Days of Hope'

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WITH a long string of television plays over 20 years, Jim Allen has established class - chronicler, poet, political genealogist, mythmaker. He has celebrated our victories and crooned laments for the socialism that might have been but never was because the working class has repeatedly been defeated, betrayed and diverted.

In Allen's work the sense of a personal yearning deeper than mere nostalgia for the lost past - scenes, events, people, early affections, certainties and clarities - is always mixed up with the yearning for a socialist future and rejection of the present.

It gives it resonance and depth, and nourishes and helps fix Allen's enduring class identity. In nothing of his which I've seen is it so clearly expressed as in his six-part 'The Gathering Seed' ', just finished on BBC TV, which is said to be semi-autobiographical.

The first episode (which I missed) was set in the '30s when the hero, Joe Henshaw, was a child. The other five cover about a year in 1945-6 when, demobbed from the army, he seeks his place in the world.

It is set in Collyhurst, a working class suburb in North Manchester, heavily rish oppressively Catholic.

A friend of mine, a long-time socialist of middle-class background, saw some of 'The Gathering Seed' and found it too grim - bleak, unrelieved and ultimately depressing.

True to reality

I can see why. But I - from a similar background in the adjoining • Cheetham area of Manchester - found it marvellously well-reconstructed and essentially true to reality - perhaps even the romanticised Irish socialist grandfather. lieutenants of their order on the exploited and beaten-down workers, the ebbing-back of the working-class upsurge into the constricted channels of narrow private concerns and the 'depressed' average routine of the slaves of Capital.

It is not the cosy world idealised by well-meaning but essentially conservative sociologists and by some socialists from outside the working class who praise the 'old' working class communities for such strengths as their solidarity.

Jim Allen's picture is grimmer because it is the view of an insider - not of one who sympathises or identifies with the proletariat, but of one whose ineradicable identity has been shaped and defined by the sort of conditions that Allen depicts.

It is the view of one who knew that world to be one in which -as a poet speaking of an oppressed nation once put it:

'The men and women whom I have loved, whose hands have held mine, whose touch is fami. liar to me, have had masters over them, have been under the men mean and cruel".

• The conditions are foul: the people are inevitably shaped bythem.

Identity

In fact Allen's great strength is a rock-basic sense of his own identity - together with an ambivalence towards his own working-class background. He angrily rejects the conditions, but sees the answer in the common struggle for a class emancipation, for (in James Connolly's words) "a full, free, happy life — for all or for none"

Allen was active in the Trotskyist movement for 15 years from about 1950. His politics are a honed-down variant of the late 1950s Socialist Labour League - direct action is central, the Parliamentarians and bureaucrats are the enemies who stand between the masses and the bourgeoisie. It is a working-class politics honed down to its syndicalist blood and guts.

Indeed, Allen has done more than perhaps anyone else to Attlee popularise basic ideas common to Trotskyism, syndicalism, and all the other rebellious, rejectionist, and antiestablishment trends in the labour movement.

It is pretty potent stuff when he skilfully clothes it in accounts of working class life and struggles, and explores working-class history using it as a probe.

The series had serious faults - especially the characteristic fault of the school of drama that Jim Allen belongs to, flat didacticism. There are lots of pauses while people 'explain' points and issues to each other.

It slows the series down, •aToly Some of these e..k: sious Some of these intermisare plain tedious, whether it is a small lecture on basic socialism, or we drop in on a YS meeting at Collyhurst Labour Club and stop for a chunk of it.

The series was too loose, seemingly unedited and self-indulgent. This creates an impression of being rambling and directionless.

This is especially unfortunate because the series is conceived on a massive scale, to unfold slowly, with a series of long set-piece scenes - political meetings, a social, a strike meeting, the old man's funeral - strewn like big boulders through the six episodes.

'The Gathering Seed' ends with the hero still not even sure if he wants to be a fighter for socialism. It seems to be intended as the first instalment of drama-memoirs - perhaps modelled on Sean O'Casey's six volumes of quasi-fictionalised memoirs, in which case this is Jim Allen's I Knock at the Door' What is to come _ if it is -will be the most interesting. Allen was a leading militant during very important struggles in the ports and mines in the '50s. I look forward to it.

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himself as something like a modern bard of the working