‘Oh, that is nasty!’ said the policewoman.
‘Poor Ben,’ said Jude, and her eyes filled with sympathetic tears. She’s quiet, Jude is, but she’s loyal. She never forgets anyone in the ever-growing army of those who’ve helped her with her arithmetic homework.
Behind us, alerted by the howls of pain, Mum tore herself away from offering Goggle-eyes the job of grand vizier in her despotic regime, and scrambled up the bank to take a peek at the damage. Mum’s good with accidents. She’s got that perfect mix of being both calm and – well, yes, he’s quite right – almost unbelievably bossy.
‘Show me,’ she ordered him. And when he had: ‘Oh, that is nasty!’ she echoed the policewoman. (Two real professionals.)
Ben didn’t respond to these sophisticated diagnoses. The poor soul looked pale as a maggot. I think he was about to faint.
The policewoman turned to Gerald, who had been scrambling up the bank after Mum, and now stood gasping for breath at her side.
‘Would you help me get this young man to the bus before he keels over?’
She must have chosen Gerald because of what was left of his nice suit. She can’t have picked him because of his physical fitness. He was still panting heavily as he obediently took Ben’s other arm to support him.
Ben tried to shake them off.
‘I’m not going to the bus,’ he insisted. ‘I’m going in the vans. I’m being arrested.’
‘No, you’re not,’ Mum said. ‘That’s going to turn into the most unpleasant bruise. You’re going home.’
She turned to the policewoman for support, and the policewoman clinched it.
‘I wouldn’t arrest you anyway,’ she declared baldly. ‘You never even got through your bit of fence.’
You could tell everyone thought this was a bit harsh. One or two of the Quakers looked a little reproachful, and Ben was positively outraged. But Gerald and the policewoman cut short his indignant protests by leading him off firmly towards the bus. As they stumbled past me down the muddy slope, I heard Ben muttering darkly about conspiracies; but apart from gripping his arm just that little bit tighter, and speeding up, the policewoman and Gerald simply ignored him.
While the economist was still snipping gingerly at his own stubborn strand of fence wire, Mum looked round the little knot of bystanders. As usual she seemed to have completely taken over.
‘We need one more now,’ she announced. ‘A replacement for Ben. Any volunteers?’
Silence. To make the point that whoever was going to volunteer had better get a move on, a few more drops of cold rain fell. Everyone glanced at one another with those helpless little I-would-if-I-could shrugs that make it clear they have an important engagement, or their mother-in-law happens to be staying, or, just this once, their yoga class has been changed to Sunday.
‘Come on,’ cajoled Mum. ‘It’s only a couple of hours down at the station. Your court case won’t come up for weeks.’
Everyone took a sudden interest in their muddy toe-caps.
‘We need another person,’ Mum insisted. ‘This snowball is going to look pathetic if we don’t even have sixteen.’
I don’t know how they held out against her, truly I don’t. I cracked.
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Certainly not!’
Then even Jude began to look a little bit wistful. She opened her mouth once or twice, daring herself to volunteer. But even her passion for Inspector McGee couldn’t triumph over her tiredness, and the fact that her feet were cold, and the unknown territory of ‘down at the station’. And Mum would only have ignored her, anyway. So we all stood there looking terribly uncomfortable, while the last policeman carefully kept his face straight, and Mum’s eyes roved over everyone, just like Mrs Lupey’s do when she’s waiting for someone in the class to confess to some heinous crime like dropping a chocolate wrapper on the floor, or sliding the window down a micromillimetre while she’s turned her back to write something on the blackboard.
But this lot aren’t that easily intimidated. After all, if they cared all that much what people thought of them, they wouldn’t have come on the demo in the first place. So they just kept on politely inspecting the ends of their shoes, and I honestly believe that, but for what happened next, the whole business might have been wrapped up with a few more moments of stern waiting, and then Mum shrugging and breaking the silence with something like: ‘Oh, well. Fifteen. Sixteen. What’s the difference?’
But the policeman snorted.
Personally, I would have ignored it. After all, if Gerald Faulkner had been standing there, he probably would have snorted too, and just as loudly. But, let’s face it, Mum’s soft on Goggle-eyes. She wasn’t soft on the policeman.
‘Lost your tissues?’ she asked him in exactly the same tone of voice Gran uses for ‘Had your eyeful?’ And I told you already that that sounds so rude Mum’s ordered me and Jude to stop saying it, ever.
It irritated him, you could tell, her coming back at him like that. And he was pretty young. Maybe Mum’s scornful response reminded him of being scolded by his own mother for tracking mud from his regulation boots over her nice clean floors or something. Anyway, suddenly he got exactly the same sort of look all over his face as Jude gets when she’s cheesed off with Mum. And he muttered sullenly:
‘Make up your minds! Fifteen or sixteen. I can’t have you lot wasting any more of my time.’
He put his foot right in it there.
‘Your time! What about mine?’ (Even if she hadn’t before, I bet she sounded like his mother now.) ‘This is your job, you know! You’re paid to do it.’ Mum shook her finger at him as if he were about three, or something. ‘I’m a lot busier than you are, you know. And my job is equally as important as yours. Not only that, but I have two children to care for, and a house to run. You’d better not tell me I’m wasting your time. I am a lot more bothered about wasting my own!’
I must say, Inspector McGee must do a really good job of training his officers. I’d have been terribly tempted to arrest her for nagging. But maybe he realized that, if he did, we’d have the satisfaction of making up the full number we wanted. So, whether it was an admirable example of highly trained self-control, or just simple petty-minded spite, he somehow managed not to respond. He just stared straight ahead, as if he were a thousand miles away, and stone deaf.
Mum was just on the verge of opening her big mouth to start in on him again when Gerald, back within earshot after his errand of mercy, realized what was going on. Practically throwing himself up the last few slippery feet of the bank, he caught her arm.
‘Now stop it, Rosalind!’ he warned. ‘It’s not the officer’s fault you’ve spent all day here.’
‘It’s not my fault, either,’ she responded irritably. ‘I know which I’d prefer between spending a nice quiet Sunday at home with my feet up secure in the knowledge that we had a sane defence policy’ – she waved her arms about – ‘and this!’ She could have been indicating anything: the mud or the occasional stinging splatters of rain, the unsightly fence stretching for miles in either direction or the bedraggled company. ‘Dragging around bleak military outposts, carrying rain-sodden placards and trailing my poor little toddlers behind me!’
I ignored ‘poor little toddlers’. I took it to be what Mrs Lupey always calls ‘a rather unfortunate rhetorical flourish’. But Jude, I noticed, looked extremely hurt. Once again, she moved so close to Gerald Faulkner that she practically stuck to his mud-streaked trousers. From this safe vantage point, she glowered at Mum.