The Death of William Posters Read Free

twenty-seven, thin faced and wearing a threadbare unbuttonable jacket as he hurried, looking from left to right, along the street and round a corner – dodging his everlasting evertrailing prosecutors. Bill was always in a hurry, travelling furtively, travelling light, an unwrapped piece of bread in his jacket pocket which he sometimes munched at as he went along. Sometimes not as much as that to keep him going, maybe only the smell of an oil rag and even that was rancid.
    But the great and marvellous thing was that they never got him! Bill had been on the run from birth and was more than a match for his persecutors. They could write his name on every street corner, but they’d never catch Bill – hurrying always one street ahead of them, or perhaps even behind, for he was clever and must have his moments of triumph as, from behind a newsagent’s shutter (the sublime light of underprivilege spreading a smile over his good-natured and cunning face) he watches them painting his name big upon some massive waste-ground wall: BILLPOSTERSWILLBEPROSECUTED – just wanting to burst out laughing yet too smart to give himself away.
    He feels a lot as he watches his name being spread out in public. Bill Posters has been infamous in these streets for generations, bandit Posters, as well known or maybe scorned and scoffed at as Robin Hood, justly celebrated in that hundred verse ‘Ballad of Bill Posters’ recited for generations in Nottingham streets and pubs. There’s been a long line of William Posters, a family of mellow lineage always hoved-up in some slum cellar of Nottingham streets. His existence explains many puzzles. Who was General Ludd? None other than the shadowy William Posters, stockinger, leading on his gallant companies of Nottingham lads to smash all that machinery. In any case didn’t Lord Byron make a stirring speech in the House of Lords about a certain William Posters sentenced to death in his absence for urging a crowd to resist the yeomanry? Who set fire to Nottingham Castle during the Chartist riots? Later, who spat in Lord Roberts’ face when he led the victory parade in Nottingham after the Boer War? Who looted those shops in the General Strike? No one has ever proved it, but the ballad sings of it, and historians may make notes for future conjectures. To those who don’t think much about the present upholder of the Posters race he is half-forgotten, invisible, or completely ignored, but those wags and sparks whose hearts he lodges in sustain that image, keep his furtive ever-enduring figure alive as it flits at dusk or dawn down slum streets from one harbouring district to another. The fact that he is never caught indicates the vast population of his friends, and the one sure sign that he is never taken off by the cops is that his name is always being painted afresh on some wall or other. His enemies, though, are equally numerous, and it is even harder to say exactly who they are than his friends. Everyone knows Bill Posters is one of us, and everybody knows that his enemies belong to the people whose emissaries come with pots of paint and describe the fact, legally on some chosen wall, that Bill Posters is going to be prosecuted. Why are they so persistently out to get Bill Posters once and for all, to nail both name and man to the flagpole of that arse-rag, the Union Jack? To write so publicly and often the fact of Bill’s impending prosecution must mean that they had mountains of evidence against him. All of it was false, of course.
    Maybe if he hadn’t been persecuted, Frank thought, he’d have turned out a different man, been a bloke like me who’d got a job at a factory and worked every week for fifteen quid or so. He might have been a good worker for the union and, who knows, in time become a big official – Sir William Posters ‘today went to confer with Beeching, Ford, Robens and Nuffield with regard to the General Strike called for