The Scheme for Full Employment

by Magnus Mills

  On the other hand, it was good that these newcomers were keen to learn about The Scheme and all its inner workings, and I suspected that the enquiries would subside after a while.

  We pulled into Blackwell dead on schedule, despite our late start. Several other vans were already being dealt with, but there was a space on the bay so I reversed into it. Within minutes Len Walker had appeared with his forklift and begun unloading. Meanwhile, Jonathan wandered amongst the various stacks of crates, pausing from time to time to study their labels.

  “Where’s Eden Lacy?” he asked at length.

  “Don’t know,” I replied. “It must be one of the depots outside our radius. Don’t forget there are hundreds of them scattered all over the place. It could be anywhere in the country. What else does it say?”

  “Size 2 rubber grommets: one gross. Stocks Green, Long Reach, Blackwell, Eden Lacy.”

  “Right,” I said. “Every picture tells a story. Some time or other that crate will be collected from here and taken to Eden Lacy depot. Maybe they’re short of grommets up there. Or maybe not. They might just move them on again after a while.”

  While we’d been talking Len had finished his unloading and was now standing nearby, listening with interest. After the mid-morning burst of activity Blackwell had begun to wind down towards dinner. Further along the bay Charlie Green was occupied with the only other remaining van. Except that occupied wasn’t really the right word. In the time Len had taken to empty us, Charlie had managed to remove one pallet from his vehicle, having spent most of the intervening minutes talking to the driver. By rights, Gosling or Osgood or one of the other superintendents should have come along and told him to get a move on, but for the moment there was no sign of any of them, so Charlie just continued his conversation. Len shook his head with obvious disdain, then headed upstairs to the games room. Jonathan and I made ready to depart.

  When we got back in the cab I saw the stack of cake boxes and remembered I had to call in at Sandro’s. There was plenty of time, so when I did the drop I made sure not to involve Jonathan, carrying the cakes into the bakery in two lots by myself. Sandro was up to his ears in work, as were his three colleagues, but we exchanged pleasantries nonetheless.

  “How are you, my friend?” he asked, taking a great armful of boxes from me.

  “Fine, thanks,” I replied. “You look busy.”

  “Oh, busy, busy, busy!” he said. “Always busy!”

  I looked at the beads of sweat rolling down his forehead, and wondered how long Charlie Green would last in such a place.

  As usual, there was one box to collect, the one that had to be transferred to Pete Giggs on run number seven. When I returned with it to the UniVan, Jonathan at last broke his silence concerning the boxes.

  “Don’t mind my asking,” he said. “But isn’t it prohibited to carry goods in the cab?”

  “It isn’t a good,” I replied. “It’s a cake.”

  “But all the same …”

  “Look,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. No one’s going to ask questions about one box, and even if they do I’ll take full responsibility, OK?”

  “Well, as long as you’re sure.”

  “Course I am. The management aren’t bothered about that sort of thing. Their only concern is to keep these vans on schedule, so all the collections and deliveries coincide. That’s all they’re interested in, so just relax and enjoy the ride, same as everyone else does.”

  “Alright,” said Jonathan. “I’ll try my best.”

  “And don’t forget you’re being paid for the pleasure.”

  This last remark put a smile on his face, and as he settled back in the dummy seat I sensed he was beginning to feel more at ease. Soon we had resumed our noonward journey to Cotton Town, cruising along the Ring Road with plenty of time to ponder the advantages of life on The Scheme. After all, what could be nicer than an excursion in a UniVan on a bright spring morning? Oh, I admit they were under-powered and rattly, and that the novelty of driving them wore off once you’d done a few years behind the wheel. But every so often, when I caught sight of my vehicle reflected in some huge glass-fronted office building, it seemed there could be no better way to earn a living.

  For without a doubt the UniVan was a glorious creation! With its distinctive gunmetal paintwork and silver livery, its bull-nosed profile, running boards and chrome front grill, it had become a celebrated national icon, recognized and loved by all! Moreover, it represented a great idea that not only worked, but was seen to work!

  Having said that, there were some people whose passion for UniVans seemed to go a bit too far. As we came onto an elevated section of road I noticed a group of men with notebooks sitting on a concrete buttress. When we passed by they all peered at us intently.

  “Who are they?” asked Jonathan, when I pointed them out to him.

  “Enthusiasts,” I replied. “They like writing down the numbers.”

  “But I thought that was just for children.”

  “Ooh no,” I said. “That lot take it all very seriously. They know the schedules better than the supers do, and some of them even own their own vans.”

  “Where do they get them from?”

  “They’re auctioned off after a hundred thousand miles.”

  “And they go out in them, do they?”

  “No, they don’t. They would if they could, but it’s not allowed, so they keep them in their gardens.”

  “Well, why don’t they just get jobs on The Scheme?” Jonathan suggested. “Then they could ride round to their heart’s content.”

  “Don’t ask me,” I replied. “They’re barmy, that lot.”

  Oddly enough, having seemingly convinced Jonathan that being paid to drive a UniVan was quite an enviable existence, I now began to have a troubling thought of my own. It was hardly anything really, nothing more than a vague irritation, but it was there alright. As far as I could tell it had been triggered off at Blackwell when we’d come across the label that said Eden Lacy. At first, I couldn’t think why the name of some remote and unknown depot should bother me so much. Then I realized it was precisely because I’d never been there. Despite having done five years on The Scheme, covering many miles of road, I’d only actually visited the seven depots on our circuit, namely, Blackwell, Cotton Town, Rudgeway, Bell Tower, Stocks Green, Merry Park and, of course, Long Reach. I also knew the locations of Royal Pond and Castle Gate depots, though I’d never had occasion to call at either of them. Eden Lacy, however, was a name I hadn’t heard before, and it struck me that as much as I enjoyed my job, there was something restrictive about always travelling along the same few routes, back and forth, week in, week out. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, just for once to go to a different destination.

  As if on cue I noticed a grey flash somewhere down to my right. We were still on the elevated section, with fine views over a vast expanse of rooftops, parks and gardens. Below us was the former arterial highway, which had been superseded a decade earlier when the Ring Road was built. Nowadays, freed from the burden of heavy traffic, it had become a pleasant, spacious avenue. And rolling along it was a lone UniVan, bound for who-knows-where.

  4

  When we returned to Blackwell that afternoon the first thing I had to do was go and see Osgood. Leaving Jonathan in charge of our UniVan, I took the single cake box and headed for the office. Osgood was there, looking very relaxed with his feet up on the desk.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said, when he caught sight of the box. “One cake to be transferred to Pete Giggs.”

  “Yes, please,” I replied. “If you don’t mind.”

  “George got you running round for him, has he?”

  “Yeah, I had to shift about a dozen this morning.”

  “I didn’t quite catch that,” said Osgood. “And you’d better hide that one underneath here. I’ve heard Nesbitt’s on the prowl.”

  “Nesbitt?” I said, dismayed. “What’s he doing in these parts?”

  “You tell me
. No one knows how his mind works. Sometimes we don’t see him for months on end, then suddenly he decides to pay a visit. Apparently he turned up at the Bell Tower the other day without any warning. Sat in the super’s room for eight hours. Never uttered a word.”

  “Well, I hope he doesn’t come here.”

  “So do I,” said Osgood. “Believe me, so do I.”

  I put the cake under his desk, thanked him and then returned to the bay, where Len and Jonathan were now deep in conversation.

  “I hope you’re setting him a good example,” said Len, as I joined them. “Keeping him on the straight and narrow.”

  “Doing my best,” I replied.

  “That’s good. We don’t want him drifting into the other sphere of influence.”

  One look at Jonathan told me he had no idea what Len was talking about. However, I didn’t bother trying to explain it all to him, as I knew it wouldn’t be long until he found out for himself. At the same time, I realized that Len had come to regard me as an ally in the crusade he’d embarked upon, namely, to conserve the eight-hour “flat” day.

  Now I have to say I could see Len’s point. The success of The Scheme depended above all else on appearances. It was popular because people could see it in operation on a daily basis. When a UniVan passed by, it reminded onlookers that all across the country men and women were occupied in gainful employment. Eight hours’ work for eight hours’ pay: that was the deal, and everyone agreed it was fair. What worried Len was the number of early finishes that were being dished out by lenient superintendents. He saw this as a threat to The Scheme’s public support, and he obviously thought I agreed with him. Well, of course I did in principle, but to tell the truth I quite liked the occasional early swerve, as we called it. It was a nice treat to go home at four o’clock on the odd day if things were quiet. Or half past three even. Certainly, it wasn’t a perk I took for granted, but neither did I wish to give it up entirely. As for Len’s reference to “the other sphere of influence”, he presumably meant Charlie Green and his ilk. True, Charlie did push it occasionally, especially when soft touches like Gosling were near at hand. All in all, though, I remained convinced that Len’s fears were groundless.

  One thing I knew for sure was that Jonathan and I would be getting no early swerve today. We still had that pallet trolley from Friday on board the van, waiting to go to Merry Park, so there was no avoiding the final journey. Len unloaded three pallets that we’d brought over from Cotton Town, then I closed the roller door and flipped the catch. As we departed I noticed him give Jonathan a friendly pat on the back.

  “Very important place, Merry Park,” I said, as we pulled out of the front gates. “It’s the central hub for this region. Any amount of UniVans pass through there, from all over the place.”

  “So how come we’ve got nothing to deliver except the trolley?” asked Jonathan.

  “Good question,” I replied. “Yes, it has been a bit quiet lately, but that doesn’t mean a thing. Sometimes you can be packed to the gunwales all day long: it just depends what comes in from the different depots. When it’s like this we just try to make the most of it.”

  “So we don’t just run round empty all the time?”

  “Oh, no. Quite the opposite.”

  As a matter of fact, Jonathan’s observation wasn’t as far off the mark as I’d made out. When I thought about it, I hadn’t actually been to Merry Park since the Tuesday of the previous week, and as far as I could remember that was just to deliver a single full-size crate. Prior to that, I had no recollection of taking more than the odd pallet there for several months, or possibly even longer. It then dawned on me that despite Merry Park’s reputation as being a pivotal component in the smooth running of The Scheme, the truth was that its daily workload was only light, especially when compared with Long Reach or Blackwell depots. This view was confirmed when we arrived half an hour later and pulled into the yard. Notwithstanding the four UniVans we’d passed on the service road going in, and the dozen or so parked on the bay, there was little in the way of proper activity taking place anywhere. Instead, a number of men stood around examining the concrete floor, or looking with deep interest at the steel-span roof. As for vans actually being loaded or unloaded, these amounted to none.

  Not that it mattered, of course. Like I said before, it was appearances that counted, and by all appearances this depot was a model of efficiency. As I reversed onto the bay, Bert Hawkes, Merry Park’s transport manager, began his daily journey from the main offices to the engineers’ workshop, a walk of about seventy yards. This was in order to collect the worksheets for UniVans that had undergone repair during the day, and to return those from the day before. Meanwhile, several drivers helped one another to put their vehicles through the automatic wash (making sure mirrors didn’t become misaligned and so forth). The bay itself was almost entirely clear of goods, another sign of efficiency, and the three forklift trucks that waited in attendance had a look of being highly polished and lightly oiled.

  In the midst of all this Jonathan and I got out of our van, opened the roller door and prepared to hand over the pallet trolley. Unlike Blackwell, where Len was always on to you in an instant, getting dealt with at Merry Park required a certain amount of patience. I knew from experience that the staff here consisted of two general types. The first category were quite cooperative, helpful even, but also very difficult to find as they spent large parts of the day secluded in the inner recesses of the depot. If you interrupted them in the middle of a card game, for example, they would quite happily lay down their hands to come and unload you. Unfortunately, this required a detailed knowledge of the building, because cards weren’t played upstairs in the games room, but in an annexe at the rear. These recluses counted among their number such men as Ernie Turner, Kenny Knowles and Mick McVitie.

  The other group could always be found somewhere on the bay, but didn’t seem very interested in unloading UniVans (especially after three o’clock when they began sweeping the floor for the evening shutdown). They tended to congregate around a warehouseman called Billy Barker, whom I regarded as a sort of mouthpiece for the rest of them. When we’d first arrived I’d spotted Billy leaning on a broom at the far end of the bay, but now that we were parked with our door open there was no sign of him. Instead, I attempted to catch the eye of one of his sidekicks, an individual known as Beak. He’d become temporarily separated from his friends and was making his way back towards them. When he saw me he tried to dodge behind a forklift, but I intercepted him as he reappeared on the other side. With no further means to elude me, he came to a halt.

  “Yes, mate?”

  “Are you expecting a pallet trolley?”

  “No, mate.”

  “Well who is, then?”

  “Dunno, mate.”

  I wasn’t really in the mood to be stonewalled in such a manner, not at this time of day, so I turned towards the super’s office and said, “Alright, I’ll have to go and ask Mr Huggins.”

  This brought the required change in Beak’s demeanour.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Pull it out and we’ll have a look.”

  Strictly speaking, it wasn’t my job to pull anything out, but I wasn’t going to make a fuss on this score so I obliged and got the trolley onto the bay. As I did so we were joined by Billy Barker, who’d obviously decided to approach us once he’d seen there were no crates to unload.

  “Hello,” he said. “Where’s that come from?”

  “Cotton Town,” I replied.

  “Thought so. That’s the one Trevor King shoved over the edge of the bay.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Look at the handle,” said Billy. “It’s bent in the middle.”

  “Blimey,” I said. “Trevor King. That’s a name from the past. Whatever happened to him?”

  “Got the sack, didn’t he?”

  “Sacked? No one gets sacked from The Scheme.”

  “Trevor did.”

  “What? For shoving
a trolley off the bay?”

  “Oh no,” said Billy. “That was after he’d got the sack.”

  “So what did he do that was so bad then?”

  “He took a UniVan home for the night.”

  “What!”

  “It was pouring with rain and he couldn’t be bothered walking. He’d have got away with it too if he hadn’t come in late the next day. As it was the yard was empty when he finally rolled in at half past eight. He got dismissed on the spot, and took it out on that trolley.”

  How much of Billy’s story was actually true was hard to tell, but it was enough to break the ice. Ever since we’d arrived at Merry Park, Jonathan had stood by the van looking a little aloof and awkward. Now he joined in the laughter, and appeared more at ease when Billy turned to him with a grin and said, “Let that be a lesson to you!”

  A movement in the yard caught my eye, and I saw Bert Hawkes commence his return journey from the engineers’ workshop to the main offices. This meant we’d been at Merry Park for almost twenty minutes and still hadn’t got rid of that trolley!

  “Right,” I said. “Who’s going to sign for this?”

  “Dunno,” said Billy with a shrug. “Who ordered it?”

  “Dunno,” I replied.

  “Well, we can’t take it then, can we?”

  “Why don’t I just leave it in a corner somewhere?”

  “You’re joking,” he said. “How long you been on The Scheme?”

  This question required no answer, of course. With no sign of Huggins (or any other super for that matter), I decided the best course of action was to reload the trolley and take it back to Long Reach. I could always come back another day if anyone decided they wanted it. Four o’clock was approaching. As Billy and his friends continued solemnly sweeping the bay, Jonathan and I prepared to make our departure from Merry Park depot.

  “By the way,” I said, when we were back in the cab. “There’s someone over here who’s well worth keeping on good terms with.”

  I started up and eased the van across the yard towards the gate house. High up, sitting behind his window, I could see John Jones. As usual he was leaning over a newspaper, and showed no apparent sign that he’d noticed our presence.