‘I understand she was a very attractive young woman,’ Gerry said. ‘Nicely dressed, too.’
‘The kind of student casual elegance that costs a packet, yes. You see far more of it today then you did then, of course. Most of us were hardly walking adverts for the fashion industry. But you’re right. It could sometimes be a bit of a distraction for the male members of the society, or the men who attended our meetings in general.’
‘What? Beauty a distraction from Marxist ideology?’ Annie butted in. ‘Well, slap me around the head with a copy of Das Kapital.’ She knew she shouldn’t have interrupted but she couldn’t help herself.
Dr Parsons laughed, but it sounded hollow. ‘I take your point, DI Cabbot,’ she said. Then she leaned forward and clasped her hands again, elbows on the desk. ‘But this was a time of great struggle, and we were very sincere and very serious about what we were doing. We wanted a fairer society, and we believed that meant a socialist society. We thought that by getting rid of the capitalist system, we could bring about the end of famine, war, unemployment, pollution. You name it. All the evils of the world. Marx and Marxism seemed to offer an essential analysis of the capitalist society we lived in, and until we understood it, we could hardly go about dismantling it and changing it. Remember, we were students, young, full of idealism and vigour. We were also academics in training. Lenin said, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary action.” We believed him.’ She turned thoughtful for a moment. ‘Mind you, he also said, “Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.”’
Gerry laughed. ‘But what about Stalin?’ she asked. ‘Where does he come in? How do you explain him?’
Dr Parsons smiled indulgently, as if she had been asked this question many times before. ‘We didn’t have to explain Stalin. He was an aberration. It wasn’t about the cult of the leader for us. Or even about the expansion of the Soviet empire. If anything, we were against colonialism. We had enough of that in our past. It was the workers’ revolution that interested us. Yes, we wanted to spread the socialist doctrine, and hopefully the socialist system, to all corners of the world, but we were starting out in our little corner. That was all that counted. Overthrowing the capitalist system for a fairer, more equal one. The overthrow of the ruling class and the ascent of the workers to power. A true workers’ state.’
‘But wouldn’t it require some rather drastic measures?’
‘It would mean a rebuilding not only of the state as we knew it, but of the human social being. It wouldn’t be a time for the personal and the sensual, that’s for certain.’
‘Do you still believe in it?’
‘Unfashionable as it is today, I do, to some extent.’
‘You said Ronnie Bellamy was a good propagandist.’
Dr Parsons narrowed her eyes. ‘I don’t recollect using the word “propagandist”. That’s a capitalist euphemism for anything they don’t want to hear. But yes. She was good with language, and she was an efficient mobiliser of people, a very persuasive dialectician.’
‘In what way?’
‘You have to consider the times,’ Dr Parsons went on. ‘It was a period of great social upheaval here. All over Europe, in fact. Remember, the Paris student demos and the Prague Spring weren’t so far in the past, and the Americans still had Nixon and Vietnam. And Watergate wasn’t so far in the future. At the time we’re talking about, though, late 1971 and early 1972, the miners’ strike was the biggest issue for us. It almost brought down the government. I don’t know if you know much about it, but one of the tactics the miners used was flying pickets. Groups of workers that could be transported quickly to bolster picket lines and blockade ports and power stations and such all over the country.’
‘It sounds like war,’ said Gerry.
‘It was. Class war. Them against us. Anyway, the point is, or one point is, that by late January 1972 we had over a thousand South Yorkshire miners allocated to help with flying pickets in East Anglia. Essex was a pretty volatile place politically at the time. We had Marxists, Trotskyists and International Socialists all over the place, and we agreed to offer accommodation in campus residences to as many miners as we could. Solidarity was important to us. The unity of theory and practice, ideology and action. We got away with it for a while, too, until the bloody university authorities threatened to take out a High Court injunction.’
‘And Ronnie Bellamy was involved in all this?’ said Gerry. ‘It’s hard to believe.’
‘Not at all. She was one of the powers behind the accommodation movement, almost got herself kicked out over it. And she was also one of the ones who got first dibs, you could say, though that hardly sounds very egalitarian, does it?’
‘What do you mean, first dibs?’ Gerry asked.
‘The miners, dear. Hunks. Right?’
Annie was confused. She had never thought of miners as hunks. Drunks, more like. She had assumed they were all rather grimy and coarse and mostly drunk when they weren’t underground. Not that she had ever met one. A distant great-uncle on her mother’s side had been a miner, but he had died before she was born. She didn’t think he was a hunk, though.
‘Oh, I see,’ Gerry said, blushing. ‘Do you mean there was... er...?’
‘Fraternisation?’
‘Yes.’
‘And fornication?’
‘Er... well... yes.’
Dr Parsons smiled at her discomfort. ‘Shagging like minks, dearie. Shagging like minks. I tell you, it was like a DH Lawrence novel come to life. Even Arthur Scargill admitted he had a devil of a time getting his men back home when the time came to go. Having too good a time of it, they were. Even a revolutionary has to get his leg over every now and then.’
‘And who was Ronnie Bellamy in all this?’ Gerry asked. ‘Lady Chatterley?’
‘Ha! Very good. I was thinking more of the miners in Sons and Lovers, actually, but you’ve got a point there. Very lady-like was our Ronnie, even back then. Very regal. I read a profile of her not so long ago in the Guardian. I understand she’s actually a real lady now?’
‘Indeed.’
‘So why are you investigating her?’
It was a shrewd question, Annie thought, and she hoped that Gerry was too smart to answer it.
‘As a matter of fact, we’re not. It’s just a lead-in to our investigation into the death of Gavin Miller. Apparently they knew one another back then, and we’re trying to find out as much about him as we can. You must excuse me, I’m quite new to all this, and I sometimes get sidetracked, just out of pure interest in something. You can learn so much on this job. It’s quite fascinating, I think, about the students putting up the miners.’
Very good, Annie thought. Nicely done.
‘Well, we had the ideology. We’d read our Marx, and we could go through all the arguments. Some of the miners were in the movement, and knew their Marx, but many of them had only the raw revolutionary spirit. Not to mention the brawn. It was a highly charged combination. And don’t forget, many of these miners were educated men. Up to a point. It was true that most of them had been denied a formal education by the corrupt capitalist education system, but they were far from stupid, and were easily able to grasp the basic tenets of Marxist dialectic and communism in general. A number of them were already members of the Communist Party. Arthur Scargill said during the 1984 miners’ strike that his father still read the dictionary every day because he felt a mastery of words was vital. It’s far too easy to dismiss the intellectual grasp and capacities of working men simply because they haven’t been exposed to literature — all those dead white male poets — and philosophy, and because they work with their hands rather than their minds. But you’d be surprised.’