The Games People Play

By Dave Shonfield

Three men plucked from the tide and times of the post-Olympic city of London decide change is in the fevered air.
A City Trader.
A taxi driver.
A man who escaped the Nazis and returns to the East End.
These men, one of which remembers the last Olympics in 1948 London, now view the world of Boris and Lady Gaga with a satirical irony on the ‘optimism’ of the Great and the Good.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mirador Publishing
• Release date: Mar 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781910530337

Dave Shonfield

A South Londoner born and bred, now a retired Civil Servant, Olympic Times is Dave Shonfield’s 3rd novel. Branching out from Crime—The Coincidence of the Palm House Murder—he returns to satire (his 1st novel being The Stakeholders), having been motivated by the peripheral power of the Olympics.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Browsing in the library soon after the London Olympics, I came across E.L. Doctorow’s RAGTIME in the Classic section. I had read this book about ten years ago, and never thought it a Classic. So I got it out again and reappraised it. Doctorow had been fascinated with writing the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL, and RAGTIME was his own endeavour to create it. Centred around New York, it was his masterpiece. A remarkable take on his hometown in the early years of the 20th century. It encapsulated the Jazz age. I had forgotten how informative and satirical it was. It was a time of change, new technology, of innovation, great progress in many fields and immense personalities; Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Scott Joplin, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbitt, Admiral Peary and Booker T. Washington, amongst others. Interwoven with these larger- than -life characters, he told the story of a wealthy white family living in New Rochelle, New York. They owned a fireworks and munitions factory. He never gave them a name, just called them Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother and Grandfather. It took the second reading for me to establish how effective this was in the narrative. The dramatic events at the time are included in the storyline; fact mixed with fiction. Although now the ‘fiction/documentary’ novel is quite a common form of the genre, when Doctorow wrote Ragtime in 1976 the format was unusual to say the least. Subsequently it was voted one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library editorial board.

There’s no doubt that America at the beginning of the 20th Century was more engaging than Great Britain in 2012. Apart from being a more interesting time, it was reckless and devil-may-care. You could hardly say that about Great Britain in 2012, with all its woes. However the possibilities of a new, exciting --- I wouldn’t go so far as to say era --- but certainly an occasion grabbed our attention. Notwithstanding that spirit of adventure over a century ago, over here, rather than over there, our Olympic exploits lit the torch to a recreational euphoria that spread rapidly across the country like wildfire, contrasting sharply with the general air of austerity that was prevalent at the time. They raised the spirit of the nation. Would you believe it, the state of the games was more popular as a daily topic of conversation than the state of the weather? Very Un-British-Like. Even the couch potatoes began to stir, and we can thank the Olympics for giving the country a new lease of life, and providing the incentive for this novel.

It’s against the background of three Olympics that I relate the story of Polish immigrant Joachim Walowski.

In my attempt to include contemporary personalities and events in the narrative, I realise I am hampered by the lack of savoir vivre, esprit de corps, some may even say the lack of talent about. Front page news of the exploits of One Direction, Simon Cowell or the Duchess of Cambridge are common place in the tabloids but hardly earth-shattering. Where are the modern-day Houdinis, Freuds, Henry Fords and J.P. Morgans? There is one such ‘character’ however, who is out of step with the age, who stands out like a beacon both in his personality and in his actions and I use him as a template.

I don’t have to name him. You know who I mean. The Victorians would have loved him.

However in this digital age life is more mundane and circumspect, but still with its fair share of scandals. Perhaps more than its fair share; for those happy, smiling faces from the Olympics would soon change into images of incredulity. Shocking events that somehow had been covered up for decades. Was it coincidental that they emerged after the success of the Games? Or had they been covered up on purpose? Here we were thinking that we were at the top of our game, but we were far from it, at least two of our trusted institutions, the BBC and the Police, in particular the South Yorkshire Police had let the public down badly, the extent of the conspiracies were still emerging. And there was also the ongoing police enquiry --- Operation Weeting --- into the News of the World phone hacking allegations that had so far- reaching implications that the paper had to be shut down and the Prime Minister set up a separate enquiry under Lord Leveson. No doubt by the time this is published some action will have been taken on his recommendations. The freedom of the press is at stake here.

We now have all kinds of knowledge available at the flick of a button and so regrettably I can never match the off-the-cuff, instant spark of Doctorow’s Ragtime. And he sets an awesome standard!

Dave Shonfield September 2013

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

The opening line from Charles Dicken’s

‘A Tale of Two Cities.’

PART 1

The London Olympics 2012

As things have turned out I reckon we have knocked Beijing --- with all respect to our Chinese friends and greatly though I admired those games --- into a cocked hat.

Boris Johnson

The Mayor of London.

1

2012 was an extraordinary sporting year for Great Britain, both for the participants and for the spectators. Apart from the enormous success of Team GB in the Olympics and the Paralympics, there were remarkable individual sporting achievements; personal goals attained by Andy Murray (Tennis—his first Grand Slam at the US Open), Bradley Wiggins (Cycling –Winner of the Tour De France) and Rory Mcllroy (Golf --- Winner of the PGA Championship).

When was the last time we had three superstars in one year?

In addition, Tony McCoy became National Hunt Champion Jockey for the seventeenth consecutive year. Yes, 17 years in a row (and he has since added another couple). If that wasn’t an amazing achievement then what was?

The country was so taken with its sporting heroes that attention was temporarily diverted from the two massive Albatrosses hanging around its neck --- The National Debt estimated at £150 bn. and the Financial Crisis, following the collapse of some of our most prominent banks having to be bailed out by the taxpayer.

It was not quite like the Wall Street collapse of 1929, but the next worse thing.

Property prices were falling across the country, and the suicide rate was rising. And part-time jobs were now the norm, with zero-hours contracts. The Powers That Be were in the process of dismantling what was left of Her Majesty’s Civil Service. Privatisation by stealth. Think of the Chinese Army, the Indian Railways, the National Health Service, all employing thousands upon thousands of people, who subsequently boosted the economies of their respective countries. The Civil Service founded in 1855, whose numbers and conditions of service have been scrutinised so often during its existence as a first priority for re-organisation and cut-backs by various governments since the war, was now at its lowest ebb. Once the envy of the world, its conditions were being pared to the bone to match a cowering, lean, non-unionised private sector that was supposedly the way forward; the key to turning around the country’s fortunes. Private was good, public was not so good, or so it was alleged. There were too many Civil Servants and the country simply couldn’t afford them. There would never again be golden handshakes after thirty years plus service with good pensions and the obligatory engraved watch or clock (unless perhaps it was in the banking industry). Therefore, this time of great sporting achievement couldn’t have happened at a more opportune moment for a Coalition Government deep in the mire of austerity. And the star attraction was the Olympics. The Games took the attention away from a bunch of moneyed public school chums, most of them millionaires, with no mandate for tinkering with the nation’s great institutions and playing roulette with the nation’s wealth. Nevertheless they did, as if it was their prerogative to make swingeing cuts to the Welfare State in order to balance the books. The books that had been so discredited by the banks. More than £1tn of public money was poured into the banks following the financial collapse. Mr Brown’s emergency package came with few government-imposed conditions and little calling to future account. In 2012, against the euphoria of the Olympics, 2,714 British bankers (how specific can you be?) were paid more than £1m –12 times as many as any other EU country. When the EU unveiled proposals to limit bonuses to either one or two years’ salary (very generous you may think) with the agreement of shareholders, there was fury in the City. How dare they! (More ammunition for the Euro-sceptics). Luckily their friends in high places were there to first strongly object and then to rescue their bonuses; at the British taxpayers’ expense, the Treasury took to the European Court to challenge the proposals. The entire government demonstrated, not for the first time, to be one giant lobbying operation for the City of London. Between 2011 and 2013 bank lending fell in more than 80% of Britain’s 120 postcode areas, helping to stifle economic recovery, and resulting from the Bank of England’s fruitless attempt to control the situation with its Quantitative Easing. Banks may have enjoyed state aid on an unprecedented scale, but their bad behaviour just got worse—and yet they suffered no retribution. Not one banker was indicted and taken to court. Contrast this with the fate of the unemployed, in the austerity programme that followed, as state support at the bottom end of society was stringently cutback.

To combat the austerity measures, gambling was on the increase and there was a proliferation of betting shops springing up on the high streets of our towns and cities to match the numerous charity shops. In such desperate times, betting and charity were both growth industries. Sophisticated, fixed-odds, touch-screen casino machines were attracting a nation of gamblers; people who were losing their jobs and their homes were looking for the ‘Quick Fix.’ And if it wasn’t betting shops, cards/roulette in the casinos, it was a form of the Eton Wall game, where most of the population went to the wall (approx 70%). In order to plug the enormous gap in the balance of payments, ‘we would all be in it together.’ But this wasn’t a likely quote by someone like Jack Jones, from his council house in south east London, (always assuming that the ex-President of the TGWU and leader of the Pensioners’ Alliance who had fought in the Spanish Civil War had not recently passed away) but by a multi-millionaire Prime Minister, who apart from his official residences in Downing Street and Chequers, has properties in Notting Hill (town house) and in Dean, Oxfordshire (country retreat). Was it right that he was claiming for bull-dog clips and a staple remover from the taxpayer? Petit Bourgeoisie you might say. Perhaps we might ‘all be in it together’, if we went to the same clubs or the same public schools, or were part of the Chipping Norton set. Unfortunately that was a minute percentage of the population.

Their strategy for recovery, Plan ‘A’ wasn’t working and there was no Plan ‘B’. Due to the significant budget deficit, even with drastic cutbacks across Welfare and putting thousands of public sector workers on the dole, the National Debt was increasing by approximately £121 billion PER ANNUM, or around £2.3 billion EACH WEEK. To put this into perspective, the ANNUAL total wage bill for the Premiership clubs for season 2011-2012 was £1.7 billion. It was a colossal deficit, haemorrhaging money like water, so a few million spent on the opening and closing Olympic ceremonies at Stratford, with some pyrotechnics thrown in was a mere drop in the ocean.

Step forward Danny Boyle with his spectacular, but extravagantly expensive, cast of a thousand, ‘Isles of Wonder,’ including Kenneth Branagh and the Queen. Actually the opening ceremony cost £27m, and the closing ceremony £20m. Could a country so much in debt afford such luxuries? It seemed that the usually parsimonious Treasury had signed an open cheque to Lord Coe and the British Olympic Association. The cost of the games had soared from the original promise of ‘a people’s games’ at £2bn—£3bn to the eventual plutocrats’ games at just under £9bn. The public representing an aging nation were never asked if watching elite sport on television for two weeks, ‘really’ cheered them up as against spending £9bn on their local hospital services or even saving some departments from closure. The whole process was undemocratic. There was no choice in the matter. The ‘Bullingdon Set’ did not believe in the pragmatic approach.

‘You have to speculate to accumulate,’ a sentiment attributed to Walter Winchell, a Broadway scribe in the 30s, covering America’s casino gambling culture as well as being a famous broadcaster (whose opening gambit was ‘Good evening Mr and Mrs America and all the ships at sea, let’s go to press’), could be said of the great multi-national companies that had won the franchise to the Olympics. These included MacDonald’s and Coca Cola. First they rubbed their hands, and then they filled their boots. None of them would remember Resale Price Maintenance or what it entailed. Since its abolition by Ted Heath in 1964, Margaret Thatcher had made hay with her privatisation programme, and successive governments have continued the trend. Anything State owned, or price fixed was anathema. The Free Market called the tune, and still does. It is now completely out of control; witness the London property prices, the astronomical salaries of Premiership footballers and the Chief Executives of privatised utilities, banks etc. Even if they fail they walk away with fortunes. In the private sector this new culture to reward failure has become institutionalised. It’s de Rigueur. It’s jobs for the boys, always has been, and always will be unless there is a change of attitudes. In time, if nothing is done about the salary explosion, and none of the political parties seem to have the will to tackle the problem, then football clubs will go out of business. But that would be the least of the country’s worries, for characters similar to Robespierre, Danton and Jean-Paul Marat will materialise and organise a multi-cultural revolution, the likes of which will never have been seen before in Britain and will make Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads look like pussy-cats. Expect unscrupulous London bankers and landlords to be first in the queue for ‘Madam Guillotine.’ (That is if they haven’t crossed the Channel to La Belle France in panic in their private jets first). Time is running out, but meanwhile The Powers That Be are scraping the barrel to find anything left worthy to sell off (perhaps the Royal Mail is the last tarnished jewel in the crown). If it were to go ahead it would be the biggest privatisation since the sell-off of the railways in the 1990s. In that case to isolate the track and signalling equipment into a separate company --- Railtrack--, which is now millions in debt, was ludicrous. Again jobs for the boys! Even Dr. Beeching wouldn’t have thought of that. Don’t we ever learn from history and our mistakes? Well in the case of Afghanistan it’s obvious that we don’t.

However, notwithstanding our disastrous gung-ho foreign adventures, at home let us return to the Elysian Fields and London’s revitalised E.20. Modern history was being made there. It was 64 years since we last hosted an Olympics.

In order to buy a basic lunch for a family of 4 from the official food stalls at the Olympic Park at Stratford, there was little change from £40. £2.80 for a soft drink, £4.90 for a sandwich and £5.90 for a Frankfurter hot dog. An expensive day out if one added the cost of travel and the tickets. Aided by up to 70,000 volunteer ‘Games Makers’, and over 13,000 military personnel acting as security (G4 had failed miserably in this respect), the multi-national companies’ outlay was negligible. Although for security reasons you couldn’t bring in your own bottled water, you could purchase a small bottle on site for £1.60. After much discussion the Authorities did allow empty water bottles to be refilled at the fountains free of charge. Well, hey, hadn’t Thames Water (the Chinese had recently taken a stake in it to aid the Australian bankers) recently rescinded its hose pipe ban thanks to the plentiful summer rainfall? Who said democracy no longer works?

From the opening ceremony on 27 July to the closing ceremony on 12 August, London basked in the exploits of top international athletes for an incredible 17 days. And then everything went back to normal. Well not quite everything; naturally the country wanted to celebrate its sporting achievements. So for a time it was still on a high.

With patriotism to the fore, on Monday 10 September over a million people gathered to worship their heroes as they paraded through the streets of the capital. A forest of Union Jacks covered their progress. The Daily Mirror amongst other newspapers issued a souvenir edition to commemorate the GREAT GAMES –and –OUR GREATEST TEAM --- it was comparable to the accolades showered on the victorious 1966 England World Cup Football Team, but that was so long ago now that the memory fades. What a medal haul! 4th in the Olympic’s World Table with 65 (29 Gold, 17 Silver, and 19 Bronze) and the same position in the Paralympics with 120 (34 Gold, 43 Silver, and 43 Bronze). There they were: Chris Hoy, Sarah Storey, Louis Smith, Victoria Pendleton, Tim Bailey, Luke Campbell, Nicola Adams, Jessica Applegate, Charlotte Dujardin, Neil Fachie, Barney Storey, Laura Trott, Mo Farah, Jonny and Alistair Brownlee, Ellie Simmonds, Tom Daley, Dan Greaves, Jason Kenny, Jessica Ennis, and Richard Whitehead to name but a few. The high profile Gold Medal winners were courted by the media, and many were invited to speak at functions, open supermarkets, and champion their own events. For example, Jessica Ennis was already advertising Olay essentials, and Victoria Pendleton, Pantene Pro V shampoo. Together with Louis Smith she had also been invited by the BBC to participate in ‘Strictly Come Dancing.’ Their lives would no longer be ordinary from now on. Public acclaim and the media would transform them into celebrities. Their photographs were in the newspapers and on T.V. and they became as much known to the younger generation as their soccer or pop idols.

Amongst the crowds that day in Trafalgar Square was Grandfather Walowski, who had served with the RAF Polish 303 Squadron based at Northolt, during the Battle of Britain. He had begged his granddaughter Irina, to take him to see the parade as in his confused state of mind (he was approaching ninety and going senile) he had wanted to cheer the young school girl from Walsall, who had won 4 Gold medals at the Paralympics before completing her ‘A’ levels. To him this was exceptional, even for a Pole. Irina had tried to explain that Ellie Simmonds was from Walsall in the north of England, and not from the capital of his beloved Poland. In any case, if she was Polish she wouldn’t be winning medals for Great Britain, but her logic had no effect on her Grandfather’s thought processes. It fell on stony ground. He was fixated on little Miss Ellie, as if he was away once more with the Ewing family at Southfork. Dallas was central to his life in Krakow where he settled after his wife died in Budapest in 1956. He had religiously tuned in every Saturday night on his colour T.V. from the Pewex shop and later when it was moved to Sunday nights. But his additional thoughts superimposed on his fragile brain, as they both sat down on the steps leading to the National Gallery, concerned the Squadron, his Squadron, the 303 Squadron. They had scored the highest number of hits amongst all the allied units during the Battle of Britain, from August to October 1940. He was so proud of that fact that one would imagine he served as a pilot officer rather than being part of the ground staff crew that serviced the battered Hawker Hurricanes. Was it just a coincidence that the Olympics covered the same period, or was his memory clock automatically tuned every year to those few months over 70 years ago, when the fate of the nation was at stake? Irina had no idea what he was thinking about as she fed him a baked Biala Kielbasa on rye bread. His face was as blank as the entry pages on her recently renewed passport. Now she was unemployed there was little chance of her visiting her