The Human Front Read Online Free PDF Page B

has.”
    “But,” I said, “suppose we find ourselves shooting at the freedom fighters?”
    Or shot by them, was what was really worrying me.
    “Cannae be helped,” said Orr. He laughed. “I’m told it seldom comes tae that anyway. It’s no like in the comics.”
    My mother objected, my father took a more fatalistic approach. There was a scene, but I got my way.
    We spent the summer working to earn some spending money and hopefully put some by in our National Savings Accounts. In the permanent war economy it was easy enough to walk into a job. Orr, ironically enough, became a hospital porter for a couple of months, while I became a general labourer in the Thompson yard. We joked that we were working for each other’s fathers.
    The shipyard astounded me, in its gargantuan scale, its danger and din, and its peculiar combination of urgent pace and trivial delay. The unions were strong, management was complacent, work practices were restrictive and work processes were primitive. Parts of it looked like an Arab
souk,
with scores of men tapping copper pipes and sheets with little hammers over braziers. My accent had me marked instantly as a teuchter, a Highlander, whichthough humiliating was at least better than being written off as middle class. The older men had difficulty understanding me—I thought at first that this was an accent or language problem, and tried to conform to the Clydeside usage to ridiculous effect, until I realised that they were in fact partially deaf and I took to shouting in Standard English, like an ignorant tourist.
    The Party branch at the yard must have known I was in the Front, but made no effort to approach me: I think there was a policy, at the time, of keeping students and workers out of each other’s way. This backfired rather because it enabled me to encounter my first real live Trotskyist, who rather disappointingly was a second-year student working there for the summer. We had a lot of arguments. I have nothing more to say about that.
    Most days after work I’d catch the bus to Nelson Street, slog up through the West End to our house, have a bath and sleep for half an hour before a late tea. If I had any energy left I would go out, ostensibly for a pint or two but more usually for activity for the Front. The next stage in its escalating campaign, after having begun to make its presence both felt and overestimated, was to discourage collaboration. This included all forms of fraternisation with American service personnel.
    Port Glasgow is to the east of Greenock, Gourock to the west. The latter town combines a douce middle-class residential area and a louche seafront playground. Its biggest dance-hall, the Cragburn, a landmark piece of ‘30s architecture with a famously spring-loaded dance floor, draws people from miles around.
    Orr and I met in the Ashton Cafe one Friday night in July. Best suits, Brylcreemed hair, scarves in our pockets. Hip-flask swig and gasper puff on the way along the front. The Firth was in one of its Mediterranean moments, gay-spotted with yachts and dinghies, grey-speckled with warships. Pound notes at the door. A popular beat combo, then a swing band.
    We chose our target carefully, and followed her at distance after the dance. Long black hair down her back. She kissed her American sailor goodbye at the pier, waved to him as the liberty-boat pulled away. We caught up with her at a dark stretch of Shore Street, in the vinegar smell of chip-shops. Scarves over our noses and mouths, my hand over her mouth. Bundled her into an alley, up against the wall. We didn’t need the masks, not really. She couldn’t look away from Orr’s open razor.
    “Listen, slag,” he said. “Youse are no tae go out wi anybody but yir ain folk frae now on. Get it? Otherwise we’ll cut ye.”
    Tears glittered on her thick mascara. She attempted a nod.
    “Something tae remind ye,” Orr said. “And tae explain tae yir friends.”
    He clutched her hair and cut it off with the