BAKED

 Alan Dent

            The night-shift workers were leaving the low, redbrick building which squatted between terrace houses on a short street near the football ground. Once, they’d been thirty, now they were ten and though they’d hoped the diminution was over, they knew from the volume of work more would go; they were all union members and professed solidarity,  but secretly and shamefully hoped it wouldn’t be them. Except for Edmundson. At twenty-eight and single, due a couple of thousand in redundancy, he looked forward to not having to arrive two hours before midnight and leave at seven. What would he do with the money? Blow it. How? Who cares? A trip somewhere. Dublin. His brother, sister-in-law and four kids lived in Blanchardstown. They’d put him up, even though they were overcrowded. He didn’t mind the sofa or cushions on the floor. A week. Plenty of Guiness in Temple Bar and perhaps a charming Irish lass with flaming hair and emerald eyes. Aye, and maybe not.

            Beside him walked Ken, who had worked at Addison’s since he left school at sixteen with two CSEs: woodwork and English. He was proud of the latter and regretted he hadn’t made something of it, but young and easy-going, the job in the bakery paid for his beer, the bookies and his Yamaha IT250. At nineteen he met his first girlfriend, who lived in the lee of the stadium. Her dad was a firefighter and her mother a cleaner. He liked the family and the little house. They welcomed him. He sat at the small table under the window for Saturday tea or Sunday lunch. Nor were they bitter when Eileen fell pregnant. He was twenty, she eighteen. They moved in for three months after the wedding but found a little flat over a laundrette before Colin was born.

                        “Another one done, eh, Ken?”

                        “Aye, not many more for me I reckon.”

                        “Eh? They’ll never get rid of you. The walls’d fall down.”

                        “Rumour is they’re shuttin’t place?”

                        “Bugger off.”

                        “No, accordin t’t union.”

                        “The bastards.”

                        “Aye, well, there’s competition, they say. Supermarkets. Big sales. Do it all cheaper.”

                        “Supermarkets. Superbastards.”

                        “Aye, well, that’ll be me on’t dole.”

                        “You’ll get your redundancy, Ken. You’ll be able to buy a flat in Spain.”

                        “Still got mortgage to pay off.”

                        “Aye? Well, watch out for yourself. See you tonight.”

            Edmundson had no interest in politics. He saw Badenoch or Starmer or Davey on the television and the way they presented themselves seemed phoney. He knew when he was being sold a pup. Nor did he have any time for the groups who set up paste tables on the market square on Saturdays selling papers advocating revolution. He didn’t want revolution, he wanted to be left alone to live as he wished. He wouldn’t buy a used sofa from any of them. His pity for Ken and his anger at what was being done to him had no political outlet. Rather, they put him in an ugly mood, made him sarcastic and abrupt. He walked the three quarters of a mile to Wetherspoons, ordered a pot of porridge, a full breakfast and a tea and sat by the window to watch the traffic. Within two minutes he spotted Bingham hurrying and rapped on the window. The other man looked up, smiled, waved. Edmundson flicked his head to beckon him in and the stocky, bald union man sat opposite him, slightly out of breath.

                        “How are you, Bill? Can’t stay long, on my way to a meeting.”

                        “Early?”

                        “Yes, but I’ve to call in on my mother on the way. Alzheimer’s.”

                        “That’s a shame. How old?”

                        “Seventy-eight.”

                        “Not old then.”

                        “No, not these days I suppose.”

                        “Anyway. What’s this about Addison’s closing.”

                        “Aye. For sure. They can’t make it pay and anyway, the old fella has had enough.”

                        “And taken enough.”

                        “They haven’t done badly.”

                        “Badly? I’ve seen his house, Graham. Redcat Lodge. Big as a bloody hotel.”

                        “Aye, I dare say.”

                        “Can’t we stop it?”

                        “You’ll get your redundancy.”

                        “I will, and I’ll booze it away and enjoy every pint.”

            Bingham laughed and ran his hand over his bald crown. The waiter arrived with the pot of porridge and the plate.

                        “I could’ve done with the porridge first,” said Edmundson.

                        “I can take it away, keep it warm.”

                        “Warm? You’ll bloody frazzle it.”

                        “Your choice.”

                        “Forget it, mate.”

            Spooning the thick mixture with relish, Edmundson jogged his head from side to side, swallowed and pointing the spoon at Bingham said:

                        “I couldn’t give a toss for the job, Graham. I’ll be glad to be out o’the place. But there’s older blokes than me who’ll never work again.”

                        “Ken Wooldridge.”

                        “Aye, for example.”

                        “He might find somethin’”

                        “Bin there since ‘e left school, Graham. All he knows is basic bakery work. Who’ll tek ‘im on?”

                        “I know.”

                        “Is there nowt you can do?”

                        “Not a thing. Workers’ buy-out, but that’s as likely as us getting promotion to the Premiership.”

                        “Workers’ buy-out?”

                        “Aye.”

                        “How does that work, then?”

            The older man, made cynical by years of  hard fight for workers’ rights looked into the eyes of the hungry shift-worker and saw his naivety. Brief because he lacked time, he explained simply how the process might play out.

                        “Anyway, that’s the theory. Better be off.”

                        “Aye. Hang on. Let me put your number in me phone.”

            The fried eggs were beautifully cooked. He knifed hard butter onto the slightly charred toast, sliced a sausage, took a bite of the grilled bread, lifted the greasy meat in to follow and chewed vigorously. His mind was shifting to arithmetic. Ten of us. What’ll be the total redundancy? How much would old Addison want? Buying the building, impossible. But he might rent. Aye. They’ve let it dwindle. We could find customers if we shifted our arses. We could. He liked the idea of having a go. He told himself it was to spite that stingy old git Addison, but what was churning through his viscera was disturbance caused by the possible fate of Ken Wooldridge.

            In the months that followed it became his obsession. He persuaded Graham Bingham to his side by filling his ears with pleas and his belly with bitter. There were eternal, tedious meetings with Addison, his accountant and his lawyer. At length, the sly businessman offered them the business for quarter of a million and rent of the premises at five thousand a month. The union’s number cruncher was called in.

                        “On these figures, you’ll never do it.”

                        “Fuck the figures,” said Edmundson.

                        “The figures don’t lie,” said Welsh, a retired van driver with a bad leg and a passion for calculation.

                                    “I know, I know. But you’re looking at the books of a business deliberately allowed to fail. We’ll work our balls off to make it succeed.”

            They were ten thousand short for the purchase and Welsh recommended at least twenty thousand in hand to get them through the first month or two. Edmundson remortgaged his little house and the funds were delivered. It was to be owned and managed as a workers’ co-op. The local press reported it on the front page. Edmundson was interviewed on local radio.

            Hearing that interview made Paillou’s hackles rise. He was in the kitchen with his wife who was stirring lovingly with a long wooden spoon a large aluminium pan of tomato, apple and celery soup.

                                    “Worker’s co-op, what’s the use o’ that?” he snapped in his heavy Glaswegian accent.

                                    “I suppose it’s better than redundancy,” Jimmy.

                                    “No, it isn’t. Redundancy shows the workers what capitalism is about. Setting up a little co-op in a capitalist economy ruled by the capital accumulation, gives the workers the wrong idea.”

            Carolyn didn’t know whether she was convinced. She’d been on the receiving end of his certainties for thirty-three years and could no longer distinguish her own ideas from his. He’d read the Communist Manifesto at seventeen and never diverted from its eternal truth. Sacked from his job with the local authority for constantly trying to persuade his colleagues to strike, he took a couple of A levels and got himself onto a degree course in sociology. For the next three years, he spent most of his time making ranting, mile-long speeches, driving minibuses four hundred miles in a day to attend demonstrations, pasting posters around the campus, serving as Student Union President for a year, and deepening his initial conviction. Like any acolyte, he steeped himself in the doctrines of the master and avoided anything which engendered doubt.

            His mind was captured by the ultimate reality of dialectical materialism, class consciousness, the historical role of the working-class, the coming revolution, the workers’ State and his role in its vanguard; but there was also the less ultimate awkward fact of needing to earn a living. As he was a couple of years older than most of his fellow students, he found the little extra maturity and the seriousness of having experienced being picked off by management, gave him a slight edge. In addition, he nurtured a relationship with David Wightman, a professor in his thirties and an orthodox Marxist.

                                    “Everything,” Wightman said during an early seminar, “is inevitable before it happens.”

The students duly noted the wisdom, but to Paillou it provided access to an arena of certainty. If the mechanism of history was known, and it was, if nothing was unpredictable, then there was a clear road ahead. Even better, the theory granted messianic status to the priesthood, those few who understood the doctrine, or at least had  read a few hundred pages of it in English. More prosaically, with Wightman’s help he could achieve a First, undertake a Phd and find himself a university position. He gained an upper second, got a postgrad place, researched and penned his thesis on women’s role in strikes since the late nineteenth century and was appointed to a lectureship.

            Energetic, competitive and ambitious he churned out publications, often in conjunction with like-minded colleagues.  Wightman was useful in his elevation to a professorship. Carolyn too, who married him while preparing her own doctorate, landed a senior academic post and by the time their first child was born they were settled in their four-bedroom semi in Kingsway East, one of the most salubrious addresses in the most sought-after suburb, where the old houses hid behind high hedges and long lawns led to the little brook which gurgled away towards the town where it disappeared beneath the streets.

                                    “I suppose so,” she said, “but at least if a workers’ buy-out can keep them in jobs..”

                                    “Ach, it sends the wrong message, when we’re trying to convince the working-class to unite to overthrow the system.”

            The soup was warming nicely, her attentions keeping it the right side of simmering, which she knew impeded the flavour.

                                    “I bought a baguette,” she said.

                                    “Oh, where from?”

                                    “The deli, and I’ve chopped some basil. Cut some rounds will you, and there’s a selection of nice cheeses in the fridge.”

            They sat at the farmhouse table they’d bought from Webster’s, the family furnishers whose prices made the common folk gawp. It was one of those heavy affairs with thick, turned legs and extensions either end which permitted accommodation of a comfortable dozen.

                                    “You know, when I hear a bloke like that..”

                                    “Who?”

                                    “The one on the radio. What was his name? Edmundson? Naïve. He’s playing the bosses’ game. And it’ll fail. They always do. Look at Robert Owen. It’s all hopeless. Twee little co-ops. I’ll have to see what I can do.”

            Carolyn felt a tiny visceral shock.

                                    “What do you think of the soup?”

                                    “Fine. It gets me riled.”

                                    “Well, let it go. You can’t be involved in everything.”

                                    “But if I can put a stop to it..”

                                    “Do you really want to do that, Jimmy? Some co-ops work, don’t they? Montdragon..”

                                    “Oh, yes. People always talk about that but look at it. It operates within the capitalist market, it has to make a profit, it exploits people in Latin America. It has to ignore negative effects to make its business model work. If it gets into people’s heads this is an alternative to capitalism, they’ll give up on revolution.”

                                    “I rather had the feeling they’d given up on that already.”

                                    “The system has to be destroyed or we’re just tinkering.”

                                    “I suppose you could say the NHS is just tinkering, but it’s worth having. Do you want some more basil?”

                                    “Aye, but if this bakery goes to the wall and the jobs are lost, that helps our argument. Capital accumulation is the enemy. A workers’ co-op which mimics a capitalist outfit, that’s the worst outcome.”

                                    “Try this cheese, Jimmy, strong Lancashire, delicious.”

            Paillou believed in confrontation. It was implicit in the dialectic. It didn’t occur to him that he’d harboured the tendency when he was kicking a deflated football round the street with his pals, long before he’d heard of German philosophy. He resolved to find his way to Edmundson and have it out with him, but hanging round the works’ entrance at the end of the night shift and spotting a young, broad, dark-haired man, muscular and athletic and with a defiant tone to his demeanour, he slipped away. His sudden lack of confidence troubled him. After all, what were the chances Edmundson would resort to violence, and if he did, it was a police matter. The principle kicked in that socialists didn’t go to the state to settle their differences. But was Edmundson a socialist? In any case, a more oblique approach was necessary.

                                    “I’d like to have a chat to you, Graham?”

                                    “Okay. What about, Jimmy?”

                                    “This Addison’s business.”

                                    “Aye. It’s looking good.”

                                    “Well, that’s your opinion.”

                                    “If they can keep it running and people in their jobs, that’s a win.”

                                    “Can we meet up? Tomorrow evening I’m free.”

                                    “I’m busy, Jimmy. Is it going to be worth my while?”

                                    “Just to talk for an hour. What harm can that do?”

            Trade unionists were usually less than revolutionary and Paillou had known Bingham for well over a decade. He viewed him as one of those officials who could be browbeaten. He wasn’t a Marxist, but one of those well-meaning workers who blunder along trying to improve things for the proletariat with no sense of how to achieve the ultimate victory. Though Paillou was critical of ultimatists: those who turned their backs on immediate gains which might contribute, he considered himself astute in judging what served the desired end and what stood in its way. He believed an hour of theoretical loquacity would wear Bingham down enough to make him cede.

                                    “It’ll fail, Graham. Co-ops always do because they have to survive in the capitalist market.”

                                    “Aye, but it’s worth a try.”

                                    “Setting them up to fail? They need to be told the truth: capitalism has cost them their jobs. Now they’re trying to save them by compromising with capitalism. They’ll have to follow the law of capital accumulation. They’ll become capitalists in their own right. They’ll compete and if they succeed they’ll put other workers out of their jobs. If they lose their jobs, that’ll show the working-class how the system works and where their true interest lies..”

                                    “Where’s that, Jimmy?”

            Paillou was reluctant to use the word revolution. In his own mouth it sounded hollow. He had long since accepted the path to overthrow had many by-ways and involved serious compromises, not least with the voting system. Once, he had argued vociferously against parliamentary representation as a deviation from revolutionary agitation but convincing himself it could be used as a passing tool of radicalisation, rather than admitting only the insane would go to the barricades when they could go to the ballot box, he became a fervent poll fighter, seeing in every parish by-election a chance to educate the working-class.

                                    “Proper socialism.”

                                    “What’s the difference between socialism and proper socialism?”

                                    “Jim Callaghan called himself a socialist, Graham, when he imposed pay restraint and slashed public spending..”

                                    “Aye, and Lenin when he had the Kronstadt sailors shot.”

            What was necessary in a revolutionary context was obviously beyond Bingham. The Bolshevik revolution, Paillou accepted, was a holding operation: Russia was too backward for a true workers’ uprising, the bourgeois phase hadn’t been lived through. It was in Germany, the most advanced European economy at the time, a real breakthrough could be expected. Thus, the Bolsheviks had to clamp down to secure what they’d won. The Kronstadt sailors threatened the gains. They had to be sacrificed for the greater good of the revolution but Paillou wasn’t foolish enough to be dragged into discussion of history or principles.

                                    “You know what I mean, Graham. These workers are being led up the garden path by Edmundson. He’s as green as garden peas. They can walk away with their redundancy money. Instead, they’re going to squander it. They might as well go to the bookies and put it all on the favourite in the three thirty at Kempton.”

                                    “Their work is important to ‘em, Jimmy. They’re prepared to risk their money for it.”

                                    “I heard tell Edmundson was looking forward to getting his pay-off, till someone put ideas in his head.”

                                    “He was. It’s the older blokes he’s fighting for.”

                                    “Not any kind of trade unionist was he, till this blew up.”

                                    “No. Bit of a tearaway if truth were known.”

                                    “Mmm.”

            It wasn’t difficult to find out. Edmundson had a reputation for booze and womanising but his major flaw was having served a brief prison sentence for criminal damage: drunk and reckless, at nineteen, he and a mate set fire to a police car, “for a laugh”. The flames did only superficial damage, but he was sent away for a year and served six months, first in Strangeways, then in Hollesley Bay, where he became proficient in snooker.

                                    “Lumpen,” said Paillou to Carolyn.

                                    “Everyone deserves a second chance.”

                                    “Of course, but the lumpen proletariat can’t lead. That has to be left to the labour aristocracy.”

            There were only nine men to be persuaded. No need to stand outside distributing flyers. Ken Wooldridge, Paillou discovered, frequented a down-at-heel little pub quarter of a mile from his two-bedroom terrace. It stood on the corner where Plunkett Road crossed Brooklands Avenue whose sweet name denied the grim, neglected houses, their doors opening onto the pavement bordering the busy thoroughfare into the town. The pub had once been a spruce, working-class venue where men and women in their best suits and frocks came to spend a convivial Saturday night, but its good days were long past, the signage over the door now read The Bro kl ds. The regulars were few, mostly old and content to make one drink last an hour and a half. Wooldridge would wander down Plunkett Road to kill an hour before going to bed, bored by what was on the television, his wife intent on the i-pad which played incessant Scandinavian thrillers and tedious rom-coms. Colin, his wife and two children had emigrated to Australia more than decade earlier and Angela was in Ealing. He’d been to visit her once in the house she shared with three other women, but was awkward. Often, in the evening on his days off, a feeling of defeat would come over him. What had his life been? It was true he’d been a kind and loving father and the years when his children were young were his best, but his offspring had outgrown him, he had virtually no contact with his grandchildren. He’d worked all his life, paid off the mortgage. That was something. His disturbance drove him from the house. Perhaps there’d be someone to talk to in The Brooklands, like in the old days; but mostly there was no one he knew. He drank his pint slowly, wandered back wondering how many years were left to him and puzzled as to why he was so sad.

                                    “My name’s Jimmy Paillou, you might have heard of me.”

                                    “No,” said Wooldridge, lifting his full glass.

                                    “I was on the council for ten years.”

                                    “Oh, aye.”

                                    “About this workers’ buy-out.”

                                    “Yes,” said Wooldridge, “it’s a good idea. Keep me in work for a few more years.”

                                    “Lose your redundancy, though.”

                                    “Eh? No, I don’t lose it. I’m pooling it, like. For the good of the lads.”

                                    “What if it doesn’t work?”

                                    “I know. It’s a bit of a gamble, but we’ll work at it. Bill Edmundson has looked into it. ‘E thinks we’ll be reet.”

                                    “D’you want to trust that jailbird?”

                                    “Eh?”

                                    “Got a year for setting fire to a police car.”

            Wooldridge took a swig and eyed his interlocutor.

                                    “’Appen, but ‘e’s a good lad.”

                                    “Co-ops always fail, Ken. You’ll be competing with the supermarkets, the big bakeries. What are you, ten blokes. They’ll swallow you whole. You can’t win against the bosses.”

                                    “We can try. We can pull together. I’m not for giving up. Old Addison has a made a fortune out of us. I think Bill’s got ‘is ‘ead screwed on.”

                                    “But think of the redundancy money. What could you do with that? You sink it in a co-op which is bound to fail, you’ll regret it for the rest of your days.”

            Wooldridge, beginning to feel the stirrings of anger, drank off his pint and set down his glass.

                                    “It won’t fail. We know what we’re doin’”

            Walking home he was troubled by the intervention. Who’s he to poke his nose in? We’ll be reet. Bill’ll see us reet.

            Paillou reflected on his bad choice: Wooldridge was desperate to stay in work; there were younger blokes who could move on. They’d be more inclined to the pay-off. He met with Harry Delbridge in Salvatore’s, the town’s oldest café, established by the Italian himself but now in the hands of Coffee and Beer, a chain owned by Alistair Collins, a chancer who began with a sandwich bar by the bus station and now owned seventy-three outlets across the region. Paillou preferred pubs, but Delbridge didn’t drink. He stirred his latte with a long spoon, Paillou poured his diet Coke.

                                    “You know about Edmundson?” he said

                                    “What’s that?”

                                    “Time in the nick.”

                                    “Yeah?”

                                    “Not that I write a bloke off for that, but he’s got a reputation for being a hot head.”

                                    “Well, we’ve got to do something. I’m for occupying the place.”

            Paillou felt his spirits lift.

                                    “We’re not ready for the revolution yet, but this co-op idea is madness.”

                                    “Bill’s all right though.”

                                    “It’s the idea that’s wrong. How can a co-op survive in a capitalist economy? The market system will destroy it. You’re pouring your money down the drain. Now, if the place shuts and you’re all redundant, that allows us to make the argument. Capitalism is no good. It throws people on the scrapheap after decades of work. Setting up a co-op is letting the bosses off the hook.”

                        Delbridge nodded and pulled from his coat pocket a dog-eared copy of The State and Revolution in an old, Soviet edition. Paillou, delighted, smiled.

                                    “Have you read it?”

                                    “Two or three times.”

                                    “Good, isn’t it?”

                                    “Yeah.”

                        Reading had never come easy to the bakery worker. He’d failed GCSE English twice, but he persevered with revolutionary texts, like a newly-converted Christian struggling with the Old Testament but rising on the tide of promised salvation. He flicked the pages, paused and read: “A Marxist is solely someone who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” In his imagination was no clear idea of how such a possibility could be realised; as the proletariat numbered tens of millions, how was it to dictate? Who to ? The vague idea of people like himself having power was enough. Out of the grievance of his humiliation, having grown up in a family strapped for cash, failed in the education system, seen his parents struggle to get by and his father’s health fail in his late forties, having to take a low-level job on the minimum wage and now facing redundancy, the simplified message of rising to some kind of dignity was enough.

                                    “That’s the point,” said Paillou. “We have to overthrow the system. Co-ops are a compromise which strengthens it.”

                        As a tiny fissure will admit water which can cause deep damage, so Delbridge’s withdrawal sowed fatal doubt. Edmundson called the men together.

                                    “What’s got into you? I’ve heard Harry’s stuff about revolution and it’s bullshit. There’s no revolution coming, just your redundancy pay.”

                                    “Aye, it’s not that, Bill,” said one, “it’s can we make it work? We’re tiny. How can we compete? It’s a bird in the hand, Bill. A few grand is a lot o’ money to us.”

                        Addison withdrew his offer. The men were paid off and the premises closed. Edmundson went to his brother’s in Blanchardstown. In Temple Bar he got talking to a young woman with red hair and green eyes.

                                    “You know,” he said, “I was dreaming I’d meet a girl like you in Dublin.”

                                    “And what’s a girl like me?”

                                    “You’ve got a bit of spirit about you. You look like you might lead the revolution.”

                                    “Aye, well I might, if the revolution pays for my drinks.”