February's Son by Alan Parks (Canongate Books 2019)

 

10th February 1973

McCoy stopped for a minute, had to. He put his hands on his knees, bent over, tried to catch his breath. Could feel the sweat running down his back, shirt sticking to him under his jumper and coat. He looked up at the uniform. Another one of Murray’s rugby boys. Size of a house and no doubt thick as shit. Same as all the rest.

‘What floor is this now?’ he asked.

The big bastard wasn’t even breathing heavily, just standing there looking at him, raindrops shining on his woollen uniform.

‘Tenth, sir. Four more to go.’

‘Christ. You’re joking, aren’t you?  I’m half dead already.’

They were making their way up a temporary stairway. Just rope handrails strung between scaffolding poles, stairway itself a series of rough concrete slabs leading up and up to the top of the half-built office block.

‘Ready, sir?’

McCoy nodded reluctantly and they started off again. Maybe he’d be doing better if he hadn’t just finished two cans of Pale Ale and half a joint when the big bastard had come to get him. Him and Susan were laughing, dancing about like loonies, Rolling Stones on the radio, when the knock on the door came. Big shadow of the uniform behind the frosted glass. Panic stations. Susan trying to open the windows and fan the dope smell away with a dishtowel while he kept the uniform talking at the door for as long as he could. Just as well they’d decided against splitting the tab he’d found in his wallet.

Living and Dying on the Factory Floor: From the Outside In and the Inside Out by David Ranney (PM Press 2019)

 

I am suddenly interrupted from this reverie by an annoying ding from my cellphone. It is a CNN news alert about yet another presidential tweet. In this one the president claims that his proposed tax reform will bring “middle-class jobs” back to the U.S. For some reason this really sets me off. Feeling angry and agitated, my mind goes back forty years to a time when I was working in a number of factories in Southeast Chicago. It was another time in my life, one when I was both an outsider looking into the world of the factory workers and an insider looking out at the outside world.

I realized that the perspective I gained then is still with me today and accounts for my anger at the simplistic notion of “bringing back middle-class jobs.” So I began to write about that time in my life, not as a memoir but as an account of life and even death on the factory floor, the raw class and race relations, the exploitation of backbreaking and dangerous labor, and the often unhealthy and unsafe working conditions. Sharing that perspective with others today seems timely and important.

In 1973, I was comfortably employed as a tenured professor at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. It was a time of great optimism and hope that we could replace a society based on greed, sexism, racism, and wars aimed at global domination with something new. I strongly believed, and still do, that we can achieve a totally new society in which “the full and free development of every human being is its ruling principle.” It would be a society where the measure of wealth would be, in Marx’s words, “the needs, capacities, enjoyments, and creative abilities” of each individual.

As these ideas were forming in Iowa City in the early 1970s, I was highly involved in local political and social activities, including opposition to the Vietnam War, supporting the demands of various civil rights groups, critiquing the political outlook of textbooks used in major survey courses at the University of Iowa, and experimenting with new social forms by organizing cooperative daycare, food co-ops, and housing co-ops. I helped to develop community education events about both the Vietnam War and the Southern African wars for national liberation from colonial powers. The political work and political education were intense and productive, but I increasingly began to feel that we were operating in a bubble that didn’t really extend beyond Iowa City. I longed to engage the growing social justice and revolutionary movements all over the world and couldn’t really do so from my comfortable perch.

So I took a one-year leave of absence and moved to Chicago, following my Iowa City friend Kingsley, who had opened up a unique pro bono legal clinic he called the Workers’ Rights Center in a storefront office in Southeast Chicago. Initially I joined a socialist group called New American Movement (NAM) and worked in its national office but later joined the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) and began working with Kingsley in the Workers’ Rights Center.

By this time my one-year leave of absence at the University of Iowa had run out and so had my money. I made the difficult decision to leave academia. Many left-wing organizations, STO included, had members working in factories for a variety of reasons. STO believed, for reasons I will discuss at the end of this book, that a new society could be built from the initiatives of “mass organizations at the workplace.” So it made sense that my financial needs could best be met by working in Southeast Chicago factories. The work was consistent with STO priorities and also engaged the sort of people who were coming to the Workers’ Rights Center for legal help. This is how I came to work at a number of different factories from 1976 to 1982.

. . .

One night when I am leaving the plant, I have a flat tire. I open the trunk to get the jack and spare. Ken stops to help. I realize that the trunk is full of leaflets advocating Puerto Rican independence and freedom for Puerto Rican nationalist political prisoners. Ken picks a leaflet up and reads it. He says nothing about it as he lifts the spare tire out while I jack up the car and remove the flat tire. He puts the flat tire back in the trunk and helps me lift the spare onto the car. Then he goes back and shuts the trunk, and we finish bolting the tire on. When we are finished:

“Thanks Ken.”

“I’m with Workers World. Who are you with?”

“Sojourner Truth Organization. Fifteen guys working here and two are commies. Who would have guessed? Any more?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well thanks and let’s Free the Five Puerto Rican Prisoners of War! Why not try to recruit the prick? Workers World can have him.”

Ken laughs, and we go our separate ways. Politics never comes up again.”

A Tournament Frozen in Time: The Wonderful Randomness of the European Cup Winners Cup by Steven Scragg (Pitch Publishing 2019)

 

Dinamo Tbilisi will mean nothing to an entire generation of football watchers, yet to my generation they will elicit an enigmatic smile and maybe even a moistening of the eye. It might sound strange to the uninitiated, but you’d be amazed just how many British football supporters go misty-eyed with joy at the memory of seeing their team of choice being knocked out of European competition by what would colloquially be referred to as a ‘crack eastern European outfit’.

Of those great unknown sides to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain, Dinamo Tbilisi were one of the most clinical and unremitting. Fast and precise, they hit you on the break and they hit you hard. For those who saw them, they were unforgettable.

In the quarter-finals, at the beginning of March 1981, West Ham United were systematically dismantled by Dinamo Tbilisi at Upton Park.

Slicing straight through the West Ham midfield and defence time and time again, they enabled Aleksandre Chivadze, Vladimir Gutsaev and Ramaz Shengelia to score goals that were as beautiful as they were devastating. Ray Stewart, the West Ham right-back and penalty-taker extraordinaire was particularly tormented by the Dinamo Tbilisi offensive. He was caught in precarious possession of the ball for the second goal, when ludicrously left to man the West Ham defence all on his own.

What made the situation so ludicrous was that Stewart’s team-mates had piled forward, as if chasing a last-minute equaliser, when instead, the first leg of the game was only 31 minutes old. Everything was still to play for. 

West Ham had fallen a goal behind a mere seven minutes earlier and even by the standards of March 1981 this was an admirably gung-ho approach from John Lyall and his players.

One botched corner, a lofted Dinamo Tbilisi clearance, an ill-advised header from Stewart and a flash of the white-shirted Gutsaev later, and the ball was once again in the back of Phil Parkes’s net. It was as shocking as it was swift.

Charlie Savage by Roddy Doyle (Vintage 2019)

 

Talk to Joe.

–I will in me hole!

It’s not a sudden thing, or a late vocation. I’ve been shouting at the eejits on the radio all my life. Some men learn how to play the uilleann pipes from their fathers; others are taught how to mend fishing nets, how to keep bees or maim cattle. My da showed me how to shout.

He spent long happy hours instructing me on the correct use of the word ‘gobshite’. He didn’t know he was doing this; I was just looking at him, and listening. But, nevertheless, that was what he did. I sat in the kitchen with him and learnt all about the different categories of gobshite. There was the ‘bloody’ gobshite, the ‘out and out’ gobshite, and the ‘complete and utter’ gobshite. There was a gobshite for every occasion, a label for every man he shouted at. A younger man just starting out in his career as a gobshite – a newly elected TD, say, or an economist just home from America who wore a cravat instead of a tie – he had ‘the makings of a gobshite’. There was still hope for him, but not much. The makings of a gobshite almost always rose through the ranks to become a complete and utter gobshite.

He never shouted at women. Now, there weren’t many women on the wireless back then but he wouldn’t have shouted at them anyway. In my father’s world there was no such thing as a female gobshite.

Before We Was We: The Making of Madness by Madness (with Tom Doyle) (Virgin Books 2019)

 

LEE: Roxy Music were a big influence. Myself, Mike and Chris went to see them at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park when the Stranded album had just come out. We saw David Essex going in, with a blonde lady friend, and they were dressed to the nines. Our mate John Jones goes, ‘He’s got a bit of a flash car.’ He had some convertible Merc and I can’t remember if the roof was down or not, but I know we got in it. Inside, he had one of those new-fangled eight-track tape players. We thought, ‘Oh, they must cost a fortune.’ So, we ended up having several of his eight-track tapes away.

Then, we bunked into the gig. Supporting was Leo Sayer. I got on someone’s shoulders – probably Mike’s, because he’s tall – and hauled myself up onto a window ledge, because I’d noticed it was on the latch. As I climbed up and looked in this window, there’s Leo Sayer, putting his makeup on. He’s got that clown’s outfit on that he wore around that time. He had all the gear on and one red cheek. He turned round, and I went, ‘Can you let us in?’ He was like, ‘Sorry, I can’t.’ I’m going, ‘We’ve come to see you, though, Leo …’ Have we fuck! But he said, ‘I can’t, obviously,’ and I descended back down.

MARK: Lee always told me that Leo Sayer mimed, ‘I can’t let you in,’ in Marcel Marceau style …

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (Profile Books 2019)

FRIDAY, 6 MARCH

Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2

Nicky in. She has hijacked the shop’s Facebook page again and left this typically bewildering post:

Good morning everyone!
With a song in my heart, I skip in to work only to be berated for buying books off a customer for £45, whereas the BGC would have paid £175. Happy customer, happy me, disgruntled tube, sorry, I meant to say ‘boss’.

BGC is Nicky’s current nickname for me, and stands for Big Ginger Conundrum. ‘Tube’, for the uninitiated, is a Scottish insult, the politest interpretation of it being ‘idiot’.”

Conviction by Denise Mina (Harvill Secker 2019)

When we met I was Anna, the new office temp from Somewhere-Outside-of-Aberdeen. I chose Hamish quite carefully. I did love him, I must say that, and I still do, sometimes. But I deliberately picked an older man with money and status. A declamatory man, full of facts and opinions. He was the perfect hide.

Hamish was born in that house and had never lived anywhere else. His family had been on or near the Scottish judiciary for two hundred years. He didn’t much like foreign travel. He read only Scottish writers. That seemed so weird to me. I think I found it a little exotic.