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Comma Press - Kit De Waal

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257 pages

English

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Whatever happened to British protest? For a nation that brought the world Chartism, the Suffragettes, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and so many other grassroots social movements, Britain rarely celebrates its long, great tradition of people power. In this timely and evocative collection, twenty authors have assembled to re-imagine key moments of British protest, from the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to the anti-Iraq War demo of 2003. Written in close consultation with historians, sociologists and eyewitnesses - who also contribute afterwords - these stories follow fictional characters caught up in real-life struggles, offering a streetlevel perspective on the noble art of resistance. n the age of fake news and post-truth politics this book fights fiction with (well researched, historically accurate) fiction.

Sujets

Historical fiction

Short story

History

Informations

Publié par	Comma Press
Date de parution	05 avril 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910974483
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	5 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0324€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Comma Press.
www.commapress.co.uk

Copyright © remains with the authors, consultants and Comma Press, 2017.
All rights reserved.

The moral rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this Work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The stories in this anthology (excluding the ‘afterwords’) are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are entirely the work of the authors’ imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, organisations or localities, is entirely coincidental. Any characters that appear, or claim to be based on real ones, are intended to be entirely fictional.
The opinions of the authors and the consultants are not those of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 1905583737
ISBN-13: 978 190558737

Lines from the ancient folk tale of Llyn y Fan Fach (pp.281-282)
are taken from the version published on www.sacred-texts.com.

This project has been developed with the support of the
Amiel and Melburn Trust and the Lipman Milliband Trust.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from Arts Council England.

Printed and bound in England by Clays Ltd.
Table of Contents
Introduction

The Pardon List by Sara Maitland
Afterword: Wat Tyler and the Great Rising, 1381

Heavy Clay Soil by Holly Pester
Afterword: Enclosures and Captain Pouch, 1607

The Mastiff by Matthew Holness
Afterword: St. George’s Hill, Cobham Heath and the Fear of Witchcraft,1649–1650

A Fiery Flag Unfurled in Coleman Street by Frank Cottrell-Boyce
Afterword: The Fifth Monarchy, January, 1661

Trying Lydia by Andy Hedgecock
Afterword: The Luddites, 1817

Spun by Laura Hird
Afterword: The Scottish Insurrection, April, 1820

There Are Five Ways Out Of This Room by Michelle Green
Afterword: Hunger Striking for the Vote

Kick-Start by Sandra Alland
Afterword: The Blind Men’s March, 1920

The Blind Light by Stuart Evers
Afterword: Easter Weekend, 1958–1963

Exterior Paint by Kit de Waal
Afterword: Smethwick, Pub Crawl Protests, and Malcolm X

Banner Bright by Alexei Sayle
Afterword: Grosvenor Square, 1968

Rivers of Blood by David Constantine
Afterword: April-May, 1968

May Hobbs by Maggie Gee
Afterword: Women’s Liberation in London in the 1970s

The Opposite of Drowning by Francesca Rhydderch
Afterword: From Capel Celyn to S4C, 1965-1979

Bed 45 by Jacob Ross
Afterword: From New Cross to Brixton, January to April, 1981

The Stars are in the Sky by Joanna Quinn
Afterword: Yellow Gate, NVDA, and Carrying Greenham On, 1983-1987

Withen by Martyn Bedford
Afterword: The Miners vs. the South Yorkshire Police, June 1984

Never Going Underground by Juliet Jacques
Afterword: Before the Act, 1988

That Right to be There by Courttia Newland
Afterword: From Peaceful Protest to Riot, 31 March 1990

The Turd Tree by Kate Clanchy
Afterword: The World Protests, 15 February, 2003

About the Authors
About the Consultants
‘The only interest in history is that it is not yet finally wrapped up. Another history is always possible, another turning is waiting to happen.’
Stuart Hall
Introduction

So you’ve joined a march. A demo. A protest. You’ve decided, like Howard Beale, the unhinged news anchor in Network, that you’re ‘mad as hell and you’re not going to take it anymore’. You’ve made a date with the masses and here you are, falling in step with a great throng of humanity snaking its way through the streets.
But something’s not right. You’re new to this. Something feels wrong.
It isn’t immediately obvious where to walk, which banner to march besides, or, more worryingly, what you have in common with any of those around you. You remind yourself that you came here with a purpose, to protest a burning issue or cause you feel strongly about. Yet, within chanting distance, you see people appropriating the occasion for other, unrelated issues. What’s worse, everyone looks so utterly different to you. The oddest thoughts start to plague you: I don’t belong here; these people don’t speak for me; this isn’t me.
There’s something about this discomfort that ought to trouble you. Why should the harmless customs of more seasoned protestors (the songs, the chants, the familiarity with basic circus skills) somehow upstage the ideological affinity that brought you all together? Keep walking, you tell yourself, eventually it will come to you. As you walk, you begin to realise that you’re only accustomed to being places where you ‘fit’, where your externally worn ‘identity’ matches those around you – an identity that can be measured in the signifiers you surround yourself with, in your shopping history.
The march comes to a temporary halt; the crowd bunches up.
What happened to ideology? you wonder, in this momentary standstill. Why is it one of the few things people don’t outwardly display in everyday life? You try a couple of hypotheses for size. Maybe it’s your education, the way history is taught – less and less as a set of skills for questioning sources (which require qualitative understanding of ideologies), and more as a list of dates and names to simply learn by rote. Or maybe, you consider, it’s because of the way politics is covered by the media – not as something to investigate or ‘get to the bottom of’, but as a kind of sport to merely commentate on, where performance is all, arguments are ad hominem , and potential leaders are passed over solely because they fail us as entertainers .
Whatever the reason, ideology wasn’t the first thing you look for when you seek familiarity in strangers. Not even here. It’s like you came with it tucked away in your breast pocket, a secret.
Those holding banners set them down for a moment to rest their arms. Others strain their necks to see if there’s any movement up ahead.
When identity, as something that can be scanned externally, invades and dominates your political life (as ethnic identity has been accused of doing in the US), it shouldn’t surprise you that phrases like ‘post-truth’ also enter the vocabulary. Truth has no currency in the markets that trade in news – the media – nor is there an ‘invisible hand’, or some consumer rights mechanism, to steer that market back towards the truth. This is simply because, in every media transaction, you, the user, aren’t the consumer. In advertiser-funded media (including online media), the primary consumer is the advertiser. You , on the other hand, are the product , the thing being sold, the audience being shipped by the truckload to the doorsteps of the advertisers. What’s more, your chemical addiction to the drug that is news means you really don’t care what it’s cut with, you’ll keep queuing up for it, keep filling those trucks for the advertisers. (Meanwhile, with licence-fee funded media, the only real customer capable of removing their custom is the government.)
Up ahead of you, a protester starts shouting a new chant. You can’t make it out.
But if you, the user, really don’t have any rights, then you really should be ‘mad as hell’. We all should be, you think. And we are. Our distrust of the media is eroding it from both sides. In the US, a new president has found purchase among the electorate by pitching himself directly against the ‘mainstream media’, even though he is, himself, a construct of it (or reality TV at least). Whilst in the UK, the BBC’s quest for ‘balance’ is sometimes adhered to at the expense of other criteria. On its own, ‘balance zeal’ can take us to some strange places: ‘balance’ between experts and non-experts, ‘balance’ between extremists and non-extremists, etc.1
The words of the protester chanting up ahead grow louder.
Kick the habit , you think to yourself. The news doesn’t make us do anything, except parrot the blame game, or spread the same gossip. Kick the habit , you think. Let’s go back to looking at the wider picture, at the wider structures. Kick the habit , you start to chant. Let’s wean ourselves off ‘balance’ and try other criteria instead: expertise, research, listening to people who’ve spent years studying a subject irrespective of how rich or popular it makes them.
The march starts moving again.

It was this impulse – to go cold turkey on the news – that inspired the commission that follows. The impulse was coupled with a hunch: that, rather than a series of discrete identity struggles, British protests form a continuum; one where ideas, tactics and philosophies can be seen flowing between movements, triggering new conversations, inspiring and shaping new methods.
The relevance of short stories to this project was obvious. When a ‘world event’ occurs, we generally experience it, and respond to it, as an individual; the most abiding sensation is of our own helplessness towards it. But quickly that event gets rewritten. In the media or in the official histories, it becomes a narrative full of agency, full of characters taking decisive actions, determining their and others’ destinies. Our own, personal experience of the event – as it unfolded live in front of us – gets over-written, overlain with any narrative available that complies with Thomas Carlisle’s ‘Great Man’ theory, that ‘history is but the biography of great men’, that the rest of us, the ‘bystanders’, aren’t part of history.
The short story rejects this version of events because, as a form, it has evolved to prioritise the non-heroes – the bystanders, the disenfranchised, the ‘submerged’ (as Frank O’Connor would say). And when it comes to ‘world events’, none are more suited to the short story than the protest. In a protest, we’re all bystanders, we’re all there because of some attempt to marginalise us; the bystanders are the people making history.
In commissioning these stories, we encouraged aut