations being realised. It is as if, in the critical years of the late 1970s, Williams is translating into fiction Lenin’s warnings of the temptations, weaknesses and dangers of ‘infantile leftism’, whether it took the form of isolated violence or industrial syndicalism. Williams reminds us that, although the technology of mass communications (and its place in a rapidly changing society) had advanced immeasurably since the Russian Revolution, the Left was still obsessed with fighting the same internecine tactical and theoretical squabbles it had fought with little respite since 1917.

Williams was right, of course. Within six years of Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister, the trade union movement had been reduced to a whining shadow of its former bellicose self. The most feared of the unions, the NUM, had been neutered by a combination of Thatcher’s vengeful tenacity and skill and Arthur Scargill’s megalomania and incompetence.

Williams’s perspicacity was obvious to those who knew him in the 1970s. Among the melee of competing slogans, analyses and apocalyptic predictions, his was a quieter, calmer voice, warning us that it was time to wake up to the implications of the enormous changes in the world of communications. In the 1970s he was one of a tiny vanguard of observers who glimpsed with concern, not simply the spectre of a future in which television, radio and newspapers would be dominated by a handful of trans-national companies and media moguls, but also a future in which our culture, and cultures across the world, might be reshaped fundamentally by radical developments in communications technologies.

In the first pages of The Volunteers Williams describes how his fictitious ‘Insatel Global News Corporation’ is prepared to explore the commercial possibilities that might arise from any sector of human activity, from sport to the political underground to financial markets:

‘Incidents can occur anywhere,’ says Lewis Redfern, describing the news industry, ‘but incidents are not news. News depends on a system and the system depends on resources. Insatel gets its resources from advertising, from the big para-national companies, who push the oil and the fibres and the metals… In News Division the political underground runs second only to sport. International terrorist movements, bombs, hijackings, kidnaps: there is no better news in the business.’

Redfern is a ‘consultant analyst’, a journalist whose role in Insatel is to use his knowledge of subversive political groups to point his colleagues towards the juiciest, most lucrative stories. Normally, Redfern would work to identify the best initial routes before withdrawing to tackle the next story. This time, however, events conspire to begin chipping away at the hard shell he has constructed around himself for his own self-protection. He finds himself unable to make his usual exit as he delves deeper into the possible linkages between the Pontyrhiw killing and the St Fagan’s shooting.

Williams doesn’t use Redfern to express an opinion, either way, about the tactics of the Volunteers. Nor does he attempt to clarify the ambiguity of Redfem’s assessment of the group’s strategic aims. It’s as if Williams is reminding us that all political actions and gestures are generated and accompanied, always, by ambiguous motives and by unintended consequences, and that only rarely, if ever, is it possible for any of us to be absolutely certain about outcomes. Williams knew, as few others did in the 1970s, that the advances in communication technologies and the media’s insatiable and growing hunger for news and controversy might begin to resemble a great cauldron, stewing our diet above a flame of consumer demand. He wouldn’t have known, as we do now, that it would result in media corporations having access to the Taliban and Al Qaeda – access denied to the soldiers our state pays to protect us from terrorism. Williams could see the beginnings of these strange and troubling clashes of moral, political and commercial imperatives. He allows Redfern to alert us to these clashes but not to pontificate about them.

Williams describes with skill the world that Redfern moves in. He may have set The Volunteers in an imagined 1980s but the novel is a fascinating reminder of the fashions and mores of the 1970s. He contrasts the clothes worn by the novel’s dour lefties with the predominating styles of that decade of peacock pop stars, spectacular hair and outrageous tailoring. In one passage he has Lewis Redfern describe the appearance of the sour, humourless Rosa:

[she] came through the doors and looked around. She was in a grey jacket and jeans: a sort of battledress. I can just remember when the hard types started wearing this, before it spread through the fringe and finally into the fashion photographs.

It is not difficult to recall from that time the beautiful faces of young women and men, tangled up in some Trotskyite sect, who made a fetish of dressing in what they imagined should be the clothes of choice of the working class. The drabber the better. The paler and pastier their skins, the more they believed themselves capable of ‘identifying’ with the downtrodden masses and of selling on street corners their unreadable propaganda sheets. Some would boast openly that, as creatures of the impending revolution, they were ‘dead men walking’, like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, the doomed German revolutionaries.

Perhaps Raymond Williams had Luxembourg in mind when he named the Rosa of the novel. He has Lewis Redfern comparing her with her sister:

she was really like her sister but in a harder-worn, harder-used copy. The same raven hair, the same big dark eyes, but the skin much flatter and duller, the lower cheeks almost grey, and the features more edgy, the mouth dry.

Williams does not attempt to describe with the same intensity the appearance of industrial South Wales where part of The Volunteers is set. Clearly, he knows the landscape but chooses to refer to it only in passing:

He got up. He looked across at me, then went to the window. ‘All quiet in the valley,’ he said ironically.

‘It’s late.’

‘I don’t know. That’s Maerdy up here, the street lights. If memories were battalions…’

I didn’t answer. I was desperately tired.

‘That’s another thing… It’s interesting. Both your parents went from South Wales to Birmingham. In the thirties, to get work.’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’re at the right distance to get this place wrong,’ he said, turning and smiling.

London-based, jet-setter news investigator, Redfern is Welsh by inheritance. Williams describes in the novel Redfern’s rebirth as a political radical: not a drab radical, not one in thrall to the ‘dead men walking’ gangs. When, towards the climax of The Volunteers, Redfern comes to give evidence to a key inquiry he wears his denim suit and the batik shirt and refuses the more sober clothes offered to him.

Raymond Williams would have enjoyed placing that luminous little dab of colour. I remember him, in the late 1970s, besieged on a Cambridge stage by revolutionary students and tight-jumpered young lecturers, baying at him for not having mentioned in a talk he had just given the ‘fact’ that the phenomenally popular American-made programme for children, Sesame Street, had allegedly been financed by the CIA.

One young comrade, his pasty face turning red with righteous Trotskyite indignation, accused Williams of ignoring Sesame Street’s role in attempting to heal America and Britain’s fractured race relations by including in its line-up fictitious characters of all colours and from all ethnic groups. As the comrade, fist clenched, preached the virtues of encouraging race-based violence for the part it could play in the impending revolutionary struggle, Raymond Williams, smiling slightly, turned his gentle face in my direction and winked.

He was communicating his delight in having the ability to draw such a crowd and to have confirmed, time and again, that his wisdom and insight generated passion and reaction among all who encountered it. Later, over a pint, I had to admit that the counter-revolutionary thrust of Sesame Street had passed me by. He smiled and said, ‘Me too.’

Kim Howells

PART ONE

1

I was in the air fifty minutes after Buxton was shot. The fax was terse:

MINISTER BUXTON SHOT WOUNDED GROUNDS FAGANS POST CEREMONY SUB RIOT HOSPITALISED CARDIFF ASSAILANT NIL.

In the upstairs office the literati were already translating:

We are just receiving a report that Mr Edmund Buxton, Secretary of State (Wales) in the Financial Commission, has been shot and wounded in the grounds of the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans, near Cardiff. Mr Buxton was visiting St Fagans to open a new extension and a newly re-erected building in the Folk Museum, which has extensive open-air exhibits. Earlier today he had presided at a joint session of the Financial Commission and the Financial Board of the Welsh Senate. When he arrived at St Fagans there was a noisy demonstration against him, but this was kept under control by the police. The shooting occurred later, but as yet we have no precise details. There are no reports of the assailant or assailants being detained. Mr Buxton, who is fifty-seven, has been flown to hospital in Cardiff. We shall of course keep you up to date with any further news as it comes in.

As a trailer this would do. Political sensation comes through like that. It might even jerk a few people awake. But almost everything that mattered was still there to find. We can all make the moves to catch history on the wing. But story and history are hard masters, once you take time to stay with them. The literati could fill in. We, downstairs, had to get out and meet the world.

There were eight of us on standby, but there was never any doubt who Friedmann would send. In my three years with Insatel, working out of their London terminal, I have acquired this instant identity: what the ex-intellectuals who run Insatel insist on calling a field. I am what they call their consultant analyst, on the political underground. Insatel is a news and events service. ‘Wherever it’s happening, with Insatel you’re there.’ In fact not you, public you; me, public me. Our reporter, your reporter. Wherever it’s happening, Mr X marks the spot. But at conferences and in promotions they don’t call us all reporters; they call some of us consultant analysts. Reporters are steam people, pre-media people. But we, I, have still to get up and go. If anything happens that sounds political, but that isn’t a speech or a party conference, there I am sent: young mole burrowing.

Of course I’ve accepted the field: the underground field. It is all that keeps me in work. Insatel cost a fortune even before oil and wheat got together to inflate the international economy. As an idea it had belonged to the fast smooth days of universal expansion. Where better to put other people’s money than an international television satellite service? After the moonshot, friends, this is the globeshot, the space–time fusion. That is to say, relatively fast television coverage of relatively predictable and relatively accessible events. Most of the events, of course, Insatel arranges itself: all the big sporting contests, the festivals, the exhibitions; Insatel’s sponsoring contracts are virtually the only means of finance, in the capitalist world. But somewhere in the margins, on a different principle, other things occasionally happen, and that’s where we become relevant, we in News Division. The network already installed for spectacle has this subsidiary facility for unarranged events.

Yet we go up and down, financially, on heavy things like oil and wheat; on cars and trucks and washing machines; on fibres, on metals, on food packaging. To run at all we depend on these other things moving. Incidents can occur anywhere, but incidents are not news. News depends on a system, and the system depends on resources. Insatel gets its resources from advertising, from the big para-national companies, who push round the oil and the fibres and the metals. To run fast we depend on them booming, and lately they haven’t been booming. Consultant analysts, by the score, have become, overnight, out-of-work reporters.

Only Insatel’s internal ratings saved my own job. In News Division the political underground runs second only to sport. International terrorist movements, bombs, hijackings, kidnaps: there is no better news in the business. Thus even in a (relatively) quiet part of the world, I was a consultant analyst they needed. I can get near these people. I understand their mental processes. I speak their language. Or so Insatel believes.

Nothing is now more respectable, in my kind of world, than an underground past. Until the middle eighties, with new things happening all around them, the media still sent their seasoned old men: tough veterans of the lobbies, the press conferences, and the small-hour ministerial negotiations. They never got within shouting distance. For a start they’d forgotten how to shout. No one now knows what they really did. My private guess is the airport bar, drinking with Immigration and Customs and stolidly alert for a shipment of foreign arms or foreign gold.

Then a new generation took over, or, to be strictly accurate, was inserted. There were a good many of us, a few years out of the active movement, needing jobs and a new kind of action. A few of us made it, while most of the generation drifted, fairly happily, into teaching and publishing and the respectable agencies. We lost touch with them, easily. But we didn’t lose touch with the few who were sticking it out: squatting, translating, organising, splitting, regrouping, marching, researching, recruiting, being recruited. That is still our world, we still think in its ways, though the consequent distinction between observer and participant has become, to put it mildly, a bit of an issue.

The really hard groups never touch us; we have to dig for them. Even when they issue their distant, quasi-official communiqués, they don’t give them to us, who would know what questions to ask. They give them straight to the establishment, who wrinkle their long noses but still take them at face value, like all the other official handouts they’re used to reporting. But many groups that appear quite hard do accept us, circumspectly, for what they can get, and that, of course, is publicity, visibility, some minimal sign that all that sustained, dedicated, voluntary work is having a little registered effect: of course distorted by the media but present in the media; a bitter habituation; the best exposure you can get.

All the soft and mixed groups come out to greet us, of course. When we arrive, they’ve arrived. ‘Sure,’ they say, ‘Insatel defines the spectrum, but look right into it, look at the contradictions of the system. It picks us up and distorts us; it also picks us up and connects us. The hard Right understands this; it wants all this coverage banned. And that’s correct, because the whole situation is so dynamic and contradictory that our paradoxical news value is a danger to it. Once we’re seen as existing, we become a real possibility, outside the orthodox channels. Dialectically, in fact, the media use us and we use the media.’ Nice sensible people otherwise. Much too nice to contradict.

It wasn’t a soft group that had shot Buxton. Friedmann half expected me to solve it right there in his office, but he was very jumpy because he knew he’d just lost. Two days earlier, I had put this up to him. I hadn’t known what was coming, but I’d seen something coming. I’d said that to let Buxton go to Wales, within four months of the events at Pontyrhiw (where a worker had been killed and eight others wounded, as the army moved in to occupy a power depot; moved in, it was widely suspected, on direct orders from Buxton), was provocative in anybody’s language: anybody, that is, except the people who arrange these affairs, who are so much inside their tight little world they think public life is a sort of timetable: official visits must be paid; normal civil service must continue. I’d shown Friedmann leaflets of the huge demonstration that had been called for St Fagans when Buxton was due to arrive. I’d said it might be anything, though the most I’d then imagined was some kind of riot. He’d pushed it back at me. ‘You tell me, Lewis, the difference between these heaving images you’d get and any Welsh rugby crowd, singing for dear heart before some match or other.’

He was having to digest that dismissive rhythm now. It had been his judgement, as Senior Analyst, that a factory occupation in West Bromwich was much more significant.

‘Tell me the difference,’ I’d echoed, ‘between that and any library footage of locked gates and pickets.’

‘No,’ he’d said, ‘this may be different, Lewis. I just have that feel it may be different.’

His feel had been rough. West Bromwich was respectable, by now in effect constitutional. Everything visible and reportable even finished early. And St Fagans, meanwhile, had erupted: the first political shooting in Britain this century. Either I could solve it then and there, or I could turn round and take his jet. The offer indicated the depths of his disgust and remorse. That plane is his ego – even to ask for it, normally, amounts to personal assault. But here he was telling me to take it. He had been wrong so badly that I could have chartered a flying carpet and six gilded flamingos, so long as I got there.

‘The crew’s already moving,’ he said, with what would have been reproach if he’d quite had the nerve.

I took a car to the field, and was driven right up to the waiting plane. I enjoyed this routine immensely. Now there was only the actual work.

2

I went straight from the airport by air taxi to St Fagans. A police headquarters had been set up in the castle: that kind of instinctive move which is always reassuring; it lets you know where you are, and what kind of world is assumed. Down to quite small details, in fact. The police themselves were in the office and the hall; the press room was in that old kitchen, with its museum collection of ancient spits and utensils; stone-cold, hollow, but with plenty of room for menials like us. We sat at the plain, scrubbed tables, facing the collections of old ladles and carving knives, in a kitchen which had everything but food.

We got a first briefing, towards midnight, from Superintendent Walter Evans. It was superficially very clear, in fact very vague. There was a large map of the immediate area: the castle, the main museum building, the park with its open-air reconstructions. Alongside it was a timetable of the main events. The Superintendent took us through both, and from this, and from what I had got earlier from the local reporters, an outline of the story emerged.

After the day’s meetings in Cardiff, Buxton was due to open, at seven o’clock, the new wing of the main museum building. He would then go on into the park to open the latest re-erected building: the eighteenth-century Customs House and Harbour Master’s Office from Aberesk, which had been taken down and removed during the construction of the new marina. The new wing was easily guarded, and Buxton landed by helicopter, straight from the joint session, in a cleared area of the car park. Six hundred police formed a square around the landing area. In the wing itself there were only carefully selected and invited guests.

Most of the programme had been known in advance, and one of the largest demonstrations ever seen in South Wales had gathered around the car park, after a march from Llandaff. Even before Pontyrhiw, Buxton had been unpopular, but then it had been a more ordinary politics. Since the Welsh Senate was established, in the initial devolution of powers under the second coalition government, the Financial Commission has been the political storm centre. For what the devolution said, in effect, was this: you can govern yourselves, on this range of issues, within the limits of the money we are prepared to allocate to you. The important effect of the Senate was to make this process, which in different ways had been there all the time, very much more visible and contested. It became apparent, above all, in the figure of the Financial Commission’s Secretary of State (Wales). He was supposed to be an impartial figure, indeed not a figure but figures: a rational accounting procedure. But of course he was political, and through his office flowed all the fierce currents of political conflict between an impatient people and a constrained, fatigued and impoverished administration. Anyone holding Buxton’s position was then a marked man in Wales: marked and resented if not actively hated.

The passage from resentment, however fierce, to what can properly be called hatred, depended, of course, on a single event. The army’s attack at Pontyrhiw, which ended with the death of Gareth Powell, would have led, in any case, to a very deep bitterness. But when the public inquiry opened, and the army’s evidence was given, it became more and more likely that what had been widely suspected was true: that Buxton was involved, not just as an adviser, or as the responsible minister visiting a trouble-spot, but in effect as a commander, as chief strategist. This was of course denied; there was no real evidence of it, of a kind you could prove. But still he was seen, throughout Wales, at the time of his visit, as the man primarily responsible for that bloody Thursday and indeed as the murderer of Gareth Powell.

It was then extraordinary, as I had told Friedmann, that within four months he was again appearing in public in Wales. Of course his work required him to go regularly to Cardiff, to the offices of the Senate and the Assembly. But that can be and usually is hermetic. Demonstrations, repeatedly, had tried to intercept him, but there was the smooth police passage from train to car, or, more often, the arrival by helicopter in the closed grounds. His visit on 9 July was primarily for a meeting of this kind: a joint session of the Financial Commission and the Financial Committee of the Senate. His visit to the Folk Museum had been arranged for many months, from before the confrontation at Pontyrhiw. I have no idea whether he was urged to cancel it. He was bound to have been aware of the feeling against him. As we all now know, he went on with it. He said in a statement, when he arrived in Cardiff, that he was in the habit of fulfilling his normal engagements. Whether this was courage or contempt for the feeling against him there is no easy way of knowing. I would still call it courage; a kind of courage: a kind characteristic of one sort of ruling-class man, in whom physical bravery can never quite be separated from the associated emotions of arrogance and contempt. Yet Buxton is not, by origins, a ruling-class man. He is an educational meritocrat, a career politician, who moved from the public bureaucracy, where he was a scientific officer, to Parliament and the administration: an effective and successful move in his mid-thirties. So it is not his inherited class, or any kind of inherited property or position, that has produced his undoubted authoritarian character. He is that now more dangerous kind of man, whose authority and whose ruthlessness derive from his absolute belief in his models: rational models of what is and must be. It is never Buxton you challenge; it is fact and reason itself. Of course the version of fact and reason that the administration has selected: the Buxton version.

The march from Llandaff had been noisy but straightforward. It was in the wait at St Fagans, in the crowding along the roads and approaches, in the sudden barrier of the police guarding the landing area, that tempers began to rise. When the helicopter was sighted there was one of those heaves and surges which can happen in crowds; people pushed or were pushed against the triple lines of police; there were scuffles and arrests; a police horse was brought down. As the helicopter landed, with its shattering noise, it even looked for a time as if the crowd would break through. The noise of the shouting, when the helicopter’s engines suddenly died, was like an explosion: a sustained explosion. Buxton got out, briskly, and waved to the crowd. He was smiling. It is said that we smile when we are either pleased or nervous; this was perhaps something else, but it came through as extraordinary bravado, and the shouting changed its pitch, became higher and harsher. But then it was over. He turned and went into the new wing. The police lines held. There was a sudden silence.

It was the next few minutes that may have turned things. The crowd, or most of them, would have stayed anyway. They could demonstrate again when Buxton came out and took off. But the police seem to have chosen that moment of relative lull and uncertainty to try to push them back, to regain the few yards they had lost. It was an extraordinary decision, for it fired the crowd at once. I say the crowd, and it was, indeed, a collective phenomenon. But when you are in such a crowd, and the pressure starts, from any direction, you are not acting according to some crowd mentality, you have to try to hold your ground, keep your feet, stay close to your friends. The physical pressures and cross-pressures build up very quickly. What may look from outside to be some kind of mass phenomenon is from inside a series of sharp small movements, almost all of them defensive, and the step to avoid becomes, without intention, the step towards another which in turn sets him moving, and the surge can begin. There was the worst fighting then. The people in front had literally nowhere to go: the police were trying to push them back, but behind them were thousands of crowded people, almost all simply trying to hold their own ground. It was inevitably rough; many people were hurt, and the police, to say the least, were at full stretch – indeed only just holding their lines.

It isn’t clear, and Superintendent Evans wouldn’t make it clear, whether the guard on Buxton, when he went on to open the re-erected Customs House, was intended, from the beginning, to be so small. My own guess is that, without the fighting, it would have been somewhat larger, but not significantly. For that trip into the park had not really been publicised, although it could easily have been found out. Under the pretext of the ceremony of the opening of the wing, the grounds of the park – indeed everything except the castle – had been cleared and closed to the public from five o’clock. And it was then a question of how the danger was perceived. The demonstration was obviously dangerous; so everything else was not, or was minor by comparison. It is of course easy to be wise after the event. In fact, as the surge and the fighting continued, few extra men could be spared. And with the park fully cleared and closed to the public, it must have seemed an oasis of quiet, a rural and pastoral tract, when Buxton left the new wing, where some of the guests, especially the women, stood looking down with fascination at the surges of the crowd, and went through, by a side door, to the winding paths of the open museum. There were at first eleven people with him, in the leading group, only three of them policemen; this group, later, began to spread out. Up to fifty other people were following, trailed out, along the sunlit paths. They went down past Kennixton Farmhouse, with its whitewashed walls, its thatched roof, its small windows. They passed the boundary stone and the tollhouse; on their right were the dark boulder walls of Llanfadyn Cottage. It could have been a stroll through a village on a summer evening: the houses so quiet, the fine high trees, the birds singing. Ahead of them, along the path, was Cilewent Farm: the old moorland longhouse from Dyffryn Claerwen in Radnor, the fine sandstone of the gable wall very light in the sun. Beyond it, to the right, was their destination, the old Customs House and Harbour Master’s Office: a world of recollection, of order, of conventional memories and signs. The angry crowd was far behind them, held and pushed by the police. It would have been taken as an interval, a relaxing, unguarded, delightful moment.

Within the next two minutes Buxton was shot. Now that it has happened it seems very obvious, with that dreadful obviousness of the absorbed fact. But at the time it was wholly astonishing: an absolute surprise. Not only in itself, as a physical fact, in that quiet parkland, that simulated peace of a village – but even more as a social fact, a political fact, for this was the first shooting of a political leader, on the British mainland, in this century. It is known that it happens elsewhere; it was not believed that it would happen here.