I'm All Right Jack (9 page)

“S
ORRY
I’
M
a bit late,” said Wallace Hardy-Freeman. “I’ve been recalled to the Office. My re-posting seems to have been postponed a bit.”

“Bad luck,” commiserated Stanley. “But why’s that?”

“It appears HE in Bangkok’s not all that keen to have me back just yet. Anyway, they seem to be short of a Charlie to take these coloured gentlemen around, and they’ve put me down for it.”

“Is that wretched Coloured Conference still on?”

“Heavens, yes. Oh, and a jolly surprise for you. The day after tomorrow I’m going round with one party who are going to have a look at Missiles Limited.”

“God forbid. I didn’t know anything about that. Of course, the management never tells you anything. I
suppose
they’ll stop for little chats with the workers and ask them questions.”

“Oh, I imagine so. They’re mad keen on information.”

“Well, I hope they don’t ask old Knowlesy anything. He always gives the same answer.”

“Did you know there’s a lot of black men coming round this afternoon?” asked Stanley during the morning break.

“No,” said Knowlesy. “We had some Chinamen round a year or so ago. Some bloke with a camera took a picture of them all coming out of the toilets. They’d been inspecting them. Dead funny it looked.”

“That was old Sid done that,” said Perce Carter, looking up from his tea. “Tried to get the local paper to buy it, I remember.”

“Talking of papers,” said Knowlesy, “have a look at page five of that
Reveille.
”

“She couldn’t’ve climbed up that tree dressed like that,” said Perce, looking critically at the picture. “Otherwise
that bra would’ve come clean off. I dunno why I buy this every week.”

“It refreshes your memory,” said Knowlesy. “And it’s all education. Let old Stan ’ave a look. What d’you go on that, Stan?”

In the afternoon the delegates from the Coloured Conference came round. Missiles Limited was a large, sprawling place and the management staff accompanying the delegates was soon exhausted by the tireless inspecting and questioning, and the lengthy discussions in foreign tongues held by most of the delegates with technical advisers they had brought with them.

Stanley was uncomfortable about it. If Mr Mahommed, the Indonesians, the Sikh and the Etonian Burmese were among the party, he wanted at all costs to avoid them. There had been some delay over his afternoon schedule, which allocated him to the avenue of lathes in the main turning shop. Missiles were doing a large contract for flywheels, and Stanley’s fork-lift truck was to carry those which had been completed from the lathes to stacks for crating. This meant that a stout prong had to be fixed to the front of the truck, but when Mr Kite was consulted he ruled that the job should be done by one of the mechanics.

“No question about it,” said Kitey, blowing through his teeth, as was his wont. “That’s not in our contract.”

“We got no one free for another half-hour,” objected Mr Crawley.

“Can’t be done,” said Kitey. “That’s Setting Up. Doesn’t come into driving, and you know as well as I do——”

“Oh, if there’s no one available,” said Stanley, “I could quite easily bolt it on.”

“If you was to do that, lad,” said Kitey, “you’d ’ave the Amalgamated down on you like a ton of bricks, and all our lads’d most likely refuse to work with you.”

“Just for that?”

“Ain’t you got any principles?” asked Kitey. “It’s neither right nor fair, taking work that doesn’t belong to you.”

Mr Crawley went off muttering to arrange for a mechanic.

“You got to keep it strict in front of old Creepy, you know,” said Kitey in a friendly tone. “You know what the boss-class is like. Give ’em an inch and they take a mile.”

“Oh, of course. Sorry.”

“Very difficult getting the boys to toe the line sometimes,” observed Kitey, offering a cigarette. “Do you indulge? They don’t appreciate all the ins and outs of demarcation. You need education. But naturally you got to fight for that too, like everything else. Mind you, I did happen to hear in a roundabout sort of way that you was at a college in Oxford. You don’t mind me asking, do you?”

“No, not at all. Yes, I was.”

“I was up at Oxford once,” said Kitey.

“Were you really?”

“Oh yes. I went to summer school at Balliol College one week in
1946
. Very interesting. Very good toast and preserves they give you at tea-time, as you probably know, of course.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yes. Very interesting too, the way the intelligentsia were sympathetic to the Party, you know. I spoke to a number of them.”

“The Communist Party, you mean?”

Kitey winked.

“Now, now, Brother Windrush. My opinions are between me and my conscience and the ballot box, as they say. Only I did happen to hear in a roundabout sort of way that you was given the push from the Foreign Office for sympathies with the Party.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

Kitey nodded gravely.

“Typical,” he said. “Typical. Privilege and the Press Lords, it’s always the same story. Muzzle the free voice of the citizen. Sack the lot. Lock ’em out.”

“Well, they certainly gave
me
the push.”

“And of course,” said Kitey, waving his hand around them, “
no
idea
how
to
run
an
industry.
Look at this hanging about all the time. A scandal.”

He shook his thin head sadly.

“You might be interested in some books I’ve got at home,” he went on. “I spend a good deal of my spare time reading, you know. Not like some people.”

“That’s very good of you.”

“No, it’s a pleasure. Drop in after work. We’re not far from the main entrance—it’s on your way to the station. It’s number eighteen, third road to your left,
on
the left. Street of terraced houses.”

“Thanks very much.”

“Not at all. It’s a pleasure to find people take a serious interest in reading.”

Mr Kite went off, and Stanley stood despondently at the door of the shop waiting for the mechanic. Kitey seemed determined to improve and recruit him. In the distance he could see the coloured delegates coming out of the canteen and going into the foundry. After twenty minutes they emerged, picking at their clothing where flying droplets of metal had singed it. One or two appeared to go home, but the remainder went resolutely on and disappeared into the engine fitting shop.

Presently the mechanic came back from the other end of the works and fixed on Stanley’s prong.

“I hope you don’t mind coming all the way back just to do this,” said Stanley. “But it’s a question of
demarcation
.”

“It doesn’t worry me, mate,” said the mechanic. “It’s your bonus you’re losing. You want to complain to Kitey the management’s inefficient not having a mechanic on the spot to do it.”

Stanley reported to the lathes and was soon scooping up flywheels on his prong, taking them twenty at a time to the far end of the shop to be pulled off the prong and stacked by two men called Chalky and Jimmo.

The work in the lathe shop was going on busily and smoothly but suddenly the whole tempo slackened. The high hum of the machines climbed down almost at once to a lower, slower tone and the practised movements of the operators became instantly more careful and studied.
Chalky and Jimmo slowed their dexterous snatching-off of the heavy flywheels to a clumsy laboured heaving.

“What’s going on?” asked Stanley, from the seat of his truck.

“Ain’t you got eyes?” asked the man Chalky. “Look up the far end.”

Into the far door had come a brightly clad group of the coloured gentlemen, accompanied by limping members of the management.

“Well, I’d have thought you’d work a bit faster if
anything
when you’re being watched,” said Stanley. “But everyone’s slowed down to a crawl.”

“What’s up with you?” asked Jimmo. “We’re on piece rates. You got to keep your eyes open. It don’t matter about supervisors, and it don’t matter about that Bertram Mills outfit taking a look, but you never know who tags on to a party like that.”

“Well, who might?”

“The Time and Motion bloke, of course,” said Chalky. “They get up to all sorts of tricks, them blokes. When they reckon the rates are fixed a bit high they try to sneak in and stopwatch some poor unsuspecting geezer to try and see how long it really takes to do some movement. Only you usually get a chance to give the bloke the tip-off and he slows down. So what they do is, say, just walk through with the supervisor or someone, chatting away just as if they was too interested to do any timing, but all the time they got their pockets full of stopwatches and next day you find there’s a new rate for some jobs. So the only thing to do is
all
slow down while there’s anyone you don’t know passing through.”

“And does that work?”

“Not always. Once or twice in the summer, when the windows are open, one of them timed a bloke on a
gang-milling
job just with binoculars through a window across the way, without even coming in the shop. The blokes was wild, of course, but they couldn’t say nothing, only keep the windows shut in future.”

“You got to keep on the quivvy vivvy,” said Jimmo.

“Mind you, if we was on day-work,” conceded Chalky, “instead of piece-rates, I dare say a lot of people might work better when they’re being watched, but nobody stands to gain by that, do they? You get a nasty atmosphere with the supervisory grades standing over you all day.”

“And everyone keeping an eye open for the foreman?”

“That’s right. I seen in the paper some industrial psychologist saying he’s known workers go home dead exhausted from trying to dodge work all day, when they was on day-work. He reckoned actually doing the work was easier these days.”

“Watch it,” advised Jimmo. “Here comes the Church Lads’ Brigade.”

The inspecting group thus referred to had come a lot closer during this conversation and were now clustered round one of the lathes to watch a skimming operation. This was just the same operation as they had watched further up the line, but this time it seemed novel in that a ginger-haired man was doing it. Most of the accompanying management staff were hanging back, looking occasionally at their watches and at each other.

Stanley could make out everyone he had met at Mr Mahommed’s party and tried to slink by unobserved, but Wallace, who was standing on the fringe, the tedium of it all showing in his face, caught sight of him with some relief.

“Wotcher, Stanley,” he said, ignoring Stanley’s frantic signals. “I’ve been looking out for you. There’s a wonderful girl works here called Cynthia Kite. We were all inspecting her just now. She spends her entire time checking whether little injectors are a sliding fit or not, it seems. I’m surprised you’ve been a whole week here without noticing her.”

“Really? Well, if old Kitey’s her father I’m invited round to tea.”

“Is that so? Here, wait a minute.”

“No talking to the driver,” said Stanley firmly, moving away, “or else the lads’ll say I’m a creep.”

He hummed and clicked back to Chalky and Jimmo with a fresh load.

“Bit of a creep, aren’t you?” said Chalky. “Talking to the bosses. Look at ’em. I dunno.”

The Personnel Manager was explaining something to one of the Indonesians, a strange ingratiating expression on his face. Against a background of continuous noise he was making himself understood with elaborate gestures, at times seeming like an angler demonstrating the great length of a fish, then rapidly changing to a hammering motion. The Indonesian looked on politely while the demonstration changed to a winding-up motion and ended with a complicated two-handed process in which the Personnel Manager seemed to be pulling an invisible lever to and fro with one hand, while describing circles with the forefinger of the other.

In the course of this performance the other delegates craned round curiously to look on, and then the whole lot of them, to Stanley’s relief, flocked out the way they had come.

“Funny the way they got their shirts hanging out,” observed Jimmo. “With the money
they
get. Be round again later, I expect.”

But the delegates, many now DCL (Oxon), had gone to tea.

T
HERE
WAS
no doubt in Stanley’s mind, from the minute she opened the door to him, that Cynthia Kite was the most beautiful girl he had seen. It struck him that she looked like an advertisement, and this was astonishingly true. This, had Stanley but known it, was high though unoriginal praise in Cynthia’s own circles, where ‘She looks like an advert’ was the pinnacle of appreciation.

A cry of “Show the gentleman in, then” from the rear of the house was the only manifestation for some time of Mrs Kite, who did not actually appear till she came to lay
the table, but Mr Kite came in at once from his wash to greet his guest. Cynthia disappeared mysteriously upstairs.

“Ah,” said Kitey. “Right now, you’ll take a cup of tea, I expect? Right. Well, the books I was speaking to you of are up here.” He ferreted among the contents of a shelf, packed with piles of
Russia
Today
and a number of cheap, red-bound editions with names like
Next
Phase
of
the
Struggle
and
V
.
I
.
Lenin
and
J.
V
.
Stalin:
Their
Achievements
in
His
torical
Perspective,
and
Concrete
Materialist
Approach,
perhaps
ten in all. It was in these books that Kitey had submerged himself in several years of evenings while Mrs Kite ironed. She had been a great ironer in her time, but once non-iron materials were said to have caught on in Russia Kitey had taken to them and Mrs Kite now spent much of her evening time at the cinema.

“I always find this one very satisfying,” said Kitey, showing Stanley
Collective
Childhood
and
Factory
Manhood.
“It’s by Ilya Vichinsky, you’ve probably heard of him at Oxford, one of my favourite writers, you know.”

“No, I hadn’t, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh? Some people find him a bit heavy going but I’m sure you won’t. He’s very descriptive.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Oh yes, very descriptive. Tells you about factory life, what it’s like in a socialist country, but I won’t spoil it for you.”

“Factory life’s a bit—well, dull, though, don’t you think?”

“Ah,
here,
I grant you. But that’s because you’re working for capitalists. That’s what it is.” He sighed. ‘It’s different in the Soviet Union.”

His tone was reminiscent of Wallace’s “It’s different in Bangkok’, so Stanley asked: “Have you been to Russia, then?”

Kitey shook his thin head. “No, I haven’t yet, but it’s the one place abroad I want to go. Course, it’s money. But those miles of cornfields, and ballet in the evening.” His eyes glazed.

At this point Mrs Kite came: stout, with a cigarette. “Evening,” she said. “Dad on at you about the Soviet Union is he?” She began spreading the table with a rather unsuccessful and lumpy non-iron seersucker cloth.

“Yes,” said Stanley. “Good evening.”

“Don’t you let him,” advised Mrs Kite. “We hear nothing else.” She unrolled the cloth as far as
Collective
Childhood,
which was on the table. “Is this your book, Mr Er …?” she asked, prepared to move it ceremoniously.

“No,” said Stanley. “It’s——”

“Oh, one of his,” said Mrs Kite, her deferential approach changing to one of business-like clearing-up. She was about to whisk it away.

“Mr Kite’s lending it to me,” explained Stanley hastily, and Mrs Kite’s approach instantly changed again to one of solicitude. “Oh, I’ll just put it over here then, while I get the cloth on,” she smirked. “Sorry.”

“Cynthia in for tea?” asked Kitey. He seemed to have shut up like a clam about Russia now, and was looking outwards and upwards through the window. “Seems to be clouding over,” he said.

There was rather a large tea: stew, followed by bread and butter with jam, and then jelly and custard. Cynthia appeared as soon as it was laid, and despite her wispy appearance ate everything. There was not much talking during the meal, what conversation there was being conducted mainly by Mrs Kite and Stanley. Cynthia did not say a word.

“I dare say you find it a bit strange at Missiles after what you’ve been used to,” said Mrs Kite. “D’you like it? I never hear from him or Cynthia.”

“It’s quite amusing for a bit,” said Stanley. “Of course I haven’t been there long but they seem a nice lot to work with.”

“You’d never know it from what
he
says,” observed Mrs Kite. “I only hear a lot about demarcation, I think he calls it.”

Kitey was stung into a reply to this.

“You don’t appreciate it,” he said. “Only you would
if the bosses and the shareholders had their way and we was fighting for our jobs.”

“I wish you’d leave off all that and enjoy yourself once in a while like other people,” said Mrs Kite. “He’s always so
miserable,
”
she explained to Stanley.

“
Someone’s
got to be vigilant,” said Kitey darkly. “
Otherwise
we’d all go plunging down the precipice like Gadarene swine.”

“I wish you’d watch your language when you get niggly like this,” said Mrs Kite. “Another cup, Mr Windrush?”

“I must be going,” announced Stanley when they had finished.

“Yes, you’ll want to get changed, I expect,” said Mrs Kite. “Nearly time I was at the Regal. Where are you off to, Cynthia?”

“Up West, I expect,” said Cynthia.

“Who with? Brenda?”

“Yes.”

“Going to the Astoria?”

“Probably.”

“Dancing?”

“Yes.”

“Well, are you meeting her there or is she calling?”

“She’s gone early.”

“Why don’t you go up to Victoria with Mr Windrush, then?”

“She doesn’t talk much for a girl her age,” explained Mrs Kite when Cynthia had gone up to put on her dancing kit.

“I expect she will when she gets to yours,” observed Kitey. “Well, Stanley, I’ll say so long. I’ve got this meeting. See you in the morning.”

“Goodbye and thank you again,” said Stanley, and Kitey went off.

“We’re most of us out most evenings,” explained Mrs Kite.

“Oh, I thought most people stayed in if they had
television
.”

“Oh no, we’ve had it so long now. Last time we all
stayed in there was ever such a fuss about keep wanting to switch over programmes. That was during the last strike. We stayed in for economy, only usually we’re most of us out most of the time.”

Cynthia came down in her dancing kit. To Stanley’s eyes she looked enchanting in the slim black blouse and skirt. He was relieved to see that she did not chew gum, and her air of inertness he construed as a dignified repose. Her faintly stunned manner attracted him extraordinarily.

“Right, let’s be off then,” suggested Mrs Kite. She led the way to the street door and locked it after them. At the end of the street she said: “Well, we go different ways. Tata, then, Mr Windrush. Hope you have a nice time.”

“Me?” said Stanley. “I was going home.”

“Why don’t you go with Cynthia, once you’ve changed? Go on, you’re only young once.”

“Well, all right. Can I come, Cynthia?”

“I don’t mind.”

In the train to Victoria Stanley said: “Your mother seems a gay old bird.”

“Oh,
mum
,”
said Cynthia.

“She’s always going off to the pictures, she says. She must be quite an authority.”

“Pardon?”

“She must know a lot about them.”

“Not really, she goes to sleep usually.”

Heavy going though it was, Stanley was delighted with her.

“If you’ll come round to where I live,” he said, “I won’t be a minute changing. Then we can go on to this dance.”

His two great-aunts were listening to the wireless when they arrived.

“I hope you don’t mind if we don’t switch this off,” said Great-Aunt Dolly. “I rather want to hear it; it’s an old friend of mine recording his reminiscences. The BBC do it with a lot of people when they get to eighty, to catch them in time. You don’t mind, my dear?”

“No.”

Cynthia was sat down while Stanley changed into a suit.
The talk was still on when he came down again and they left with a silent exchange of little waves with the aunts. Following them through the door, the sprightly,
gnome-like
voice of the ex-lover of Dolly Tracepurcel retailed the account he had heard as a boy of the Waterloo celebrations in London, told to him by a grandmother who had witnessed them as a girl of fifteen.

Presently they arrived at the dance hall. The hall itself was above the entrance passageway, and from above came a continuous thumping. The ceiling strained like the timbers of a wooden ship to the constant clacking and shuffling of several hundred feet.

“I suppose your friend Brenda is somewhere in that lot?”

“I expect so.”

“I suppose we ought to go up and find her.”

On the way up the stairs Cynthia began blossoming into some sort of life, a sort of limbering-up as the music began to be distinguishable. Stanley, who had begun to share something of Cynthia’s glazed dreaminess, realized with a shock that it was the sort of dance that reminded him of an assault course. But it was too late now: Cynthia, apart from her face, which remained deadpan, had finally come to life. She flung him about, with only brief intervals, for a full hour. It was obviously for this that Cynthia husbanded her energy and packed away her food.

At the announcement of an interval, which aroused a formalized booing from the dancers, Cynthia at once relaxed to her former inertness, so that Stanley was able to sag against a pillar in an exhausted silence, thankful that he was not expected to talk as well. In time, a
lost-looking
girl approached and stood by Cynthia. This was evidently Brenda, for the two held a brief conversation.

“All right?”

“M’m.”

“Who you been with?”

“Baz.”

“Over the bar now, is he?”

“M’m. That your friend?”

“M’m.”

“Doesn’t he look tired?”

Presently the band reappeared and the person called Baz came to collect Brenda. He was somewhat younger than Stanley and appeared to have suffered no ill effects,
approaching
with a jaunty lunging gait on enormous suèded and crêped feet.

He nodded cheerfully to them, with a head garnished with five partings.

“All right, Cynth?” The cut of Baz’s jacket gave him an unnaturally burly look which assorted strangely with the tasselled black cord on a rolled gold slide he wore in lieu of a tie. He secured Brenda and took her off as the band began to thump again.

“All right?” assumed Cynthia. Reinfused, she plucked Stanley from his pillar, refusing to permit him to be one of the ten per cent casualties it would have seemed sensible to allow for. The whole business, to Stanley’s mind, was acutely different from what he had had in mind. In this sort of dance there were no close-ups and an entire absence of sentiment. And when it came to it, there was not even a last waltz, merely a few bars of changed rhythm before the final chorus, a sort of hint at the convention, which hardly affected the dancers. Even the final departure of the band had no significance for several couples who continued their evolutions like so many demented geometricians.

Stanley waited while Cynthia got her jacket and then escorted her in a drooping silence to Victoria.