The Back-Bencher
fly STRIX 'I'm awfully sorry,' I said, 'I can't manage "Friday. I've got to go to a meeting that afternoon:, `Oh?' said the friend who had rung me up. 'Too bad. Better luck next time.'
We exchanged farewells.
'Oh?' As I replaced the receiver I tried to analyse what it was about his intonation that had vaguely disquieted me. Disbelief? Not exactly. He knew me too well to suppose me capable of refusing his invitation for any save A valid reason; no one has ever suspected me of inventing an excuse in order to avoid a day's shooting. Yet there had been a hint of incredulity, or at least of surprise, in his voice, and coupled with it the kind of amused condescension with which we greet a small child's announcement that he is going to perform some feat which we know to be well beyond his powers. His tone had implied that I was not the sort of person who went to meetings and that he would not expect much good to come of it if I did.
My tone, now I come to think of it, had implied ,much the same thing. If I had said, 'I've got to have a minor operation that afternoon,' I should have spoken with exactly the same blend of stoicism and self-pity; for the fact of the matter is that I do not often go to meetings, I do not enjoy those, which I do attend, and my contribu- tions to the proceedings are at best of negligible value.
Some men seem to be in and out of committee- rooms all the time. Meetings are the element in which they live. Their poise, their style, their assurance at the conference-table are unobtrusive, but to someone as unconferenceworthy as me these qualities are clearly recognisable. My friend or rather my acquaintance G. possessed them in full measure, and when some years ago we served together on a committee I used to study his tech- nique and contrast it miserably with 'my own.
G. always arrived a few minutes before the meeting was due to start. Though not in other matters an unpunctual man, I never seem to be able to get to a meeting on time. Once I came on the wrong day and, tiptoeing abjectly through the door on which hung a reproachful sign 'Meeting in Progress,' listened for several minutes with not much more than my usual incompre- hension to the deliberations of another com- mittee altogether; I was just, beginning to realise that something was amiss when the secretary tapped me on the shoulder and escorted me to the door. When in an unguarded moment I told G. of this contretemps he looked at me very queerly indeed. , G. always occupied the same seat, next to the chairman with his babk to the window. He brought with him a large but trim portfolio from which, when he had taken his place, he extracted an orderly pile of dockets and • folders. Having selected the one he needed he put the others back; placed a gold watch on the table in front of him; took out his fountain pen; and proceeded to go through the minutes and other circulated papers, parts of which had already been side-lined. All this was done with a kind of dedicated rflish. * I My entry into the committee-chamber; was made in less professional style. Heralded by a certain amount of surreptitious rattling, for I never could remember which way the door-handle turned, I normally arrived about five minutes after the proceedings had begun. The chairman acknowledged with a fatalistic nod my muttered apologies, I slipped into the nearest empty chair like some hunted creature going to ground, and my colleagues resumed their business.
I do not for some reason possess anything in the nature of a portfolio, and it would at this stage be borne in upon me that I had left the agenda and all the other documents with which we ,had to deal in the pocket of my overcoat.
'I think, Mr. Chairman,' G. would be saying, 'that we really ought to have another look at sub-paragraph 14 (d) before we pass these minutes as correct.'
There would be a general rustle as everyone turned back to sub-paragraph 14 (d). A feeling of nakedness would come over me. Ought I to Create a fresh disturbance by going out to fetch my papers? Was I quite sure that they were in my overcoat pocket? What an ass I should look If I came back without them! At this point the secretary generally came to my rescue with a spare set of documents. 'Pretty scatterbrained sort of chap, Strix,' I could feel the committee thinking.
At first I made feeble attempts to model myself on G. When I saw him writing marginal notes on the Report of the Finance Committee I wrote marginal notes on it too. I had never read the report and would have been wholly unable to understand it if I had, so my glosses were rather jeJune.
'How true `Not enough,' Is this correct?', 'Two to one bar one'—it was with meaningless comments of this kind that, assuming an alert and judicious air, I embellished the incompre- hensible document. I abandoned the practice for ever after an occasion on which my kindly neighbour nudged me and whispered, 'We're on to page two of the Appendix now.' I saw that I was still on page seven of the report itself, and I wondered how my benefactor interpreted the fact that I had just written 'Any more for the Skylark?' across the top of it.
After this setback I lost heart and relapsed during most of the proceedings into a trance-like state. Whenever I did manage to mumble out some lame contribution to our discussions, it always transpired that my point had either already been dealt with by a previous resolution, should more properly be raised under another item on the agenda, or was based on a serious misunderstand- ing of the facts. When one day somebody, speak- ing of the composition of a sub-committee, said, 'We simply can't afford any dead wood,' G. looked at me and then quickly looked away again; I had the impression that there was a short, embar- rassed, almost contrite hush round the table.
I soldiered doggedly on. It was, I think, 'Those- in-favour-say-Aye' that brought out the best in me as a committee-man. 'Aye!' I said, in a deep voice best described as henchmanlike, and I raised my right hand in a somehow world-weary way, as though my whole arm was pretty well worn out with being flapped up and down in the t public service. (G. never said 'Aye!'; he merely twitched his fountain-pen into an upright position while he studied the papers before him.) Something told me that I would not be re- elected when my tour of duty ended. Just before this happened I got my name (which had hitherto appeared only in the 'Apologies for Absence' paragraph at the beginning) into the body of the minutes by seconding an amendment to a reso- lution about a charwoman's pension. Shortly after this I tendered my resignation: it was accepted by return of post The meetings I do go to tend, for fairly obvious reasons-, not to deal with issues of the first im- portance; they are the sort of meetings at which the County Pest Officer is represented by one:of his deputies. But once, in the war, I was flown across deserts and mountains and oceans to attend an inter-allied conference in the Pentagon. 1 can remember nothing about it save the result. This was regarded by the British as reasonably satis- factory. It is true that the Americans had adopted none of our proposals, and that there was con- siderable doubt as to whether they had fully understood what we were talking about. But they had, after several sweltering days of debate, agreed to set up an inter-service committee to look into the whole business, and moreover—this was the point on which the subtle British con- gratulated themselves—the risk that the United States Navy might boycott a predominantly Army concern had been eliminated by the appointment of a naval officer as chairman. His name was Captain Grosskopf, which in the language of our then enemies means Fathead.
We flew back across oceans and mountains and deserts, and the war went on for another three years. But we never heard of the Grosskopf Committee again.
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