It was a start, she thought, her heart thudding painfully. If nothing else, it was a start.

Three days later the General Strike was on. Workers in almost every industry laid down their tools and walked out. Buses, trams and trains stopped, factories and docks were deserted and even offices were empty. And in the same breath, the government went into action. A formal state of emergency was declared and a class war split Britain as undergraduates, stockbrokers, barristers and other white-collar professionals realized boyhood fantasies and climbed on the footplates of strikebound trains and worked up steam. Others drove London’s buses and lorries filled with essential food supplies, and still more lined up in the quadrangle of the Foreign Office to sign with the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, or queued at London police stations to be sworn in as special constables. It was a lark, a break from routine, they said, and although they had a good income and many came from wealthy families, the government was paying them £1 15s a week to do the work, as well as a further £1 14s 6d for food and 5s for clothing. A total of £3 14s 6d a week for work that ordinary folk could do far better, and were fighting for the right to do for much less.

‘They’re laughing at us,’ Adam said bitterly to Olive a few days into the strike. ‘The TUC has given a guarantee that their members will supply food, hospital supplies and essentials, and carry on doing slum clearance and building hospitals, but Churchill will have none of it. He wants to paint us as black as the ace of spades. There’s the navy mooring its submarines and destroyers along the docks of all the major rivers, marines marching with fixed bayonets to escort trams, the army driving through streets in armoured cars and tanks rolling up, and the police using their truncheons to knock hell out of us every chance they get. Churchill’s declared war on us and now he’s gone this far he can’t be seen to lose. And them damn university students and the rest of the upper classes who’d never stoop to dirty their hands in the normal run of things think it’s all great fun to drive buses and load lorries and play at driving trains.’

Olive stared at him. She wondered what his reaction would be if she told him about Edward Forsythe. Ruby had one foot in the working class and one foot in the upper, and that wouldn’t go down well, not how things were. And Ruby’s great friend, Clarissa, sounded even grander than her brother. Ruby was consorting with the enemy, that’s how Adam would see it, she knew that.