Picture the scene. Frame it in your mind’s eye. We are looking at a great new development to the East of the City, with the eye of a TV cameraman (we will call him Les) who loves the very idea of it, who sees beauty in a tower block slanting cool and clean into a windy sky, and in the blossom drifting from the instant trees of the Garden Centres, and in the majesty of a great steel and glass pyramid so vast he can hardly lose it from his frame, even if he wanted to, even if he was paid to, which you may be sure he isn’t; symbol of the city’s wealth and busy-ness. Les sees no point in dwelling on the ‘To Let’ or ‘For Sale’ signs, or the homeless who drift like the blossom up against the concrete walls, already stained by soot, weather and urine, or on the rats which nose up out of the flooding sewers; Les prefers to focus his lens on the beautiful faces of the PR women and the gently crumpled Armani suits of their employers, and who wouldn’t? His shots are disciplined, beautifully framed. He’s one of the best around.
But what’s this? We’re into fiction now? Thank God for that. We need no longer take anything seriously. We know all that other bad news, don’t we; indeed, we’re pleased, to know it so well. How are the mighty fallen, we rejoice! Serve them right, we cry – the bastards, the property developers, sticky fingers in the pension fund: serve them right for being richer than us, for sending their useless unecological spires into the godless sky. Forget all that. We have a story to tell. Let’s turn our cameras West a little: while we consider our children, all our victims. Let’s turn our minds to the tale of young Timothy Bagshott, son of Jim Bagshott, property developer, swindler, charmer. Les, are you on line? Soundman; are you there? Paul, are you happy? (Most sound-men are called Paul, and directors always say, ‘Paul, are you happy?’ and Paul always replies, ‘Yes.’ So I have a vision of all Pauls as happy men or liars, take your pick.)
Paul is giving us the sound of school children singing, a little further to the West of the great city development to which we have been referring. Paul has located a school of the new regime: they’re singing a Christian song as recommended by an Act of Parliament at morning assembly. Their innocent voices carol: this is what they sing:
‘So here hath been dawning
Another blue day,
Think, wilt thou let it
Fly useless away?’
So far so good; the Protestant work ethic still about its perfectly decent business. But what is this? What are they singing now?
‘Or wilt thou use it
For profit, and say
Hasten the dawn
Of another blue day?’
What has got into their voices, their hearts, their souls? What view is this of their own existences? Do they no longer want to go to heaven? Do they want heaven on earth, these kids? Do they want their oats now, not later? Good God, how will we keep our youth in order, if they have adopted the hopes and aspirations of their elders and betters, Mr Maxwell, Mrs Thatcher and her fine son Mark, all those City folk whose names we have already forgotten, stabbed in the back by their colleagues, the insider dealers, the fraudsters, the goers to sea in sleazy yachts? The new robber barons. Weep, children, weep for your lost souls. Trust Les to be hot on Paul’s heels, getting them into shot. What’s happened is that Paul and Les have a new master now: the stern director Angus, and a commission from the BBC, though it scrapes its barrel for funds. Oh yes, we’re into fiction now. We’re allowed a glimpse of the terrors of reality.
Here, little sister to Canary Wharf, we see Bagshott Towers, an unfinished development complex striving to survive recession. Once it was the little river port of Parrot Pier: a pretty place: a miniature Greenwich, albeit on the wrong side of the river. Parrot Pier boasted a Georgian house or so, and an old playhouse, some bonded warehouses, a host of railway cottages and navy dwellings. Gone, all gone: in their place a cluster of concrete structures rise out of a river of mud. If Les will only point his camera where Angus requires, we can see what can only be a group of anxious structural engineers teetering on the still unfinished thirteenth floor of a residential block, wondering whether or not it’s entirely safe. Too late, in any case – from the ground floor up to the twelfth the habitation units are already occupied; here now dwell the desperate human overflow from the Inner City (the local council hires in homeless from other city boroughs for a substantial fee, hires out its own homeless to others for a lesser one, and so mysteriously makes a profit: it has something to do with the river view and Poll Tax levels).
Listen hard, and hear the hurrying feet of Rupert Oates, the social worker, driven by pressure of overwork to speak his thoughts aloud, at our expense. ‘Les, where are you? Paul, Paul, pick up Mr Oates’ thought patterns, if you please. Paul, are you happy?’
‘More than happy, Mr Angus, sir. I call you “sir” because you as my director are equipped to take an overview, earn more than I do, are not staff but work freelance, and can engage the bosses in conversation. I, who do not have the benefits of your education, your background, your capacity for chutzpah, am only fit to lick your boots, be told what to do and develop biceps, which my girlfriend hates, by swinging the sound boom overhead. She does not like me to be muscly, macho. More than happy, sir! What option do I have? The thoughts in Mr Rupert Oates’ head run thus:
“Listen, folks, I have a tale to tell of Bagshott Towers, I know it well. Being the welfare man round here: kept sadly busy too, I fear. Here, where once stood Parrot Pier and village pond and willows dear, now soars the height of Bagshott Towers, stressed concrete takes the place of bowers –”
‘You live in a flowery house called The Bowers, I believe, Mr Director Angus, over on Hampstead Hill, next door to “The Cot” where Mr Bagshott used to live, before he was carted away for corruption. Bagshott tore down his dovecote, according to the gutter press, and put in a swimming pool and re-named The Cot “Amanda” after his girlfriend – and why not, Mr Director? Mr Bagshott was a vulgarian, as am I: happy Paul the sound-man. Mr Oates has a word or two to say on that. They go like this: “The grass of course is greener on the other side, where the gentry of the world reside. But listen, folks, we have a tale to tell, of how the rich and mighty fell. The property speculators’ bubble produced this land of mud and rubble. And Timothy Bagshott’s dad, I fear, is much to blame for all that’s here, and now he languishes in jail, so let Jim himself take up the tale.”’
‘Les,’ says Angus, ‘that’s more than enough of Paul. Can we reconstruct Amanda three months ago, when the fraud squad swooped at five that summer morning, and eased Jim Bagshott out of bed, and put him in a police car and sped him off to meet his just deserts? And can we do it within budget?’
You, the viewer, will have seen similar scenes on TV many times. The camera, following the vanishing car, seldom turns back to the house to see the forlorn figures of those left behind, waving goodbye on the step: in this case it’s young Timothy Bagshott and his dismal Aunt Annie. Or, as Rupert Oates observes, ‘My tale’s of Timothy Bagshott, son of Jim, and how misfortune came to him, and how the lad faced up to perils great, and how at least he conquered cruel fate.’
Paul the sound-man swears this is what goes on in Rupert Oates’ head, and Paul has the acuity of the really happy to be believed now. ‘Paul, are you happy?’
‘Happy as Larry, Angus.’ There is hope, you see: there is always some underlying happy refrain, if only we can hear it. Let’s for God’s sake get on before the light goes.
‘I’ll have something to say to my solicitor,’ says Jim, and who should he find sharing his open prison cell, of course, but Clive his solicitor, so this is how the word or two went:
‘What are you doing here?’ asked Jim.
‘Six years,’ said Clive. ‘For fraud. And you?’
‘Twenty years,’ said Jim, ‘for bribery and corruption.’
‘Last time we met,’ said Clive, ‘we had champagne and chips for breakfast. Remember that.’
‘And now,’ said Jim, ‘we are reduced to porridge. But, knowing us, we’ll soon have cream on it. My only worry is the boy. Poor Timothy, poor motherless boy. The house sold over his head: his school fees left unpaid. Nothing between him and destitution but my sister, his Aunt Annie, and all she cares about is herself, but then who doesn’t?’
‘But he’s got the Welfare, Jim,’ said Clive. ‘Let us not forget the Welfare. It’s what we paid our Poll Tax for, or failed to, as the case may be.’
‘What’s to become of the boy?’ asked Jim again. A tear or two fell from his eyes.
‘The criminal classes often weep for the sorrows of children,’ Angus the director says in a note to the actor playing Jim, ‘although they have caused the sorrows themselves.’ The actor yawns.
* * *
Ripple dissolve to a month ago – Angus favours ripple dissolves: they remind him of his childhood and save re-writes – when on the step of the shuttered Amanda Timothy Bagshott stood alone, his smart pigskin suitcase by his side, the very model of a smart City gent in uniform, only slightly miniatured by virtue of his lack of years. And zooming up is a battered mini-van, with Department of Youth writ large upon its rusty side – nothing rustier than the Welfare, these days, in any city in the world – and in the van our good friend Rupert Oates himself. Paul, happy Paul, pick up his thoughts!
‘See, here I come, the Welfare Man, in the County Council van, though Bagshott is a cursed name round here, still Timothy does deserve my care.’
And Timothy and his poor Aunt Annie, a nervous, plain, unmarried lady in her middle years, much burdened by black plastic sacks into which are crammed all her worldly belongings and such of Timothy’s as she could be bothered to bring, step into the van. The boy would not be seen in public, even on the steps of a disgraced and shuttered house, with a black plastic sack. He would rather die than lose his dignity. This is what private education does to a lad.
And off the van goes, through the dilapidation of poor Parrot Pier, to the slightly less broken structures of the new estate. Here removal vans abound: the hopeful and the hopeless, the repossessed and unpossessed: have you got them in shot, Les? You’re not doing a promotional video now: this is real life.
‘Till Timothy’s fortunes we decide,’ thinks Rupert Oates, ‘it’s been judged best that he reside, for such are fate’s ironic powers, with his aunt in Bagshott Towers. A Council rent book! Oh what a shame, to those with Bagshott as a name.’
Les captures the faces of Timothy and his Auntie Annie, as they stare up the soaring, if truncated, face of Audrey Tower, their future home. Twelve floors finished and twenty-five hoped for. ‘Most of us,’ observes Rupert, ‘of course are glad to take what there is to be had, but Audrey Tower I have to tell is where the problem families dwell, and as a pleasant place to live is quite the worst the Council has to give.’
The arrival of the Bagshott aunt and nephew and Mr Oates in Council towers is observed by one Jon-Jon Ooster, a sixteen-year-old punk of some charm and intelligence, albeit white-faced, grimy and hung with leather, chains and nose rings. Jon-Jon, a vegetarian, smokes a cigar in the corridor he is to share with the Bagshotts (and a dozen others, of course, but they’re too in terror of Jon-Jon to leave their apartments to put in an appearance). Paul, a snatch of conversation, please. Are you dreaming? We have to hear as well as look.
‘I’m certain there’ll be a shortage of oxygen this high up,’ said Aunt Annie. ‘If Timothy’s asthma returns I shall hold you responsible, Mr Oates.’
‘I didn’t know you had asthma, Timothy,’ says Mr Oates.
‘I haven’t,’ says Timothy.
‘Yes, he has,’ declares Aunt Annie. ‘It started the day his mother left home. He was only seven. Do you remember that day, Timothy?’
‘Not if I can help it,’ observes Timothy.
‘See? How he suffers!’ says Aunt Annie. ‘Poor little Timothy! Poor wee boy!’
Aunt Annie has decided that the mercy directed at Timothy, by virtue of his childish state, shall include her too, by reason of the sympathy and concern she clearly shows for her nephew. Aunt Annie is not without a soupçon of her brother Jim’s self-interested genes.
Into the flat they go, gene sharers both, sister and child of brother Jim, and find it bleak, and sparse and grim. The view’s terrific, even so.
‘Is this really how the workers live?’ asks Annie. ‘Come away from the window, Timothy, it isn’t safe. Timothy suffers from vertigo. Don’t you, Timothy?’
‘No,’ says Timothy.
‘You must understand, Mr Oates,’ says Aunt Annie, ‘that it’s impossible for us to live here.’
‘All flats on the Bagshott Estate are of standard size and shape, Miss Bagshott,’ observes Mr Oates. ‘You are very lucky indeed to have anywhere at all to live. Bed and breakfast is the best that you could have reasonably hoped for. I had to plead your case most strongly at the last Council meeting to get you even this.’
‘But my brother built the place,’ says Aunt Annie.
‘Exactly,’ says Rupert Oates.
‘Ingratitude!’ exclaims Aunt Annie. ‘And how are we expected to live? I am penniless, you understand. All my money was in my brother’s companies.’
‘So was the Council’s,’ says Mr Oates. ‘The Social Security office is not far. Try to attend early, otherwise a queue builds up.’
‘I must live on charity?’ asks Annie.
‘It’s that or work,’ says Rupert Oates. ‘The same for you as it is for everyone. Nor can the Council continue Timothy at his private school: last term’s incidentals, we notice, came to £1,500. Timothy must say goodbye to riding lessons, stables for his mounts, music and fencing tuition, and a log fire in his study. Timothy must go to the local comprehensive, like anybody else. To Bagshott School.’
Les, turn your camera to the comprehensive school; a structure twenty-five years old, once pride of Parrot Pier, now in excessive disrepair, except a recent Council grant of £150,000 paid through Jim Bagshott’s companies has recently effected some meagre improvement. Graffiti sour the walls, the scuttle of cockroaches unnerves the listening ear.
‘A boy with Bagshott as a name at Bagshott School? It seems unkind but that’s the rule,’ muses our friend and Timothy’s, Rupert Oates, who now uses his mobile phone to get in touch with Mr Korn, headmaster of Bagshott School.
Picture Mr Korn, frame him in shot: a good man, the hope of the nation, of middle class origin and working class aspirations: he has children’s art upon his walls: night and day he fights for the rights of his pupils and the survival of civilisation, in the face of finance cuts, the irrationality of the parent classes and the original sin of his pupils. He’s tired but he won’t give up. What’s he saying, Paul?
‘I’d like to oblige but I can’t. The second year’s full and I’m understaffed as it is. I know, Mr Oates, that it’s my happy duty to educate all the kids in this area regardless of race, colour, creed and handicap. If there were only something special about him. There is? What is it? His dad’s in prison? So are all the dads in prison. What’s that you say? Jim Bagshott’s boy? Impossible! I won’t be responsible. He’ll be lynched, and I’ll be blamed.’
But Mr Oates puts the pressure on and so the second years squeeze over to make room for Timothy Bagshott. On his way down twelve flights of stairs – the lift is broken – Mr Oates has a word or two with Jon-Jon Ooster, who keeps him company.
‘I had a letter from your headmaster, Jon-Jon.’
‘Two thousand pupils and Mr Korn writes about little me! Quel honneur!’
‘You can hardly count as a pupil, Jon-Jon, since it seems you seldom attend.’
‘They go on at you if you’re there,’ says Jon-Jon, ‘and they go on at you if you aren’t. So what does it matter one way or another?’
‘Tell you what, Jon-Jon,’ says Mr Oates, ‘since we’re all in this together, how about you keep a helpful eye on young Timothy Bagshott, your new neighbour. You’re a good boy at heart. Help him settle in.’
And Jon-Jon laughs and says, ‘Yes, me and my mates, we’ll help settle any Bagshott in.’
‘Ingratitude, complaints,’ thinks Rupert Oates, ‘what else can be expected? We have so far from nature’s way defected, the Bagshott lift in Bagshott Towers is often stuck for hours and hours; they piss into the shaft and rust soon turns all moving parts to dust.’
‘I say,’ said Timothy Bagshott to his Aunt Annie as dirty water from the loo bubbled up into the sink, ‘I’m sure the Pater never imagined his own family would end up here or he’d have seen to everything very differently. Tell you what, try running the bath: sometimes it’s a simple matter of an airlock,’ but both are distracted by cries of help from the Ooster household and a sudden blow is directed upon the thin front door, which splinters, and there stands Jon-Jon.
‘My mum,’ says Jon-Jon, ‘cannot abide it no more. Every time you empty your bath her loo fills up.’
‘Too bad, old chap,’ says Timothy, and shuts the door in Jon-Jon’s face.
‘People like that having the nerve to complain!’ remarks Annie. ‘Why, they’re nothing but a Problem Family!’
Another blow upon the door: a burst of splinters in the room: Jon-Jon enters in unasked, and with him brothers both older and younger.
‘Ooster’s the name,’ says Jon-Jon, ‘and this is Joe-Joe and this is little Ripper, and as for me, I’m Jon-Jon.’
‘What quaint names you have round here,’ says Timothy.
‘None so quaint as Bagshott,’ observes the middle Ooster lad. ‘Ripper’s called Ripper for a reason, and Joe-Joe’s back from Borstal where they taught him love of animals and how to have a cold shower every day. We Oosters get about, enjoy life: they suspend our sentences more often than not, to save the prison service aggro.’
‘How fascinating,’ observes Timothy.
‘I am reliably informed,’ says Jon-Jon, ‘that you are about to attend Bagshott Comprehensive. I am a pupil there myself. If I were you, I’d get your Auntie Annie not to take a bath from now on, because my mum don’t like it when she does.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ says Timothy, and closes what’s left of the door and tries not to tremble.
* * *
News of his family’s predicament flics fast to big bad Jim, but how can he help his little son?
‘Lovely piece of renovation we did on that school,’ observes Jim. ‘He shouldn’t have too hard a time. Renamed in my honour. A deal of asbestos in the assembly hall walls and high aluminium joists as well; not too good at stress-bearing but economical. Perhaps I should mention it? What do you think, Clive? Imprisonment makes me indecisive. I blame the Courts!’
‘Quieta non movere,’ replies Clive, which, being translated, is ‘let sleeping dogs lie’.
‘A lot of glass in that assembly hall,’ muses Jim. ‘What with the roof. They may have had the impression it was anti-ultra-violet glass, but the contractors let me down. What could I do?’
‘Quieta non movere,’ says Clive.
‘A fuss about nothing, a scare, this ozone layer,’ says Jim. ‘If a boy gets skin cancer it’s easily cured. I blame his mother; she had no business walking out on me. Everything a woman could want – a fur, a chauffeur, nannies, holidays. Ingratitude! The boy takes after his mother, Clive, and that’s the truth of it. All that money spent on his education, and not a flicker of gratitude: has he been to visit me? No! He thinks himself a cut above me: always did. Sneered at me from behind the bars of his cot. I hope his Aunt Annie’s coping. Perhaps I should get in touch with his mother?’
‘Quieta non movere,’ is all Clive says, and Jim fears his friend means to sleep the years of his sentence away...
An evening or two later (Angus deals with the passage of time on screen by flicking over the days in a calendar; that simple nostalgic device) and there’s Auntie Annie removing soup stains and ironing a secondhand school uniform for Timothy to put on in the morning for his first day.
‘Black, grey and navy blue,’ observes Timothy. ‘How dreary; necessary, I daresay, amongst the great unwashed or why would those in charge choose it? And supposing I get head lice, or impetigo? What then? Perhaps I should aim for a quick medical discharge?’
‘Timothy dear,’ says Auntie Annie. ‘Try to be sensible. Co-operate. Don’t put on airs. Be like the others. If you ever want to escape from Bagshott Estate you must work hard and pass exams, and I must be here to help you. There is some talk of a cut in our subsistence allowance, of my going out to work; but my work is here with you, helping you get an education. You look on me as a mother, don’t you, Timothy dear?’
‘Of course I do, dear Aunt,’ says Timothy. ‘Never let it be said that a Bagshott worked from nine to five.’
‘Or seven to midnight,’ said Auntie Annie, ‘now the Shop Act is cancelled and a crust is so very hard to earn.’
‘I will do what I can for you, Aunt,’ says Timothy. ‘I will aim for suspension rather than expulsion. Needs must and all that. But I will not willingly keep the company of the Oosters of this world.’
Even as he spoke, a great convulsion shook the corridor, indeed the very structure of the dwelling block, the elevator quivered between its rusty girders and fell an inch or so: Maisie Ooster was rounding up her boys. Maisie Ooster was twenty-four stone and perfect with it, if loud. Annie stuck her head out of her splintered front door.
‘Take no notice of me,’ cried Maisie Ooster. ‘I washed these lads last night and I can’t do a thing with them today,’ and she laughed so loud and heartily that Annie joined in, but not Timothy, and so night fell, and the full moon arose over Bagshott Towers, and made all things so boldly brilliant and beautiful even the rats and the cockroaches paused in their rustling, and the human scavengers lifted up their hearts, and even the muggers paused to consider the nature of creation, and the wild creatures of the night slept, thinking it was day: and those who normally slept by night awoke, including Rupert Oates; in the morning Paul had his thoughts on tape ready for playback to Angus. Paul’s tapes are like some film, really sensitive, and just as film will pick up scenes that never were, so Paul’s tapes pick up sound. He is always in employment. Perhaps that’s why he’s so happy.
‘Night falls on Bagshott Towers,’ mused Rupert Oates that moonlit night, ‘on good and bad and in between, as most of us are seen to be. And who’s to blame? Your poor old mum? No. She had a mum herself, you know, and is what she was made, as are we all. Moon on Bagshott Towers! And there’s a fox, and there the night owl flies. Listen; the wild life of the city cries – and morning breaks, and unreality breaks in, on this strange world we’re living in.’
The moon set. The sun arose. Cameraman Les, up bright and early, uninstructed by Angus, who has a hangover, is filming the kids of Bagshott Comprehensive arrive – some on crack and some still clutching teddy bears: some pregnant and some virtuous still, and all shockable one way or another, either at the innocence of some, or the knowingness of others.
‘Children of Bagshott Towers,’ says Rupert in his heart, ‘school’s not so bad. It’s warm and there is dinner to be had. Your teachers want to help you, honestly they do. I’ve asked them and they say it’s true.’
Angus arrives, apologetic, and the film crew sets up in the corridor outside Mr Korn’s office, where Timothy stands disdainful and alone. The headmaster appears – ‘Please, sir –’ says Timothy, but Mr Korn is already inside and the door is shut. Even the best of teachers develop deafness to the pleas of the pupils: it is not the teachers’ fault. Children are no different from adults, other than in scale and lack of experience; their clamour, their tugging at the conscience and coatstrings of those they see as powerful, render dazed, punch drunk and rude those who are paid to suffer it.
And coming down the corridor, framed by Les, observed by Timothy, a smallish, pimply, owlish child called Twitcher, son of an optician.
‘I’ve had enough,’ says Twitcher, ‘of this day.’
‘Already?’ enquired Timothy, quite alarmed.
‘Ten minutes in this place is always enough. Already my eye is twitching. My mother said if it happened I was to go home.’
‘Well!’ say Jon-Jon, Joe-Joe and Ripper, fast approaching, ‘Well, well, well. If it isn’t little Twitcher: off home are we, darlint, nice back home with Mummy? Twitcher wears a vest,’ they say, and so on, and then, ‘Tell you what, Twitcher, give us a dance and show us how happy you are!’
‘I don’t know how to dance,’ says Twitcher.
‘Then we’ll jump on your toes,’ says Jon-Jon, ‘and teach you, unless by any chance you have dinner money to spare. Just a borrow, of course, until tomorrow.’
‘I don’t take school dinners,’ says Twitcher, ‘because someone always takes the money. I bring packed lunch instead, with egg and curry filling that nobody likes, not even me. But at least I don’t starve.’
‘Better than what our mum gives us,’ says Ripper.
‘A biff on the communal lug hole. If you got no money, you gotta dance. If you can’t dance, then we gotta stamp.’
‘Now look here, you fellows,’ says Timothy Bagshott, ‘bullying a little fellow like this. It simply isn’t on.’
Six cold eyes focus in upon Timothy Bagshott; Twitcher dodges away and who can blame him.
‘If it isn’t my neighbour Timothy Bagshott,’ says Jon-Jon.
‘Fairdos. You let Twitcher go so it’s up to you to see us right.’
‘You’ll get nothing from me,’ says Timothy Bagshott.
‘We will,’ says Jon-Jon, ‘cos we’ll smash your face in or else. All you’ve got and more; your dad dines on champagne and chips, you’ve got a lot to spare.’
‘But he’s in clink,’ says Timothy boldly.
‘We know his sort,’ say the Ooster boys. ‘Some men are born to champagne and chips as the sparks fly upwards,’ says Jon-Jon, who’d been in Mr Korn’s high-flyers special English class until his fifteenth birthday, the day he went on mental and moral strike and they let him into the cinema to see ‘15’ films. The porn he takes home for the video and the subtleties of ‘Pause’.
‘Hand over what you’ve got and we’ll have your trainers too, unless you want to dance.’
‘I wish you boys wouldn’t dance in the corridor,’ says Mr Korn, emerging from his room. ‘Just stand quiet, boy, until I’ve time for you.’
In post-production, we are allowed merciful release from scenes of teenage torture; Angus tactfully intercuts a scene between Maisie and Annie which, according to Paul’s sound tape, carried above even the sound of Bagshott plumbing. The two women had got together with a book called Plumbing Made Easy to solve the bath/loo problem.
‘A wire like this, Miss Bagshott,’ Maisie said, ‘must have a dozen uses. Say you had a dress shop with a fair size letterbox, you could pull it through and hook your winter outfit out in no time at all.’
‘You have a lively mind, Mrs Ooster,’ said Miss Bagshott.
‘If you were married to my Barley,’ said Mrs Ooster kindly, ‘no doubt you’d have the same. A wife contrives as best she must.’
And with a gurgle and a splodge the blockage was cleared; that the water supply and the sewage now intermingled on the floor below was no concern of theirs.
Annie thanked Maisie and Maisie remarked, ‘My Gawd, you could do with a thing or two in here. Telly, video, three-piece, cocktail cabinet. My Barley can get things cheap.’
‘Thank you,’ said Annie primly, ‘but we Bagshotts don’t like to be indebted. We’re cosy as we are.’
‘Don’t put on airs,’ said Maisie. ‘Your brother’s doing time, like anyone else.’
‘That’s rather different,’ said Annie. ‘My brother is no criminal.’
‘I call it criminal,’ said Maisie Ooster outright, ‘when other people’s drains come up my sink, and who’s doing that but your brother?’
‘I accept your censure, Mrs Ooster,’ said Annie, ‘or may I call you Maisie? The fact of the matter is, I used to live a lonely life up at Amanda; my brother always away on business, and Timothy learning to be a little gent at boarding school. But here! Why, even the dole queue is quite jolly. And I packed little Timothy his favourite lunch: egg and curry sandwiches.
‘My boys never bother with lunch,’ said Maisie. ‘They pick something up on the way, they say. They’re such good boys. We believe in discipline, Barley and me. Take the stick to them often and hard, they grow up good as gold.’
‘Sir,’ says Timothy the while, entering Mr Korn’s office unasked and unabashed. ‘I will not continue to wait outside; it was you who wished to see me, not I you. In the circumstances, I’d be glad if you said what you had to, and let me begin the education the State so kindly provides, and not waste the taxpayers’ money, nor my valuable time, keeping me waiting.’
‘You’ll be Timothy Bagshott,’ murmured Mr Korn.
‘And you’ll be Mr Korn,’ replied Timothy.
‘I was only going to welcome you to the school, Timothy,’ said Mr Korn.
‘I’d rather you called me Bagshott,’ said Timothy. ‘We are not friends.’
‘Boy,’ said Mr Korn, ‘is it your intention that I suspend you?’
‘It is, sir.’
‘Then you will have to do better than that, Timothy. My threshold of natural indignation is high. Are you perhaps having trouble with the Ooster boys? Joe-Joe, Jon-Jon and Ripper? The family is not easy, but they are all our responsibility, and yours perhaps more than anyone, your name being Bagshott.’
‘Guilt by association, sir?’
‘A matter of cultural, family and communal guilt. Your father and his like are responsible for many social ills round here: bad housing for a start; the breakdown of family life in general; the squalor of our streets and schools.’
‘So the sins of the father are to be visited on the children?’
‘I think you’ll find they are, my boy, whenever you enter the toilet block. The sewers leak: the plastic pipes are all too permeable. There you are, Mr Hobbs!’
Enter Mr Hobbs, the PE teacher: a karate expert, shaven-headed with an evil mien, as are too many of his ilk.
‘Mr Hobbs,’ said Mr Korn, ‘we have a problem or two to deal with today. When the indoor swimming pool overflowed because of the stuck ball cock, electrical damage was clearly done. The fire alarms have rung six times already –’
‘I thought that was your little joke, sir,’ said Mr Hobbs, ‘to keep us on our toes.’
‘My sense of humour is quite, quite gone,’ said Mr Korn. ‘And the automatic doors to the assembly hall are working in reverse. They close when anyone approaches.’
Timothy laughed.
‘I’m glad you find that funny, Timothy,’ said Mr Korn. ‘Trust a Bagshott! Let me introduce you to your head of year, our Mr Hobbs. Mr Hobbs doubles as caretaker at this, your father’s school, in order to pay his mortgage. Timothy, if I might give you a word of advice: a slight note of diffidence, even of apology, might help you get along with pupils and with staff.’
‘I have nothing of which I need be ashamed,’ said Timothy. ‘I am proud of my father, as any son might be.’
‘He’s a lucky lad,’ said Mr Hobbs. ‘I’ll let him be first on the wall-bars since he’s new. They carry quite an electric charge; the wiring in the gym being what it is, after the flooding, and even before.’
‘Perhaps I am just a little ashamed,’ said Timothy. ‘Sir.’
Now what of Timothy’s mother? Doesn’t she care? Surely she’s read of Jim Bagshott’s disgrace, arrest and imprisonment in the press: surely she’ll care, do something to rescue the flesh of her flesh, love of her love?
‘Meanwhile the Welfare, ever tender-hearted,’ observes Rupert Oates, ‘seeks to trace our Timothy’s mum, long departed, and find her – what surprise! – not so far away though feeling unmaternal, sad to say.’
Audrey, for such is her name, works as the barmaid at the local pub, the Bagshott Arms – the landlord is in trouble with Equal Opportunities for describing her as barmaid, when it should be barperson. No one has yet got round to insisting that he be called the landnoble which presumably is the non-gender specific of landlord. But who cares about that? On with the story. Are you happy, Les? Paul? Angus? Happy, happy, happy, in the execution of our craft. What other happiness can there be?
‘Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb,’ says Rupert now, for although Paul swore he was happy, his boom proved faulty. Let it just be said Rupert Oates put the child’s plight to the mother and the mother denied all knowledge of the child. Some mothers are like that and a lot of fathers too. Children are plentiful, since parents must opt out of parenthood, not opt in: the former is a boring, expensive, time-consuming thing to do. But Rupert Oates persevered, and finally Audrey grudgingly acknowledged she had borne a child to a property developer of note and criminality, Jim Bagshott of Bagshott Towers and Bagshott School.
Where Mr Hobbs now addressed his class in language vile, insulting and persuasive, as was his custom.
‘First one to talk gets a detention,’ said Mr Hobbs, ‘and the one sitting next to him. Both sides. Anyone who thinks my bark is worse than my bite is mistaken. My little darlings, my sensitive children, welcome back. How many walls did you deface in the holidays? How many old ladies did you mug, cars did you joy-ride, reefers did you inhale and raves attend? I’ve brought an extra little playmate for you today; young Timothy Bagshott. He’s son of Jim, perpetrator of your fate. Once you lived in squalor in slums upon the ground, now you live up on high, in half-completed tower blocks. The rest of Europe gave up the habit years ago, of housing its riff-raff in the sky, but Jim Bagshott told your elected representatives the old ways were the best, that is to say the cheapest, and your elected representatives, mesmerised like the snakes they are –’
‘Sir,’ said Timothy, ‘isn’t it the snakes who do the mesmerising, and the rabbits who get mesmerised?’
‘Take a detention, lad,’ said Mr Hobbs. ‘Have it your own way. Your father is a snake and the Council are rabbits. And it is thanks to your snake of a father that the PE wing is flooded and I am teaching History to Form 13, a class well known throughout the school to be composed of spastics and pygmies.’
‘Sir,’ said Timothy, ‘I really must protest. You shouldn’t call people pygmies. Say rather people of restricted growth, or the vertically challenged.’
‘Another detention, boy,’ said Mr Hobbs. ‘I call you lot what I like and so long as it’s not racist and I don’t lay a finger on you, no one can say me nay. Spastics and pygmies, the lot of you!’
Mr Hobbs left the class to check the basement’s pumps in case the central heating blew.
‘If you tear Timothy Bagshott limb from limb, class,’ said Mr Hobbs, ‘you’ll only get probation. Why don’t you have a go?’
Form 13, so familiarly called because it was understood to be unlucky in that its members had Mr Hobbs as year tutor, personal counsellor and careers’ officer, turned to stare at Timothy, undecided as to its group response. The toilets in both school and home were so often out of order that even the young ones had noticed – it is one thing to defecate in lifts and corridors out of choice, in a spirit of defiance, quite another to have nowhere else to go. And there always has to be someone to blame, and how seldom is that person not just in the room with you, but on the same scale? Mr Hobbs had given permission to hate, and to not a few in the class Mr Hobbs was a hero. The oppressed soon learn to lick the oppressor’s boot. It was, in other words, a tense moment.
‘I expect,’ said Timothy, ‘you get quite a few days off because of the structural difficulties inherent in the rehabilitation of any educational institution.’
Jaws dropped.
‘That is to say,’ said Timothy, ‘if you ask me, my dad cocked up this sodding school on purpose. My dad hates schools.’
* * *
The moment passed. Ordinary mayhem broke out, and Twitcher was its target, not our Timothy. Twitcher got his glasses broken but that was nothing unusual. All knew Twitcher’s father was an optician, the only dad not in prison, and could easily acquire more. Form 13, the other side of their culture and conditioning, were quite reasonable and thoughtful lads, whose habit it was to take justice into their own hands, since society afforded so little evidence of it. And pleasure likewise, since so much of what they did was frowned upon.
Up at the Bagshott Arms the while, Rupert Oates wrestled with the soul of Audrey Bagshott.
‘So what if I ran off with the chauffeur?’ cried Audrey. ‘I chose love, not money, didn’t I? Isn’t that what a girl is supposed to do? And don’t tell me Jim turned criminal when I left; he was born like that: devious, greedy and grungy. And he always did the plumbing himself, liked to turn his hand to a real man’s job, so Amanda was always awash with water. My built-in cupboards filled up with water. My shoes and my furs were always awash. And I couldn’t take Timothy with me: the chauffeur didn’t like kids. You know what kids are like in cars, never at their best.’
‘He’s thirteen now,’ said Mr Oates. ‘I had him in my own car. He made no trouble.’
‘But I’m with the landlord now,’ said Audrey, ‘and you have to be eighteen to get in for a drink. And I know those boys from Bagshott Comprehensive. Nasty, thieving little hooligans, lacing their Cokes with rum if you so much as look the other way.’
It is always hard to reason with the not altogether reasonable, but on the other hand the least reasonable make the warmest mothers, so Mr Oates persisted, and on hearing that the lad lived in a block of flats named in her memory, and perceiving that Jim Bagshott’s heart was still tender towards her, she consented to visit both her child and her husband.
And Mr Oates was relieved, because he knew only too well for any child to be in Mr Hobbs’ class was a strain upon that child’s source of cheerfulness, and cheerfulness in Bagshott Towers was the rarest and most precious of all commodities.
‘Sticks and stones,’ said Rupert Oates in his heart, ‘may break my bones, and words can always hurt me. And who it is who says they don’t can only mean to bruise me. Flesh and bones will heal at last, but insults past stay with me.’
Mr Oates did not like Mr Hobbs. Neither did Mr Korn, but Mr Hobbs was on a fixed contract, and could not be fired other than for gross professional negligence, which he took care not to show. And, besides, Mr Hobbs was a dab hand at keeping the boilers going. Disgraceful people often develop very rare and precise skills, so that others will be obliged to put up with them.
Mrs Ooster, in spite of the wild and aggressive mien of her very large sons, was an agreeable person indeed. Angus cuts gratefully away from Rupert Oates light verse musings – which Angus feels are somehow happy Paul’s fault, and totally out of order, considering the overall style of the piece – to Aunt Annie’s new home and the arrival of Mrs Ooster with a daintily pale pink TV set with a built-in aerial like a leaping dolphin.
‘So kind of you, Maisie,’ Aunt Annie is saying. ‘The only people who ever came up to Amanda were those bearing writs and solicitors’ letters. No one ever seemed to like us, for all Jim was forever throwing parties. Why did you say the TV didn’t have a back, Maisie? It seems to me to have a back. I imagine one could get quite a shock if it didn’t. All those nasty wires.’
‘Things which fall off lorries,’ said Mrs Ooster enigmatically, ‘don’t have backs. Never mind. You’ll learn, now you live in Audrey Tower. Would you care to come to Bingo with me tonight?’
‘I’ve never gambled in my life,’ said Auntie Annie.
‘It’s not a gamble,’ said Mrs Ooster. ‘The Caller is a very good friend of mine.’
And Aunt Annie was glad that Mrs Ooster had a very good friend, because she’d had a glimpse of Mr Ooster and thought him a surly and miserable fellow indeed.
Angus prefers to look through his viewfinder at Audrey who, although into her forties, is blonde, well-bosomed and high-heeled, rather than at staid (so far) Auntie Annie and vast Mrs Ooster – agreeableness is a quality that can get you lost on the cutting room floor, but sexiness keeps anyone in shot. So visiting hours at the open prison are here and Audrey’s sitting opposite Jim, who doesn’t seem one bit pleased to see her. The Rupert Oates’ of this world, in spite of the harmonies inside their heads, can be naive, believing that others are as they are: that is to say, really nice if a trifle power-hungry.
‘I’ve come all this way,’ says Audrey, ‘and you aren’t one bit pleased to see me.’
‘Because I know what you want,’ says Jim. ‘And it’s the same as everyone else wants.’
‘What’s that?’ asks Audrey.
‘Money,’ says Jim. ‘The only thing I’ve ever had to offer. So now you come running to me for the fees, so your boy can go to boarding school and be a little gent.’
‘Such a thing never crossed my heart, Jim,’ says Audrey.
‘Then it should have,’ says Jim. ‘What sort of mother are you? Running out on your own child. That boy’s going to spend the rest of his life searching for an absent mother figure.’
‘What’s got into you Jim?’ asks Audrey.
‘Psychology classes,’ says Jim. ‘There’s nothing else to do round here. I wasn’t much of a father myself. He’ll be searching for an absent father figure too. Not much of a husband either. A workaholic like me leaves a trail of personal disasters behind.’
‘You go on saying things like that, Jim,’ says Audrey, ‘and I’ll be on the step waiting when you come out.’
‘As to the fees,’ says Jim, ‘I’ll see what I can do. I haven’t been fair to him. Bringing him up posh then pushing him in the deep end.’
Audrey expresses admiration that a man in prison could still get his hands on money; Jim expresses his anxiety about the swimming pool at Bagshott School – chlorine might eat away at the new-style insulation of the underwater electrics – and suggests Timothy be warned not to take a dip. And so love, affection and trust is reestablished between the two. Angus makes a note to establish a heart-shape frame around the pair in post-production.
Aunt Annie has packed a very special lunch for Timothy today. He eats it in the safety of the Art Room. Twitcher is there, together with a small group of boys in need of quiet and protection. The Art Room door affords some protection against the clanging and banging, the shouting and screaming, the pushing and shoving in the corridors outside.
‘Anyone care for a chicken leg?’ enquires Timothy. ‘Seasoned with salt, and lemon, roasted in butter and basil. Only 4op the piece, and a bargain at the price.’
‘Sounds foreign to me,’ says Twitcher.
‘Then how about a cigarette?’ asks Timothy. ‘25p each or three for a pound.’
‘Why are three more expensive than one?’ asks Twitcher.
‘Because I have my father’s blood in me,’ says Timothy.
‘He’s inside, isn’t he?’ says Boy 1.
‘He is indeed,’ says Timothy. ‘Left to rot by a corrupt authority, a society indifferent to the rightness of his case.’
‘Open prison?’ asks Boy 2.
‘Of course,’ says Timothy.
‘Then it doesn’t count,’ says Boy 3. ‘My dad’s doing thirty years in high security, and not even a political.’
Boys 1, 2 and 3 will have to double as prison attendants (trainees, of course; they will have to age down for the one, age up for the other). This is not a lavish production, and extras are expensive. The producer can see no merit in having Boys 1, 2 and 3: the dialogue could have been accomplished with just the one bit part player. But Angus says the way to look lavish, is to be lavish.
‘Besides,’ says Boy 2, ‘it’s not fathers that count in here, it’s mothers. How’s yours?’
‘Run off,’ says Timothy.
‘That’s nothing,’ says Boy 2.
‘It was to me,’ says Timothy sadly.
* * *
All contemplate the truth of this. Angus studies each face at some length to get the value of their hiring and keep the producers in their place. The Ooster boys at this point lean on the Art Room door so it collapses inward, being made none too solidly, and deprive the already dismal group of their dinner: chicken legs, ham rolls, crisps, Ryvita and cheese slices, and a bottle of Montrachet Cadet which Timothy has been keeping to himself. Well, the Ooster boys have to live too, and Mrs Ooster is too busy keeping Mr Ooster happy in the mornings to do much in the way of providing lunch, nor does their father see why he should provide men younger, bigger and more energetic than he with funds simply because they are his sons. Rupert Oates’ voice shivers over the scene: ‘Children remember this, that childhood ends. When you grow up, at least you’ll choose your friends.’
Mr Oates then appears in conversation with Aunt Annie, offering her a change of residence: he has organised it so that she and Timothy can exchange dwellings with a family living on the outskirts of town, almost in the country; Timothy can be taken out of Bagshott School and go to Parrot High: a smaller and altogether milder institution in a better area, so much so that it is soon to become a Direct Grant School. But Aunt Annie, to Rupert Oates’ surprise, will have none of it. She is happy, she says, as Mrs Ooster’s neighbour: she’s on her way to Bingo and, besides, she’s come to fancy the view from the twelfth floor and Timothy no longer suffers from vertigo.
‘But I’m offering you a thatched cottage,’ says Rupert Oates, and all Aunt Annie says, pushing past, is, ‘Nasty, germy things, thatches.’ Mr Oates inhales the fetid air of the Ooster level, as it’s known at the Council offices, and marvels. The Ooster boys are active and healthy eaters and drinkers and seldom make it inside their home before being overtaken by the call of nature. The lift is so often out of order, their own door so seldom opened promptly to them (Mr Ooster has the lock changed frequently) they can hardly be blamed for this lack of control. So far one can get, no farther. Requests to the Council by Mr Oates that common lavatory provision should be made at the entrance to Audrey Tower convulsed the Supplies and Facilities Dept with mirth. How many hours would such constructs survive the vandals? Let the corridors stink: there was nothing to be done about it.
Angus decided against attempting to dramatise this sorry state of affairs. Producers, viewers and indeed Les would resist anything too graphic, so Mr Oates was merely left sniffing the air and wincing; Angus then cut away to a scene at Bagshott School, where the French class was in process, cheerful enough, if punctuated by cheers, jeers, Kung Fu kicks and the sound of breaking windows. A student teacher, pretty and eighteen, and in her first year at college, stood weeping in front of the class, who thought it best to tactfully ignore her distress. The lads were not unkind but no doubt thought the sooner she toughened up the happier everyone would be. That, or get out of teaching. Timothy sat at the back of the class, reading.
‘Tim,’ muttered the boy next to him, ‘what are you reading?’
‘A book called Teach Yourself French,’ said Timothy. At which point Mr Hobbs erupted into the room, shouting, swearing, thwacking everyone in sight. ‘Dregs and rabble!’ he shouted. ‘Form 13, the dross of the streets: what’s the point of teaching them French: they can’t even speak their native tongue. The sooner they’re out on the streets and on crack the better. Their mothers are, et tes grands-mères.’ The class fell silent, shocked and stunned, and the student teacher ran from the room and out of the profession altogether. Had it not been for Mr Hobbs, she would have toughened up perfectly well in her own good time.
It was this particular scene which causes the TV critic of The Times, who later became editor of Punch – a humorous magazine, now deceased – to become almost incoherent in his outrage: the film, he complained, was a vicious attack against the educational system of the nation. Schools such as Bagshott Comprehensive did not exist. A foul fabrication! Everyone knew schools were places where calm and kindly teachers, in an organised fashion, set about the business of teaching and socialising the docile and grateful young. Else what were the taxpayers paying their taxes for? But that is by the by. Just why ‘The Tale of Timothy Bagshott’, a play for TV, was never repeated and wiped from the BBC archives. Just as Les could not bring himself to turn his camera on what we had better call defecatory matter, nor could the critic of The Times face truth. Why should he be expected to do better than Les?
The cookery class at the Open Prison was doing rather better: Clive and Jim were baking £50 notes into a cake tin. Clive extracted them from between the pages of a cookery book called Easy Steps to Home Baking and handed them to Jim, who dipped them one by one into a rather over-vanillaed mix before laying them in the tin. He sang as he dipped. He was in love, and for a man to fall in love with his own wife is a happy experience. Can electrified fences a prison make, or cookery classes a cage?
And because new love flies through the universe, turning all things rosy, tipping the spires of the Bagshott Development, and even the poor, unfinished, stunted growth of Audrey Tower itself, with gold, Aunt Annie looking out over what to many was the debris of a ruined city and a languid slime of murky river and seeing only charm, progress and infinite possibility, said to Timothy, ‘Oh, by the way, a postcard came for you. It’s from your mother.’ She’d meant just to forget its arrival. She’d never liked Audrey, even before she ran off with the chauffeur and so upset Jim.
The postcard was what’s known as a Sixteenth Century Dutch interior, a woman sweeping clean a yard, forget the yard’s outside not inside. ‘See ya soon, kid,’ the message on the back said in its enchantingly quivery red-biroed writing. The hand of his mother. Timothy rejoiced in his heart, felt his father’s blood surge more strongly in his veins, and his mother’s too, and the very next day took Mr Hobbs aside and offered him and his wife a free holiday for two in the Bahamas, through certain travel agencies known personally to the Bagshott family, in return for Mr Hobbs desisting from libelling Form 13.
‘Schedule flight or charter?’ asked Mr Hobbs.
‘Schedule,’ replied Timothy.
‘Club Class or Economy?’ asked Mr Hobbs.
‘Club,’ said Timothy, and so the deal was done. That Mr Hobbs knew his time was up in teaching, that Mr Korn – following a doctor’s report relating to the traumas suffered by the pretty student teacher (I’m not saying her prettiness had anything to do with the advent of natural justice: merely that it helps) which she had the courage to attribute to Mr Hobbs and not the pupils – finally had sufficient evidence to apply to the Council for Mr Hobbs’ dismissal, was neither here nor there. One thing to be said for Mr Hobbs was that he was not proud, and another was that he knew which side his bread was buttered. It is important to keep looking for good in people, otherwise one might succumb to despair.
We next see Rupert Oates visiting Audrey Tower with a cake, a gift for Annie, baked by her brother Jim in prison. A nice scene this: Annie’s surprise and gratification at her brother’s thoughtfulness: her mixed pleasure (once Mr Oates was gone – no Bagshott was born yesterday) and disappointment at finding her mouth more full of money than cake: the internal struggle as to whether or not to just swallow the note that said the money was to take Timothy out of Bagshott School and pay for his private education, or just keep the money herself, and the eventual triumph of good. Aunt Annie decided to act unselfishly, and do as her brother wished. People make this kind of decision all the time, though cynics think they don’t. The assumption that the great men of the people act only in their own interest is a plague of our time.
Meanwhile, it’s packed lunch time in the Art Room, and Timothy stands on a chair and exhorts fans and doubters both to direct action. The power of the union, the will of the workers, so fast fading in the adult world, will find its revival in our schools: it is a prophecy: not a difficult one, if you consider the state of our schools. Rather like a Western scientist impressing a native tribe by predicting an eclipse.
‘Fellow pupils,’ cries Timothy. ‘Comrades! Have you no courage, no common sense? Are you sheep or are you men? Packed lunchers all, have you no pride? Daily we are subjected to these Ooster raids: it is too much. We must unite against these bullies: singly we are powerless, united and organised, who can stand against us? The formation of the Bagshott Protection Agency is underway – membership 50p, payable to me. Twitcher here will make a note of it. An offence against one is from now on an offence against all. The Teamsters’ Union was better than none. Ask any US baggage handler.’
‘We’ll get found out,’ said Boy 1.
‘We’ll get into trouble,’ said Boy 2.
‘We’ll get sent to Mr Korn,’ said Boy 3.
‘But you’ll get to eat your dinner,’ said Timothy Bagshott, and as the faces of Boys 1, 2 and 3 broke into smiles, Les lingered long upon them, at Angus’s request.
Happy Paul took care to record the conversation of the Ooster boys as they approached the Art Room, the dinner of others on their minds. It went like this:
Ripper: ‘Jon-Jon, big brother, there’s something I want to know.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Jon-Jon.
Ripper: ‘If our mum ever won at Bingo, instead of always losing, would we get chicken legs for dinner, like Timothy Bagshott?’
‘Spastic,’ said Jon-Jon, ‘you are a spastic. Our mum always wins at Bingo. She just tells us she doesn’t.’
Tears came into Ripper’s eyes. Boys depend dreadfully upon their mother’s love, no matter how much taller than their mothers they become. Joe-Joe said nothing. He was a silent lad, and had spoken very little since the day his pet rabbit produced a litter of twelve and Barley Ooster flushed the lot down the toilet. It had been a miracle birth: how can a single pet rabbit produce a litter without divine intervention? And indeed, the problems with Audrey Tower plumbing dated from that traumatic day, though the tenants preferred to blame Jim Bagshott.
As the Ooster boys leaned heavily through the Art Room door and splintered it for the third time that term, they were set upon by the Bagshott Protection Society, in united and organised protest, and forcibly thrown out again into the corridor, bruised, surprised, and without their trainers.
‘It’s a madhouse, this school,’ said Jon-Jon.
‘You can’t even get dinner when you’re hungry,’ said Ripper.
But Joe-Joe said, he who had been silent for so long, ‘If we asked Mr Oates, he’d get us free cooked dinners every day.’
Money, time and patience ran out for Angus at this stage. There was trouble with the crew. Paul had another job to go to: Les lost interest once he had perceived there was nowhere for the story to go but to a happy ending, and began to frame his shots sloppily and forgot to renew the batteries before they ran out, thus holding everybody up intolerably, and to the detriment of the shooting schedule.
* * *
Angus was obliged to forgo the dramatic (fairly) scenes in which Timothy Bagshott gave the cake money back to his Aunt Annie, and told Mr Korn he wanted to stay on at Bagshott School, which now he had organised a little he had come to love. He was certainly finding it profitable. Viewers never got to see how Jim confessed to the Parent Governors that the school swimming pool was potentially dangerous and how in return, and for health reasons, he was let out on parole. How Audrey and Jim (reformed by love) and Timothy returned to Amanda, to run a centre for the homeless. How Aunt Annie ran off with Barley Ooster – why do you think she wouldn’t move to a thatched cottage? – to Mrs Ooster’s great relief. Mrs Ooster had come to dislike sex and Annie had all her years of celibacy to make up for, which suited everyone. Mrs Ooster was now able to give all her love and affection to her boys, who became model members of society. How Twitcher’s father paid for him to have his short-sightedness cured by the new Soviet method of paring away the cornea, so the lad was no longer obliged to wear glasses. How Joe-Joe’s rabbit gave birth to another set of miraculous young, which Joe-Joe, now his father was happy with Aunt Annie, was allowed to raise: how a vandal-proof toilet was installed at the entrance to Audrey Tower and its remaining seven floors constructed without undue torment to those already living there, and so forth. All these happy occurrences were left drifting in the hopeful air – too expensive to be nailed on film and, besides, as everyone knows, good news is no news. So forget it. Who cares about dramatic form?
‘Paul, are you happy,’ enquired Angus for the last time, and Paul replied, ‘Yes’ with some sincerity, for with the end of filming he was at least free to return to the arms of his girlfriend, and as his parting shot gave Angus a few more lines from Rupert Oates’ head.
‘Though socialism’s dead and gone, they say,
Yet still shall justice and compassion win the day.
How else can man (and woman too) live with him (her) self?
Only with understanding, empathy, good management, these three,
Shall come the proper sharing out of wealth.
The best will, not the worst will, of the people be set free.
No one’s a villain, but the world has made him so.
No one’s a villain, but if you ask him won’t say no.
Who, me?’
Thank you, Rupert Oates, you’ll be late for your meeting.