He was in and out of the shops all the time, and Norman’s father, in the Grindery, took him down to a meeting of the Union branch, Norman didn’t go, he couldn’t be bothered, he said to Tavendale They just claik and claik and grab your subscription and never give anything, they’re a twisting lot of sods in the Union. But the old man’s aye been keen on them. And looked a bit shamed, He’s Labour, you see.

Tavendale said There are lots of chaps that, my step-father was, and you all cheered up, sitting on buckets in the furnace room, a slack hour, and having a bit of a jaw, you were none of you Labour and knew nothing about politics, but all of you had thought that the Bulgars of toffs were aye Tory or Liberal or this National faeces. And somehow when a chap knew another had a father who’d been Labour you could speak to him plainer, like, say what you thought, not that you thought much, you wanted a job when apprenticeship was over and a decent bit time and maybe now and then a spare bob or so to take your quean to the Talkies—och, you spoke a lot of stite like the others did, about the queans that you’d like to lie with, and the booze you’d drink, what a devil you were, but if you got half a chance what you wanted was marriage, and a house and a wife and a lum of your own…. Wee Geordie Bruce said The Tories have the money, they’re the muckers for the working man; and Norman said Blethers, the Bulgars have money, but they take good care to keep it for themselves or spend it on their lily-fingered whores, what’s the good of Tories to us, you neep? Alick said that maybe the next Labour Government wouldn’t be so bad as the last had been, they were working folk themselves, some of them, though they’d birns of the rotten toffs as well…. And you all said what you thought, except Ewan—funny, you’d started to call him Ewan—he just sat and listened and nodded now and then, as though he couldn’t make up his own mind: well, that’s what a chap with sense would do. And when one of the chaps in the Stores said to you: I hear you’re all sucking the young toff’s anus you nearly took him a crack in the jaw, the daft sod, young Ewan was as good as he was and a damn sight cleaner in the neck and the tongue.

Well, Ewan went to the Union meeting that night, next morning chaps asked him what he’d thought o’t, and he said there hadn’t been much on at all, there’d been less than a dozen members there—I suppose you can’t blame a union if the chaps who belong to it won’t attend its meetings. Norman asked what the hell was the good of attending, the Union had sold the pass time and again, the heads of the bloody thing down in London were thick as thieves with the viscounts and earls. Ewan said that was rotten if it was true, why didn’t the Union give them the chuck? And Norman said he’d be Bulgared if he knew.