Flashpoint

by Michael Gilbert

  “All right,” said Dylan. “It comes down to cases. I’ll come up and talk to the management. But I’m not going to talk a lot of hot air. We want a list of people who would be made redundant. Not by numbers. By names. And we need to know what the management is going to do for them. Whether it can place them anywhere else. How far it can supplement the state benefits until they get fixed.”

  “We don’t want any lump sum payments,” said Martin. “We all know what happens to golden handshakes. Four Saturday evenings at the local, and it’s all back in the pockets of the brewers.”

  “Right,” said Dylan. “Compensation for loss of the job, but spread over six months. We shall have to fix it so that it doesn’t cut down the Social Security.”

  “Six months? Is that long enough?”

  “I’d reckon so. You’ve got to remember that it won’t be floor workers who go. They’ll be operating the same number of smelters and reduction plants after the amalgamation as they were before. It’s the overheads and administration they’ll be saving on; maintenance men, telephonists and office staff. People like that don’t find it too difficult to get fixed.”

  “The people who’ll get fixed quickest,” said Martin, “are the typists. They’re getting it with cream and jam. My daughter’s a typist. First week she went to work she was earning more’n I did after twenty years on the floor.”

  The conversation turned to grades and differentials. Dylan, who had been looking at his diary said, “I can’t make it up North till next Monday. I’ll see you all then. We’ve got to pack it up now. There’s a newspaper man waiting outside for me to tell him what a bloody fine chap I am.”

  “You want to watch it,” said Barrow. “They’ll twist your words. The other day I had one of them ask me what I thought of our Chairman. He had me down as saying that I thought he was a grand old buster – would you credit it? What I really said was that he was a randy old bastard.”

  Dylan found Patrick Mauger sitting patiently in the corridor outside the conference room. A group of ladies wearing tight hats and horn-rimmed glasses were waiting to go in and tell the Junior Under-secretary of State for Education what was wrong with the nation’s nursery schools. A member who was shepherding a party of his constituents down the corridor had met head-on with a group of Middle Eastern journalists. A worried looking government whip was dodging about in the crowd like a scrum-half looking for an opening.

  “It’s a bloody miracle,” said Dylan, “that this outfit functions at all. It’s overcrowded and it’s understaffed, and if you try to change anything they just look at you and say, ‘Oh, we’ve always done it this way.’ Any business that tried to operate like that would be bankrupt in a month.”

  “People like it,” said Patrick. “If Parliament was too well organized they’d think it was totalitarian. Who are those boys you were seeing? They looked a tough crowd.”

  “I’ll tell you about them in the car. I’m getting off home for a breather.”

  They made their way out to the forecourt where members’ cars were parked. The ‘A’ Division sergeant on the door knew them both and nodded. Patrick’s work took him often enough to the House for him to be on terms with most of the officials and policemen.

  “We four departmental Under-secretaries share this car,” said Dylan, “and as I’m the new boy I don’t see much of it, do I, Tom?”

  The uniformed chauffeur grinned, and said, “Where to, sir? Home?”

  “Home’s the word,” said Dylan.

  The streets were fairly empty, and it took them less than ten minutes to reach the Embankment end of the Albert Bridge, and another five to get aboard Dylan’s floating home, one of the colony of houseboats moored at Chiswick Eyot.

  “I’ve been loaned this floating palace by a chap in the Foreign Service,” said Dylan. “He got posted to Lima. A bit of luck for me. I shouldn’t have been able to afford to bring my family down to London without it.”

  “You’ve got them all here, then?”

  “The Dylan family is complete again. Wife Pauline, eldest son Paul, daughter Ellen and a young bombshell called Fred. Six years old, and more trouble than all the others put together.”

  “And your favourite.”

  “How did you guess,” said Dylan with a grin. “Watch the gangplank, or you’ll be in the drink. Fred’s fallen in three times already. I think he does it on purpose. You’ll stop and have some tea with us, I hope. Pauline, come and meet the press.”

  Pauline Dylan was a woman in her early thirties, some six or seven years younger than her husband. A woman of some character, Patrick guessed; neither out of the top nor the bottom drawer, but out of that very large middle drawer of an increasingly classless northern society. He was not surprised when he discovered, later on, that she had started life in the cottage of a millhand, and had got a First in Sociology at Leeds University. Four years as the wife of an MP had hardened her to unexpected visitors.

  She said, “Come along in. I hope you realize, Mr–”

  “Mauger. Patrick Mauger.”

  “Mr Mauger that when a Yorkshire woman says ‘tea’ she doesn’t mean thin bread and butter and cakes.”

  “Whatever she means is all right by me,” said Patrick.

  They went into the main room, which had a big stern window and a view across the river which Whistler would have approved of.

  “I was complaining to you about the old-fashioned habits of Parliament,” said Dylan. “I believe that its timetable was designed for a period when a gentleman dined at five or six in the evening and took supper around midnight. Can you eat sausages, Patrick?”

  “Just try me,” said Patrick.

  When a substantial high tea had been disposed of, Dylan said, “You were asking about those men I was seeing this afternoon. They’re fine people. A bit truculent, because they’re worried. But it’s their folk they’re worried about, not themselves. Out of the eight men there, I happen to know that four of them paid their own fares to come down here and talk to me. All right, it’s a small thing. But how many businessmen would have made the journey without charging it to expenses?”

  “Very few,” said Patrick. “What’s worrying them?”

  “It’s hard times for the copper recovery plants.”

  “Recovery?”

  “There’s a lot of copper lying about. Obsolete and discarded machinery and equipment. Anything made of copper’s worth melting down and using again. The business really got underway during the war, when we couldn’t ship in the raw material. Even in America, where they can dig the stuff out of the ground, nearly a fifth of their output is secondary production. Didn’t you know?”

  “What I don’t know about the copper industry could be put into several large books,” said Patrick. “Go on, what happened next?”

  He wasn’t writing anything down. He had found that the sight of someone taking notes inhibited good talk. He retained the essentials of what he was told by a system of mental mnemonics. Most newspapermen acquire this knack.

  “What happened next was what always happens when there’s a good thing going. Too many people climbed on the bandwagon. A lot of little firms started up, without enough capital behind them, and made a bit of easy money. When the going became harder the choice was, fold up altogether or amalgamate. Common sense said amalgamate. Save some jobs instead of losing all of them. But it wasn’t an easy idea to put across. Because when two firms got together they saw the directors all getting cushy jobs in the joint outfit, or a bloody good golden handshake if they had to go; while as far as the workforce was concerned, it was, ‘Thank you very much. Don’t bother to turn up on Monday.’ I cut my teeth on problems like that when I was in ACAT, and had a lot more of it when I went over to MGM.”

  “That was one of the things I wanted to ask you about,” said Patrick. “Didn’t you have a bit of bother when the two Unions joined up?”

  “Bother?”

  “With a chap called Killey.”

  “Ah,” said Dylan. “H
im. Yes, I did have a bit of trouble with him. You remember that chap, Pauline?”

  “I remember you bawling him out,” said Mrs Dylan, who had come back into the room to clear the dishes. “I always said you made a mistake there.”

  “You could be right, love. I ought to have patted him on the back instead of kicking him on the bottom, but I was younger then.”

  “It would have saved you a heap of trouble.”

  “It would have saved me writing about two hundred letters,” agreed Dylan.

  “Would it be a good idea to do something like that now?”

  Dylan looked surprised, and said, “I haven’t seen him for years. Don’t say he’s starting up again.”

  “It’s not so much starting up again. He seems to be on a new tack.”

  “What’s it this time?”

  “Last time he was on about voting. This time it’s something to do with money.”

  “For God’s sake! Whose money? His or mine or the Union’s?”

  “I don’t completely understand what it’s about,” said Patrick. He was finding it difficult to say in cold blood, ‘Someone thinks you’re a thief.’

  “If he thinks Will’s had a penny that wasn’t his,” said Pauline. “He’s mad. Not just bad, mad. He wants certifying.”

  “You must have some idea what it’s about,” said Dylan.

  Patrick said, “It’s something to do with the amalgamation. My brother-in-law knows about it. He works for the Law Society, and he got it from Killey. Come to think of it,” he added with a grin, “I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone, but he can’t have meant you.”

  “If he’s going about saying things like that,” said Dylan grimly, “I certainly ought to know about it. Politics is a game where any mud sticks.”

  “If he says it in public,” said Pauline, “you’ve got to do something about it, Will. It’s libellous, isn’t it?”

  “I think Killey’s got enough sense to realize that,” said Patrick. “He’s a lawyer himself.”

  “Do you think I ought to do something about it?”

  “The original idea was that if you made a friendly gesture of some sort, he might accept the olive branch and pipe down. I quite see that you can’t do that until he withdraws the present suggestion.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked, any old way,” said Dylan. “I’ve done a lot of negotiating in my time and I’ve got to know something about the way people’s minds work. One sort of chap, you give him a little, and he’s grateful and he gives you a bit back, and sooner or later you meet in the middle. But there’s another sort. You give him something, he doesn’t say ‘thank you’. As far as he’s concerned, you’ve gone back and he’s gone forward. It’s a new start line.”

  “You think Killey’s like that?”

  “He comes from Grantham. If there’s anyone more obstinate than a Yorkshireman, it’s a Fenman.”

  The conversation turned on to families and backgrounds, and Patrick kept it there until it was time for him to go.

  After he had gone, Dylan said, “Bugger Killey. Why should we let him spoil our lives for us? I’ll give you a hand with the dishes.”

  Over the washing-up Pauline said, “You’ll have to do something about Fred. He cut school again today.”

  “Cut it?”

  “He said he had a headache and they sent him home. Only he didn’t come home. He’d been promised a trip by the River Police. They took him down to Wapping in one of their launches.”

  Dylan started to laugh, turned it into a cough, and said, “There’s not much I can do about that, love.”

  “You’ll have to take your hand to him.”

  “My father used to take a belt to me,” said Dylan, “but it never did me an ounce of good.”

  4

  “Ninety-four,” said Lefty Marks. The way he said it, it sounded like a prayer.

  “Three eighteens, double top, Patrick.”

  “Treble twenty and seventeens, boy.”

  “Three sixteens, fourteen, double sixteen, boy. Never fails.”

  “Let the boy work it out for himself.”

  Patrick took a deep breath. This was a moment to live for. One leg apiece, and ahead by a whisker in the final. Toe up to the brass tell-tale. Steady as you go. He flipped the heavy dart at the board. Double eighteen.

  Got to go for the double top. If he hit it, that left him two nines. Good enough. One of his better numbers. On the other hand, if he missed it and got a single twenty, which was all too likely, it meant a shot at double nineteen. Marks had next throw. Being left-handed he preferred the right-hand side of the board and would find double nineteen awkward.

  The computer which lives inside the human head and is more efficient than any man-made computer had these calculations and human equations worked out and analysed in the time it took him to raise the second dart to eye level. At the very last moment, almost as it left his hand, he changed his aim and went for the single eighteen.

  After that, double top. Must be. Right in the middle. No argument.

  “I don’t know what we should do without you, Patrick,” said Marks. “Honest I don’t. One thing they did teach you at Oxford and Cambridge. How to play darts.”

  Patrick accepted the pint of beer which was offered to him by his opposite number in The Daily Telegraph team. The occasion was an important one. It was the semi-final of the Beaverbrook Cup and the saloon bar of the Marquis of Anglesey was packed to suffocation with players, officials, supporters and plain old-fashioned drinkers.

  Patrick felt relaxed and happy. Part of his happiness came from the fact that he was the only man in the Watchman contingent from the editorial floor. The rest of the players and supporters were from the works. Compositors, like Edgecombe and Sivewright; Parsons, who was in charge of transport; Marks, who was a senior electricity chargehand and said to be a card-carrying member of the Communist party.

  “Wossit feel like to be in the finals, eh?” said Parsons, fighting his way across with another trayful of pint glasses. “I ordered these before you threw, Patrick. Knew you’d do it.”

  “Who’s the opposition?”

  “The Express. They think the cup belongs to them, seeing their gaffer gave it.”

  “Right now,” said Patrick, “I feel we could wipe the floor with anyone.”

  “Mustn’t forget they’ve got Pearly Deans. Semi-final in the News of the World last year. Beaten by that Welsh bugger – what was his name – he won it.”

  No one could remember his name.

  Edgecombe, who had the mournful look which all compositors seem to wear like a uniform, said, “He’s hot stuff, is Pearly, but there’s one thing he can’t abide. Band music. Puts him right off his shot.”

  “And just what are we supposed to do about that?” said Marks. “Hire a bloody great brass band and get it to play outside the window. Look a bit pointed, wouldn’t it?”

  “What we could do,” said Parsons, “is to have a bit of band music tape recorded. Bring in one of those miniature sets, see, and turn it on accidental when he’s going for his double out.”

  Patrick, who had finished his victory pint and was starting work on a follow-up, lost the thread of this interesting discussion. Over his fourth pint he found himself wedged up in one corner with Lefty Marks.

  Marks said, “How’s the old profile going along, Patrick?”

  “It’s going all right,” said Patrick.

  “He’s a fine boy. Worth more than most of the silly sods we waste print on.”

  “He’s had an interesting career. I only hope no one tries to spoil it.”

  “Is someone trying?”

  “I’m not sure. I had lunch today with my brother-in-law. He works in the Law Society. He told me something – mind you, there’s probably nothing in it. He’d got some idea into his head–”

  Marks listened, bending forward so as not to miss anything, and nodding his head from time to time.

  The celebrations finished with closing time. The members
of the Watchman staff, who had been given the evening off for the occasion, went home to bed. Patrick made his way back to his bachelor flat in Albany Street. As he was undressing it did occur to him, fleetingly, to wonder if he might have been a bit indiscreet in what he had said to Marks, but he dismissed the thought. Lefty was all right. He was a good chap.

  At that precise moment Marks was making a telephone call. He dialled a Clerkenwell number and was answered, in a cheerful and wide-awake voice, by someone he addressed as Syd. There must have been a dual connection at the other end, because sometimes it was Syd who spoke, and sometimes someone called Ben. Marks seemed to know both of them well.

  I got home at the usual time that night and found Mutt full of excitement because the Archbishop was cutting a tooth. This may have been top line news for her, but it seemed to be a dead bore for the Archbishop, and he explained his feelings to us at length.

  While Mutt was calming him down with one hand and getting supper with the other, I read the two accounts I had brought home with me, one in the green-labelled King’s Bench Reports for 1945 and the other in the yellow-labelled Appeal Cases for 1947. After supper, when quiet had at last been restored, I told Mutt about them.

  “It wasn’t Jonas,” I said. “It was his father. He discovered a method of welding which would work under water. It depends on combining electrically induced heat with a flux which contains pyro-manganese powder. Everyone uses it now, but it was a novelty then, and commercially very valuable because it meant you could repair an underwater structure without hauling the whole thing out.”

  “And Jonas’ father actually invented it?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about that. He was the original home-grown boffin. He thought it all up himself, and carried out the experiments in his own tool shed. Then he sold it to a crowd called North West Marine Appliances.”

  “Who tried to steal it from him. Typical.”

  “That was the general idea. But it wasn’t completely one-sided. The company had certainly put a lot of money into developing it and they had an agreement–”

  “Drawn up by their own lawyers.”