by Eva Ibbotson
Con heard a polite cough, and, turning round, he saw an elderly couple smiling at him. “Have we come to the right place for the yeti demonstration?” asked the man.
“Our friend Margaret told us about it,” said the woman. “She couldn’t come herself; she really can’t get about much. But we’ve brought a Thermos and a folding chair for Charles. His knees, you know.”
Con said that they had come to the right place, and they set about arranging their chair and getting comfy.
Some more minutes passed.
And then, walking in a neat line down the Mall, their banner torn from Sister Theresa’s bathrobe waving in the breeze, came the little white-bloused girls of the Sacred Heart Convent. Without fuss, taking no notice of the amused stares of the passersby and the tourists with their cameras, they bowed their heads to Con and Ellen and then went to stand in a row in front of the tall spiked railings, facing the silent sentries of the Coldstream Guards.
They had hardly got settled when, swinging across St. James’s Park, came a motley, long-haired crowd of boys and girls from Newlands Progressive. They had raided the art room for posters, and the slogans they carried, though not always spelled quite right, were brightly painted and eye-catching. A FARE DEEL FOR YETIS, said one placard and AKTION NOW! said another. They had been singing “We Shall Overcome,” accompanied by their teacher on a mandolin, as they straggled across the park, but when they reached the palace, they became quiet immediately and went to stand behind the little girls of the convent, their banners pointing so that the Queen could see them.
Then a strange collection of people came shuffling across the road toward the palace. Ellen recognized the homeless man with his little dog who had shouted at her the night before. He had brought some friends with him. It was clear from their appearance that they lacked most of the necessities of life, such as hot water, beds, and teeth, but they were in good spirits. Perhaps a bit too good, some of them, thought Ellen. They gathered at the railings and struck up a conversation with the elderly couple. At first the old gentleman on his folding chair was a bit put out, but the dog soon put an end to that. He wagged his tail politely, and Con saw the old man reach out to scratch him behind the ear. “It hasn’t been the same since Buster went,” he sighed. “Can’t get another dog now. He’d outlive me.”
And now people began to appear from everywhere. The children of Bermeyside Primary came up Buckingham Palace Road and went to stand beside the Newlands Progressive students. The boys of the cricket-playing prep school, in striped caps that made them look like little wasps, marched proudly up Constitution Hill and came to a halt beside the convent girls. Ellen’s ballet students, moving already with the grace of dancers, came in across Green Park.
And so they came. Slowly but surely the trickle became a stream, and the stream a river. There were children from schools that neither Con nor Ellen had had time to visit—and schools that Leo had called out from the northwest of London where he lived. And there were university students who should have been at lectures and nannies pushing prams containing babies whose own parents were too rich to look after them. There were mothers and workmen and pensioners.
They had done it. The traffic had stopped and there were long lines of cars with puzzled people in them, hooting. Policemen appeared, looking baffled—was it some kind of rally they hadn’t been told about? So many children—and where were the teachers?
“Come along, move along,” they said. And people did come along and did move along, but always, quietly and obstinately, to the place they had been told to come, the great circular space outside the stately gray palace of the Queen.
There were perhaps a thousand people there by three o’clock. But an odd thing about crowds is that a thousand isn’t very many. Of course, in a railway station or a theater it is a lot. But not in a huge wide concourse like the one in front of Buckingham Palace.
Con and Ellen had done their very best; no one could have done more. But you simply can’t get a million people to come to a demonstration in a single day.
And now as Con ran up the steps leading to the statue of Queen Victoria in the middle of Queen’s Gardens and looked out over the crowd, he couldn’t help thinking that although it was more than just a puddle of faces gazing up at him, it certainly wasn’t a sea.
He climbed the statue and raised his arms, and someone started chanting, “We want the Queen, we want the Queen!” Then others joined in, and soon they had all taken up the cry. Then Con lowered his arms, the crowd fell silent, and in his strongest voice, he spoke.
“Thank you all for coming. I shall now present our request to Her Majesty the Queen.” Con was an intelligent boy and he knew that the Queen was no freer than anyone else to do what she liked, but was surrounded by officials and red tape and things that it was all right to do and things that it wasn’t.
He climbed down, took the scroll of paper that Ellen handed him, and began to walk toward the main entrance of the palace. By the huge gates he stopped, not quite knowing what to do. If he walked past the guards, he would be challenged and turned back. Boys did not walk casually into the palace, he knew that.
While he stood there hesitating, a gray-haired man in a dark suit came out of a door further on and came toward him, past the guards. He looked pale and stern but he spoke politely to Con.
“What exactly is going on here?”
Con explained clearly and carefully about the plight of the yetis. “It’s all in that bit of paper. The place they’ve been taken to, the latitude and longitude. The people who did it. And the time when”—he faltered for a moment—“the time when they’re going to be shot.”
The man took the scroll, which had taken many hours to prepare. “I will see that it goes through the usual channels,” he said.
Con didn’t know what the usual channels were, but he didn’t like the sound of them.
“No,” he said. “It’s for the Queen.”
“You must know,” said the man impatiently, “that the Queen cannot possibly attend personally to everything that comes her way.”
“Not everything,” said Con. “But this.”
“The Queen is not—”
“I don’t know what the Queen is not,” said Con desperately. “But what she is, surely, is someone people can turn to when there’s trouble.”
“I have no further comment,” sniffed the man. “You must disperse this crowd immediately, or I shall be obliged to have you arrested for unlawful assembly, disturbing the peace, and,” he added, as the little dog lifted his leg against one of the stone gateposts, “fouling royal property.” Then he turned away and went back into the palace.
“We’re staying till something is done,” shouted Con to his departing back. But the man showed no sign of having heard.
Half an hour, an hour, and still the crowd stood there, their faces lifted to the great façade of the palace. Newlands Progressive struck up a rousing chorus of “We shall not, we shall not be moved.” And then a wave of whispering passed through them.
“Did you see her?”
“It was her, I’m sure.”
“A face. There by the window.”
“It’s the Queen. She’s going to come out, I know she is.”
But the woman whose face they had glimpsed at the huge first-floor window did not come out onto the balcony.
“She’s gone.”
“She’s not coming!”
“It wasn’t her. It was the housekeeper.”
“Or a lady-in-waiting.”
Suddenly, disappointment swept the crowd. They realized how tired they were, how hungry.
For Con it was worse. It wasn’t going to work. The great yeti demonstration was over, and just as Perry had warned, nothing had changed. All this time he had been telling himself that if he worked hard enough, cared enough, he could save the day like some hero in a story. For him it wasn’t only about saving a threatened species, about stopping blood sports and meaningless killing. For Con, to fail was to fail his
friends: to fail Lucy, Uncle Otto, Clarence, Grandma, and Ambrose. They were innocent, and kind, and they had trusted him. He had brought them halfway across the world to certain death. It was unbearable.
Con felt rage rising inside him. He thought he would choke. He ran to the statue, clambered up, and began to shout.
“We’ve failed. It’s useless. Go home. Nobody listens to children and tramps and old ladies, and nobody ever will. Go home. You’ve heard all that stuff—‘Might is right,’ ‘Money talks.’ Well, it’s true. It’s all true. The killing and the hating will never stop. If you say you don’t like it, they’ll call you a wimp or wet or a dreamer. If you say there is another, kinder, more thoughtful way, they’ll call you a lunatic. If you go on saying it, they’ll probably shoot you. Go home.” Con paused for breath. Ellen was crying and telling him to stop, but he was just getting warmed up. He had plenty more to say. “And as for the Queen,” shouted Con, but nobody ever knew what he was going to say about her, because his voice was drowned out by the rumbling growl of a big diesel engine being revved—an engine with a dodgy, clattering water pump. All heads turned, and sure enough, straight up the wide Mall toward Buckingham Palace came a canary yellow articulated lorry with COLD CARCASSES, INC. in large letters on its side. After it, in a long line, came more lorries. There was a low-loader, a giant removal van, a huge-wheeled quarry truck, and a spanking new Scania heavy-haulage vehicle lit up like a Christmas tree.
The yellow lorry drove up to the palace, and as the crowd parted and cheered wildly, it parked right across the front of the main gates, blocking them completely.
Perry jumped out of the cab, looking pleased with himself.
“Oh, Perry, you came back!” Ellen rushed over to him and hugged him. “But it’s no good. They’re going to arrest us.”
“Are they, now?” said Perry. “Just give me a few moments to get my mates organized, and we’ll have a little chat.”
Quickly, he directed the massive vehicles to park across every entrance to the palace. The three big gates at the front were blocked. The other lorries drove round and out of sight, to block the rear entrances.
“Right,” said Perry. “That should do it. She won’t be taking delivery of any groceries for a while.”
When they were ensconced in the familiar cab and Perry was enjoying a well-earned cuppa, Con said, “You’re going to get into awful trouble. You can’t just lock the Queen into her own palace.”
“I haven’t locked her in,” said Perry. “I’ve locked everybody else out. It’s a picket. Legitimate industrial action. I had a word with some mates about it, and we agreed it was worth a try. I’m not saying it’ll work, mind you,” he said, directing his words to Con, “but I’ve learned one thing after all the scrapes I’ve been in, and that is never give up. And trust your friends,” he added.
Ellen blushed. “We thought you’d just gone away …”
“What happens now?” said Con hastily.
“Now,” said Perry, “we wait.”
They didn’t have to wait long. The police hadn’t been particularly worried by a peaceful demonstration of children and unimportant people outside Buckingham Palace, but now the wail of sirens was heard and flashing blue lights converged on the scene from all directions. A whole fleet of police cars drew up, and uniformed men started pouring out of them. Perry and the other drivers had formed a line in front of Perry’s lorry, with arms folded. They weren’t all big and beefy—though the man from the removal van looked pretty fearsome—but they didn’t look as though they were going to budge in the face of the massed officers of the law. The policemen stopped at a safe distance from the drivers, and the man in charge produced a bullhorn. His voice echoed over the heads of the crowd.
“You are breaking the law. You must cease this action immediately and remove your vehicles.”
Perry didn’t need a bullhorn.
“Remove them yourself,” he roared back, “if you can.” And he held up a handful of wiring. All the drivers had disabled their engines, and it would take many hours to make them work again. They had a good laugh at that.
“You are all under arrest,” came the voice from the bullhorn, “and we are now obliged to take you into custody.”
The policemen took out their batons and began to walk forward. A couple of the drivers clenched their fists, and the driver of the removal van produced a large wrench from his overalls. It was going to get ugly. The remaining demonstrators started booing the police and chanting, “Save the yetis.”
Then something made the advancing police stop. A big black car rounded the monument and drove toward the blockading lorries, right between the line of men in their blue uniforms and the grim-faced drivers. There was a little flag on the hood of the car. A young, fit-looking man jumped out of the front passenger seat and ran round the car to open one of the rear doors. Out stepped a tall, well-dressed man with thinning hair and a face that reminded one of a rather sad sheep. Ellen, who had been watching everything from the cab of Perry’s lorry, thought she had seen him somewhere. He walked toward Perry and stopped in front of him.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but one would rather like to drive in and have one’s dinner.”
Ellen had never seen Perry flustered before, but she saw it now. He actually stammered. “W-well, sir … I’m afraid you can’t. The yetis are going to die if we don’t stop it somehow.”
“Ah, the yetis. I read about that. A nasty business.”
There was a silence, which seemed to go on for a very long time.
“Coldwater Straits, is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah, jolly good. That’s in BAT, I believe. Now if I can just squeeze past, then perhaps I could have a word with Mother.”
Perry stepped aside, and the tall man pressed himself through the narrow gap between the lorry and the railings and disappeared into the palace.
Everything went very quiet. The police didn’t move; the drivers didn’t move.
“In bat? Cricketer, is he?” growled the removal van man.
“Why did you let him through?” called Con. “You said it was a picket.”
“That bloke,” said Perry, “is the only hope we have left.”
Time passed very slowly. The few demonstrators that remained gathered in small groups and talked quietly among themselves. Some reporters arrived, and a van from one of the television networks.
Somewhere in the palace, in a comfortable sitting room with thick carpets and a fire burning in the grate, a delicate hand put down the teacup it had been holding and reached for the telephone.
For the rest of their lives, there was one moment that Con and Ellen always remembered. As the evening settled down and became night, and all over London the streetlights blinked into life, the people outside the palace waited: Perry and the drivers, the remaining demonstrators—quite a lot of them schoolchildren who knew that their parents would be worried sick—and the policemen. Only the uniformed driver of the big black car didn’t wait. He drove off to put his car in the garage and have his supper.
And then, from one of the doors in the façade of the palace, the gray-haired official emerged and crossed the wide front terrace toward them. They watched him in utter silence as he approached the railings and stopped. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit and brought out an embossed envelope. He poked it rather unceremoniously through the railings into Con’s hand, turned on his heel, and departed.
Con saw the royal seal, a magnificent coat of arms with a lion and a unicorn on it. He handed it to Perry.
“You read it, Perry. I daren’t.”
Perry read it, and in a strange, choked voice as though he were getting a cold he said, “All right, Con, up you go. They have a right to hear this.”
He gave Con a leg up onto the top of the cab and, from there, Con scrambled onto the roof of the lorry. He didn’t need to shout this time, for every face was turned toward him, and the only sound was the ever-present thrum of the big city.
“We have an answer,” he cried. “I shall read it to you:
“We have this day in accordance with the petition of our subjects instructed George Ullaby RN, commander of Her Majesty’s Research Vessel Seadog, stationed in the Weddell Sea, to proceed with all possible speed to Coldwater Straits and in liaison with the staff of the British Antarctic Territory Research Station, there to prevent by any legitimate means at their disposal the unlawful, cruel, and inhumane destruction of the yetis.
“We thereby require and request, in recognition of the granting of this petition and in anticipation of the successful outcome of this mission, that the vehicles at present obstructing the entrances to our Royal Residence might be removed with dispatch, because the bin-men come on Fridays.
“We did it,” said Con. “Thank you, oh, thank you all so very much.”
And he started to cry.
It was quite a party. The police gave up any attempt to be proper police. There was so much hugging and backslapping going on that they really couldn’t call it an unlawful assembly. You can’t arrest people for laughing and dancing—well, not in England you can’t. Some of the constables got straight to work helping the drivers fix their lorries, sharing jokes about what they had seen on the roads of Great Britain—lorry drivers and policemen are out in all weathers. The Newlands teacher, who had become a royalist, borrowed the bullhorn and started to sing “God Save the Queen.” The old gentleman offered the homeless man a drink from his Thermos, which turned out to contain a pretty decent Speyside malt whiskey, and before you could say knife, they had decided to set up a kennel in the country to breed Jack Russells, which after a long argument was the only breed they could both agree was a really nice little dog.
There were some unfortunate moments—there always are at a real shindig. Some of the Newlands Progressive pupils went skinny-dipping in the Serpentine and persuaded three girls from the convent school to come along. A small boy from the prep school was violently sick after winning a packet of cigarettes off one of the Bermeyside kids in a hastily assembled game of Texas Hold ’Em poker on the flatbed of the low-loader. Still, a party is a party. What can you do?
