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 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 grey 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 on her teeth, 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 knee socks 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 crocodile 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 Bill 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, the 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 gruelling 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.
14
The Great Yeti Demonstration
“No 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 crocodile down the Mall, their banner torn from Sister Theresa’s bathrobe waving in the breeze, came the little white-bloused girls of the Convent of The Sacred Heart. Without fuss, taking no notice of the amused stares of the passers-by 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 spelt 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 towards 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. The boys of the cricket-playing prep school, in striped caps which made them look like little wasps, marched proudly up Constitution Hill and came to a halt behind the convent girls. Ellen’s little 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 north-west of London where he lived. And there were 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 and looked baffled — was it some kind of rally they hadn’t been told about? So many children — and where were the teachers?