“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 grey 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 theatre 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 climbed 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 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 towards 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 grey-haired man in a dark suit came out of a door further on and came towards 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 that 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 on to 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 a 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 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 towards Buckingham Palace came a canary yellow articulated lorry with COLD CARCASSES 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, 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 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…”