The Useful Idiot

Начало книги

Drizzle fell in the faces of the returning men, soaked their clothes, and made the once proud banners behind which they walked yet more sodden. Hobnailed boots clattered on cobbles and the men tramped onward with their eyes straight ahead, not looking at the shop windows they had long shunned, not looking at the eyes of the children bunking off school, not looking at their women watching them. They had fought for longer than anyone else but they had lost and they were all but broken.

The great wheels above the pit had not turned for eight months but now the spokes of the winding gear scissored the sky. The overseers were underground checking for gas in the tunnels, preparing for the first shift. At the colliery gates a mass of police stood in capes, gleaming dully with the wet. Protected from the rain by the eaves of the lodge was a blackboard, pinned on it a type-written list of the men the owners thought fit to return to work. Missing from the list were the names of the troublemakers, the hard-core union men, the Communists, the men who would never work at the pit again.

Читать дальше →