Spectator New Writing Prizewinner 1971

The Hundred Thousand miraculously fed on sunshine and warm air

BILL NICHOLSON

I suppose it must be spring, the sun shines in the cold air and in the park are tightfisted crocuses—or is it croci? And not yet March. It is callous this sun of brightness and resurgent sap, while not having the decency to inquire if the moment is fitting. Lightheart weather for among friends and that scintilla of cold that carries the laughter of children across the park from their unindented cheeks to me.

The grass in many places is trampled the colour of roads; between scraps of invisible litter move men isolated in overcoats with spikes in their hands stabbing the well-used earth as if to sow it in the spring season with seed of another plant, and hope of a later harvest. This is the true commencement of a change of a new world, even of a better tomorrow. There are several out in the park to celebrate the coming of spring but not many. Since it is February still this early promise may be a misprint but "not entirely so for in its time spring will come and burst the heads of men like neon through the eyes.

Yesterday also I was in the park but innocent then of the flowers pricking out of the earth, my eyes full of people. It is about one o'clock, then. The march they intend will set off at half-past one and I am one of the many many who enter the park uncasually with a destination at its centre. On my right between the two rows of bald trees on the grass a group is gathering round a red banner and they begin to move, yes, two hundred or so they go swinging their arms following their standard to their allotted station in the ceremony. Ahead of me are the Boilermakers and Shipmakers in procession, their banners a magnificence of straw-gold ringlets and love-locks on lead-red embroidered around a painted image or icon nf Brother E. J. Hill, who is not known to me. Six men bear it forward with privilege in this way: two to the poles, four to the strings that brace it in the wind, unsurpliced acolytes. The members of the procession are fitted with a disorderly solemnity belied only by the little red buttons they wear the size of a tenpenny piece that say: Kill the Bill, for they have not the look of assassins.

From all sides similar crocodiles are converging on the main arena of the park. By Speakers' Corner two machine-lifts clutch loudspeakers high, maybe thirty feet, in the air and clear across the intervening space I can hear their communications: greetings, instructions, remonstrance. I weave slowly among the tight-packed squads, youths alone with private banners, bandsmen, hard-hat miners, hawkers brandishing badges, newcomers, trippers, photographers, policemen, vendors of lef twing newspapers, union officials, leafletdistributors, working-men in multitude passive content having located their post to admire the throng that earlier, much earlier that morning they had set out to form. The dominant sound is the shuffling of feet, jagged strains of bands tuning up, subdued laughter as if the great vault above is gothic hooped and resonant. The sky in fact is hazy not blue nor asphalt but the haze of clear sunlight behind white dispersing clouds.

The park is filling, swelling, London dribbling people from every street as surrounding hills feed a lake with streams when the snows melt: snow becomes slush before reaching its destination since the colouring of these serious men come by special train from the industrial north has no characteristic of hilltops where fallen snow lies untouched. The gathering, now immense, has lost none of the property of a Sunday, this Sunday morning; the sun is coming out and expertly theatrical picks out the wanton opulence of the banners hanging like regimental standards above the heads of men but reading like pubsigns: a bull, a tree being felled in a sunlit wood, a vintage combine-harvester at work in a field of wheat; for the Railwaymen, a family group at home in a clean Edwardian kitchen, a moustached husband upright as his creed, the family for which he works in attitudes of honest dependence around him. These idealised representations of the working life are history and iconography combined, woven, sewn and painted with uncritical devotion by ladies who had surely done their apprenticeship on the prie-dieu of the church.

Near me is a tall man in a red and black kilt made yet taller by a bearskin, standing idly watching the crowd with the superior confidence lent him by his plumage. I ask him who he is and in a Midlands accent he replies: "Coventry Standard Motors British Legion Pipe Band." There is a silver band nearby also: they stand in a wide circle facing inwards forcing a little pool of space in the mass. They are playing with intent abstraction as if awaiting an inevitable, an irresistible onslaught, rather as I've always imagined the Thin Red Line to have been. I lean forward to see the music. They are playing 'Death or Glory.' The loudspeakers say: "Brothers, there are one or two of us who are acting in an irresponsible way by littering the park. There are leaflets being dropped. Please pick them up and put them in the litter bins."

This is not a demonstration of the word, despite the placards. Leaflets play no part, they are from unwelcome extremists or are advertising later demonstrations for quit_ different causes. Leaflets are little tongues that speak, argue: they may be crushed in the litter bin because this is not a demonstration of the word, it is a demonstration of presence. It has statements certainly, or a statement: it will be on the television news later today, and in the Monday morning papers, not the voice nor the headlines nor the copy but the pictures. They say there are a hundred thousand souls here. They have come, they have organised and travelled and assembled, to pose for a picture. By no means ignorant of the reasons for their journey, by no means inarticulate, they have nothing to say that requires words.

I make my way to flag No 1, which is to be the head of the march. A short blackhaired man is moving swiftly through the crowd with an armful of papers crying: "Bring the Tories down, bring the Tories down." The papers have the pink masthead of the Workers Press; he is finding few takers. Ahead I see the Mineworkers, who are to be the first contingent in the march, and there near them a group of quiet men beneath the drabbest banner in the park, black letters on white, reading: Back the campaign, Attack the Bill. This is the TUC General Council party, who will form the front rank of the procession and make the speeches in Trafalgar Square. Now, neither marching nor orating, they seem faintly out of place, altar-boys accustomed to wait in the vestry before the ceremony today uncomfortable under the eyes of the congregation.

Among the Mineworkers, judging by the banner, the place of honour has gone to the North Gawber branch of the Yorkshire section. This banner is fitted on a frame which runs on wheels; it shows a staircase ascending to a rising sun in the clouds. A miner is climbing the staircase, his arms raised up to the apocalyptic rays, and in the sun is the legend 'Socialism.' Each stair has a label, from the bottom: ' Soci“1 Security,' 'Family Allowances,' Nationalisation,' 'Five Day Week,' 'Health and Peace,' and 'Prosperity and Happiness.' This last, the top step, is an inferior goal to socialism, the sun: this if nothing else, this dedication to an abstract cause, gives the banner the air of a relic treasured from another age.

I recognise Vic Feather in the party. Beside me a man in a blue windcheater greets a younger man. "Hallo, brother." " How is it, brother? " This younger man has the job of counting the number of demonstrators for the TUC. I look round the multitude that now extends across the park and ask him how he will do it. "Oh, just going to guess," he says. "Double the number the police say and you're never far wrong." The crowd is still growing. A steady stream flows from Marble Arch where coaches are parked along the tarmac path to preordained flag positions. Vic Feather shakes hands as they pass. "Alright then Vic ?" "What kept you, lads? Look at the time." "Sorry Vic, we ain't got no money." It is a quarter to two. The holiday spirit bred in Private trains and unaccustomed places Pervades the crowd. The sun shines. One Of the TUC party says to another: "I've never seen anything like this; this'll i'•ake 'em begin to think."

It is intoxicating to be part of a great mass and yet I an outsider am more part Of the hundred thousand than they. Their loyalties, their identities, their eyes, centre on the symbol of their locality, the banner; the crowd speaks with many voices not loudly in any ana 'It no single mind. Thus the unexpected sense, belied by the aerial view which would be a park the colour of hair, the colour"of many heads, that this is a small crowd, a manageable crowd, each man close enough at any one time for his individual separateness to be recognisable. The unceasing herd that sinks into the Oxford Circus tube station at halfPast five has more about it of the Long March than these: commuters with nothing in common but their destination reveal in their mass facelessness only one characteristic, which is singlemindedness. This Splash of humanity on to the mirror of the Park is always separating and separating again into droplets whose tension presents a clear surface, a boundary, even When there is no intervening space.

These men are out for the day. The never-mentioned power of these mass demonstrations is that today, now that the Privacy of the bathroom has extended to travel, entertainment, work, this is the only circus left, this and the football stadium. What is the power of an empty stadium? The circus is the ring of spectators, the unaccustomed unity round the sawdust Of"banks of unfamiliar faces: let the elePhant run away, the high wire snap, the circus is in us. Near me a man has fast hold of a little boy with one hand and in the other a bulging brown plastic holdall. In it I can see a cucumber, a Thermos flask, copy of the Sunday Times, some sandWiches in polythene carefully made last tlight or in the cold dawn this morning in a Yorkshire house, the little boy rudely Woken and slowly accumulating excitement as his eyes ungum. Today, even grey as it is so early, is the day of the Mating down south, the day of the circus, the day of the great match when they too Will be players. On the door the knock of a Mate waiting in the cold because there's a blis to catch to the station: the little boy dressed like going to chapel — but this Chapel is three hours away and in a different world—beginning by anticipating here on the familiar threshold facing the familiar subdued light of the Sunday street.

The television cameramen are here, the TUC party has drawn itself into ranks and the police are clearing a way. "Is the band ready?" The band strikes up, the cameramen walk backwards, the leaders of the march walk forwards, the miners and I follow, so we emerge slowly out of the park towards Park Lane. At Marble Arch some cars are held up by the procession and one hoots. The marchers respond with a rattle of jeers and all around I hear an easing of throats and face muscles at the first encounter with an identifiable enemy, A union-baiter, A Tory, a capitalist, a man in a car wanting to go elsewhere, anywhere, other than in the direction of the march.

The procession moves deliberately. On either side pressed up to the kerb the spectators wear the precise expression that many years of watching television has programmed them to adopt when faced with the unusual across an unmeasurable electronic distance. One or two men clap, with that restrained but revealed approval that only the English have the nerve or timidity to associate with politics: we are the circus on the move through the town, and the curious inhabitants stop, applaud, pass on. "Come and join us," the marchers cry to the watchers. The spectators remain motionless but the marchers move on, faces glowing, for now they have committed the act of limitation: they have called themselves "us," they have welded themselves together into a body that must be joined, that has bounds; no longer possible as I did to wander into a throng on a patch of grass. The movement is on the move, has acquired its own impetus: we of the circus are veterans of the last five minutes. To join would be an act of bravado, to cross the three foot gap between the static and the active would be to leap an ideological gulf. This knowledge makes us in the march conscious of a superiority, even the contempt, that an actor feels for his audience, the soldier for the civilian in time of war.

The sunlight is bright as we enter Park Lane. On the right the mass in Hyde Park sems to be unmoving, undiminished, yet the procession is fed by it. The sound of treading feet fills the air; the band at the front plays, and stops, and plays again. When the tune is familiar, two or three marchers fall in with the words, but soon fall silent with an embarrassed laugh. Here at the front behind sober dignitaries who are avoiding remarking that they are being filmed as they walk the atmosphere is constrained. The traffic lights pathetically uninformed about the changed state of affairs turn amber and red against the march and are triumphantly ignored. This happens several times on the march and each time the same secret thrill can be felt as the marchers, motorists to a man, accelerate past the mechanical policeman with the angry eye, charging their virility like a battery on the impotence of the lights.

Now we are passing the Dorchester. There is a man in our contingent with a voice dark-brown like lumpy gravy who has been shouting "Tories out!" at intervals. "You capitalist swine, come down here," he cries, smiling at his comrades. Temporarily through his eyes I see Park Lane as a realization of a symbol. Yesterday ears dull with machine-roar piling up the overtime working the hands together with acid soap to eat off the ingrained factory grease; today outside the Dorchester, the Hilton, there are Rolls-Royces and doormen in comic uniforms. There it is, the wealth incarnate of a different species of man. The political consciousness of the working man drinks great draughts of water clear as crystal, water of the mind, water of identity, from marching down Park Lane. London is a magnificent city to the day-tripper, a fleshpot to be desired, to be withheld, to be renounced. The Puritan ethic instinct in the Northerners awakes and revels in the clarity of the issue. "Nine, ten, eleven, twelve," they chant behind me; "See some factories for yourselves."

The gravy man's eye lights on a sign on a building : C. Hoare and Co., Bankers, Established before 1673. "Get your money out of the bank," he shouts, "before we take it from you." To the surprise of the welldressed onlookers he cries: "You're like something from outer space!" He is blown With the power of him who does over him who watches. It is a sense of this power, which is metaphysical not physical because it is to do with superior certainty, that is at the root of a true revolutionary mentality. The protester discovers that the more violent his actions, the stronger by Implication is his commitment, and thus he enjoys spiritual dominance; he has learned that while determined action does not necessarily arise out of moral commitment, moral commitment does spring ready armed out of determined action. The deed precedes the creed. In its faintest early stirrings the man marching by me was responding to this discovery: the outrageous deed lends strength to the mass, to the political image, and more significant than these, to the blood and tissue of the human creature that is its author. As we pass the Playboy Club the gravy man shouts : "Get 'em down, girls, there's a big buck down here'll get that little pouf off yer!" Not a particularly big man, but big with outrage, virile because he is the action among the embracing reaction.

The band by chance is silent as we round Hyde Park Corner. I look back over half a mile of waving banners and hear the pipes and bands and voices that follow, feel the power of numbers. "Can't play past Buckingham Palace," says someone, " in case the corgis are asleep." Gently said, no tumbrils in this voice nor in the quiet laughter that greets it. All along Piccadilly passing people stand and watch their backs only regarding the half-breed paintings that hang on the railings of Green Park, individual paintings but not painted by individuals. The sun goes in, briefly. A man by the bus stop is reading a Sunday paper; I catch a headline: Tories plan even tighter Union laws. As the sun reappears there is a sporadic chant: "Class war in, class war in, in, in." Vic Feather four or five rows in front of me waves up at some unsmiling Indians in a window.

Come and join us," say the marchers.

As we enter Piccadilly Circus again the band is silent and there is a hush full of the shuffling of feet. A cinema on the right advertises "Naked England : the British Way of Sex." Naked England swings solemnly round Eros, its mental processes stripped of trousers, underpants, but revealing not obscenely the tender hopeful unviolated bodies of children. Those who watch chew gum leaning on as impassive as the railings. The blocked cars do not hoot. There are distant sounds from more vociferous parts of the procession to the rear which wave forward at diminishing volume: "Up Heath! Right up! Up Heath! Right up! " Marchers and spectators laugh, the band begins to play. In England it is the music hall that will defuse the revolution.

We are approaching Trafalgar Square and the sound of male voices singing mixes with the band. The National Gallery is alive with heads all gazing towards us; I count five police vans beside the Sun-Life of Canada building. The square seems to be full already. On the pediment of Nelson's Column a platform has been erected, and above it is banked a full male choir. About forty black-blazered men, displaying forty badges on the top left-hand pocket, profiles to their conductor, they are singing 'The Red Flag'. a sound full but not brash harmonising part against part and so skilfully obliterating the coarse and rabble-rousing rope of melody. Any lingering defiance in the ranks of the marchers Pntering the square is suppressed by the relentless decency with which the choir chloroforms the sunlit Sunday noon.

After 'The Red Flag' we hear 'We will kill the Bill' sung to the tune of 'Onward Christian Soldiers.' I am bemused at the dislocation between the intentions of the assembly, headlined on every placard, and its tone; this tone is precisely captured by the men with wellcombed hair singing seconds to 'Onward Christian Soldiers ' with undetectably different words. The paternally-inclined police chiefs now hive off the TUC leaders and conduct them round the back of Nelson's Column. The rest of us crush into the square itself. I force my way with determination entirely out of place in this genial gathering to a position from which I can see choir and TUC leaders. The choir are singing a song I don't know but that seems vaguely familiar. My eye falls on a clear hand-printed placard that reads: "The Industrial Slavery Bill, Created by Adolph Heath and Eichmann Carr, the illegitimates ons of Satan, Spawned on the floor of Hell." As the song ends I realise they are singing: "Amen, amen, amen, amen." My mind connects the sight and the sound and I follow the idea that this is primarily a religious event, the battle a religious battle, not in stated content but in tone. The faithful are largely middle-aged, they see stairs for them to climb, they see a rising sun ahead, call it what you will, and they se dark clouds intervening. There is reason in the debate over the Bill, but here in Trafalgar Square before the wide pulpit on the Column there is no place for reason. There is a joke among students at present that God is alive after all but does not wish to become involved: nobody told these trade unionists that God had been thought to be dead because God is a projection of a certainty and their certainty is in the classwar. God the supremely English non-interfering Court of Last Resort is committed to the classwar as is his nature on the side of the underdog. The morally equivocal period of reformation when Harold Wilson set high church against low church is now past, and certainty may flourish under the benign eye, in the face of the evil emanations, of the Devil. Religious conviction requires persecution: the trade union movement is no exception. The absence of mass hysteria, of mob oratory, testify to the unease the protesters feel about the seriousness of the persecution. The weakness of the demonstration is a function of the complexity of the Bill, out of the 150 clauses of which the union leaders are unable to pull a recognisably vicious devil.

fhe TUC men are now sitting in two rows looking like the Soviet Politburo reviewing a Mayday parade. The choir, in credibly, is singing Yellow Bird.' Men squeeze past me, breath heavy with exhaled beer, and intensify the crush; bodies are pressed together without mass emotion. No one joins in with the choir, who are now singing 'We'll keep a welcome in the hillsides when you come home to Wales.' In a valiant attempt to locate the geographical heart of the multitude they sing in quick succession. 'On Ilkley Moor b'at Hat,' 'Do ye ken John Peel,' ' Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner' and ' Dear old Glasgow town '; but the multitude has not heart. A Welshman in front of me has made a trip to Petticoat Lane and returned with a long blonde wig: " In'it lovely then?" "I always knew your wife was bald, Harry," "My boy put it on and I said, Christ take it off you look just like your mother."

Tom Jackson comes on to the platform and there are mild cheers. It is three o'clock. I read a placard: "General Feather, call out your 9,000,000 troops and kill the Bill." " Don't push mate or you might cause an Ibrox here." The men around me couldn't get any closer yet everywhere I see that amused detached look that says I'm not actually part of this I just want to stick around and see what happens. At half-past three Sidney Greene stands up and says: "I have just been told that at this very moment the last contingent is leaving Hyde aPrk." I climb on to a fountain. There are isolated cries of " General Strike!" and I notice to my right and left two groups waving orange banners that read: Support the Postmen, General Strike. "This is the biggest demonstration held in London this century," says Sidney Greene; it's true the square is full and not half the procession is arrived yet. Now Vic Feather speaks. He talks about D-day: "D for demonstration, D for determination, D for democracy," He speaks as if at a Guildhall dinner aggressively but on a full stomach lacking the sharp periods of mob oratory. The response is modest. There is revivalist fervour waiting in the mass for the man who will tease it from them but no such man comes: such a crowd is a woman the act of arousal is sexual and no meandering gentility however strongly motivated by desire will achieve the penetration and excitation of the act. The Wesleyan preachers knew it as the new Left knows it but moderates such as the TUC abhor such carnal knowledge. An assembly of a hundred thousand is not moderate. There is a conflict remaining unresolved, between the power of force admitted in the calling up of this army, and the protestations of legality made by its generals. This conflict paralysis simultaneously the force of argument and the argument of force.

Beneath me on the fountain edge the conflict is acted out in miniature. As the speakers have been fulfilling their destinies scripted in quieter hours the orange banners of the general strikers have forced nearer to me and thus nearer the platform. The crowd is being penetrated by a determined file led by a young man in a donkey-jacket clutching a loud-hailer. They stop and with the intention of drowning the speaker they shout : " General strike!

as they shout I learn they are not one or two but very many. They move with order and determination, copies of the Workers Press in their hands. Their shouts interfere effectively with the measured sound-waveS from Nelson's Column. "Get off yer knees! Stop crawling to Heath!.. . " They are mainly young but have neither the appearance nor the accents of students. Now the donkey-jacket with the loud-hailer is below me and some men in the crowd nearby are objecting: "Shut up can't you?" A middleaged woman in a fur-tipped rust-coloured coat turns round and says in a subdued voice: "Shut up and let's hear 'em speak."

Donkey-jacket: "We've 'eard 'em long enough. (Through loud-hailer) General strike! General strike!

Fur-tipped: You just shut up.

Donkey-jacket: What you know about it then missus?

Fur-tipped: I've been e. trade unionist since 1931 so I should bloody well know so just get lost.

Donkey-jacket: What union yer in? Fur-tipped: NALGO.

Donkey-jacket : Might have guessed. (Through loud-hailer) General strike! General strike!

Fur-tipped: (pulling at loud-hailer) Give me that.

Donkey-jacket: (ignoring her) General strike!

Fur-tipped : Show what a little sod you are you need a thing like that to shout through what's wrong with your natural voice?

Vic Feather: (from platform) Let me speak please, let me speak. You have never seen in this country so big and united a demonstration...

Fur-tipped; Let 'im speak. Let us listen.

Donkey-jacket: Listen what for? He's sold out. How many times do you have to hear him sell out?

Fur-tipped: What do you know about it?

Donkey-jacket: I know they ain't going to stop the Bill by talking. Only a general strike'll stop it. General strike! General strike!

Fur-tipped: You know nothing about working class politics, you're not working class, you're just bloody hangers-on. I know what I'm talking about, I'm a miner's daughter, I'm not a bloody Tory.

Vic Feather: (from the platform),. . NIRC — Nirc! What a title! We're not going to be governed by a nerk... I'm for common sense...

Donkey-jacket: Get off yer knees, Vic, Furtipped: Bloody little outsider why don't you sod off you little sod.

Donkey-jacket: Knickers!

The crowd I see from the fountain is docile and this makes the placards comic: Wanted Robert Carr for attempted murder of free Trade Unions; Kill the Bill.Men who fought in a war against a fascist state and whose imaginations are too sluggish to embrace Heath and Hitler simultaneously listen without anger as Jack Jones speaks: " The Bill is totalitarian in concept, it's a step in the direction of a Fascist state..." A man smoking below me flicks a butt into the blue water of the fountain where it hisses and circles like a torpedo Without a boat to sink. The union leaders attempt to sink a heavily located boat without a torpedo. "The Bill is inherently Wrong," cries Hugh Scanlon, "what are We going to do about it?" There is a great cheer for this which is the precise question of the hour. "Have we not the right to ask that the trade union movement uses its Whole economic and political force to stop the Bill? " " Yes! " cry the crowd, but only the steady chants from below me suggest how: "General strike. General strike! "

The moderate TUC are in an untenable position: they have stated their outright opposition to the Bill, yet are not prepared to use their ultimate deterrent to make that opposition concrete. It is a cold war: both sides have nuclear weapons, but the Government has launched only a fierce conventional war, and so have psychologically inhibited the unions from what has the appearance of over-retaliation. The Government has by-passed the danger of nuclear holocaust by making its provocation bewilderingly vague; and now the deterrent held by the unions no longer has credibility. They have shown they lack the will to use it in this gradualistic minuet, where the Tory leader conducts the orchestra.

As Tom Jackson stands up to speak he is greeted with the strongest applause of the afternoon. Certainly this is partly sympathy for the postmen in their strike, but it is also relief at the ergergence of an issue where the battle lines are laid down, the nature of victory and its terms pre determined as also the nature of defeat.

Once a strike has gegun, traditional loyalties may align themselves with a con tented heart: in the cheer for Tom Jackson is contained the pleas, Show us our enemy, show us our goal, tell us to kill for it, tell us to die for it, only save us from uncertainty.

" We can get sympathy," he says, "We can get it by the bucketful. What we need Is cash. We stand now like the Thin Red Line holding back injustice " (yes, this is the battle)" . . . We had believed thatt his dispute had been deliberately provoked by a new management trying to break Post Office trade unionism. Now we are not so sure. It seems that the Government is taking a hand, that hard-nosed men are taking over and deliberately trying to des troy our unity" (ah, the enemey!)!. They fail!" (That will be our victory) " We will not crawl back and accept the pittance proffered bly the Post Office" (that would be our defeat) " ... Support for the UPW is support for a better tomorrow for all working men and women. This is your fight. Our defeat will be your defeat! Our victory will be your victory!" (Yes, yes, that is our certainty!) It is nearly five o'clock, and I leave in search of a cup of coffee. Unbelievably the march from the park has not ended even as I cross Haymarket to a café. "If you all hate the Tories, clap your hands," they sing. Clap clap, clap. On the placards: "The Right to Strike is the Right to Higher Living Standards." The coffee is expensive and unpleasant; all the while I drink it the demonstrators march past. I wonder what if we have no right to higher living standards? Or what if that right has to be fought for and won and what if the price of victory is the defeat of somebody somewhere in another company another county another country far away even over the seas where the sun shines every day and the mineral resources are apparently inexhaustible? The demonstration now through plate glass offers the answer clap your hands if you all hate the Tories louder now and louder. A man who claps his hands makes a short sharp noise by hitting himself.

Bored by the after-dinner speeches unpreceded by a heavy meal I idle down Whitehall and into Downing Street. The cul-de-sac, rain cloud grey, catches a cold wind against which the windows of No 10 are tight shuttered above the helmets of bored policemen. The sun which is low in the sky does not penetrate through any of the many passages to the seat of power. Past the iron railings, the hanging tree and down the steps are three ambulances from the Weybridge (Airscrew) Division of St John's Ambulance. I overhear a well-dressed little boy say to his mother: "Looks as though your battle's going to be commenced soon, mother, look what's down there." But the battle is not commenced. This is no commencement.

Today Monday in the park I am hurt by the premature spring that enhances loneliness. Winter is an alibi for unhappiness as is night but spring and sun force open the eyes. This is commencement or renewal and so hurts in that birth is out of old matter, even in spite of it puncturing it. The old smell is of decomposition. The butality of the spring is that it destroys the past and the fragrances of the past in the interests of its revolution which is in turn the earth's revolution. To this brutality given no choice we submit.

Yesterday in the park we swept the fallen leaves of last autumn into a great heap and urged them to strain for life, and our gardeners went round the lower branches of the trees with secateurs and clipped off the sharp and visible buds.

I watch a park-keeper for a while as he spears the litter on his spike. When he comes near me I ask him why he chooses to do this job. He says, "Because nobody tells me what to do, because I'm left free, free in my mind. And now that winter's over, the worst of it's past..."

This article, by Bill Nicholson, was the judges' unanimous choice in the Descriptive Writing category of The Spectator's New Writing Competition. Bill Nicholson is 23. He went from Downside to Christ's College, Cambridge, going down last year with a double first in English. He occupied various positions on Varsity, the Cambridge undergraduate newspaper, in the course of which he prudently interviewed BBC officials about the BBC's graduate trainee scheme. A year later he applied for such a traineeship and was accepted. He is presently working on the Today programme and has another eighteen months of training before him. Congratulated on his acumen he says, "It was not quite as ruthldss as it seems. But getting into the BBC is like planning a military campaign." He also says that he spent his first eighteen months at Cambridge falling in love and his second eighteen months falling out again. He is still out, "unfortunately." He describes himself also as " a prolific failed writer " with three unpublished novels and three unperformed plays written so far.