’I’m sure he would.  But it would be a little too indecent.  Neilson shall do it.  Besides, he’d do it better.  Or do it yourself.’

‘Will you?’

’I will not.  My acquaintance with the subject is inadequate, and I’ve no intention of improving it.’

In the end Peacock did it himself.  It was pretty good, and pretty murderous.  It came out in next week’s number.  I met Clare Potter in the street the day after it came out, and she cut me dead.  I expect she thought I had written it.  I am sure she never read the Fact, but no doubt the family ‘attention had been drawn to’ the article, as people always express it when writing to a paper to remonstrate about something in it they haven’t liked.  I suppose they think it would be a score for the paper if they admitted that they had come across it in the natural course of things—­anyhow, they want to imply that it is, of course, a paper decent people don’t see—­like John Bull, or the People.

When I met Johnny Potter, he grinned, and said, ’Good for you, old bean.  Or was it Peacock?  My mother’s persuaded it was you, and she’ll never forgive you.  Poor old mater, she thought her new book rather on the intellectual side.  Full of psycho-analysis, and all that....  I say, I wish Peacock would send me Guthrie’s new book to do.’

That was Johnny all over.  He was always asking for what he wanted, instead of waiting for what we thought fit to send him.  I was sure that when he published a book, he’d write round to the editors telling them who was to review it.

I said, ‘I think Neilson’s going to do it,’ and determined that it should be so.  Johnny’s brand of grabbing bored me.  Jane did the same.  A greedy pair, never seeing why they shouldn’t have all they wanted.

3

It was at this time (July) that a long, drawn-out quarrel started between the Weekly Fact and the Daily Haste about the miners’ strike.  The Pinkerton press did its level best to muddle the issues of that strike, by distorting some facts, passing over others, and inventing more.  By the time you’d read a leader in the Haste on the subject, you’d have got the impression that the strikers were Bolshevists helped by German money and aiming at a social revolution, instead of discontented, needy and greedy British workmen, grabbing at more money and less work, in the normal, greedy, human way we all have.  Bonar Law, departing for once rather unhappily from his ‘the Government have given me no information’ attitude, announced that the miners were striking against conscription and the war with Russia.  Some Labour papers said they were striking against the Government’s shifty methods and broken pledges.  I am sure both parties credited them with too much idealism and too little plain horse-sense.  They were striking to get the pay and hours they wanted out of the Government, and, of course, for nationalisation.  They were