The Strange Case of the Grocer's' Apostrophe in the night

 I must confess I enjoy a little innocent mischief as much as the next man which is why I always found Chirnside such agreeable company.  When working for the Min of Works it was his aim to slip as many fables into the national conscientiousness as possible.  It was generally felt, amid his chums, that the small footnote in the Culloden Museum Guide book was his masterpiece. 

 

The innocent and wholly unreferenced assemblage of words claimed the reason Bonny Prince Charlie’s romantic hordes were slaughtered was not, as thought, due to tactical incompetence and the misfortune at last to take on a bunch of coves used to mixing it with Louis XV’s finest – rather than the usual garrison of chaps with a note from mother excusing them drill – but in fact because the entire Scottish nation had boycotted carrots as they were breed orange to support King William and his ilk.  The resulting night blindness led to an inability to find the British Army until late morning and the rest was, rather messy history.  I understand a suspicion of vegetables is a hall mark of the that land even to this day – neeps and tatties excluded.

The decision to release government documents has always caused me a mild frisson of delight wondering which of our more senior members will suddenly remember they have god children to visit or Sales of Works to open rather than be in town when some blasted historian discovers they were, as a junior civil servant, responsible for Spitfires, but failing to send them to Burma and leaving them in a shed at the Club or selling Maidstone to the French 30 years ago.  Chirnside was looking a bit shifty one late December and so I did what any friend would do, plied with strong drink and threatened to reveal what I knew about that time he spent the summer as Goal Defence for the Roedean Netball team unless he fessed up.  It didn’t take long, it never does.

Some fifty years ago the government were a bit worried about the state of internal subversion.  You will remember that at that time the Cold War was at its height and we were just minutes away from tuning in to see yet another dreary play on the BBC about what life would be like in Penge after a revolt of the suburban proletariat and would the city states of South Surrey indulge in a little Red Terror and overthrown all that was decent and clean.  Chirnside was then a somewhat junior minion in the Home Office and had caused a bit of a stink after some efficiency research project he was minding had revealed that his leaders preferred, in their leisure time, to hang wall paper rather than read a book at a ratio of approximately four to one.  This was not the cultured image his betters had put about and so he was moved, sharpish, to count mess tins at the War Office.

You must remember this was a time of change.  Arriving on his first Monday in Horse Guards Avenue he discovered the place had been renamed the Ministry of Defence and this was causing such existential uncertainty among many of the older duffers there that Chirnside found himself not, as expected, amongst the Quartermasters, but plonked out amid the counter-insurgency coves.

Some of you, no doubt, will have heard that Military Intelligence is a contradiction in terms but in those days some pretty sharp minds were applying themselves to the issue.  The threat of Communism was not one which was taken that seriously.  Having bugged Party headquarters it was generally felt that any keen young radical who turned up would soon be made so glum by the old men who ran the thing that they were doing a better job than any member of MI5 to prevent a revolution.  As for those teenagers spouting Mao and letting their hair hang loose over their collars it was observed that there was something Edwardian about them and, given enough recreational diversions the Marxist call to arms would end in some garden parties, whimsy and badly formed poetry.  Seeing that some popular beat groups could call for Revolution in one breath and sing a jolly song about ‘Aunty Mary’s dress shop’ in another, the realm was safe from threat from that quarter.  No, the boffins at the MoD were sure if any threat were to come to Queen and Country it would not come from Moscow or a Modern Polytechnic but from Maidenhead.

The Post War Years had brought many modern conveniences to the world of domestic management.  Where once a fellow would have been exhausted from pushing a lawn mower seemly not so much constructed but hewn out of the living iron or doomed to toil for long hours washing and drying the bone china, now he could allow the electric age to take care of the drudgery.  Likewise his good wife would not banish all children from the house and promise him nothing more than a pile of yesterdays leaving for supper because Monday was wash day.  Consumer durables had meant she was free to hold a little job in town and fit the washing, ironing and cooking around her career.  These people had time.  These people had wit and cunning and a desperate need to apply it.  Across the land in suburban villas and small town apartments a race of the middling sort who had so long been kept in their place by trying to keep up with the Jones had now time to hold fondue parties and still have space in the diaries to contemplate subversion.  They had to be stopped and Chirnside was the man whose hour had come.

Confrontation is never the answer as I have found when trying to stop Mrs The Hon Sec from ‘clearing up’ my study – damn it I might not have read that seed catalogue; indeed the firm offering interesting Chrysanthemum hybrids may have gone out of business several years ago but there is no need to assume that I will not read the blasted thing one day.  No, confrontation is no match for diversion.  If ever keeping a Geography Master talking about his favourite sort of drumlin rather than setting the test he promised Chirnside was your man.  He once got the Latin Master to recount his entire holiday jaunt around the lesser known outposts of Hispania thus skipping an entire autumn term of declension.  The way to keep these Suburban Subversives in line was to offer them up a target for their ire which was both an affront to them and a constant source of affirmation of their natural superiority, while closing down the possibility of inter-class alliances.  Thus was invented the Grocer’s Apostrophe.

Picture the scene.  It is midnight in East Horsley.  Black balaclaved men dart from door to door.  The look out, sheltered in an Ironmonger’s porch hoots twice like a Snowy Owl and his colleague, knowing all is clear, inserts an inappropriate apostrophe on an advertisement for Mr Govett’s Belgium potatoes.  They retreat, a job well done.

I don’t need to tell you, gentle reader, the success of this strategy.  Across the land outrage!  Phone calls were made.  Letters written to local papers.  Societies formed.  A whole, if minor, publishing industry founded on the tide of disgust for all things unpunctual.  The seething anger and resentment of a thousand intelligent, passionate and above all zealous men and women turned from threatening the Commonweal and batted into the long grass of a ceaseless struggle against tradesmen who, fundamentally, couldn’t care less.  It looked a bit touch and go in the 80s but the replacement of ‘are’ with ‘R’ and adding random Zs to the end of shop signs saved the day.

We live in an age of blabbermouths, where a chap can barely sit down before someone wants to show you a photograph of their luncheon or tell you about a tricky time they are having with their in-laws.  Good lord what is the point of in-laws!  I did feel, however, I could comfort Chirnside.  This sort of thing is far too sensitive for the populace as a whole to know.  After all, no one will ever know which Archbishop it was, nor where was the Golf Club’s bunker he was discovered in or the Cabinet Papers he had on him at the time and those are matters of far more concern.   So, when you see a tradesmen’s sign which isn’t all it should be – Mum’s the word.