Free Time of Hope by C. P. Snow Page B

of promotion. He was a departmental officer grade one, salary scale two hundred and twenty-five pounds to three hundred and fifteen pounds; his entire activity was spent in mounting to the next grade. As I came to know him, I heard of nothing else. A contemporary of his in another office got promoted. ‘Why don’t they do something about me?’ sounded Mr Vesey’s cri de coeur . His technique for achieving his aim was, in principle, very simple. It consisted of keeping in the public eye. If ever he could invent an excuse for calling on the director, he did so. So that every child who left school before the age of fifteen secured a visit to the director’s room; a trim, spectacled figure, holding a file, knocked briskly on the door, the director was entangled in an earnest consultation, found himself faced with enormous exophthalmic eyes. The director soon became maddened, and sent down minutes about types of case which it was unnecessary for him to see. Mr Vesey went to see him to discuss each minute.
    When any senior person came into our room to inspect the work, a trim spectacled figure stood beside him, on the alert, agog and on tenterhooks to seize the chance. The visitor asked one of the clerks a question. Mr Vesey leapt in to answer it. The visitor asked me to describe some of the statistics. Mr Vesey was quicker than ever off the mark.
    All lists, charts, notes of any kind going out from our room had to be initialled NCWV. For a time he experimented with hyphenating the W and V, possibly in the hope that it would make the initials impossible to miss. There were rumours that his wife wanted to be called Mrs Wilson-Vesey. However, the assistant director asked him brusquely what the hyphen was put in for. All superiors were important to Mr Vesey, though some were more important than others. The hyphen disappeared overnight.
    His worst moments were when, as occasionally happened, the assistant director – instead of asking for information through Mr Vesey as head of the branch – demanded a clerk by name. Mr Vesey’s enmity towards me first showed itself after a few such calls. The assistant director found I knew my lists inside out (which was child’s play to anyone with a good memory), took a fancy to me, said maddeningly once that if I were still at school the department would make a grant to help me go to a university. Meanwhile, Mr Vesey was raising cries to heaven: how could he organize his branch if people did not go through the proper channels? How could he secure discipline and smooth working if people went over his head? Junior clerks did not understand the whole scope of his responsibilities – they might give a wrong impression and that meant his promotion would never come. There was such a thing, said Mr Vesey in a tone full of meaning, as junior clerks trying to draw attention to themselves.
    So it went on, a blend of monotony and Mr Vesey. So it went on, from nine to one, from two to five-thirty, from my sixteenth birthday to my seventeenth and beyond. Often, during those tedious days, I dreamed the ambitious dreams of very young men. Walking past the lighted shops in the lunch hour of a winter’s day, I dreamed of fame – any kind of fame that would put my name in men’s mouths, in the newspapers, make people recognize me in the streets. Sometimes I was a great politician, eloquent, powerful, venerated. Sometimes I was a writer as well known as Shaw. Sometimes I was extraordinarily rich. Always I had the power to make my own terms, to move through the world as one who owned it, to be waited on and give largesse.
    The harsh streets were lit by my fancies, and I was drunk with them – and yet they were altogether vague. There was a good deal of ambition, I knew later, innate within me; and I had listened since I was a child to my mother’s prompting. But those dreams of mine had not much in common with the ambition that drives a man, that in time drove me, to action. These were just the lazy and