“I gather Mr. Huggerneck is here against his will,” I observed. “Don’t you believe it,” Charlie said. “He wants your help.” “How does he act if he wants to kick you in the kidneys?” ‘He wouldn’t eat your food.” Fair enough, I thought. Accept a man’s salt, and you don’t boot him. Times hadn’t collapsed altogether where that still held good. We were sitting round the kitchen table, with Charlie smoking a cigarette and using his saucer as an ashtray and me wondering what he considered so urgent. Bert wiped his plate with a spare piece of toast and washed it down with coffee. “What’s for lunch?” he said. I took it as it was meant, as thanks for breakfast. “Bert,” said Charlie, coming to the point, “is a bookie’s clerk.” “Hold on. “ Bert said. “Not is. Was.” “Was,” Charlie conceded. “And will be again. But at the moment the firm he worked for is bankrupt.” “The boss went spare,” Bert said, nodding. “The bums come and took away all the bleeding office desks and that.” “And all the bleeding typists?” “Here,” said Bert, his brows suddenly lifting as a smile forced itself at least into his eyes. “You’re not all bad, then.” “Rotten to the core,” I said. “Go on.”

I was wrong also about Bert Huggerneck, and even in a way about Allie, for they, too, proved to have more fire than reservations.
Charlie brought Bert with him after work on Thursday and we sat round the kitchen table poring over a large-scale map.
“That’s the A-34, “ I said, pointing with a pencil to a red line running south to north. “ It goes all the way from Newbury to Stratford. For Nottingham, you branch off just north of Oxford. The place we’ve chosen is some way south of that. Just here…” I marked it with the pencil. “About a mile before you reach the Abingdon by-pass.”
“I know that bleeding road,” Bert said. “Goes past the Harwell atomic.”
“That’s right.”
“Yeah. I’ll find that. Easy as dolly-birds.”
“There’s a roadside fruit stall there,” I said. “Shut, at this time of year. A sort of wooden hut.”
“Seen dozens of ‘em,” Bert said, nodding.
“It has a good big space beside it for cars.”
“Which side of the road?”
“On the near side, going north.”
“Yeah. I get you.”
“It’s on a straight stretch after a fairly steep hill. Nothing will be going fast there. Do you think you could manage?”
“Here,” he complained to Charlie. “That’s a bleeding insult.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Is that all I do, then? Stop the traffic?” He sounded disappointed; and I’d thought he might need to be persuaded.
“No,” I said. “After that, you do a lot of hard work extremely quickly.”
“What, for instance?”
When I told him, he sat back on his chair and positively beamed.
“That’s more bleeding like it,” he said. “Now that’s a daisy, that is. Now you might think I’m slow on my feet, like, with being big, but you’d be bleeding wrong.”
“I couldn’t do it all without you.”
“Hear that?” he said to Charlie.
“It might even be true,” Charlie said.