Charlie quickly returned to his old routine of coming into the office at four-thirty, even before the cleaners had arrived, which allowed him to read through his papers until eight without fear of being disturbed.
Because of the special nature of his assignment and the obvious support of his minister, doors opened whenever he appeared. Within a month most of his staff were coming in by five, although Selwyn turned out to be the only one of them who also had the stamina to stick with him through the night.
For that first month Charlie did nothing but read reports and listen to Selwyn's detailed assessment of the problems they had been facing for the best part of a year, while occasionally popping in to see the minister to clarify a point that he didn't fully understand.
During the second month Charlie decided to visit every major port in the kingdom to find out what was holding up the distribution of food, food that was sometimes simply being left to rot for days on end in the storehouses on the docksides throughout the country. When he reached Liverpool he quickly discovered that supplies were rightly not getting priority over tanks or men when it came to movement, so he requested that his ministry should operate a fleet of its own vehicles, with no purpose other than to distribute food supplies across the nation.
Woolton somehow managed to come up with sixty-two trucks, most of them, he admitted, rejects from war surplus. "Not unlike me," Charlie admitted. However, the minister still couldn't spare the men to drive them.
"If men aren't available, Minister, I need two hundred women," Charlie suggested, and despite the cartoonists' genre jibes about women drivers it only took another month before the food started to move out of the docks within hours of its arrival.
The dockers themselves responded well to the women drivers, while trade union leaders never found out that Charlie spoke to them with one accent while using quite another when he was back at the ministry.
Once Charlie had begun to solve the distribution problem, he came up against two more dilemmas. On the one hand, the farmers were complaining that they couldn't produce enough food at home because the armed forces were taking away all their best men; on the other, Charlie found he just wasn't getting enough supplies coming in from abroad because of the success of the German U-boat campaign.
He came up with two solutions for Woolton's consideration. "You supplied me with lorry girls, now you must give me land girls," Charlie told him. "I need five thousand this time, because that's what the farmers are saying they're short of."
The next day Woolton was interviewed on the BBC and made a special appeal to the nation for land girls. Five hundred applied in the first twenty-four hours and the minister had the five thousand Charlie requested within ten weeks. Charlie allowed the applications to continue pouring in until he had seven thousand and could clearly identify a smile on the face of the president of the National Farmers' Union.
Over the second problem—of lack of supplies—Charlie advised Woolton to buy rice as a substitute diet staple because of the hardship the nation was facing with a potato shortage. "But where do we find such a commodity?" asked Woolton. "China and the Far East is much too hazardous a journey for us even to consider right now."
"I'm aware of that," said Charlie, "but I know a supplier in Egypt who could let us have a million tons a month."
"Can he be trusted?"
"Certainly not," said Charlie. "But his brother still works in the East End, and if we were to intern him for a few months I reckon I could pull off some sort of deal with the family."
"If the press ever found out what we were up to, Charlie, they'd have my guts for garters."
"I'm not going to tell them, Minister."
The following day Eli Calil found himself interned in Brixton Prison while Charlie flew off to Cairo to close a deal with his brother for a million tons of rice per month, rice that had been originally earmarked for the Italians.
Charlie agreed with Nasim Calil that the payments could be made half in pounds sterling and half in piastres, and as long as the shipments always arrived on time no paperwork concerning the money needed be evident on the Cairo end. Failing this, Calil's government would be informed of the full details of their transaction.
"Very fair, Charlie, but then you always were. But what about my brother Eli?" asked Nasim Calil.
"We'll release him at the end of the war but then only if every shipment is delivered on time."
"Also most considerate," Nasim replied. "A couple of years in jail will do Eli no harm. He is, after all, one of the few members of my family who hasn't yet been detained at His Majesty's pleasure."
Charlie tried to spend at least a couple of hours a week with Tom Arnold so that he could be kept up to date on what was happening in Chelsea Terrace. Tom had to report that Trumper's was now losing money steadily and he had found it necessary to close five of the premises and board up another four; this saddened Charlie because Syd Wrexall had recently written to him offering his entire group of shops and the bombed-out corner pub for only six thousand pounds, a sum Wrexall was claiming Charlie had once made him a firm offer on. All Charlie had to do now, Wrexall reminded Arnold in an accompanying letter, was to sign the check.
Charlie studied the contract that Wrexall had enclosed and said, "I made that offer long before the outbreak of war. Send all the documents back. I'm confident he'll let those shops go for around four thousand by this time next year. But try and keep him happy, Tom."
"That might prove a little difficult," replied Tom. "Since that bomb landed on the Musketeer Syd's gone off to live in Cheshire. He's now the landlord of a country pub in some place called Hatherton."
"Even better," said Charlie. "We'll never see him again. Now I'm even more convinced that within a year he'll be ready to make a deal, so for the time being just ignore his letter; after all, the post is very unreliable at the moment."
Charlie had to leave Tom and travel on down to Southampton, where Calil's first shipment of rice had arrived. His lorry girls had gone to pick up the bags, but the manager of the port was refusing to release them without proper signed documentation. It was a trip Charlie could have well done without, and one he certainly didn't intend to make every month.
When he arrived on the dockside he quickly discovered that there was no problem with the trade unions, who were quite willing to unload the entire cargo, or with his girls, who were just sitting on the mudguards of their lorries waiting to take delivery.
Over a pint at the local pub, Alf Redwood, the dockers' leader, warned Charlie that Mr. Simkins, the general manager of the Docks and Harbour Board, was a stickler when it came to paperwork and liked everything done by the book.
"Does he?" said Charlie. "Then I'll have to stick by the book, won't I?" After paying for his round, he walked over to the administration block where he asked to see Mr. Simkins.
"He's rather busy at the moment," said a receptionist, not bothering to look up from painting her nails. Charlie walked straight past her and into Simkins' office, to find a thin, balding man sitting alone behind a very large desk dipping a biscuit into a cup of tea.
"And who are you?" asked the port's official, taken so completely by surprise that he dropped his biscuit into the tea.
"Charlie Trumper. And I'm here to find out why you won't release my rice."
"I don't have the proper authority," said Simkins, as he tried to rescue his biscuit, which was now floating on the top of his morning beverage. "No official papers have come from Cairo, and your forms from London are inadequate, quite inadequate." He gave Charlie a smile of satisfaction.