15

‘Brother browncoats! Fellow soldiers, in the van of mankind’s ever-onward march against pestilence, privation and perishing.’

It was two hours later. Pip stood on a bench in the basement, his own brown coat flapping, arms upraised. Beside him on the concrete floor was Faith, holding her open notebook. He stared down at a hundred-odd faces, which stared back at him with a mass expression of mixed interest, scepticism and bafflement.

‘During industrial peace, there’s nothing so becomes a worker as modest stillness and humility,’ Pip went on. ‘But when the blast, “On strike!” blows in our ears, what do we do then?’ He paused, as if waiting for a reply. ‘I’ll tell you. We imitate the action of the tiger. We stiffen the sinews, we summon up the blood. We disguise our normally fair nature with hard-favour’d rage. We lend our eye a terrible aspect.’

He stopped again, to judge the effect. The man in front’s mouth had dropped open.

‘Today, Brothers, I have taken a grave decision. You have all taken a grave decision. I made it on your behalf. And on behalf of the decent, working men and women, confined in their council houses up and down the country, who deserve a fair crack of the whip from the very section of the community expected to serve their most intimate needs. To wit, the doctors. I cannot say where our brave action will lead. Perhaps to the triumph of workers’ natural virtues over capitalists’ natural vice. I set no limits to my ambitions, which of course are also yours. Today St Swithin’s, I say. Tomorrow the world! But I must ask you to be patient for an hour or two, while I explain exactly the issues which have incited you – through me – to choose this agonizingly serious option.’

The audience rose as a man and started filing through the door.

‘Really, they could have been a bit more courteous,’ Pip complained crossly to Faith, watching the last pair of brown-coated shoulders leave. ‘After all, I am their democratically elected leader. They might possibly have found the rest of my speech a bit boring, but they could surely have sat through it with a fixed gaze thinking about football and sex and things, like I did often enough during your father’s lectures in St Swithin’s.’

‘Poor Pip.’ She stroked the back of his neck sympathetically, as they sat together on the hard bench. ‘You put such desperately hard work into it since lunch.’

‘I suppose some of that material about the differences in financing the current and capital programmes of the Health Service might have been a little beyond a few of them,’ he admitted. ‘But one can only try.’ He looked up as Harold Sapworth strolled in, without his brown coat. ‘My audience have walked out on me,’ Pip complained.

‘Go on?’ Harold glanced at the wall clock. ‘No wonder. It’s just on three. Tea break.’

‘But surely you can’t take tea breaks when you’re on strike anyway?’ Pip said irritably.

‘They still feel like a cuppa, I suppose. Besides, you sort of get in the habit. I goes on taking tea breaks when I’m lying on the beach on holiday.’

‘Did you deliver the letter safely?’ Faith asked.

‘Easy. I got a forty-five bus. Funny, never been down the Elephant for years. Cousin of mine lives round there, in the New Kent Road. Or rather, he did. He shifted a year or two back to the Isle of Wight.’

‘Did you hand it personally to the Minister?’ Pip demanded severely.

‘Well, not actual. Bloke with a flat hat and brass buttons downstairs said he’d take it up.’

‘I suppose we have cast it into the usual channels, like bread upon the waters,’ Pip reflected.

‘And what do you suppose we shall find after several days?’ Faith asked. ‘Perhaps some extremely uneatable soggy slices?’

He looked at her. ‘You’re sounding a little doubtful.’

‘I am. To be honest, I feel we’ve taken off a jumbo jet without knowing how to land it. You’re not angry, are you, love?’ she added quickly.

Pip said nothing for a moment, just nodding, elbows on knees, slowly rubbing his hands together.

‘On the contrary, I feel rather like that, too. I think I could quite justly compare myself at the moment with Garibaldi, landing in Sicily at the head of his thousand red-shirted heroes. But he knew where to go. I don’t. I can start a strike, that’s obvious. Perhaps any fool can do that. But I’ve not the slightest idea how to run one. It’s much more complicated than simply cutting off the delivery of minced chicken and bunches of flowers to the Bertie Bunn. All sorts of tricky problems must be sorted out. St Swithin’s has obviously got to go on treating emergency cases – that seems traditional with hospital strikers, right across the world. So we’ve got to keep going the hot water, central sterile supply, fire precautions, and so on. Even the canteen. If they couldn’t have their tea break, my members might not be one hundred per cent solidly enthusiastic.’

‘Harold, you must have experienced a dozen strikes,’ Faith suggested, as the porter was pulling on the first brown coat in sight.

‘I’ve been through a few, that’s straight. When I was sweeper in a car plant, we was called out so often I reckon some of the lads began to forget which end you put the engine in. They used to call us the Dagenham Kamikazes. That’s a Jap car, ain’t it?’

‘What’s the first principle in running a strike, then?’ Pip asked him.

‘Discipline,’ Harold replied firmly, doing up the buttons. ‘Keeping the lads in line. Arthur Pince was as useless at that as a bull’s lit. Mind, Arthur was ginger.’

Pip frowned. ‘I thought he was a small dark man?’

‘Ginger beer. Queer,’ Harold explained.

‘I suppose discipline in the ranks depends on the use of my personality,’ Pip decided thoughtfully.

‘Use that if you like, mate. Personally, all the shop stewards what I know prefer a bit of the old –’ He made his boxing motion. ‘The reliable aggro.’

‘1 deplore the use of violence in any context.’

‘Have it your own way,’ Harold told him amiably. ‘But if any of the lads gets less than wildly fanatic, then you’ve got to give them a bit of encouragement, by which I mean the flick knife in the car tyres, or maybe calling with a meat axe to do up their front room.’

‘I think violence is perfectly justified,’ Faith agreed with him. ‘After all, in an army at war, any soldier who fails in his duty is shot on the spot.’

‘Shooting’s too good for some of them cowboys.’ Harold nodded gloomily in the direction of the door. ‘They want a bit of the old electricity where it tickles most.’

‘Harold, I leave you in charge of morale,’ Pip told him. ‘Use whatever means you think best to maintain it, but stop short of murder.’ He looked up in surprise as Forfar McBridie strode in, wearing Highland dress with bagpipes under his arm.

‘I want to ask a straight question,’ McBridie began. ‘What’s the strike got to offer Scotland?’

‘I hadn’t really given that aspect much thought,’ replied Pip, annoyed at the intrusion.

‘Well you’d better,’ the Scotsman told him bluntly. ‘I’m from Clydeside. That’s where the real revolution’s going to spring from. A great red river, rolling down the M6 to London. By the time we’ve finished, we’ll make Culloden look like a pop festival.’ He threw his head back, gazing starrily at the concrete ceiling. ‘God save King Jamie the Eighth! Up from the Clydebank shipyards to Holyrood House. Scotland will be the richest nation in the world, because we control its two most precious fluids – oil and whisky.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, there can be a King Clive in Cardiff and a King Arthur in Tintagel,’ Pip told him shortly. ‘And the Scots pound may be worth so much you can come down whenever you feel like it to buy up the Crown jewels, or spew diced carrots over Piccadilly, like after football matches –’

‘I’ve a mind to slice your nose off,’ declared Forfar McBridie angrily, reaching for his skean-dhu.

‘Harold, administer the disciplinary treatment,’ Pip ordered. ‘Listen, Mr McBridie. This strike is on behalf of decent men and women throughout the country, not just bits of it. Who are you?’ he demanded abruptly of a thin, wispy lady who had just ventured through the door, wearing a long fringed dress and a yellowish straw hat which appeared to have been mislaid for some time under other heavy articles.

‘Mr Cripps, is it?’ she asked throatily. ‘They said I should find you here. I saw you in the papers. What are you going to do about the doggies?’

Pip scratched his stiff fair hair. ‘Doggies are nothing to do with us. This strike is directed against doctors, not vets.’

‘Oh, but they are to do with you,’ the lady continued earnestly. ‘You’re the man, Mr Cripps, who can do something about our poor doggies. You must stop them smoking.’

‘You are referring, I suppose,’ said Faith, ‘to dogs in experiments, given tobacco smoke to find the cause of cancer?’

‘Exactly, Miss. It’s wicked. Unspeakably wicked. The poor doggies. It’s bad enough, people who encourage children to smoke. But doggies!’

‘I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you,’ Faith continued coolly, ‘that the experiments will probably save thousands of human lives?’

‘I’m not interested in that. It’s cruel to the doggies. It’s not that they even like smoking. Whoever saw a doggie smoke of its own free will? You must put a stop to it, Mr Cripps,’ she instructed Pip firmly. ‘Don’t call off your strike until every doggie in the country has been released by these mad scientists to breathe God’s fresh air. And baboons –’

‘Stop!’ Pip jumped up, hands over ears. ‘I am running, with extreme difficulty, a strike at St Swithin’s for one specific purpose. And everyone seems intent on climbing on the bandwagon for their own selfish reasons. Yet if I lose sight of my purpose – which is simply to stop doctors ratting on their fellow countrymen – I’m lost. That’s exactly how Julius Caesar came to grief. And Napoleon. Trying to fight too many people at once. Harold, deal with this lady. Perhaps you could organize some sort of industrial action at the Battersea Dogs’ Home?’

Harold Sapworth sucked the tip of his thumb. ‘Funny, but I was just going to ask you a favour, too. That cousin what I just mentioned, down in the New Kent Road. It’s not that he wanted to go to the Isle of Wight, actual. He’s doing a bit of bird there. Eight years, with good behaviour. Mind, he was innocent. I know the bloke it was, what carved up the postmistress. But if you could keep up the strike until justice was done –’

‘No, no, no!’ Pip smacked a fist into his palm. ‘I’ve half a mind to call it off, here and now. A strike is a matter of standing up for your principles, not of blackmail.’

‘Can’t see much difference, myself. They has to buy you off in either case. It’s just a matter of fixing the right price. Still, don’t put yourself out. I never cared much for my cousin, anyway. Besides, his old woman’s enjoying having it off with all and sundry. I collected these letters for you upstairs,’ he added, thrusting a pair of envelopes into Pip’s hand.

Pip strode to the far corner of the basement, sat down alone, and opened the first envelope. It said:

 

Dear Chipps,

I understand from your aunt that you have taken employment as a hospital porter, and are interesting yourself in industrial relations. I congratulate you. It is a subject sadly thin in the attention of first-class academic minds, such as I believe you to possess. You may not feel this compliment either sincere or acceptable after the exchanges of our last meeting. But I assure you that I have always considered you academically sound, if utterly disastrous in practice. Will you kindly be on my ward round at Virtue by ten o’clock tomorrow morning. You will learn something to your eventual advantage.

 

Yours,

Lancelot Spratt.

 

‘I wonder what that crafty old hyena’s up to?’ Pip muttered. ‘I suppose I’d better go along. At least, he daren’t make me look a fool any more in front of everybody, including the patient.’

The second envelope contained a telephone message. He read it, jumped up with a shout, and sprang across to Faith and Harold Sapworth, who were arguing with the intruders in the doorway. ‘It’s all right,’ Pip exclaimed. ‘We can go ahead with absolute confidence. We’ve been taken seriously. Look at this – it’s from the BBC. They want me to appear on television.’ He tugged down the lapels of his brown coat. ‘Tonight,’ he said breathlessly, ‘I address the nation.’