The Blue Touch Paper by David Hare

Author:David Hare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

9

Cream and Bastards Rise

We returned to a Britain which was in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Life had already begun to feel different in October 1973 when OPEC, the oil producers’ cartel, had used the occasion of the Yom Kippur War to hike up prices by seventy per cent and deliberately to fix the supply. Our plane back from Saigon was three-quarters empty because airline fares had shot through the roof. No one was travelling. We lay out across three seats, and were given complimentary dry Martinis at 7 a.m. in a bid to re-attract our custom. Back home, sensing that the oil shortage would give coal miners a welcome new bargaining power, and with inflation running at twenty per cent, the National Union of Mineworkers had put in for a whacking pay rise for their members. Edward Heath, never even in his more confident moments the most secure or cogent of leaders, was in nervous and sometimes secret negotiation. For one reason or another he had decided that the coal workers’ aims were political, not economic. Heath later claimed that he had asked Mick McGahey, the leader of the Scottish miners, ‘What is it you want, Mr McGahey?’ and that McGahey had replied, ‘I want to see the end of your government.’ Whatever the truth of this story – and to a dramatist’s ear the dialogue rings false – Heath had taken up residence in the bunker, believing he was heading for a definitive showdown with the unions.

Rehearsals for my new play began on 31 December in a church hall in a basement next to St James’s, Piccadilly. The next day, the prime minister announced the three-day week. The purpose, he said, was to avoid power cuts and to ensure continuity of supply. But the effect, unsurprisingly, was to create a superfluous sense of crisis. Blackouts became a regular feature of daily life, and television shut down at 10.30 p.m. The previous summer the director of Knuckle, Michael Blakemore, had invited me to his seaside house in Biarritz so that we could put our heads together. In the late afternoons he used to go down to the wide Atlantic beach and show off his native prowess, standing straight as a pencil on a speeding surfboard. Over dinner one evening he had voiced a widespread sentiment which I was to hear many times in different forms. Michael said that when he had arrived in Britain from Sydney in the 1950s the country had admittedly been awful, but basically it had worked. Now, he said, it was less awful but it didn’t work. I argued the opposite, paraphrasing Raymond Williams: ‘If people cannot have justice officially then they will have it unofficially.’ The fact that British citizens had lately become so much more militant was surely to the good. It was a disputatious time, certainly, but that’s because there were important things to dispute. If people were today demanding their rights, well, wasn’t that a sign of vitality? And if

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