I'm All Right Jack (5 page)

“My God,” said Stanley. “I’ve been witch-hunted!”

Stanley went straight to Charing Cross Hospital. Wallace was lying with his right leg in a horizontal cradle.

“Witch-hunted?” said Wallace. “Bad luck. Thank God we never had any nonsense of that sort in Bangkok.”

“They don’t even charge me with anything in particular,” complained Stanley. “Just some business about being associated with Communists. What an extraordinary thing.
I’ve never joined anything at all, not even the Wolf Cubs.”

“Are you going to appeal?”

“I don’t know. Can you?”

“Oh yes. Then it all goes to some chaps called the Three Advisers. God knows who they are. I shouldn’t bother. If you want to defend yourself they’ll say they consider it inadvisable to let you know the exact charges.”

“I see. I wonder if it’s just that I’m no good and they’re doing this to break it gently?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Good gracious, I couldn’t do without you. No, you must have been up to something.”

“Well, I hope your leg gets better. I imagine they’ll let you hop about soon.” He sighed. “And so farewell to the Last Outpost of Privilege. Do they pay people any better outside?”

“Practically everywhere. Industry’s crying out for people. I only stay because it’s the only way to get back to Bangkok.”

“W
ELL
,
THERE’S
only one thing to do,” said Great-Aunt Mildred. “Start painting the bathrooms. No need to waste one’s time. Nothing runs you to seed quicker than idleness.”

Stanley sipped his tea in a melancholy frame of mind.

“It’s the
injustice
of it all,” he said.

“It’s worse than injustice,” said Great-Aunt Dolly. “It’s impertinence. I see no reason why you shouldn’t be a Communist if you want to. It’s a very dim thing to be in my view, but the point is, any gentleman is entitled to his opinions. It’s bad for the working classes, of course, but it never does any harm in a gentleman.”

“But don’t you see, Aunt,” protested Stanley. “I’m not a Communist and I’ve never wanted to be one. It’s all nonsense.”

“My dear boy,” said Great-Aunt Dolly, “in
that
case I
think I’ll go and see the Foreign Secretary about it. It does seem a
great
impertinence.”

“No, please,” said Stanley hastily. “I’m afraid it wouldn’t do any good at all. I suppose there must be something behind it.”

“Well, what?” snorted Mildred.

“I’ve been trying to think. I don’t even know any Communists. Ah, but wait a minute. I seem to remember Philip, Cat’s husband, once did a poster for a Russian cartoon film that was showing here—some comic weasel animal called Igor. Wasn’t much of a success, I remember. I suppose they connect me with him, though I can’t think why.”

“Did he get any Russian money for it?” asked Dolly.

“Well, I suppose indirectly he did. From the distributors, or whoever pays for posters. I know he and Cat lived on it for a month or two, and he was always hanging around to see if there was any more work going. I believe he joined the Anglo-Soviet Friendship thing for a time to try and get some more posters, till he found there was nothing doing.”

“Well, no use crying over spilt milk,” said Mildred energetically. “Care to come to the judo class at the gym, Stanley?”

“Thanks awfully but I think I’ll go and buy some paint,” said Stanley.

Stanley found painting soothing at first, but three days saw the job finished and Stanley’s future as a gentleman still unresolved. One or two of the dogs had pale blue spots in their coats as a result of straying in during the ceiling painting, but apart from Stanley’s recurrent nausea the painting had come off pretty well.

“Why get a man to do it when we can have Stanley?” was Great-Aunt Mildred’s enigmatic comment. She did, in fact, seem pleased, but Stanley was anxious to avoid being available when she came to decide that the whole house needed doing.

Wallace, after one premature reappearance at the office,
now wisely stayed away. With Stanley dismissed, the burden was likely to prove too great, he argued, for a sick man. This decision, taken in enlightened self-interest, forced the Personnel Department to transfer to the section a new man who at once proved extremely competent. It was quickly obvious that he was making a far better job of it than Stanley and Wallace combined, and it was this which paved the way for Wallace’s reposting to Bangkok. It had become the only sensible thing to do with him. Wallace, having proved once again from his own experience that self-interest pays the best dividends, was put on long leave to await reposting to many happy amatory years in Siam.

On the day following the business at the Agyppian Embassy the Coloured Conference returned somewhat
uneasily
to its tasks. Its early bounce and goodwill had begun to evaporate, a circumstance for which the British Minister of State was unable to account. He found himself longing for the goodwill tours to begin.

“I can’t think what’s got into that chap Mahommed, Julian,” he said to his private secretary. “All these veiled accusations. And this stuff today about collusion. Why should we colluse?”

The secretary looked thoughtful for a while.

“Collude,” he said finally.

“There you are. We don’t even know the damned word. And I had a couple of Indonesians glowering at me half the morning. When do the first lot push off to look round factories and council estates?”

“Not till a fortnight tomorrow, sir.”

“You know, I’ve an idea Mahommed’s a bit peculiar. He goes in for Sanity Through Nudity, you know. However, one has one’s duty. I’ll not spare myself.”

The Minister of State’s modest if old-fashioned goal of the House of Lords was so well known that the secretary said: “Exactly, sir” in exactly the wrong tone.

Stanley did not follow the declining fortunes of the Coloured Conference, as reported day by day in the
news
papers
.
Having had a whole fortnight at Her Majesty’s Foreign Office he felt he had done a good deal to help, and he had no particular wish to have much more to do with the business. There must surely be, he considered, other ways in which his expensive education could help the country. But although he felt, on the whole, distinctly
helpful
towards his fellow men, he found it difficult, reading the Public Appointments columns in
The
Times,
to whip up any great interest in what seemed to be an offer. There seemed to be almost daily openings in Nigeria and the Gold Coast, usually for engineers with experience in water conservation, any number of obscure jobs in HM Land Registry or in the spidery offices of provincial Town Clerks, and even a vacancy or two for Research Workers in Bovine Infertility, but Stanley’s painfully acquired English degree hung
uselessly
about his neck, clanking the more heavily as his search for employment lengthened.

“You know, Stanley,” said Great-Aunt Dolly, “they’ve been talking about full employment for years in the
newspapers
, but look how it works out in practice. It seems an excellent thing for the working classes, but nowadays so many people like us have to have jobs it’s all terribly
overcrowded
. Take Polly Walden’s family; she’s the same age as I am. Well, they were rather poor after the First War so when they’d finished with the Kaiser three of her boys had to become clergymen. Imagine. She said herself how
tiresome
it was. Now, they’d be your father’s age and of course, being in the church, they all had to get married, and
all
their children—people your age—have simply had to get jobs. Four of the girls are in shops and nearly all the boys are in advertising.”

“I don’t like the thought of advertising much,” said Stanley. “You know, I think I’d stand a better chance going where there’s a crying need. Have you seen anything about this business of industry crying out?”

“I think industry’s likely to be
very
tiresome,” said Dolly. “And you’d have to go and live in the Midlands. I don’t know if you’ve ever been. It’s depressing.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Stanley. “There must be lots
of places round London, making light stuff. I don’t think I’d go in for anything heavy.”

So when a day had been fixed, Stanley put on his duffle coat and his bowler hat, and took train to Oxford to see a man at the University Appointments Board.

“Oh, yes, it’s quite true,” said the man at the
Appointments
Board. “Firms are always asking us for good chaps, and they usually like what they get and ask for more. We’re gradually breaking down the resistance of industry to the graduate.”

“They’re likely to resist?”

“Oh yes, there has been that tendency. They used to be inclined to say: ‘We want chaps as soon as they leave school so that they know what they’re talking about by the time they’re thirty. Not fellows with their heads stuffed with a lot of useless stuff.’”

“Well, I think that’s very sensible, don’t you?” said Stanley. “Though mind you, I didn’t stuff myself with a great deal.”

“But now it’s all changing,” said the Appointments man. “They like a chap with a first-class degree and they run special courses to train him for the job.”

“I see,” said Stanley, a little discouraged. “I suppose chaps like that would do well?”

“Certainly, in time. It’s my ambition to have university men on the Board of Directors of all the big firms and in twenty years time we shall see it.”

“I wish I were twenty years younger,” said Stanley feelingly. “It should be pretty easy to get a cushy billet when you get that organized.”

The Appointments Board man’s expression altered.

“
Attitude
is vitally important,” he said, a little primly. “One must be prepared to go to Industry and say: ‘This is what I have to offer—intelligence, a trained mind, the ability to learn, and so forth. And
enthusiasm
for the job.’”

“I see,” said Stanley. “I’m sure you must be right; after all, you’ve handled hundreds of chaps like myself.”

The Appointments man began to say: “Well, to be
strictly accurate——” but he seemed to change his mind and went on: “Let me have a look at your paper
qualifications
.”

He began to flip through Stanley’s file.

“Of course, it’s difficult to know what one’s attitude is,” said Stanley helpfully, “until one is faced with one ghastly industry in particular.”

“Which ghastly industry in particular?” asked the Appointments man, looking up.

“No, I mean
any
industry that one might
consider
ghastly,” explained Stanley. “Say a great heavy
thumping
business like iron and steel.”

The Appointments man swallowed carefully.

“Mr Windrush,” he said heavily, “you did say to me just now that you weren’t frightfully good at interviews. I can understand that. But you must realize it’s useless to approach any industry in a frivolous spirit.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Stanley, a little alarmed. “I’m afraid you must have misunderstood me. I really am quite serious about all this.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Mr Windrush,” said the
Appointments
man. “It’s essential. Now, you say here you would actually prefer the production side rather than selling?”

“On the whole yes,” said Stanley. “I feel I’d be more
in
the product that way, and one wouldn’t be badgered so much when sales were going down. I’m sure the sales people get kicked out first.”

“Well, that’s hard to say,” said the Appointments man. “You mustn’t think it’s a precarious life in industry. A firm
might
conceivably go bust, but it’s very rare these days. A man going into industry has very good security of tenure.”

“He has?”

“Oh yes,” said the Appointments man emphatically. “The security of
employment in industry’s practically as good these days as in the Civil Service, and, as you know, people in the Civil Service are hardly ever chucked out.”

How very odd he should say that, thought Stanley. I only lasted a fortnight at the Foreign Office.

“You’re rather restricting yourself, you know,” said the
Appointments man, looking at Stanley’s papers again, “when you say you don’t want heavy industry and you prefer to be near London. You’ll find it a bit difficult convincing a firm that you’d go to any lengths to get in with them, and that’s the sort of spirit they want. However,” he went on, “I’ll sort out some vacancies to suit you.”

Twenty minutes later, with high hopes in his breast and four duplicated vacancy notices in his pocket, Stanley left to catch the London train.

T
WO
OF
Stanley’s letters of application brought courteous though negative replies. He was disappointed that Can-Can Frozen Foods had, to their regret, already filled their vacancy, and somewhat hurt that Worm Castings Ltd had not selected him for their short list. But in the course of the week there came two invitations to attend for
interview
.

“They’re both pretty good firms,” said Stanley, “and they’ve both got a steady future, it seems to me. One depends on people keeping on washing—that’s Spindley’s, they make Fome and Turgy, and the other relies on people eating—that’s Bumper Bars. I’ve never actually eaten one but I’m going to try some today.”

“That sounds a sensible idea, Stanley,” said Great-Aunt Dolly. “And it sounds quite like a slogan, too. Why
don’t
you go in for advertising?”

“No, I must go where they are crying out for me,” said Stanley.

Spindley’s, the English division of the great
Americo-Dutch
-Swedish-German soap and detergent octopus, said they looked forward to seeing him at their Boltley, Lanes, factory on the thirteenth, but after a last-minute
cancellation
, accepted by Spindley’s in view of Stanley’s acute
stomach upset, they looked further forward and said they would be pleased to see him on the fourteenth.

Spindley’s factory (Telegraphic Address, Sprinklefome Arkpark Boltley) lay in the outer fringes of the vigorous Northern cotton town. It had been well and cheaply put up towards the end of the depression in the neglected district of Arkwright Park, but plans to have surrounded it with a small garden city (‘Integrating it with the community’ was a phrase bandied freely about at the time) had fallen through as business prospects revived, and the flat ground had been filled up to the edge of the moors with a fine confusion of sheet-glass works and semi-detached houses.

Stanley’s taxi from the station bumbled over cobbles towards the place, and having come between neat piles of oil drums and an avenue of the sort of ten-foot wooden reels of cable that are so prone to being left out in the weather, stopped before glass doors.

Face to face with industry at last, Stanley perked up and went in out of the drizzle to find his destiny.

“All the other Arts graduates came yesterday,” said a secretary as she showed Stanley to his starting point. “They’re all chemistry graduates today, but we’re fitting you in.”

The chemists had assembled in a glass cage of an office on the first floor of the building, a chubby group with the extraordinary air of juvenility peculiar to chemists. They were mostly gazing through the windows, which looked out on three sides of interminable low stacks of raw bar soap.

“Good morning. Doesn’t it smell clean?” said Stanley, and all the chemists said good morning too, and resumed their gazing.

Stanley had a look at a wall-model of soap production. The chemists presumably knew all about this, and were ignoring it. But like Mr Boyle’s Book of Colours to Pepys, it was so chemical that Stanley could understand but little of it, except that he marvelled at the label
Fatty
Acid
at one juncture. It seemed too like a nickname to be genuine.

Shortly, they were interrupted by the arrival of the
factory manager, cold-eyed in a baggy suit. With him came a collection of battered fellows in white coats and old trilby hats. Evidently a soap-making team, thought Stanley.

“These gentlemen are our top management, gentlemen,” said the factory manager, to Stanley’s incredulity. “Each of you will go round with three of them in turn and be shown the processes. After that there is lunch in the canteen before I interview you.”

“Starting with palm oil,” said Stanley’s first expositor. “Follow me.”

They walked in silence through lanes in the stacks of soap, and up iron stairways. On the next floor up Stanley’s nose twitched and he began to sneeze incessantly.

“Why am I sneezing?” he asked the man.

“Ditto, probably,” said the man. “Particles in the air from that end. That’s the bottom of the Ditto tower, where they’re shovelling it into those hoppers. Most people get used to it quickly.”

“That’s the stuff for—Aaah!—washing things whiter than anything else, isn’t it?” gasped Stanley.

“You’ve got the wrong idea,” said the man. “Leave that nonsense to the advertising boys in Liverpool. It’s a good product, and so’s Fome, but it’s for a different job.”

“Oh, I know it’s good,” said Stanley, “but I can’t persuade my great-aunts to use either of them. They said they tried and they got a rash.”

“They may be exceptional,” said the man. “Quite likely, but I can tell you my daughter-in-law’s baby had her nappies done in both with never a sign of a spot since birth. However, I’m taking you up here to see the palm oil.”

He opened a door and pointed out.

“There it is,” he said.

The palm oil was not, to Stanley, of enormous interest. It was the contents, apparently, of the million oil drums he had passed on the way in. From the door, however, was a fairly comprehensive view of Boltley.

“It’s not as smoky as you might think,” said Stanley. 

“It’s Wakes Week,” said the man, “or you’d see the smoke all right. All the town’s shut down and off to Blackpool.”

“Oh, but you’re not having a Wakes Week. What a shame,” said Stanley. “I’d been meaning to ask about hours and holidays.”

“You can’t leave soap,” said the man, who proved to be the Soap Production Controller. “The kettles must go on, night and day. They’re the next stage, after additives. Follow me.”

The kettles proved to be great vats, and they climbed up more iron staircases to look in the tops of them. They were lit internally and when the porthole was opened Stanley could see a remarkable wrinkled surface below, giving an occasional bubbling puff.

“This lot’s about half done,” said the Soap Controller after a fractional glance. “See how the colour’s changing?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Stanley. “It’s going a sort of appalling grey. Do they have to stand and watch it
all
the time?”

He was depressed if this were indeed the prospect, but the Soap Controller had moved across to look at the next kettle and did not hear him. However, the only other human beings in sight were two chemists at a distant control panel, and one of the chemists candidates was being shown it by his guide.

They saw rough moulds and trimming, stamping and wrapping machinery.

The morale of the girls employed seemed up to par, several whistling in an odd way after they had passed. They spent a little time watching an electric-eye counter, which clicked up as fibreboard boxes filled with containers of Sprinkle passed by on a chute.

“That’s something like Scrum, isn’t it?” said Stanley, to the pain of the Soap Controller. He also tested the electric eye by waving a hand back and forth past it, so that the counter had to be reset.

Stanley had just recovered from his sneezing when the
Soap Controller swapped him for one of the chemists and handed him over to the factory manager.

“I’ll show you the Ditto process, Mr Windrush,” said the manager bleakly.

They began climbing steps again and came out suddenly through a door on to a narrow railed ledge. Stanley,
unprepared
, reeled slightly at the view below, and gripped the rail firmly. They were nearly at the top of the Ditto tower.

“Through there,” said the manager, indicating a
plate-glass
porthole, “are the nozzles spraying the Ditto solution, and a blast of hot air is coming up the tower. That dries the particles and they fall below as powder. Now, which way will the nozzles be arranged?”

If I’m going into detergent production, thought Stanley, I’ll have to be able to answer complicated mechanical questions like that. They wouldn’t point straight down, of course, or he wouldn’t bother asking me. He considered for some time.

“They’ll squirt it in from round the edges, I imagine,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t they point straight down?” asked the manager. “That’s the obvious way. Look.”

He yanked the porthole open and there was no doubt about it. They did all point straight down. A gust of hot Ditto-filled air came out briefly and attacked Stanley.

The manager said nothing, but shut the porthole and set off down the steps.

Stanley took the opportunity of a few quick breaths in the open before going in and down to the bottom of the tower, but it was no use. Once in the Ditto-shovelling room his sneezes came on again. The manager appeared to cut short his explanatory remarks about the Ditto process and led the way to a quiet corner of the bar-soap cutting room.

“Tell me about yourself,” he asked, not without some curiosity.

Stanley blew the Ditto out of his nose, took a deep breath and began.

“Mr Windrush,” said the manager after a while, “you
must realize
why
we are interested in you. It’s not to make better soap—that’s a job for the chemists. Your concern in production would be to make soap
better.
Speeding up processes, time and motion study, efficiency generally, cutting out waste time. Now just tell me quickly why you think you would succeed at that?”

“That’s extraordinarily difficult,” said Stanley. “I mean, you seem to make it terribly efficiently as it is, don’t you?” The Appointment Board man’s words rang in his ears. “I can offer you intelligence, a trained mind, and enormous enthusiasm for the job,” he went on. “With a person like myself with a fresh mind you might well have the whole factory organized an entirely different way.”

“We must decide whether to take the chance, Mr Windrush,” said the manager. He looked at his watch. “Would you make your way to the canteen for lunch? We shall be having visitors from the Coloured Conference later on and we must keep to schedule.”

Spindley’s canteen was patronized, following American practice, by management and workers alike, master and man breaking bread together in a keen atmosphere of democracy and Ditto particles. The food had a robust mass-production flavour and the tables formica tops. All the chemist candidates were chattering together at one table, but Stanley ate apart in a depressed condition.

Three workers joined his table and with a great
flourishing
of sauce and tomato ketchup bottles started to eat.

“New, lad?” asked one of them in a friendly tone.

“Oh, I’m just here having a look round,” said Stanley.

“Tom’ll put you right, lad,” said one of the others over his
Daily
Mirror.
“Always ask the Union man when in doubt, eh Tom?”

“Oh, you’re the Union man?” said Stanley. “That’s very interesting. But actually I was thinking about joining the management as a trainee.”

“Fair enough,” said the man Tom. “I’ve nothing to hide. I maintain there’s the best labour relations in this factory of any in the town. I suppose you went to college?”

“Yes, Apocalypse College, Oxford,” said Stanley. “Do you know it?”

“Can’t say I do, except by repute,” said the union man. “But perhaps you can tell me: how is it that every worker given a state university education wants to become a recruit to the boss class? It’s the same with all the young chaps here from Boltley Grammar.”

“I wasn’t clever enough to get a
scholarship
to Oxford, though,” said Stanley. “You see, my father paid. Apocalypse was his old college too, so I got in.”

“Aye, well perhaps doing that might’ve kept someone else out,” said the man with the
Daily
Mirror
in his blunt Boltley way. “Not that I’m blaming you, it’s the society we live in. I’d like to see a real social democracy with everyone no matter what ’is colour, class or creed standing just the same chance of a job.”

“Hear, hear, Brother Sidebotham,” said the union man. “I concur.”

“Oh, you’re absolutely right,” said Stanley, “but there’s a faint chance I might not get through. Anyway, excuse me, I’ve got to get back; they’re behind schedule. They have to get finished with us before these people from the Coloured Conference start to come round.”

“Excuse me,” said the third man, joining in the
conversation
for the first time, “I hope you don’t mind me asking. Are them your own teeth?”

“Oh yes,” said Stanley, in some embarrassment.

“I thought they were somehow,” said the third man, sticking relentlessly to it. “You keep them nice and white and it just crossed me mind they might be dentures.”

“Well, goodbye,” said Stanley, uncertainly, and took his tray back.

“Tom,” said Mr Sidebotham, “I wonder what these darkies are coming round for? I reckon we could do without any coloured chaps being introduced here as workers while any Boltley chap’s out of a job.”

The third man nodded.

“We ’ad enough of that on the trams,” he said.

Back in Eaton Square the next morning, with all
ex
penses
paid, Stanley was interested to see that an incident had occurred late the previous afternoon at a Boltley soap factory, in which several members of a delegation from the Coloured Conference had been inundated in an apparently accidental release of a large quantity of detergent foam.

There was, he saw, no mention of Ditto having washed them whiter.