Company Funeral ?
By JAMES CALLOW
.66 ARS proceeding to the Company General Office should no longer use the inward exit... . ." It is true that any road turning away from the river seemed to go inwards ; but "inward exit "! It was merely another company , circular. The next one had referred to a new scale of ice-issues to " Company quarters—junior bachelor type " ; the third to Company summer brides. After reading them that afternoon I said : "I'm going shopping ; down the bazaar," and Smotson, whose senior bachelor quarters I was sharing, said: "I don't think the Company likes employees going ,to the Abadan town- ship. Still there's no regulation against it, actually. Why don't you use the Company shop in the bungalow area?" I told him. • I was being suffocated by the Company. You couldn't get to the township of Abadan by taxi. There were no taxis. You could either ring for Company transport or walk the two-odd miles. I walked. Through a quarter of a mile of bungalow area, , down past the General Manager's house to the river. Down the river along the embankment (" bund " it was called, of course), and then past the great Company tankers moored at Company jetties. Past the Company workshops and the Company " General Office" with its inward exit neatly barricaded off for repairs, past the Company power-station, past the refinery and then out of the Company fence and over a small muddy canal to the township—not, quite definitely not, the Company township. It was a pock-marked, distracted, ruined-looking place, and the home of the local Persian administration, of the police offices and prison, of the Persian medical officer, of a handful of Persian postal officials, the home, too, of those Persian labourers in the oil-refinery with not enough Company service to qualify for quarters in the single-storied, barrack-like area devoted to Company employees, third-class." Here, in the bazaar, you could talk to a Persian merchant or two from the plateau as, with clouts on their heads and cool nightgowns about their bodies, they stood or sat in their little booth-like shops surveying the nearly empty streets over the bags of rice and millet and the bales of piece-goods with which they surrounded themselves. They were not romantic in mind or appearance, but, camouflaged by squalid clothes and dwell- ings. they made large fortunes supplying necessaries to Company employees "third-class," each of whom owed a township mer- chant indirectly from twenty to forty pounds. Rates of interest and margins of profit are high in Persia, and each merchant with a capital of ten thousand pounds outstanding on account of goods purchased by the labourers stood to double it within a couple of years. Still, these merchants were not Company-minded in the accepted sense, and once they had satisfied themselves that you were not a Company spy or, worse still, an information man from the local administration or from Ahwaz, the provincial capital, they would talk freely enough. There is a comforting sort of familiarity about the ramblings of a Persian not engaged in showing off or in screwing the last farthing out of you. He mixes history, geography and complimentary remarks in an amiable salade rus.se, in which King Solomon has a friendly talk with Alexander the Great at Delhi during the Indian Mutiny, and they foretell between them the Magnificence of Queen Victoria and the success that was to come to her in the great war against the Germans. After an hour or two of relaxation I walked back to the bungalow area reflecting on the relationships of Sa'adi and Sherlock Holmes. The merchant's twenty-year-old son, who spoke good English, had assured me that the well-known English writer Sherlock Holmes had pinched all his ideas from the Persian poet. I wondered much about this as I approached Smotson's senior bachelor bungalow. '
The night had come 4nd was lit by great flares of low calory gas burning to waste behind the tank farm, lit too by the lights appearing in garden and on verandah as the bungalow area awoke for its evening whisky. Smotson, also cooling off in his garden. gave me a drink. "I think you ought to have a bath and change of clothes after going to that place," he said. He had a voice rather like Douglas Byng's. I hope you didn't drink anything there," he added. I lied shamelessly about that. "That's good," he said. "We've just buried Chemical Jones, you know. Typhoid. I think you ought to know the drill," he continued, "as you'll be joining the office." He spoke of the staff office where I was to help him. "They ring you up from the Company hospital in the morning and give you the danger- ously-ill list. It's a little like the army. You have to be careful about the numbers, especially with a Jones. We've sikteen. As a matter of fact I very nearly made a boob," he said, with a very Douglas Byng and confidential guffaw of laughter. "You see, Workshop Jones's number is very nearly the same as Chemical's. He's 23303 and the other is 32202. That's funny, isn't it? And they're both Davids. Still, we got it right. It's little things like that that matter. Well, then you cable the next-of-kin, and you go on cabling each day till he's off the D.I. list. If the worst should happen the hospital will let you know at once.
Then you want to be very careful. Religion first ; and. remember this, make quite sure whether he's a Mason. Some people pay a lot of attention to that at funerals. Then you get in touch with the workshops for the coffin and the civil engineer- ing department for the grave in the Company cemetery. The gardening department definitely don't run it longer. Don't forget to remind the engineers about the pumps, because if the tide's going to be high it brings up the water-level and we abso- lutely must keep the grave dry for the funeral. Those engineers are.always forgetting. Then you ring the company garden depart- ment for flowers. Don't forget transport, of course. You have to keep your wits about you, but there's a list of what to do in the office. I say, do go and have a bath, old boy. I'm just going to give Hackshaw a tinkle to make quite sure Jones went off all right." We both went into the senior bachelor bungalow.
The telephone in my bedroom was on a joint line with Smot- son's. Worried about typhoid, the sherbet and Jones, I picked up the receiver and listened. "How did the funeral go? "asked the senior bachelor. "Oh, all right," said Hackshaw in a cultured and rather unwilling voice ; he was a new importation, a young man of the right type that the Company was beginning to intro- duce from the older universities. "Many people there? "asked Smotson. "Quite enough, I thought," said Hackshaw. "He started a new line," he added informatively. "Oh, good," said Smotson, almost with triumph, and I put down my receiver and fled to the bathroOm terrified that my. visit to Hajji Abdullah would land me second in that new line of Company graves. Some months later I persuaded the Company to give me a Company passage home in a Company tanker.
Today, when I read that Persian officials are addressing letters to the "former Company," to the "so-called Company,' to the "Organisation for selling oil," I feel sure that it must give some pleasure to many who are not Persians and, of course, much pleasure to almost all Persians. Admirable technically, and often financially, oil directorates can at times, and for very long times too, be extraordinarily unimaginative over ordinary. everyday, pedestrian human affairs. For years now, and quite unselfconsciously too, important officials in London have been producing shiny pamphlets on what the Company has done for Persia, and important officials in South Persia have shown off Company churches, Company restaurants, Company bungalows, hospitals and the rest. They have dressed up that pale anony- mous body of shareholders in the proudest clothes of the fairy godmother. Now, one supposes, whatever else happens, that particular charade is over.
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