Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [613]
She leaned back against a tree, staring towards the horizon.
“You really want to know that? Now?”
“Yes.”
She sighed.
“Oh well, if you must.” She pulled up a long blade of grass and began to wind it around her finger. “No one agrees with me, you know. I mean, if you ask any of the other girl drivers, or the people living around Sarum – what will it be like after this is over? – they will all, every one of them, tell you: ‘We’ll just go back to normal.’ You know what normal is?”
“Just working I suppose.”
“No. Leisure. Domestic servants. Cheap labour. And exploitation. It’s how it’s always been.”
“But you think that will change?”
“Yes. With the whole class system. The war’s changing that. The ordinary people feel they’ve been ordered around too much in the services, but they’ve got used to being something other than servants in people’s houses. They’ll demand a change.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Neither. But the old class society will collapse, and I think that’s a good thing too.”
“Welcome to America,” he said with a smile.
“Oh, I don’t think we want anything like that,” she said.
He was puzzled. “Why not?”
“Too capitalist. All greed.”
He remembered the scene in the market place, and her anger at the G.I.s’ wealth.
“So let me get this straight. You want the people to be free, but they mustn’t get rich, is that it?”
She laughed. “You’re trying to make me look stupid, but in a way, yes.”
“My God, are you a socialist?”
She considered carefully. “No. I mean, not like the Russians – or the fascists for that matter, who began saying they were socialists. But capitalism . . .” she looked for words “ . . . it’s unfair. And it encourages greed.”
“Money’s bad?”
She tapped him on the arm with her blade of grass.
“What a question to ask when you’re almost in sight of Salisbury cathedral. Of course it is. Money is the root of all evil.”
“It’s what you do with it,” he suggested, but she shook her head. “Well,” he went on, confident on his ground, “your Labour Party here may agree with you, but I don’t think the Conservatives will, nor most of the country folk around here. They’re capitalists.”
But to his surprise she disagreed.
“No they’re not. The real Conservative has a sort of feudal outlook: he wants everything to stay the same but he looks after his people: he feels responsible for them. And he doesn’t think they should be tempted into running about after money.”
“Which he has, but he can handle – is that it?”
“Something like that. I suppose you could say many people feel God arranged the classes the way they are.”
“And the socialists – your Labour Party – want the state to organise everyone: but they don’t want the poor to get ahead too much either. So they’ll just break up the wealth of the rich and then keep everyone from succeeding.”
“There are other kinds of success than money.”
“Sure.” A thought had just struck him. “So in fact, the right wing and the left wing in this country – the old guard Conservatives and the Labour people – have exactly the same outlook – a kind of religious paternalism. And the capitalists are just the bad guys in between.”
“I hadn’t thought of it. Yes. I suppose that’s quite true.”
“Nor had I, until I talked to you,” he confessed. “Frankly, I didn’t come over here to fight for either the feudal aristocracy or the socialists,” he added irritably. “I thought this was the home of democracy and individual liberty.”
“It is. And common law. And we abolished slavery first,” she added with a laugh. “But you can’t just put the individual first. It isn’t fair.”
“Life isn’t fair, lady.”
“Not yet.”
“But why can’t you just give everyone a chance to make as much money as they like?”
She stared at him in surprise.
“Because if one man makes money, he must be taking it away from someone else.”
It was a fundamental attitude of European life that Adam Shockley had not encountered before.
“But, you just create more,” he said.
“You may,” she conceded. “But,” she waved her arm over the landscape, “in the last few thousand years, this place has been pretty well picked over.