POLITICS

A Tale of Two Inner Cities

FERDINAND MOUNT

I'm Oliver Twist's new case worker. Oliver, I have come to take you back into care.'

`Yes, Miss.' Oliver looked in awe at this woebegone young female with her huge spectacles and her lank wisps of hair. Nothing less like a suitcase could possibly be imagined. Perhaps she kept a suitcase at home, or hundreds of suitcases and slept in a different one every night. Or perhaps she would shut him up in a suitcase, along with dozens of newborn babies in overnight grips and waifs locked in gladstone bags.

`You must not call me Miss. You must call me Brunnhilde.'

But poor Oliver there and then resolved that he could no more address this strange Suitcase Worker by the mysterious appellation of Brown Hilda than fly to the moon, so he fell quiet and gazed at the floor. And such a floor it was too, such a cracked, greasy, coffee-stained square of linoleum that a cockroach would have twisted its ankle trying to cross it. There were stubs of Brown Hilda's cigarettes all over it, wall to wall. Why, the very carpet-sweeper must have choked to death on it. The soles of your shoes would catch lung cancer in a minute.

`Please Miss, I want some more.'

`I never knew such a greedy boy. You've only just finished your Diet Salad. In Sweden, all the little boys and girls love their Diet Salad.'

But Oliver was dreaming of the fat sugary doughnuts with runny jam which he had had with Mr Brownlow, and the delicious burgers with steaming processed cheese spilling over the sides, and the pizzas with extra peperoni and onions, and the Big Macs with their glorious forbidden taste of fatty cardboard. And then there were the piping hot dinners in the work- house, the mounds of soggy golden French fries, and the steak and kidney pies and the heaps of spaghetti soused in ketchup. And tears rolled down Oliver's cheeks at the thought of the bygone days with the dear old Bumbles: the skiing trip when Mr Bumble had got so drunk, the pony- trekking holiday in Wales with Marlene Bumble. But now the workhouse had been turned into artists' studios, and only the Bumbles lingered on in the caretaker's flat, complaining about the damp. `So this is the boy.' A plump, oleaginous personage in clerical habit peered down at Oliver. 'You say he is maladjusted, Miss Lundqvist?'

`He does not find it easy to form stable relationships, Mr Chadband.'

`He is an orphan of the Inner Cities. And what are the Inner Cities, my friends? Are they a vale of health? No, they are not. Are they a place of resort for decent folk? No, my friends, they are not. They are an abode of dee-priv-ayshun. This is a dee- prived boy. Watch him, Miss Lundqvist, watch him well.'

But Brown Hilda did not watch him at all, because she had other occupations to pursue. She had her odd little cigarettes to roll which had such a sweet foreign smell to them, and she had telephone calls to make, oh such a lot of telephone calls. I swear the managing director of British Telecom cal- led on her every Christmas with two dozen red roses to thank her for her custom.

So Oliver ran away down the Seven Sisters Road, doubled round the Sains- burys in the Holloway Road, dodged the juggernauts at Highbury Corner and found himself panting like a puppy in front of Mr Brownlow's commodious villa in Penton- ville. But hallo, what was this? Boards up, For Sale. 'Gone away, had to sell up,' said a passer-by muffled to the eyes against the wind-chill factor. 'They say he was a Name at Lloyds.' And Oliver wept at the thought of his good old benefactor, reduced to nothing but a name, bankrupted of flesh and blood, a pale wandering nominative.

`What have we here? Boy blubbing in the street. Are you giving me an audition, boy, trying to extort my sympathy, hey?'

`No sir. Why should I be?'

`Don't you know who I am, boy?' roared a highly portentous gentleman in a verit- able echo chamber of a voice.

`Are you on television Sir?' quavered Oliver.

`Certainly not, boy. I despise and reject the idiot box. I am the last survivor of the live the-atre. Vincent Crummles of Crum- mles Peoples Productions at your service, a poor wandering player clinging on by the grace of God and the Arts Council. Do you want to be an Act-or, boy?'

`Not specially Sir.'

`Quite right, dear boy. It's a diabolically overcrowded profession. No standing room. We can only take half-a-dozen boys a year from the Donald Sinden School for Overacting, keen as mustard, fees all paid by the Manpower Services Commission, did the entire Wars of the Roses last season, didn't cost me a penny. Come and meet the Infant Phenomenon.'

`Can it, Dad,' retorted an extremely short young lady in pink dungarees. 'My name's Ninetta, and I'm a Person of Restricted Growth, and report you to the Equal Height Commission if you don't watch your language.'

`It's not like the old days,' Mr Crummles said mournfully, sniffing a pinch of some powder which Oliver thought did not look very like Mr Brownlow's snuff. 'We used to put on well-made plays then — Private Lives, The Deep Blue Sea, Dial M for Murder. But now it's all Pinter and Brecht and Beckett if you want your grant. Not a decent love scene in a single one of them. Nothing for Mrs Crummles to get her teeth into. If you're looking for work, dear boy, you could always try the people who used to do our costumes before there was a slight unpleasantness about the bill.'

And so, tired and dejected, Oliver made his way through the warren of lanes north of Oxford Street, past angry men wheeling racks of clothes swathed in polythene, to ring the bell at a neat block of offices just off Cavendish Square.

`That demd bell,' he heard a voice scream. 'Don't answer it, my poppet. Let it ring, light of my heart. I simply can't see a demnition soul. If it's the media, tell them that Mantalini is holding exploratory talks with Habitat-Mothercare and that the re- verse take-over of Laura Ashley is off until the Harrods deal has been to the Office of Fair Trading.'

Oliver sighed and turned away and directed his flagging footsteps to the one place in this harsh world where he knew he would always be welcome.

`Why Oliver, my boy, come in, come in. The bubbly is on the video, help yourself, my dear. Mr Sikes here was just telling us about his little brush with the law.'

`So I says to them, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I says, and you are ladies and gentlemen within the meaning of the Act, because you have done your duty, you have stood up for the right of your true- born Englishman to protect his castle against intruders.'

`But, Bill, you was the intruder.'

`That was a mere technicality, you old skinflint. I never wanted to blow him away. You know me, Fagin, I only take the shooter along for form's sake. These days my main interests are in financial services. Now about this here Business Expansion Scheme, if young Oliver can do the shin- ning up the drainpipe. . .

But Oliver was already fast asleep on the zebra-skin sofa-bed. And God bless us every one, in a very real sense.