by Alan Hackney
“It does seem to me,” said Mr Hooper, “that you aren’t really answering my question, ‘Why do you want to come here?’ Let me show you how the management is arranged.” He fished in a drawer and presented Stanley with a sort of family tree. “You’ll note the horizontal structure below the top,” he said. “That means in practice a large degree of autonomy for each of our products; they even compete with each other, in much the same way as the different divisions in General Motors.”
Stanley puzzled for a little while over the diagram while Mr Hooper toyed with the pens on his desk and looked a little distastefully around his office, as if seeing it properly for the first time.
“It certainly does look very horizontal,” admitted Stanley. “So much so it leads me to ask what the chances are of getting to the top.”
“That’s a fair question,” said Mr Hooper. “The answer is, it depends partly on the firm and partly on you, but anyway you’ve a fair way to go before you would appear on that diagram at all. It would mean some years, even after your training. And I might add that advancement means even harder work. For instance, there’s no nonsense like the top management rolling up a couple of hours after the rest. Everyone from the General Manager downwards clocks on before eight in the morning, no matter how senior.”
The prospect thus outlined surprised Stanley a great deal. It seemed to him unlikely on the face of it that industry was going to attract many of the best brains, going about it that way. No wonder they were crying out.
“I suppose that’s American influence,” he said. “Do the men make a lot of money as a result?”
“Fourteen to sixteen pounds a week and subsidized canteen dinners,” said Mr Hooper. “We’re pretty efficient you see.”
“I do see,” said Stanley. “It’s most interesting.”
“I’ll show you part of the process,” said Mr Hooper reluctantly, “before you go.” He put on a white coat that was hanging up in the corner and led Stanley out and along to a door.
“Through here we come out half way along the Bumper machine I was telling you about,” said Mr Hooper. “Here we are. They’re just going to be enrobed.”
In front of them a continuous stream of little yellowish cylinders ran past on a perforated strip conveyor into a curtain of chocolate at the entrance of a low tunnel. On each side stretched the length of the interminable Bumper machine. It hummed and clicked in front of them, hissed steamily to the left where an early part of the process was going on, and gave out a continuous flum-flum noise from the packing end on the right.
“This is a standard enrober. Three-stage,” said Mr Hooper. He picked off one of the naked cylinders with a swooping movement as it ran past, took a bite mechanically and showed it to Stanley.
“Oh yes, I had some the other day,” said Stanley.
“We’re on the summer formula now, of course,” said Mr Hooper, swallowing, and dropping the rest of the bar into the reject basket by the conveyor. “The winter formula comes in in October.”
“What do you put in?” asked Stanley curiously, but Mr Hooper would not say.
“The formula’s only known to Mr Bumper himself in America and two other men,” he said. “One of them will be flying across about the end of September for the winter-base mixing.”
“How mysterious,” said Stanley, “I wonder if I can guess.” He imitated Mr Hooper’s swooping movement to pick up one of the passing bars. It resisted his attempt and he was not able to pick it off the conveyor before his hand and cuff had gone into the enrober.
“Bad luck,” said Mr Hooper, “it’s a question of knack. They’re pressed onto little prongs further back there so’s they don’t roll about. I’ll show you where to wash before you go.”
Stanley, left with the undercoated bar in his hand, felt it only polite to bite it before throwing it in the basket. It was a well-remembered taste.
“Quite up to standard,” he said with an effort.
*
In the Eaton Square house Great-Aunt Dolly was entertaining a visitor when Stanley returned. It was her son, Bertram Tracepurcel.
“Bertie’s here, Stanley,” said Great-Aunt Dolly. “He’d come round oftener, you know, but for Mildred.”
“Well, Stanley,” said Uncle Bertram. “Some years since we met.”
“Well, what a surprise. I thought you were still in Bolivia. Are you just back?”
“Good gracious no, Stanley,” said Great-Aunt Dolly. “Bertie’s been back years. He’s just been telling me of a wonderful idea to do the Tax Man in the eye. I give him all my money now and he keeps me, and as long as I live another five years I don’t have to pay any death duties.”
“You must think it over,” said Uncle Bertram. “And what are you doing these days, Stanley?”
“Stanley’s trying to get into industry,” said Dolly. “They witch-hunted him from the Foreign Office, so he’s trying to get into industrial management.”
Stanley shook off some of the dogs who were assiduously licking the remaining chocolate from his cuff.
“It’s pretty difficult to get in,” he said. “Today I went to Bumper Bars, but it all seemed very horizontal and a bit difficult to get to the top. And really, it didn’t sound frightfully rewarding when one got there. Clocking on at the same time as the workers and wearing oneself out.”
“But you’re absolutely right, Stanley,” said Uncle Bertram. “We’re living in a technological age, and if you want to get to the top you’ll have to be highly technical. Do you feel highly technical? No, I thought not. So you’re likely to stay at the bottom in management and there’s no future at all in that. In my case, I’ve got a bit of money and I’ve got on a few Boards of Directors. But if you haven’t any money, take my tip and become a proper worker. How much were Bumper Bars going to pay you?”
“Well, I said I was unmarried, mobile and ambitious, and they said five hundred.”
“Well, I ask you. Why bother, my dear fellow? If you were unskilled, your union would see you never got as little as that, I can assure you. And any firm would be glad of you. Why not?”
“Well, they told me at Bumper Bars that their chaps get sixteen pounds a week.”
“Of course, my dear fellow. Why scratch about racking your brains trying to make the workers’ lot more smooth? Why not be one of the chaps that reaps the benefit? You could still go on living here and be richer than most of your friends for years.”
“That certainly sounds sensible,” said Dolly. “Have you any firms you could recommend?”
“The essential thing,” explained Bertram, “is to get into a go-ahead firm where the management are all giving themselves ulcers trying to make the place more efficient and telling the men it means a bigger wage-packet. You’ll be the one that gets it. And consider this, Stanley: You’ll be important. Both the big political parties will depend on your vote and consider it their moral duty to protect you. You’ve got a rosy future, my boy.”
“Would any of your firms fill the bill?” asked Stanley.
“Yes, I should think Missiles Limited would be a good bet for you, if you want a good firm near here, but you must do it off your own bat. Don’t mention my name to anyone; just turn up.”
“Well, thank you very much. I really must think about it.”
“Not a bit. You must seize your opportunities, and if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, there’s a big future for you as a worker. Give it a try, Stanley. But as I say, don’t say your Uncle’s on the Board, or you’ll only disturb the industrial peace.”
“All right. I’ll not mention it to anyone.”
“Good. You can’t be too careful about your relatives. Look how they chucked you from the Foreign Office. Keep me dark.”
“Well, that’s all fixed,” said Dolly. “Now Mildred’s likely to be back shortly, Bertie, so I suppose you’ll want to be going. Don’t leave it so long before you call again.”
“Right, Mother. And don’t forget, Stanley, you’ll be all right with Missiles.
You’d only do better on building sites, but that means hard work and a long trek each day on a motor bike. Always remember, it’s the shareholder and the unskilled man who have the best of it; they’re both in short supply.”
*
After Uncle Bertram had left, Stanley thought over his advice. The more he thought of it the more logical it seemed, and after receiving a rejection letter from Bumper’s he went again to see the man at the Appointments Board.
“I’m sorry you don’t appear to have had an awful lot of success so far,” said the Appointments man. “But we may have to face it, Mr Windrush: it may just possibly perhaps be that you may not be perhaps quite the management type. It does happen like that with some people, you know.”
“You may be right,” said Stanley thankfully. “As a matter of fact I’m rather relieved to hear it. I’m going to try a rather different approach. But thank you very much for all your help. It’s been most civil of you, and I might have been quite out of place in that exacting sort of life.”
“Not at all, Mr Windrush,” said the Appointments man, wincing a little. “That’s what we’re here for.”
He put two letters of complaint from the personnel managers of Spindley’s and Bumper Bars into Stanley’s file.
“It’s been an experience meeting you,” he said.
CHAPTER 8
IT MUST not be supposed that Stanley Windrush was an idle shirker. On the contrary, the Ideal Of Service had been very firmly dinned into him at school, and he had always been consciously dedicated to it.
Unfortunately, schools like Stanley’s proceed on the assumption that their products, imbued with such an ideal of service, will equally develop a superior degree of reliability and competence. Alive to the facts of present-day life, these schools now teach a great deal of science, but this was not the case in Stanley’s day. A mild spell of reading English Literature at Oxford after the war had set the wrong seal on an already futile process. Stanley was the last true dim gentleman.
While cleverer contemporaries of his at Oxford were now becoming, understandably, the angry young men of literature and the theatre, or were joining the queues at emigration offices, Stanley—who had never felt the sting of ability frustrated—looked cheerfully round for some occupation to fit his vast incompetence. The flamelike ideal of serving the community still burned in the dim hollows of his mind.
Sensibly following the convenient principle of going where there was a crying need, Stanley looked round for an efficient-sounding industry within reasonable travelling distance of Eaton Square. He had seen the place called MISSILES LTD several times from the train, only a few minutes out of Victoria, and about eleven o’clock one morning, having decided to give them a trial, he called at his local Labour Exchange. This he found in rather a dull street five minutes away from his aunts’ house. A number of actresses were coming out of the women’s section, fiscally fortified for another week of chancy auditions.
Inside, the man first thought he had come about a passport, but Stanley disabused him.
“No, it was for a job,” he said. “Employment,” he added in an explanatory tone.
“Yes,” said the man. “Sit down, but you more than likely want the place in Tavistock Square. They deal with all the higher appointments there. People with professional qualifications.”
“Oh, but that’s very far from what I want,” said Stanley. “I’ve been having shots at that sort of thing, but I’ve taken advice and I’ve been told I’d be far better off as an Ordinary Worker.”
“I don’t quite understand you,” said the man. “For instance, you say Ordinary Worker. What do you mean by that? The ministry publishes a complete book of classified occupations, hundreds of pages. Every time there’s a new edition you get a funny article on it, so-called, in the papers. And you’ve probably seen What’s My Line on the television. Well, there you are. There are thousands of different sorts of what you call Ordinary Workers.”
“Yes, well, when I say Ordinary Worker,” explained Stanley, “I mean I’d like to try an ordinary unskilled job at Missiles Limited. A friend of my Great-Aunt’s tells me that’s just the sort of firm, you know—all teed up to give the chaps working there a big encouraging wage packet. It’d take too long to explain why I want to go there particularly, but I do. I imagine this simplifies things for you?”
“We don’t want things simplified like that, thank you,” said the man a little huffily. “Our job is to help people find the employment most suitable for them and their employers, and often enough it’s not an easy job. What are your qualifications, and what was your last job?”
“I was at the Foreign Office,” said Stanley. “I suppose my real qualification was I knew some Japanese.”
“Ah,” said the man, seizing on this. “Now, vacancies in interpreting. Let me see.” He began pulling at a card index in a metal cabinet beside his desk. “We’re on the right track now,” he said, smiling for the first time, with something to get his teeth into.
“I’m sorry to have to say this,” said Stanley, fairly firmly, “but I’m afraid you aren’t. I don’t at all feel like interpreting. I just want an unskilled job at Missiles Limited. If they’ve got any vacancies, that is.”
The man stopped rummaging in his index, and shut the cabinet. He took a deep breath and surveyed Stanley in a pent-up sort of silence.
“You don’t want to avail yourself of our facilities, then?” he asked.
“But don’t you see, I do,” explained Stanley. “I’ve seen it in the newspapers. All jobs like this between eighteen and sixty-five have to go through the Ministry of Labour. So can you tell me if there are any jobs at Missiles?”
The man opened another cabinet and looked reluctantly through it.
Finally he said: “Yes, there are,” very reluctantly, but then he shut the cabinet again to make another attempt.
“Be reasonable,” he urged. “A man with your education.”
“But that’s just it,” said Stanley. “I’m not really educated at all, you see, so the only thing I could do would be to be a schoolmaster, and I’d hate that.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the man, seizing the opening. “I think it would be a help if I gave you the address of the Education Office.”
“Oh come now,” protested Stanley. “It’d be worse than old Shaky Lacey we had at school. Can you imagine me with a class of boys?”
“I’m not the imaginative type,” said the man. “Now, the address is Number 25 …”
“No,” said Stanley, “it’s just not me.”
The man switched to another line of argument.
“Now why don’t you think it over properly for a bit,” he suggested. “Go on National Assistance for a while if you can’t make out. They’re only too willing to help. Then you can decide what you really do want to do,” he added in a tone of strained kindness, for all the world like any father but Stanley’s.
“But I do know what I do want to do,” said Stanley. “I’d like very much to be a sort of gentleman farmer, but I haven’t any money, so failing that I really want at the moment to be an unskilled industrial worker. At Missiles Limited,” he added.
The man passed a handkerchief over his brow.
“I’m here to help you,” he said dully. “But if you won’t let me, you won’t. All right,” he went on, defeated, “let me start at the beginning. Your name again?”
“This is not at all what an employment exchange is for,” he grumbled, as he began to take Stanley’s particulars. “I see my duty to the community quite differently. Insurance number? People come here with one idea in their heads, they want to do so-and-so. Our job’s to talk them out of that. Get them properly suited. But if you won’t accept help …”
“But I’m very grateful,” said Stanley. “Thank you for your help.”
“Card?” said the man. He took it. One of Dolly’s dogs had savaged one corner of it slightly. “Take proper care of this card.” He still seemed very frustrated.
; “I certainly shall,” said Stanley. “And I shall do nothing with it until told what to do with it.”
“I’ll tell you what to do with it right now,” said the man, a glint of satisfaction in his eye. “Take it to the counter there, or any Post Office, and buy the last three weeks’ stamps, or you’ll get had up.”
But when Stanley had gone he telephoned Missiles Limited and said in the persuasive tone of habit: “I’m sending you one unskilled. Windrush. Very keen. Strongly recommended.”
Missiles Limited had heard it before and awaited Stanley without visible excitement.
Stanley drank some curious coffee at Victoria Station and having given them time to settle down to the day’s work, he made his way to the factory to inquire.
*
“Vacancies?” said the man in the time-clock office at the main gate. “Yer, course there are. You seen the notice up. Watsher trade? Electrical fitter? Coppersmith?”
“Oh no,” said Stanley. “Nothing skilled.”
The man took him by the shoulder and laid a long pointing arm within an inch of his head. He squinted along it for the space of a breath and then said: “Up that main avenue, go straight the way through and you come to a road junction.”
“Yes, I see, a ro——”
“You go left‚” interrupted the man. “And on your left’s the inquiries. Mr ’Aywood.”
*
Stanley went in and knocked at a hatch. There was no immediate response and he sat down on a bench. He had hardly done so when the hatch opened and Mr Haywood looked out.
“Yes?”
“I came to see about a job,” said Stanley, coming to the hatch.
“You probably want the main block,” Mr Haywood leaned out and pointing through the window began: “Follow this road and bear right at the bottom….”
“Excuse me,” said Stanley. “The man at the gate said come here. Isn’t that right?”
“Ah, but for managing staff you want the main block,” said Mr Haywood. “Follow this road down …”