THE CLIMBING FRAME

by MARY HOCKING

  Ellis, who had some integrity where education itself was concerned, made no reply to this outburst.

  Rudderham sighed and collected his own papers. He turned over a sheet of paper with a lot of figures on it. ‘What’s this? Not mine . . .’

  Ellis glanced at it. ‘Oh, that’s probably the information that was prepared for Wicks. He must have left it behind, I’ll take it, shall I?’

  ‘Prepared for Wicks!’ Rudderham held tight to the sheet of paper. ‘What the devil do you mean?’

  ‘I understood from Chatterton that Wicks had asked for advance information.’

  ‘Advance information!’ Rudderham stuttered. ‘You mean that Wicks was given this before the meeting?’

  ‘I imagine so; I don’t know much about it, I’m afraid. But I believe that the Schools Section was working on this, as well as the stuff for the meeting . . .’

  ‘No wonder he was so knowledgeable !’ Rudderham stared at Ellis, his protruding eyes angry and also a little hurt. ‘This is intolerable!’

  ‘You weren’t supplied with a copy?’ Ellis inquired diffidently.

  ‘I was not.’

  ‘An oversight, I’m sure.’

  ‘Never mind. Not your fault.’ Rudderham bundled his papers into his brief case, including the offending sheet of figures. ‘But I shall see about this.’

  He went out. The meeting had finished at eight because several members had to attend a special meeting of the Establishment Committee. It was a light, warm evening. Rudderham’s car was at the garage for repairs; he had meant to ask Ellis to give him a lift, but the discovery of the information prepared for Wicks had upset him so much that he had to be alone. As he blundered into the street, he was a slightly ridiculous figure, straws of hair which he had neglected to sleek down blowing around his bald pate, his protruding eyes staring rather wildly while his mouth opened and shut as he made little ejaculations to himself. He had a desire to run out into the country, like a sick animal going to ground. He had not been very well lately, he got so confoundedly worked up over small things and this made his heart work overtime. There had been a scene at breakfast only this morning because his egg was underdone. His housekeeper thought that he had blood pressure and wanted him to see his doctor. He had been angry about this as well. He felt himself gradually being surrounded by people who were against him, people who watched his every movement. He knew the kind of things they would be saying about him, because he had heard what was said of others against whom the herd had turned. ‘Getting on, poor old Rudderham; I did a round with him the other day and it was painful to see him labour up to the fifteenth . . .’ ‘. . . asking us to make a decision on item 4 when he was reading the info. on item 5!’ ‘. . . maundered on something dreadful at that prize giving . . .’ Oh yes, he knew what they were at, he wasn’t a complete fool; they were all waiting, ready to throw him on the scrap heap. Well, he’d show them!

  He stopped half-way down old Eastgate High Street to get his breath back. He had been walking too fast and his hand was clenched so tight round the handle of the brief case that for a moment or two he could not ease the fingers. Arthritic, too!

  Chatterton and Wicks. How damnable! Wicks, of course, would use anyone to further his own ends; but Chatterton . . . he had thought better of Chatterton. Admittedly the man was losing his grasp lately, but Rudderham had always thought he had dignity and had grudgingly admired him for it. He wasn’t in the rat race; no doubt he would be the loser thereby, but nevertheless one liked the man for it. And up to a point, you could trust him; he wouldn’t sell out on you. Or so Rudderham had thought. Yet Chatterton was now paying court to Wicks, because that was the direction from which the wind was blowing; Wicks was the man of the future, so one must keep on the right side of him, Rudderham was no longer important because he was on the way out.

  It was the first time that Rudderham had had reason to suspect Chatterton of such scheming, but now that he allowed his mind to wander back over the past months he had no difficulty in picking out other warning signs. At the meeting of the Schools Sub-Committee only last week, hadn’t Chatterton stayed behind talking to Wicks for at least ten minutes? That was pretty significant, when one came to think about it, because Chatterton did not usually delay his departure from meetings. He had left promptly enough tonight.

  Then there had been the prize-giving at the Highfield Grammar School. Wicks had sat in the front row on the platform—to one side admittedly, but why the devil should he have been in the front row at all? He wasn’t even chairman of a sub-committee. And at the reception for staff, Wicks had been at the top table; in fact, he had actually sat next to Rudderham.

  He’d have to do something to stop this focusing of attention on Wicks. Why, Chatterton was grooming him for the chairmanship, that was what it amounted to! And he had always respected Chatterton’s judgement—look how he had deferred to him over that fellow Drew’s appointment—if ever there was a man who would see through an upstart like Wicks, it should surely be Chatterton. He was walking too fast again, he slowed down and turned into Leather Market. The streets here were deserted, this was the business part of the old town and there were only a few private dwellings in basements or above garages. Half-way down the street, he heard someone call out a good night, then a door slammed. Footsteps behind him on the cobbled street, brisk, surefooted, young, suddenly quickening, coming close.

  ‘Major Rudderham . . .’

  Damnation! The last thing he wanted at this moment. He turned angrily, an ominous flush suffusing his face. This was what was wrong with modern society, this lack of respect, this refusal to allow a public person any privacy, this arrogant insistence all the time that one must do obeisance to the new lords of creation. He glared at the young man who loomed out of the summer night, noting with disapproval the green corduroy jacket and the ginger slacks.

  ‘Major Rudderham. How fortunate!’ As though he had been planted there just to satisfy this young man’s need. ‘I’d been hoping to have a word with you.’

  No deference in the voice, the fellow might have been talking to an equal. Rudderham glared into the big, horn-rimmed glasses which dominated the pale face and gave it an air of bland, but not entirely benign, omniscience.

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘I tried to get you at your home,’ the young man explained, barely noting Rudderham’s refusal.

  ‘Been out all day. Some of us work, you know, even though you fellahs don’t believe it.’

  ‘I rang the education office, too; but they’ve got a new ruling there, did you know? No one under the rank of Assistant Education Officer is allowed to speak to the press.’

  ‘Very sound.’

  ‘But no one of that rank is ever in the education office. It doesn’t make for good public relations.’

  ‘The office staff aren’t there just to suit the convenience of the press.’

  ‘But you can’t very well complain about inaccurate reporting if no one is prepared to make a statement, can you?’

  ‘What you chaps don’t realize,’ Rudderham said, his pulse hammering and the blood beginning to sing in his head, ‘is that some people don’t spend their time trying to make work, snooping around looking for trouble, doing a bit of muck-raking here and there; they have a real job to do and they can’t always be at the beck and call of the mass media.’

  ‘Muck is better raked than left lying about,’ the young man said.

  They came into the glare of Cross Street, which was the main thoroughfare of the new town. Rudderham turned to his companion.

  ‘Don’t like to be rude,’ he said. ‘But a man must speak his mind sometimes . . .’ He was going on to explain that he had had a very busy day, but the young man said coolly:

  ‘Not at all. I think it is probably best that the press should be hated by authority. It shows we are doing our job.’

  ‘Of all the damned impertinence!’ Rudderham exploded. ‘If you’ve been pestering me just to preach that kind of rubbish, young fellow-me
-lad, you can take yourself off.’

  ‘Nothing personal was intended.’ The young man looked at him in faint surprise; he was as much a prisoner of his view of life as was Rudderham of his. ‘And, in fact, I really had something important to ask you . . .’

  ‘If you think I’m going to stand here in the High Street at this time of the night giving a statement to you, you’re very much mistaken. Telephone and make an appointment. That’s the way to deal with things responsibly.’

  ‘Unfortunately things move too fast for that kind of approach nowadays. We go to press tonight . . .’

  ‘Then you’ll have to wait for next week’s issue, won’t you?’

  ‘This can’t wait.’

  ‘Go to blazes! The world wasn’t made for you and your kind.’

  ‘If that’s your last word, Major Rudderham . . .?’

  ‘It certainly is. And I shall speak to your editor tomorrow.’

  Shouldn’t have told him to go to blazes, he thought wretchedly as he hurried along the main street. Undignified to let them see they’ve got you rattled. Perhaps he would not speak to the editor after all; might be better to let the matter drop. But the episode had upset him, and now instead of wanting to hide himself away, he wanted the comfort of companionship. He was passing close to Chapel Street where the Leader of the Majority Party lived. Should have thought of Joe Heggarty before, he said to himself; ideal man to talk to. It would mean drinking sherry, but he supposed he could put up with that.

  Joe Heggarty had lived alone since his wife died; but on this particular evening he was not alone. Jean Kane was with him.

  ‘Come and join us,’ Heggarty greeted Rudderham. ‘We need cheerful company.’

  Rudderham suspected irony. He was never quite sure how to take Heggarty, a dry twig of a man with a corrosive tongue and a mind as disinterestedly probing as a surgeon’s scalpel.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong man tonight,’ he said, lowering himself wearily into an armchair and accepting the inevitable sherry with as good a grace as he could muster.

  ‘What went wrong at your meeting?’ Jean Kane could see no other reason for depression. Her single-minded devotion to public affairs usually irritated Rudderham, who liked his women to be physically attractive and intellectually void, but this evening she was the ideal foil.

  Rudderham told them the whole story. When he had finished, Jean Kane said, ‘Well, you know what I think of Wicks.’

  ‘I do indeed,’ Heggarty sighed. ‘But you don’t do him justice. He’s extremely hard-working, he has an agile brain and a remarkable capacity for assimilating facts.’

  ‘He has a shallow mind and a crossword puzzle mentality,’ she retorted. ‘And he is completely self-seeking.’

  ‘That doesn’t debar him from service in local government,’ Heggarty said dryly.

  ‘But he has no principles.’

  ‘They aren’t a prerequisite.’

  ‘Don’t be so prosy, Joe. Principles matter. You’ve got to have something you believe in, otherwise you’re driven before every puff of hot air from the electorate. Wicks has a constant stream of people yelping at his heels because he has a reputation for lending an ear to every complaint, however trivial.’

  ‘He would say that that was why he was elected.’

  ‘If he thinks government works that way, he’s a bigger fool than I take him for. He merely wants to build up a reputation for himself as being the man the masses can turn to.’

  ‘A useful reputation to have.’

  ‘While he has no power. But he’ll never get anything done. He’s too afraid of losing one vote to put a single item of policy through.’

  ‘That’s an exaggeration. He can take the cut and thrust of debate better than most men, and I’ve seen him emerge quite unruffled from very nasty public meetings.’

  ‘Maybe; but you’ll never get strong government from Wicks.’

  Rudderham, who had started by enjoying the attack on Wicks, felt the conversation was now tending too much to the abstract.

  ‘What are you going to do about this business of mine?’ he asked Heggarty.

  ‘Nothing, of course,’ Heggarty answered equably. ‘Wicks is Deputy Leader of the party and he has a right to ask for any information that he wants. You could certainly insist that you have a copy of anything supplied to him.’

  ‘I shall do that all right!’ Rudderham felt deflated, but less uneasy. Perhaps he had been exaggerating things a little; a good job he had come here tonight, Heggarty might be a trifle sharp but he had the ability to scale an issue down to size.

  ‘It was probably an oversight,’ Jean Kane said. It was not the kind of oversight that she would have tolerated and Rudderham was annoyed with her.

  ‘Too much of that sort of inefficiency lately,’ he said.

  ‘Can you wonder?’

  ‘We are back at the point at which you came in,’ Heggarty said to Rudderham. ‘Jean thinks that we ask too much of our officers. What do you think?’

  ‘We pay them, don’t we?’

  ‘We pay them to do a job and then we try to do it ourselves,’ she said, sweeping his remark aside in her imperious way. ‘Our job is to decide policy, but over the last few years we’ve been doing the administration as well. Members who have never had any experience of authority themselves won’t trust anyone else with it. So you get the situation where you pay a man £5,000 a year and you won’t even let him decide whether a fence should be repaired at a cost of £120 or whether a teacher should be allowed one extra week’s sick leave! We shouldn’t be meddling with this kind of thing. Our officers can’t get out from under our feet to do the job we pay them to do!’

  ‘This is what is called taking an interest in the small change of educational life, I suppose,’ Heggarty mused. ‘I must say I’m rather glad I’m not on the Education Committee.’

  ‘Members’ heads are so full of trivia they’re too confused to do any really constructive planning. And some of them are so limited in intelligence that they resent any kind of advice from their officers. It’s no use looking so disapproving, Joe. It really is a scandal that we have members of the Education Committee who take a delight in telling all and sundry that they themselves had no education to speak of. And yet the planning of the education of future generations is in the hands of these people, who have nothing to offer but a grim determination to shift the balance of misfortune!’

  ‘What we need is a more decisive chief officer,’ Rudderham said. He had been waiting for some time to get in with this.

  Jean Kane opened her mouth and Heggarty looked at her sharply, eyebrows raised. Whatever she had intended to say, she thought better of it; she merely shrugged her shoulders and said:

  ‘The man is tired. And I can’t wonder at it.’

  The two men glanced at each other. Jean Kane had fallen under Chatterton’s spell years ago. He had a respect for her quick brain and in her imagination this had flowered into a more lively and personal interest. Although there had been no outward display of feeling on his part, she told herself that there was a deep understanding between them. To this understanding she owed the few moments of happiness that came to her like a glimpse of sunlight on a distant valley. She prided herself on concealing her feelings, but in fact the uneasy self-consciousness of her manner betrayed her whenever she was in conversation with him. Rudderham wondered why he took any notice of her; stripped of all her intellectual armour, this was just another frustrated spinster! He left soon after this, feeling that he had obtained as much as he could hope for from his talk with them.

  As he walked along the quiet streets that led to his own home, he realized that he had forgotten to tell them about the incident with the reporter. But perhaps that was a good thing; he had not come very well out of it, and it was no doubt best forgotten.

  Chapter Seven

  And so, on the morning of 9th June, the Eastgate Recorder asked, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘Are our County representatives becoming too remote?’ As a result
of the trials and tribulations of a Miss Cathcart, the Recorder was reluctantly driven to the conclusion that they were.

  Miss Cathcart’s child had been involved in an incident in the playground of Crossgate Primary School. He had misunderstood the teacher in charge of his group. He was only seven and a nervous little boy. Because he could not understand the game which was being played, he had been told to ‘go away’. In his childish innocence, he had imagined that he was free to amuse himself and had clambered up the climbing frame, a piece of apparatus sited in the playground and intended, presumably, for children to climb. On seeing him, however, the teacher had become very angry, had told him to get down at once, and when, being rather confused, he had failed to comply quickly she had rushed over to him and dragged him down forcibly. He had torn both hands, bruised his nose, and grazed one knee. And he had been severely frightened at being manhandled in this way. He received no medical attention, nor was any attempt made to explain his condition to the mother into whose arms he catapulted crying hysterically when the children were released at the end of the afternoon.

  This, and here the Recorder struck a warning note, it must be made clear, was the uncorroborated story of the mother. In spite of every effort, it had not been possible to obtain a statement from the education office or from the Chairman of the Education Committee.

  What was of particular concern, apart from the events themselves, was the way in which the mother was subsequently handled by officialdom. She went first, very properly, to see the Head Master. He brushed her aside, telling her that he was too busy to see her. So she went to the education office. But alas, for Miss Cathcart! All the senior officers at the education office were busy, too. Miss Cathcart waited for over an hour, sitting in what appeared to be a filing room. At the end of this time, she was seen by a young girl in her teens, whose one concern was to minimize the seriousness of Miss Cathcart’s complaint. ‘Your boy was probably disobedient,’ this damsel told the distraught mother. The only concrete suggestion made by this young woman was that Miss Cathcart should see the Head Master. This suggestion, not unnaturally, did not commend itself to Miss Cathcart, who next approached the Chairman of the Education Committee. The Chairman promised to investigate the matter. Finally, after two days had passed since the incident occurred. Miss Cathcart received a letter from the Chief Education Officer in which it was suggested that the child had exaggerated the incident, and again referring the mother to the Head Master.