by Tom Sharpe
‘Personally, I’d be inclined not to draw any,’ said Wilt, ‘but if you press me …’
‘I most certainly do,’ said Mr Scudd.
‘Well, one thing’s for certain. I wouldn’t suppose that the bloke was a raving Marxist.’
‘Not a very positive answer.’
‘Not a very positive question, come to that,’ said Wilt. ‘You asked me what conclusions I’d arrive at and when I tell you I wouldn’t arrive at any, you’re still not satisfied. I don’t see what more I can do.’
But before Mr Scudd could reply, the County Advisor forced himself to intervene. ‘I think Mr Scudd simply wants to know if there’s any political bias in the teaching in your department.’
‘Masses,’ said Wilt.
‘Masses?’ said Mr Scudd.
‘Masses?’ echoed the County Advisor.
‘Absolutely stuffed with it. In fact, if you were to ask me …’
‘I am,’ said Mr Scudd. ‘That’s precisely what I’m doing.’
‘What?’ said Wilt.
‘Asking you how much political bias there is,’ said Mr Scudd, having recourse to his handkerchief again.
‘In the first place, I’ve told you, and in the second, I thought you said you didn’t think there was anything to be gained from discussing theoretical assumptions and you’d come to see for yourself what went on on the classroom floor. Right?’ Mr Scudd swallowed and looked desperately at the County Advisor, but Wilt went on. ‘Right. Well you just take a shuftie in there where Major Millfield is having a class with Fulltime Caterers brackets Confectionery and Bakery close brackets Year Two, affectionately known as Cake Two, and then come and tell me how much political bias you’ve managed to squeeze out of the visit.’ And without waiting for any further questions, Wilt went back down the stairs to his office.
*
‘Squeeze out?’ said the Principal two hours later. ‘You have to ask the Minister of Education’s Personal Private Secretary how much political bias he can squeeze out of Cake Two?’
‘Oh, is that who he was, the Minister of Education’s own Personal Private Secretary?’ said Wilt. Well, what do you know about that? Now if he’d been an HMI …’
‘Wilt,’ said the Principal with some difficulty, ‘if you think that bastard isn’t going to lumber us with one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors – in fact I shouldn’t be surprised if the entire Inspectorate doesn’t descend upon us – and all thanks to you, you’d better think again.’
Wilt looked round at the ad hoc committee that had been set up to deal with the crisis. It consisted of the Principal, the V-P, the County Advisor and, for no apparent reason, the Bursar. ‘It’s no skin off my nose how many Inspectors he rustles up. Only too glad to have them.’
‘You may be but I rather doubt …’ The Principal hesitated. The County Advisor’s presence didn’t make for a free flow of opinion on the deficiencies of other departments. ‘I take it that any remarks I make will be treated as off the record and entirely confidential,’ he said finally.
‘Absolutely,’ said the County Advisor, ‘I’m only interested in Liberal Studies and …’
‘How nice to hear that term used again. That’s the second time this afternoon,’ said Wilt.
‘And you might have added the bloody studies,’ snarled the Advisor, ‘instead of leaving the wretched man with the impression that that other idiot lecturer was a fee-paying member of the Young Liberals and a personal friend of Peter Tatchell.’
‘Mr Tatchell isn’t a Young Liberal,’ said Wilt. ‘To the best of my knowledge he’s a member of the Labour Party, left of centre of course, but …’
‘And a fucking homosexual.’
‘I’ve no idea. Anyway, I thought the compassionate word was “gay”.’
‘Shit,’ muttered the Principal.
‘Or that if you prefer,’ said Wilt, ‘though I’d hardly describe the term as compassionate. Anyway, as I was saying …’
‘I am not interested in what you are saying. It’s what you said in front of Mr Scudd that matters. You deliberately led him to believe that this College, instead of being devoted to Further Education …’
‘I like that “devoted”. I really do,’ interrupted Wilt.
‘Yes, devoted to Further Education, Wilt, and you led him to think we employ nobody but paid-up members of the Communist Party and at the other extreme a bunch of lunatics from the National Front.’
‘Major Millfield isn’t a member of any party to the best of my knowledge,’ said Wilt. ‘The fact that he was discussing the social implications of immigration policies –’
‘Immigration policies!’ exploded the County Advisor. ‘He was doing no such thing. He was talking about cannibalism among wogs in Africa and some swine who keeps heads in his fridge.’
‘Idi Amin,’ said Wilt.
‘Never mind who. The fact remains that he was demonstrating a degree of racial bias that could get him prosecuted by the Race Relations Board and you had to tell Mr Scudd to go in and listen.’
‘How the hell was I to know what the Major was on about? The class was quiet and I had to warn the other lecturers that the sod was on his way. I mean if you choose to pitch up out of the blue with a bloke who’s got no official status …’
‘Official status?’ said the Principal. ‘I’ve already told you Mr Scudd just happens to be –’
‘Oh, I know all that and it still doesn’t add up. The point is he walks into my office with Mr Reading here, noses his way through the books on the shelf, and promptly accuses me of being an agent of the bleeding Comintern.’
‘And that’s another thing,’ said the Principal. ‘You deliberately left him with the impression that you use Lenin’s whatever it was called …’
‘The State and Revolution,’ said Wilt.
‘As teaching material with day-release apprentices. Am I right, Mr Reading?’
The County Advisor nodded weakly. He still hadn’t recovered from those heads in the fridge or the subsequent visit to Nursery Nurses who had been deep in a discussion on the impossible and utterly horrifying topic of post-natal abortion for the physically handicapped. The bloody woman had been in favour of it.
‘And that’s just the beginning,’ continued the Principal, but Wilt had had enough.
‘The end,’ he said. ‘If he’d bothered to be polite, it might have been different but he wasn’t. And he wasn’t even observant enough to see that those Lenin books belong to the History Department, were stamped to that effect, and were covered with dust. To the best of my knowledge, they’ve been on that shelf ever since my office was changed and they used to use them for the A-level special subject on the Russian Revolution.’
‘Then why didn’t you tell him that?’
‘Because he didn’t ask. I don’t see why I should volunteer information to total strangers.’
‘What about Naked Lunch? You volunteered that all right,’ said the County Advisor.
‘Only because he asked for worse reading material and I couldn’t think of anything more foul.’
‘Thank the Lord for small mercies,’ murmured the Principal.
‘But you definitely stated that the teaching in your department is stuffed – yes, you definitely used the word “stuffed” – with political bias. I heard you myself,’ continued the County Advisor.
‘Quite right too,’ said Wilt. ‘Considering I’m lumbered with forty-nine members of staff, including part-timers, and all the teaching they ever do is to natter away to classes and keep them quiet for an hour, I should think their political opinions must cover the entire spectrum, wouldn’t you?’
‘That isn’t the impression you gave him.’
‘I’m not here to give impressions,’ said Wilt, ‘I’m a teacher as a matter of unquestionable fact, not a damned public-relations expert. All right, now I’ve got to take a class of Electronics Engineers for Mr Stott who’s away ill.’
‘What’s the matter with him?’ asked the Principal inadvertently.
<
br /> ‘Having another nervous breakdown. Understandably,’ said Wilt and left the room.
Behind him the members of the Committee looked wanly at the door. ‘Do you really imagine this man Scudd will get the Minister to call for an enquiry?’ asked the Vice-Principal.
‘That’s what he told me,’ said the Advisor. ‘There are certain to be questions in the House after what he saw and heard. It wasn’t simply the sex that got his goat, though that was bad enough in all conscience. The man’s a Catholic and the emphasis on contraception –’
‘Don’t,’ whispered the Principal.
‘No, the thing that really upset him was being told to go and fuck himself by a drunken lout in Motor Mechanics Three. And Wilt, of course.’
‘Isn’t there something we can do about Wilt?’ the Principal asked despairingly as he and the Vice-Principal returned to their offices.
‘I don’t see what,’ said the V–P. ‘He inherited half his staff and since he can’t get rid of them, he has to do what he can.’
‘What Wilt can do is land us with questions in Parliament, the total mobilization of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate and a public enquiry into the way this place is run.’
‘I shouldn’t have thought they’d go to the lengths of a public enquiry. This man Scudd may have influence but I very much doubt …’
‘I wouldn’t. I saw the swine before he left and he was practically demented. What in God’s name is post-natal abortion anyway?’
‘Sounds rather like murder …’ the Vice-Principal began, but the Principal was way ahead of him on a thought process that would lead to his forced retirement. ‘Infanticide. That’s it. Wanted to know if I was aware that we were running a course on Infanticide for future Nannies and asked if we had an evening class for Senior Citizens on Euthanasia or Do-It-Yourself Suicide. We haven’t, have we?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘If we had I’d ask Wilt to run it. That bloody man will be the end of me.’
*
At the Ipford Police Station, Inspector Flint shared his feelings. Wilt had already screwed his chances of becoming a Superintendent and Flint’s misery had been compounded by the career of one of his sons, Ian, who had left school and home before taking his A-levels, and after graduating on marijuana and a suspended prison sentence had gone on to be seized by Customs and Excise loaded with cocaine at Dover. ‘Bang goes any hope of promotion,’ Flint had said morosely when his son was sent down for five years, and had brought down on his own head the wrath of Mrs Flint who blamed him for her son’s delinquency. ‘If you hadn’t been so interested in your own blooming work and getting on and all, and had taken a proper father’s interest in him, he wouldn’t be where he is now,’ she had shouted at him, ‘but no, it had to be Yes Sir, No Sir, Oh certainly Sir, and any rotten night work you could get. And week-ends. And what did Ian ever see of his own father? Nothing. And when he did it was always this crime or that villain and how blooming clever you’d been to nick him. That’s what your career’s done for your family. B. all.’
And for once in his life, Flint wasn’t sure she wasn’t right. He couldn’t bring himself to put it more positively than that. He’d always been right. Or in the right. You had to be to be a good copper, and he certainly hadn’t been a bent one. And his career had had to come first.
‘You can talk,’ he’d said somewhat gratuitously, since it was about the only thing he’d ever allowed her to do apart from the shopping and washing up and cleaning the house and whining on about Ian, feeding the cat and the dog and generally skivvying for him. ‘If I hadn’t worked my backside off, we wouldn’t have the house or the car and you wouldn’t have been able to take the little bastard to the Costa …’
‘Don’t you dare call him that!’ Mrs Flint had shouted, putting the hot iron on his shirt and scorching it in her anger.
‘I’ll call him what I bloody well like. He’s a rotten villain like all the rest of them.’
‘And you’re a rotten father. About the only thing you ever did as a father was screw me, and I mean screw, because it wasn’t anything else as far as I was concerned.’ Flint had taken himself out of the house and back to the police station thinking dark thoughts about women and how their place was in the home, or ought to be, and he was going to be the laughing-stock of the Fenland Constabulary with cracks about him visiting the nick over in Bedford to see his own home-grown convict and a drug pusher at that, and what he’d do to the first sod who called him Snowy and harrying … And all the time there was, on the very edge of his mind, a sense of grievance against Henry fucking Wilt. It had always been there, but now it came back stronger than ever: Wilt had buggered his career with that doll of his and then the siege. Oh, yes, he’d almost admired Wilt at one stage but that was a long time ago, a very long time indeed. The little sod was sitting pretty in his house at Oakhurst Avenue and a good salary at the ruddy Tech, and one day he’d probably be the Principal of the stinking place. Whereas any hope Flint had ever had of rising to Super, and being posted to some place Wilt wasn’t, had gone up in smoke. He was stuck with being Inspector Flint for the rest of his natural, and stuck with Ipford. As if to emphasize his lack of any hope, they’d brought Inspector Hodge in as Head of the Drug Squad and a right smart-arse he was too. Oh, they’d tried to butter over the crack, but the Super had called Flint in to tell him personally, and that had to mean something. That he was a dead-beat and they couldn’t trust him in the drugs game, because his son was inside. Which had brought on another of his headaches which he’d always thought were migraines, only this time the police doctor had diagnosed hypertension and put him on pills.
‘Of course I’m hypertense,’ Flint had told the quack. ‘With the number of brainy bastards round here who ought to be behind bars, any decent police officer’s got to be tense. He wouldn’t be any good at nailing the shits if he weren’t. It’s an occupational hazard.’
‘It’s whatever you like to call it, but I’m telling you you’ve got high blood pressure and …’
‘That’s not what you said a moment ago,’ Flint had flashed back. ‘You stated I had tension. Now then, which is it, hypertension or high blood pressure?’
‘Inspector,’ the doctor had said, ‘you’re not interrogating a suspect now.’ (Flint had his reservations about that.) ‘And I’m telling you as simply as I can that hypertension and high blood pressure are one and the same thing. I’m putting you on one diuretic a day –’
‘One what?’
‘It helps you pass water.’
‘As if I needed anything to make me do that. I’m up twice in the blasted night as it is.’
‘Then you’d better cut down on your drinking. That’ll help your blood pressure, too.’
‘How? You tell me not to be tense and the one thing that helps is a beer or two in the local.’
‘Or eight,’ said the doctor, who’d seen Flint in the pub. ‘Anyway, it’ll bring your weight down.’
‘And make me piss less. So you give me a pill to make me piss more and tell me to drink less. Doesn’t make sense.’
By the time Inspector Flint left the surgery, he still didn’t know what the pills he had to take did for him. Even the doctor hadn’t been able to explain how beta-blockers worked. Just said they did and Flint would have to stay on them until he died.
A month later the Inspector could tell the doctor how they worked. ‘Can’t even type any more,’ he said, displaying a pair of large hands with white fingers. ‘Look at them. Like bloody celery sticks that have been blanched.’
‘Bound to have some side-effects. I’ll give you something to relieve those symptoms.’
‘I don’t want any more of the piss pills,’ said Flint. ‘Those bleeding things are dehydrating me. I’m on the bloody trot all the time and it’s obvious there’s not enough blood left in me to get to my fingers. And that’s not all. You want to try working some villain over and being taken short just when he’s coming up with a confession. I tell you, it’s affectin
g my work.’
The doctor looked at him suspiciously and thought wistfully of the days when his patients didn’t answer back and police officers were of a different calibre to Flint. Besides, he didn’t like the expression ‘working some villain over’. ‘We’ll just have to try you out on some other medications,’ he said, and was startled by the Inspector’s reaction.
‘Try me out on some other medicines?’ he said belligerently. ‘Who are you supposed to be treating, me or the bloody medicines? I’m the one with blood pressure, not them. And I don’t like being experimented with. I’m not some bleeding dog, you know.’
‘I suppose not,’ said the doctor, and had doubled the Inspector’s dose of beta-blockers but under a different trade name, added some pills to counter the effect on his fingers, and changed the name of the diuretics. Flint had gone back to his office from the chemist feeling like a walking medicine cabinet.
A week later, he was hard put to it to say what he felt like. ‘Fucking awful is all I know,’ he told Sergeant Yates who’d been unwise enough to enquire. ‘I must have passed more bleeding water in the last six weeks than the Aswan Dam. And I’ve learnt one thing, this bloody town doesn’t have enough public lavatories.’
‘I should have thought there were enough to be going on with,’ said Yates, who’d once had the unhappy experience of being arrested by a uniformed constable while loitering in the public toilets near the cinema in plain clothes trying to apprehend a genuine loo-lounger.
‘Well, you can think again,’ snapped Flint. ‘I was caught short in Canton Street yesterday, and do you think I could find one? Not on your nelly. Had to use a lane between two houses and nearly got nabbed by a woman hanging her washing on the line. One of these days I’ll be done for flashing.’
‘Talking about flashing, we’ve had another report of a case down by the river. Tried it out on a woman of fifty this time.’