Free The Blackpool Highflyer by Andrew Martin

white hand. He seemed quite surprised to be addressed.
    'Me?' he said; 'no, though I keep in touch with him by tele­gram and letter. We're in the Mission together, the Socialist Mission.'
    I looked again at the paper, and the words: 'Blackpool: A Health Resort?'
    'Where is Alan Cowan just at present?' I said.
    'Dunfermline,' the long-haired fellow said instantly. He was thin and white, like a plant kept out of the light. All the energy and life that might have gone into giving him a bit of colour had instead been directed into the growing of his hair. 'He's at a speaking engagement.'
    I nodded.
    This fellow could have taken the bottom ends of his hair, and put them in his mouth. But the hair was something for­gotten about, like his suit.
    'Do you work for him?'
    'Publicity Officer,' said the long-haired fellow. 'Mr Cowan pays me fair wages.'
    I knew I'd already missed Early Doors at the Palace The­atre, but I said: 'I've a couple of questions of my own, if that's quite all right?'
    The long-haired fellow said, 'Aye', though he looked a little anxious.
    'What's he, Alan Cowan, I mean . . . What's he got against folk going to Blackpool?'
    'Well,' said the long-haired fellow, 'I'd better start at the beginning of you're asking that.'
    'Will you step in here for a pint?' I said, nodding towards the Evening Star.
    The long-haired man shook his head. 'Don't drink,' he said.
    'Would you not have a lemonade or something?' I said, and his eyes fairly lit up at that, so we stepped into the pub.
    'It's been so hot out there today,' said the long-haired fel­low, putting his hat and his papers down on the edge of the red billiard table. But it was no cooler in the pub, of course: just a different heat, with beer smell and cigar smoke mixed in.
    Looking across at the papers, my eye caught the words beneath 'The Socialist Mission'. They read, 'Formerly "The Anarchist Dispatch'".
    I had a glass of Ramsden's for myself, and the socialist mis­sionary took his lemonade, which he drank off in one. Then he fell to looking at me, sideways, like, half trying to see round his hair, and half hiding behind it.
    'You're anarchists as well as socialists, are you?' I asked. I was talking as if there were many, but before me was just the one fellow.
    'The two go along a little way together,' he said, and then he was off, talking at me, but not looking at me once.
    He started, as threatened, from the beginning. It was all about how the liberal-labour men had not improved the con­dition of the working man as they had promised, and nor had the trade unions, and so a new type of organisation was wanted. What was needed was the socialisation of the means of production. 'We must have a straight-aiming struggle,' he said, and 'Alan Cowan believes that class war is its most effi­cient locomotive.'
    Well, at that word I cut in: 'Where do you stand on the rail­ways?' The long-haired fellow moved his hair about for a while, steeling himself to say something. He had rather long, fine fingers, and I thought: he's never done a hand's turn. He was not part of the working life himself, but a kind of shadow, or echo of it.
    'Railways ...' he said at last: 'Run by crooks, and should be nationalised.'
    'And as to Blackpool and wakes and holidays, and so on?'
    'Blackpool?' he said. 'Well, I don't call that a very worthy holiday place. The working people go there and what hap­pens? They loiter on the sands by day, suffocate in some cheap place of amusement by night.'
    'Been to Blackpool yourself, have you?'
    The socialist missionary gave a kind of shrug, as if he didn't knozv whether he'd been to Blackpool. 'What's that got to do with it?' he said at last, and with a little more of the brass neck to him.
    'If not Blackpool, where might they go instead?' I asked him.
    'Well, they might get out into the country once in a while, but that's not ... I do wish Alan was here because he puts it all over so much better than I ever could, but the question is: does Blackpool