Home life
Drawing the line
Alice Thomas Ellis
Two ancient sayings have run together in my mind: 'Don't you know there's a war on?' and 'Get in the queue.' Don't you know there's a queue on?' I mutter morosely to myself and sometimes I won- der whether shopkeepers were barking these phrases at the public during the Wars of the Roses. They arise, I believe, from a peculiarly English cast of thought, and whether we always had this tendency to form ourselves into lines and permit ourselves to be verbally abused by those who are, theoretically, there to serve us is a question which I sometimes ponder in the watches of the night. I am feeling very bitter at present because I just had to queue to get myself shot full of typhoid and tetanus and cholera and goodness knows what else before I go to Egypt, and while it is bad enough having to queue to pay for your cornflakes it is galling to have to queue to get yourself jabbed and made to feel ill. I remember when I was expecting the children and was supposed to trip regularly along to the hospital or surgery so that some doctor could take my blood pressure and listen to the foetal heart-beat, I wasted hours in hideous tedium before I decided it was all too much and if anything was wrong I would undoubtedly be the first to know about it and then I would go to the doctor. They were very hoity-toity and disapproving about this but I was past caring. Preventative medicine is un- doubtedly a good idea and, I am sure, prolongs life but if queuing up to get it renders a good deal of life maddeningly boring then it seems a bit pointless.
We were in the building society the other day. Eight places for people to sit and transact business and only one in use. There was a bell on the counter labelled 'Enquiries' and after a while the man in front of us put his finger on it and kept it there. A disgruntled-looking person even- tually emerged from the wings in answer and the man in front of us said his enquiry was: why were there eight places for people to sit and transact business and only one in use? I admired him enormously for voicing this simple query which had been running silently in all our heads, and it worked. The disgruntled person actually sat down and did something. I think the man in front of us was a taxi-driver. There is something very competent and reassur- ing about taxi-drivers.
The bank is possibly even worse than the building society because you can see dozens of people wandering round behind the grille looking far from gainfully em- ployed. They clutch sheaves of paper and look neither to left nor right — which we all know is a ruse to deceive the author- ities. (I have heard of people who spent a lifetime walking the corridors of power clutching documents without ever doing a stroke of work.) The public stand meekly except for one or two free spirits who mutter and shuffle and raise their eyes to heaven — and Janet. Janet once enlivened proceedings considerably on reading aloud the notice instructing us to wait there until a cashier position became available. What — she mused aloud — precisely was the cashier position? Did it differ materially from the missionary position? Was life in the bank perhaps more eventful than it appeared on the surface.? Failing a Janet perhaps we should all take to theft. If we are to believe what we see on telly, bank-robbers get in and out pretty smart- ish. Even breaking through into the vaults from the laundrette next door could well prove to be faster than queuing up.
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