The Fancy (7 page)

“What else shall we have?” asked Sheila, doing as she was told. “Get something out of the cupboard. Mummy gave me lots of her preserves.”

“I’ll say she did,” said Dinah, opening the cupboard and recoiling. “Talk about not knowing there’s a War on!”

“I know,” said Sheila embarrassed, “she always thinks I’ll starve.”

“Wow!” said Dinah, pushing the bottles about, “peaches! Can we have these, darling? I say, grown on the estate?”

“Yes.” Sheila stared at the white enamel back of the stove, seeing instead the peach trees, crucified docilely announcement.pa on the wall at the back of the stables. She could almost feel a peach in her hand, warm and furry. She was picking them for tea and there would be thick yellow cream and the table laid on the loggia and the wasps trying to get at the jam. She never allowed herself to feel homesick. Anyway there was now this vague uncomfortable feeling that it was all wrong. But there wouldn’t be peaches and cream in Paddington Green. A lock of hair fell over her face and she immediatet Swinley and social equality. “Oh damn my hair,” she said. “Di, do you think it’s worth the trouble of doing it this way? Does it suit me? It’s good
from the front but I don’t know that it’s so hot from the side.” They talked about hair for a long time.

After supper, Dinah said : “I could do with a drink. How about going round to the local? Is it a decent one?”

“Yes, not bad.” Sheila had never been there. Timothy’s doctrine that girls went into country pubs but not London pubs was deeply rooted.

They each had a gin-and-mixed in the Lord Nelson, and Dinah chatted to the landlord, who gave them their second gin on the house. It tasted just the same as at the Mayfair. When they got back to the Flats, the night porter was on duty, with circles under his eyes.

“I’ve got day starvation,” he told them, sizing up Dinah. The three of them chatted pertly for a while, Dinah giving him back as good as he gave. Sheila thought they were all very amusing people and asked him to come up and have some coffee.

“Not safely forgot abou

*

By folding up and stacking the trestle tables and re-arranging the chairs, the canteen at Canning Kyle’s could be transformed into a concert or lecture hall. It had been a judging ring once in the competition for practical, hygienic and becoming hats for female machine operators. Those walls had witnessed many amateur variety turns, but nothing so strange as the parade of abashed and giggling models in all sorts of unpractical, unhygienic and unbecoming headgear from poke bonnets to boudoir caps.

This evening, however, the canteen was transformed for more solemn business. On the platform at the far end, away from the serving hatches, was a trestle table bearing a jug of water and a glass, five chairs behind it and in front the microphone that usually worked
fortissimo
or not at all. The rows of chairs in the body of the canteen find anywhere b“Wouldn were rapidly filling up. Smoke and chatter increased every moment as employees pressed in from outside, pushing for a seat, calling to
friends or making for the side wall which was the traditional leaning place for hecklers and wits. Although it was after six o’clock, not many people had gone home. Most people wanted to attend the Trade Union general meetings, to see what they were getting for their threepence a week.

The noise in the canteen did not lessen appreciably as five men filed through the door at the back of the platform and sat down behind the table in attitudes of unnatural ease. The fattest of them, who was very fat, kept saluting and making comradely gestures towards acquaintances in the audience. Next to him a pugnacious young man who needed a haircut sat avidly waiting for the talk to begin. In the centre was the Chairman, square and bespectacled, beyond him a modest man of high integrity but no influence, and at the end a twinkling little man who thought the whole thing a bit of a farce and was surprised at himself for having a hand in it.

The pugnacious young man rose, and people began to hush each other and even those who were not attending noticed that something was happening and stopped their conversations at last to listen.

Disdaining the microphone and gripping the edge of the table, the young man pitched his voice as if he were in the open air.

“Brothers and sisters!” he shouted, restraining himself with difficulty from calling them Comrades. “Brothers and sisters all, I declare this meeting open!” A few scattered murmurs of “Hear, hear,” from incorrigible yes-men.

“And I now call,” continued the young man, searing them with his gaze, “I call upon our Chairman, Mr. Charles Wheelwright, to read the Minutes of our last General Meeting and report progress!”

A spatter of polite applause ran through the audience as the Chairman rose to his feet, smiling benevolently. The modest man on his right reached over the table and placed the microphone more directly in front of him.

“Brothers and sisters,” began Mr. Wheelwright in his normal voice, which was instantly drowned by cries from the side wall of : “Turn the bloody thing on!”

“Yes it’s on!” said a voice from behind the scenes. The Chairman nodded and went on speaking confidently in a quiet microphone voice, unaware that he appeared to his audience like a character in a silent film.

“Isn’t it on?” The, Chairman looked enquiringly at the modest man, who looked worried and glanced behind him as if trying to pass the blame on to someone else.

His audience did not leave him unaware for long. “Turn it
on
, George!” yelled the side wall.

“Shut up!” said someone from the centre seats, “and give our Brother Chairman a chance.”

“Try another station,” shouted a hoarse man in a white scarf and
bicycle clips, “you might get Sandy Macpherson!” Everyone laughed and the voice behind the scenes shouted something back. The Chairman waited patiently for the backchat between George and the side wall to subside, and when George said : “Try it again now, Mr. Wheelwright,” he tried again and was unperturbed by the bellow and squeak which he produced. The twinkling man and the fat man at opposite ends of the table were both enjoying themselves hugely, one to himself and the other in collaboration with has friends, who received many waves and salutes and raised handclaps. These two were and there was nothing I s.quite prepared to sit here all night and enjoy the fun, but some of the audience were beginning to think of their trains and buses and teas, and were telling each other it wasn’t good enough. Feet began to stamp and the heckling was not confined to the side wall.

Mr. Wheelwright, still bland, spoke to the modest man, who came round the table and removed the microphone to the side of the platform.

“All right, brothers and sisters,” he called in a voice which needed no amplifying anyway, “we’ll get on with it without the—bloody thing as you call it.” This happy flash of wit restored humour at once and the audience settled down to listen while he read the minutes. His spectacles dropped forward as he read and he paused every now and then to look up over them at his audience when he wanted to make a point.

Mr. Wheelwright had come to an intricate and rather dull question about income tax and was explaining how the Committee and the Management had settled it. The Committee had done this, the Committee had done that. Most of the women yawned and fidgeted. Wendy looked at her watch and hoped the meeting would not last too long. It would be awkward going out before the end with all these people between her and the door, but she must not be home more than three-quarters of an hour late at the most. She moistned her lips, cocked her head on one side and fixed a bright, dutiful gaze on the platform, trying to be interested.

Whenever the Chairman looked like winding up the subject of income tax, the pale man with the goitrous neck, who had raised the question at the last meeting, quickly resuscitated it with a further quibble. He and Mr. Wheelwright stood and talked at each other boringly across the rows of heads. There seemed no reason why either of them should ever stop. The modest man, who was the Union Secretary, was paying close attention, like a pupil in the front row under the teacher’s eye, the twinkling man was thinking his own thoughts, the fat man, who was the Union Treasurer and should have been attending, was half asleep, and the pugnacious young man was getting impatient at having to keep quiet for so long.

However, when Mr. Wheelwright and the income tax fiend stopped talking at last and sat down rather sour with each other, he was on his
feet in a moment, combing back his hair with knobbly fingers.

“Brothers and sisters all!” He had a good platform voice. “Just a few minutes of your time,
if
you please! I’ve got something to say to you. You may not like it, but you’re going to get it.” He threw back his head and breathed round at them through distended nostrils.

Freda leaned forward. This was what she had come for. This young man was the mouthpiece of all her convictions ; it stirred her to hear him talk. If she had not sublimated her sex long ago in movements and enthusiasms, she might have been in love with him. Perhaps she was. She had once had a very alarming dream about going swimming with him : most disquieting in view of what Havelock-Ellis said about water in dreams.

“I’m speaking to you today,” her god was saying, “as a member of the Production Committee of Canning Kyle’s. Now you all know what this Production Committee is, don’t you? It’s a Committee formed as a common meeting ground between the workers and the Management to give every one of you——” he paused to rake them with his eyes——” every one of you the chance to speed up Production. If you have any ideas about how you could do your job quicker, or more efficiently, how metal could be saved or a bottleneck cleared up —anything like that—all you have tohe Ledward Strain. b do is tell the representative of your shop, and that idea of yours will get as much consideration from the Management—we’ve got ’em where we want ’em this time ; I’m telling you that—as if it came from the Managing Director himself.” People fidgeted. They knew all this. They had been sated with speeches and notices and pamphlets at the time when the Production Committee was being formed.

“But you know all that,” said the young man impatiently, as if he had read their thoughts. “‘Don’t come at us with all this pep talk,’ you say. ‘We know.’ That’s just the point. I might have forgiven you if you didn’t know, but you do know. You’ve grumbled enough, God knows, about the way this factory’s run, and now you’ve got the chance to have a say in the running of it, and you know you’ve got that chance——” His voice was rising—“You know you’ve got that chance, I say, and what have you done about it?” His voice was so accusing that even those who didn’t know what he was talking about tried to look innocent. “What have you done about it?” He shot out a pointing finger on the end of a long arm. “You, and you, and you?” He swung his arm round his audience, who cleared their throats and looked righteously at their neighbours. “Yes, and you, sir!” The arm spotlighted a heavy man in creaking shoes, who was sneaking out to catch his train. “You who are so keen to get back to your bloody tea!” Laughter, dying away uneasily as the young man swung back on them with that great knuckled forefinger. “I’ll tell you what you’ve done!” he roared, and even the creaking man.
who had been pretending not to hear, was held in the doorway by that dramatic pause.

“I’ll tell you what you’ve done, you fine patriots—oh, you great-hearted British workers. You’ve done absolutely, God—damn—all —bloody nothing.” He dropped the words on to them with nods of his untidy head. “Three months this Committee’s been going and so far we’ve not had a single suggestion or hint of co-operation from any one of you. We’ve had complaints of course—you’ll always get those —that’s the only way we know you’re still alive.”

A spotty youth, with lips that looked as if they were turned inside out, jumped up and said : “All right, then, but what’s the Production Committee done? We elected you to—what d’you call it?—to whatsitsname Production and 1-1-look what’s happened.” He was not a very fluent speaker. “The output last week was lower than it’s been for months. We know that by our pay packets.”

“Thanks, Brother Collister,” said the man on the platform smiling triumphantly. “You’ve asked my question for me. What’s the Production Committee done? You’re the Production Committee! We’re only your mouth-pieces. If there’s been a drop in Production, it’s your fault.”

“Here, ’alf a mo,” said Brother Collister. “I don’t see what it’s got to do with me. I’m only in the Main
tain
ance Department. I’ve got nothing to do with Production—fixing the plumbing and doing the lights and such. It’s higher you got to look. We’re doing our jobs and we’re being let down, that’s what I say. I’ve said that all along. We’re doing our jobs, I’ve said … can’t do more … fixing the plumbing … fifty-seven fuse boxes … “He became incoherent. His saliva glands seemed to work in conjunction the bad smell in the Redundant Stores startlyh with his vocal chords, so that the more he talked, the wetter and more unintelligible he became.

“What’s your worry then?” asked the young man on the platform. “If you’re satisfied you can’t do more at your own job, what’s the trouble?”

“I’ll tell you what the trouble is,” said Brother Collister, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand and swallowing. “We know Production’s gone down because of our pay packets. Ever since this what-d’you-call-it—P-Production Committee started, we’ve been taking less money, that’s what.”

“Ah, I thought so!” The speaker put his hands in his overalls pockets and added triumphantly. “That’s the only thing that brings some of you up here, isn’t it? Your pay packets!” He pronounced the words as if he wouldn’t be found dead with such a thing on him. “You haven’t got the guts or the courage of your own convictions to try and get this factory going all out, but as soon as your miserable little wages are affected, up you come running with : ‘It’s all the fault of the Committee.’” He squealed it in his nose. “I tell you we’ve.
done our best. We’ve had meeting after meeting with the Management, but every time they’ve had the laugh on us because they know we haven’t any backing from the workers.”