“Yeah?”
“Listen, I need help,” said Con. “Can you get this school out? The whole school? In front of Buckingham Palace at two o’clock this afternoon?”
“I can,” said the boy, spitting out of the side of his mouth. “But why should I?”
Con explained about the yetis and the boy nodded. “I saw it on the telly. But, man, the Queen. Why not the Mafia or something?”
“The Queen has her own planes. People would listen to her.”
The boy stood looking down at Ambrose’s photograph, which Con had brought.
“Do we get paid?”
“No. Will you come?” said Con.
He spat again. “OK,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’ll get them out, and I’ll get my cousin Mervyn to bring out Fairfield Junior.”
His next school couldn’t have been more different — a little prep school inside the gates of a big house where the boys, in white flannels, were already out on the cricket field. There was the sound of clapping and polite voices saying things like “Well played, Johnson” and “Good for you, Smithers!”
Con climbed over the high wall and dropped down beside a dozy-looking boy in spectacles, who was supposed to be fielding at long off but actually seemed to be searching for interesting-looking beetles.
But though he looked dozy, he was very quick on the uptake. “I saw it on TV,” he said. “And I’ll do everything I can to bring some people. Mind you, there are some pretty grim characters here. There’s a boy called Smithers who pops at nesting blackbirds with his air gun. But I’ll do what I can. Oh, heck, there’s the ball!”
And to groans and catcalls as the nice boy missed his catch, Con ran out of the high gates and continued on …
Ellen, meanwhile, was tackling the girls of the Sacred Heart Convent a couple of streets away. The nuns had already shooed the little girls, in their gray pleated skirts and white blouses, into the school, and Ellen had to barge her way into the locker room where they were changing their outdoor shoes.
Quickly she grabbed two of them, a fat girl with freckles and a thin one with braces, and explained what she wanted. In a minute she was surrounded by whispering, tittering children, some with one shoe on, some with none, all of them wanting to know what was happening. They sighed over Ambrose’s picture, said he was just like a teddy bear, and giggled when Ellen asked them to assemble in front of Buckingham Palace. As she ran to her next school, Ellen felt thoroughly disgusted. She was sure she had wasted her time.
Yet it was those same little girls in their white blouses and kneesocks who, at two o’clock that very afternoon, locked Sister Maria in the lavatory, shut the Mother Superior in the coal house, and marched in an orderly line to Buckingham Palace. What’s more, a girl called Prudence Mallory had found time to make a banner with the words SAVE THE YETIS splashed across it in red ink. The banner was made from the calico bathrobe of Sister Theresa, which another girl, called Betty Bainbridge, had “borrowed” when she was meant to be taking a message to Matron. All in all, Ellen had been very wrong to underrate the girls of the Sacred Heart.
Next Ellen visited a ballet school, where the girls were doing pliés at the barre, and managed to get past a whistle-blowing games mistress to tackle some cold-looking high school girls stripping for gym, before she met Con again at Newlands Progressive. This was rather an alarming place: very new and fashionable with lots of glass and sculptures in the hall, and the children all seemed to come from very trendy homes. But they were certainly very quick on the uptake when it came to what they called protest. “We’re not protesting,” said Con, “we’re asking for help.”
“Of course you’re protesting,” said a boy of about twelve in bare feet and an Indian shirt. “You’re protesting against blood sports.”
Con had to agree with this. “But we want to keep it orderly.”
“Oh, sure,” said the boy. “Trouble with the law is just a waste of time.”
The teacher came back then — Ellen thought him a bit shaggy for a teacher — but he listened to them, which was more than could be said for some of the others they had met. “This might be a good opportunity for a lesson in practical citizenship,” he said. It was an odd place, Newlands Progressive.
The whole morning, Con and Ellen never stopped to rest or eat as they pounded through the streets of London. They begrudged even the seconds that it took to retie their shoelaces.
Convent schools and prep schools, strict schools and sloppy schools, schools for maladjusted children and schools for little snobs … Jewish schools and French schools and schools for the Deaf, schools run by bullies and schools run by kind and enlightened head teachers — that grueling morning, Con and Ellen visited as many as they possibly could. But London is a big city, and there are a lot of schools. They may have broken some kind of record, but they couldn’t visit them all.
And by two o’clock, half-dead with fatigue, they sat on the steps of the Victoria Monument in the middle of the huge area that faces the Queen’s London home. They had bought a couple of meat pies and a banana and as they munched and rubbed their aching feet, they knew they had done everything they could. There was nothing to do now except wait.
Chapter 14
The Great Yeti Demonstration
O ONE’S GOING TO COME,” SAID CON SUDDENLY, in a flat, bleak voice. “We were mad to think they would. It’s all been a complete failure.”
“It’s only half past two,” said Ellen. “Remember, the schoolchildren have got to get out of their schools somehow. That isn’t exactly easy. And people have jobs …”
Another five minutes, ten …
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.”