A Disturbing Influence (4 page)

Those two years, you know, can have quite an effect on an intelligent young man who’s hardly left his home-town before. And Harry came home distinctly thoughtful, even rather radical. Now I approve of radicalism in the young—I approve of the young altogether, in fact, and I think that any young man with any spunk in him will find something to be radical about, even if it’s only his dear old dad. Well, Harry went farther than most, in fact he cut out the father-hating stage altogether, and I used to find him in the public library reading
The
New
Statesman
rather than taking it home to shock the old man, who was, by the way, frankly obese by this time. Harry and I used to have long talks together, during which I would shatter what I considered dangerous leanings towards Teach-Yourself-Marxism, while he tried to undermine my faith in political quietism. And, of course, we became good friends, and we both forgot that I had once been his teacher. He even began to get me worried, to make me wonder if I shouldn’t get out of Cartersfield and go and live a little before I died, but, of course, I didn’t do anything more than wonder.

Well, among the many things which seemed to Harry to be violently wrong with the world, the wrongest of all was the hydrogen bomb. He learnt all about it, he could tell you how many people died at Hiroshima, how many people would die, over what period of time, if an H-bomb were dropped at such and such a height over Marble Arch or the Birmingham Public Library or the main Post Office at Leeds. He knew about geese on American radar screens, and radioactive milk, and babies with two heads, the lucky things. I don’t know how much of his information was correct, and I think he probably took the gloomiest possible view of everything to do with the bomb, but it was quite obvious, even to Brigadier Hobson, that to answer Harry Mengel you had to know your facts. And, of course, in Cartersfield no one knew anything at all; in fact poor Harry had great difficulty in getting anyone to argue with him,
even. People said: ‘Is that right, Harry?’ and ‘You don’t say?’ and ‘Well I never’, but they couldn’t, you know, contribute to the conversation. There was Brigadier Hobson, it’s true, but he was hardly fair game, since he seemed to think that the next war would be fought with infantry, like the last, and anyway he was quite nice really, even if he did embody all the positively evil clichés of the public-school system. I was mildly on Harry’s side. No one else gave a damn. Mr Ponsonby, the perennial mayor, couldn’t have told a hawk from a handsaw if he hadn’t been the ironmonger. And the headmaster, that chairman among chairmen, believed in letting things take their course and seeing all the evidence before one made one’s decision; that is to say he never listened to a word anyone else said, then gave his own opinion, which was, briefly, on the one hand this, on the other hand that, and we should wait and see. ‘Then you’d better be wearing dark glasses, that’s all,’ Harry told him one evening, ‘or you’ll never see anything again.’

Now I don’t want to give you the wrong impression about Harry. He had his views, yes, but he was still a grocer, and when his father died at last of sheer adiposity (this was not the official reason, of course, but Dr Nye did have a tendency to be indiscreet) Harry found himself with a pretty good business to run. It’s true that trade in Cartersfield wasn’t as good as it had been, but people still had to eat, and Harry’s father had branched out a bit—there were Mengel’s Groceries in two or three neighbouring towns—and Harry was really rather well-off. I think this annoyed him a little, being a rich radical, but, after all, what about Stafford Cripps, so that was all right. I told him I didn’t see why a rich man shouldn’t be a Socialist if he wanted, and he needn’t give all his money away, either, this isn’t the day of judgment: when he gets the sort of state he’s working for he’ll find it’s taken from him soon enough, and meanwhile he can probably do a lot more good by hanging on to it. That’s what I said, and I think I may even believe it. So not long after the funeral, anti-bomb posters began to appear in the windows of Harry’s shops, and a few people muttered and said he should
keep his politics out of his business, but they didn’t stop buying at his store, because it was easily the best one in Cartersfield, and, anyway, a poster didn’t make any difference to the quality of the goods. I think he could have put up a Communist poster and people would still have come. Not that Harry had any leanings towards Communism, far from it; Harry was a
petit
bourgeois
and glad of it once I’d explained to him that it was all right really. Brigadier Hobson did threaten to take his account elsewhere, it’s true, but Harry simply grinned at him and said, loud enough for a few people to hear (and they told everyone else): ‘Thank you, sir, I should be very glad to have a cheque. Your account stands at two hundred and thirty-five pounds, four shillings and fourpence, plus that bunch of grapes you are carrying, and I was going to speak to you about it anyway, sir.’ And Brigadier Hobson went very red in the face, because he had plenty of money, but didn’t like paying bills very much, and he stayed with Mengel’s and his credit remained, too. Nice man, Hobson, under all the bombast. They often are, those harrumphers. He knows when he’s beaten, all right, and accepts defeat better than victory, the old fool.

Anyhow, there was Harry, a young radical with a chain of groceries and a bomb on the brain, and lo and behold, one day it occurs to him that the Aldermaston March would be clumping along the by-pass in a month’s time, and Easter Saturday being Easter Saturday, what was he going to do about it? There’s a dilemma for you, business versus faith, a big selling day against the biggest anti-bomb performance of the year. He pondered and puzzled about it for days. He even made tactful inquiries to see if any of his friends would take over for him while the March chugged along the by-pass, but without success. Meanwhile he made his preparations—he was going on the three other days, anyway; it was just the Saturday, when the march would be passing his own town, that he couldn’t be on it. And he wanted very much to be on it on that day in particular, to march, even if it was only along the by-pass, with a great big banner saying: ‘
C
ARTERSFIELD SAYS BAN THE
BOMB
’. ‘We’ve got to give them a feeling of welcome,’ he said to me one night, when I caught him making it, a huge thing it was, too, blue with the words in gold, and a picture of a mushroom cloud in scarlet. Absolutely hideous. Harry had no colour-sense at all.

‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ I said, though it was quite obvious what he was doing.

‘I’m making a bloody banner,’ he said. ‘Here, grab a hold of that corner, will you? It’s getting wrinkled. We don’t want our lovely message lopsided, do we?’

So I took an end, and I helped him paint it. I even added a few violet puffs to the mushroom cloud.

‘Pretty good,’ he said, when we’d finished. ‘Now we’ll let it dry before we add the poles.’

‘Poles?’ I said. ‘What do you mean, poles?’

‘Two poles. One each side. It’s got to be spread out tight so that people can see it. It’ll be no bloody good if it just droops, will it?’

‘And who’s taking the other pole?’

‘You are,’ he said; he didn’t even bother to look at me, he just stated it as though it was a fact we had both known for a very long time, but I had not known it for a long time, I had no intention of making a fool of myself for him or anyone else, and I told him so, briefly and clearly.

‘Come off it,’ he said. ‘You and I will show these dead and dying men of Cartersfield that we mean business.’

‘Damn it, Harry,’ I said, ‘I’m —— if I will.’ Yes, I swore. Tut, tut, fancy a schoolmaster knowing such horrible words. Well, where do you think schoolboys learn them? ‘I’m —— if I will,’ I said, and I meant it.

‘Well, then, you’re ——, that’s all,’ he said.

And we left it at that, because he knew perfectly well that I could never be induced to march in his march, let alone carry a hideous banner. And so time passed, and Easter came nearer, and Harry’s problem remained unsolved. He was terribly torn between
shutting the shop altogether and missing a day of footslogging, and people didn’t help him, either, in fact they even began to be a little unkind, saying: ‘Oh, I won’t take it now, I’ll collect it Saturday; you will be open then, Mr Mengel, won’t you?’ and Harry would smile and say: ‘Yes,’ then go into his office and curse a bit. I may say that by this time, thanks to Harry and his dilemma, people were beginning to get interested in this march thing, though not me, of course. I had no intention of walking even as far as the north-east corner of Chapman’s Wood just to watch a lot of fanatics parading down a main road. But others were saying that perhaps Harry might be right, one never knew, did one, and perhaps these people weren’t all cuckoo, were they? And others said angrily that it shouldn’t be allowed, particularly not at holiday-time, holding up the traffic when everyone wanted to get out for a drive. The pubs got quite quarrelsome. Even one young radical can cause trouble if he tries.

And though of course he was delighted that people were taking an interest, Harry was still going through agonies about Easter Saturday. Ever since he’d taken those commissions on his father’s waistline Harry had hated to let a good thing go by, and holiday-time is no time to close your shop just to go on a crusade (because that’s what he called it now). And then he thought he’d had a brilliant idea. He came and told me, under pain of radiation sickness if I told anyone else, that he’d thought up a compromise. He’d shut the shop for half an hour while the march went by, and give everyone on it an Easter egg.

‘How about that!’ he said.

‘But, Harry,’ I said, ‘there may be a thousand people there.’

‘No, there won’t,’ he said. ‘Second day—five hundred at the most. Anyway, I can afford to give away a thousand Easter eggs.’

Well, how should I know what he could afford, and how many people there’d be on his precious march? I reckoned he knew what he was talking about, and I just hoped his old mother wouldn’t die
of a stroke when she heard about it. So I shrugged and said I thought he was quite out of his mind, but that was his business, not mine.

And then things began to get out of control. On Good Friday Harry went off to Aldermaston and he tramped along all day, feeling like Christ going to Calvary, no doubt, with all those students from all over the place who, said the newspapers, gave the whole thing its character. And suddenly, in that procession, which was much bigger than anyone expected, Harry said, he began to feel at home. It must be just like a university, he thought, I suppose, and forgetting he’d given up that sort of thing to be a good steady grocer he got really worked up. He told me afterwards, that night in fact, that he’d never been so excited in his life.

‘It’s bloody marvellous!’ he said, hopping about all over my room in his great big marching boots. ‘Why, there’s
thousands
of us, David, thousands!’

He’d never called me by my Christian name before, and I hadn’t invited him to, because I prefer not to be called anything. My ex-wife used to call me Dave, and I’ve hated my name ever since. So that annoyed me to start with, and then his dirty great boots all over my carpet.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said, ‘sit down or take those boots off, man, I don’t want this place looking as though your whole loony procession has been through.’

But he wasn’t listening to a word I said, he just went on and on about how marvellous everything was.

‘David,’ he said, ‘I want to tell you——’

‘Don’t call me David,’ I said, ‘and take your boots off.’

‘But why shouldn’t I call you David?’ he said. ‘It’s your name, isn’t it? God, you don’t know what today was like. I fell in love with the whole world, it was just fabulous!’

Now when people say things like that to me I’m liable to get very pedantic and sarcastic and boring, and usually I say: ‘Really, are you sure, the
whole
world, how can that be? Let us examine our terms,’ and other carefully chosen irritants along the same lines. But
Harry was different, Harry was a friend of mine, and besides he was clearly out of his mind. I didn’t know what to say, so I said: ‘Oh my God, Harry.’

‘Dave,’ he said, and I winced, ‘Dave,’ and he seized my shoulders and started shaking me, ‘do you realize that the youth of the country is with us? Nothing can stop us now.’

‘Oh my God,’ I said again. What else could I say?

‘We’ll win now. We can’t lose. Everyone will come over. The thing’s a wild successs, don’t you see?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t. And take your boots——’

‘You will tomorrow!’ he shouted, and then he danced round my room a bit more, and then he went away, planning God knows what.

Well, you can imagine how I felt about all this, pretty fed up hardly describes it. I mean, what the hell could have got into the boy? I made myself angry thinking about the effect of mass meetings on impressionable minds, and muttered ‘Nuremberg’ to myself, like a good suspicious radical, and then I went to bed. I was so angry with Harry that I went straight to sleep. (Usually I lie awake for an hour or so working myself up into a rage, otherwise I can’t sleep. Yes, I dare say it is unusual.)

Well, next morning came, and nothing very exciting seemed to be happening that I could see. I hate the Easter holidays, anyway. It usually rains, and with a lot of guff about religion they even shut the cinemas most of the time. And I feel I ought to be doing
something,
which is nonsense. It’s as bad as Christmas. Anyway, I went along to the store to see what Harry was up to, but he wasn’t there. A lot of other people were there, though, and his poor mother was running round in circles doing his job and hers on one of the busiest mornings of the year. She was far too flustered for me to bother even to ask where Harry was. Anyway, she’s a pretty stupid woman, I think, or she wouldn’t let Harry spend so much time thinking about politics. If she was loyal to her class she wouldn’t stand for it. Well, I came out of the shop ready to be angry at the slightest
opportunity, and the first thing I saw was one of my pupils, a particularly dim one at that, so I asked him with perhaps exaggerated care if he’d seen Harry. But of course he hadn’t, and he gave me a look as if to say I must be round the bend. Now if there’s one thing that really makes me angry it’s being treated as loopy by someone whom I know to be less intelligent than myself, so I gave him a gentle cuff over the ear and was about to move on when I saw that he was staring past me at something up the street.