As luck would have it, I got to the railway station just as the 3:57 was rolling in. I darted past the ticket inspector and down the stairs. I opened the door of one of the middle carriages and bundled myself and the bicycle into the bright warmth of an almost empty commuter service. I ignored the faint disapproval of a couple of young women, who’d squeezed themselves into fashionable, though unseasonable, running shorts, and pulled the window down. I looked out along the platform. I’d half-expected to see men in dark hats running down the stairs and chasing after me as the train moved steadily out of the station. Except for a very angry ticket inspector, who was already turning to go back up the stairs, the platform was empty.
I closed the window and steadied the bicycle. For reasons I couldn’t recall, the South London lines hadn’t yet been magnetised, and this was a slow and bumpy ride. But the road junctions we passed all looked reassuringly jammed up. Surely the van wouldn’t be able to follow me along the line? The young women had given up on looking at me and were again singing snatches to each other of something that had been popular last season in the Blackpool Electrodomes. The words were hardly Noel Coward, but the tune had a cheap Dago lilt that doubtless commended itself to these off-duty shop girls.
Next stop was Nunhead. I didn’t know this, so stayed on. A couple of people got off here, but no one got on. I closed the window again, and now sat down and lit a cigarette. I could stay on all the way to Blackfriars and ignore the renewed attentions of the shopgirls as I stripped off and examined my clothes. But every minute on the railway train magnified the chances that someone would eventually get on or be waiting for me. The next stop would be Peckham. I didn’t know this place very well. But I knew there was a big street market. It would soon be dark, and I could disappear within that great expanse of lighted stalls and look for a coffee shop or somewhere else with a toilet, where I could examine myself at reasonable leisure.
Coming out of the other carriages, about a dozen people got off with me at Peckham. None of them showed any interest in me. I gave a silver threepence to a guard, who didn’t ask for a ticket and helped carry the bicycle down the stairs. In the street outside the station, there were the expected crowds of shouting, jostling people. I was about to throw myself among them, when two men stepped out of the waiting room.
“We’re so glad you could make it, Sir,” one of them said, removing his hat. “We weren’t at all sure the message had got through that we were starting early.” He looked closely into my face.
“Weren’t you on the television a few nights ago?” he asked.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
I looked down from the raised platform at the rows of expectant faces. I’d been too busy smoking and racking my brains to bother listening to what the man who’d spoken to me at the railway station was now saying. I was feeling thoroughly stupid for having gone along with them. But they’d guided me with firm deference into an elderly car that had been converted to run on methane, and had then pushed through the crowds deep into an area of crumbling properties that all looked as if they’d been cut up into bedsitting rooms. We’d got out at what might have been an old chapel, and I’d been allowed ten minutes to lock myself into the toilet and hunt feverishly through every shred of clothing I had on. Now, washed and brushed—and no wiser about how I’d been so easily tracked through England—I sat in the middle place at a trestle table while the man beside me was now droning on about the rise of the single old age pension to 19s.9d.
“But this brings me to the main business of our meeting,” he said finally with a change of tone. He kicked my right foot and looked down at me. “We are both pleased and honoured to have with us Arthur Nobbing, who has come down from London at very short notice to speak about the Future of Britain after the Next General Election.” He stopped and everyone in the audience clapped politely.
Now, of course, would have been a good time to make my excuses and run for the door. My bicycle had been propped up just inside the main door. If I got back on it, I might be able to make it to a bus stop before any of my pursuers was able to home in on me. But my legs were aching from the previous bicycle ride. Here was as good a place as any for demanding a call to the police. Besides, I was in a large crowd. Surely no one would dare move against me in front of all these witnesses?
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” I said as I stood up. I spoke in my best lecturing voice and wished I’d paid a little more attention to the details of who I was supposed to be and what I was expected to say. But I’d at least caught the theme of my speech, and I might as well play along with things before I asked if there was a telephone in the building.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” I repeated. I suddenly noticed that, with one possible exception at the back, my whole audience was male. They were mostly of the South London working classes. A few still had their cloth caps on. I glared at one old man who sat in the front row. He was picking wax out of his ears with a matchstick. He grinned toothlessly back and put the matchstick behind one of his ears. They he took off his cap. I pressed my brain to the task in hand and took another deep breath.
“I wish to thank the good people of this association for having taken the trouble to invite me down from London. And I’d like to thank you all personally for having had the goodness to come out on this rather inclement afternoon to listen to me.” I paused. A youngish man near the back of the hall shouted at me to get on with things. The man beside me stood up and pointed. My heckler fell silent and shook his head. He continued staring insolently back at me. The old man at the front had now begun picking his nose and inspecting the results through one lens of a pair of reading spectacles. I swallowed and pressed on.
“You will have noticed,” I went on, now ignoring everyone in the audience, “that, of all the great European powers—indeed, of all the powers in the world—our own England has escaped the opposing but equal horrors of revolution and tyranny. We alone have passed beyond the middle years of our century with our historic institutions and our historic liberties intact.
“No—more than this,” I added, warming to my theme: this might, after all, be one of the asides in volume two of Churchill—“we have not emerged into the present with our institutions and liberties merely intact. We have even renewed and strengthened them. Which of you who had arrived at manhood twenty five or twenty years ago, would that thought that we could now be looking back on a generation of profound and unbroken peace, and that we should be looking forward to a general election where the will of the people would be honestly consulted and fully respected? Which of you would have expected the Bill of Rights Act? Or the reforms to Church and State that, even had our neighbours enjoyed average fortune, would have renewed our claim to be the classic home of civil liberty?”
Someone coughed loudly. My heckler said nothing, but now made a most vulgar gesture with his left hand. I stared him down and continued:
“England is a country where the people are free to live as they please. We do not fear, in this country, to open our doors to a policeman. We are not stopped as we go about our business and made to show proof of identity, or to persuade the authorities that we are behaving as they would wish us. We can read and speak as our wills direct us. We are free men in a free country, living in plenty under the Queen’s Peace.