I'm All Right Jack Read Free

I’ve spent some time in hospital.”
    “Hospital? An illness?”
    “Oh no, no,” said Stanley, “I mean yes, of course, but not a real illness. You see I’d been eating some edible fungi.”
    “I see,” said the Chairman, without warmth.
    “ In edible fungi, by the sound of it, eh?” said a gentleman on the right wing of the board, smirking.
    “Oh Lord, no, edible, sir,” said Stanley, “but some inedible got accidentally mixed with them.”
    There was a short silence at this point, and the gentleman on the right wing looked displeased to have his remark corrected.
    “You’ve been reading up on the world situation, Mr Windrush,” continued the Chairman with faint distaste for the phrase. “The American Presidential Election looks interesting, doesn’t it?”
    “Oh, I do agree, it does,” said Stanley.
    “What strike you as being some of its more interesting features, Mr Windrush?”
    “Well,” Stanley paused as if to give this weighty thought, but found it difficult to keep the pose.
    “Our situation here in relation to their situation there,” he improvised. “That’s very vital. We all know what a shortage of dollars means, don’t we? If it results in a shortage of dollars it will be very serious for us.”
    “Mr Windrush,” said the Chairman, “Perhaps if you were to explain how the Presidential Election might result in a dollar shortage …?”
    “That’s one of the difficult things to see in this situation,” said Stanley. “The two don’t seem at first sight to be connected, but …” But what? “Let me put it this way,”he plunged on. “If this country is short of dollars we can’t buy from America, and we must buy from somewhere else.”
    “And why couldn’t we?”
    “If we had to,” said Stanley, “if we were faced with that, well … we could.”
    “Perhaps someone else would like to ask a question,” said the Chairman restlessly, looking round. “Would you like to start, Mr H’m-m’m?”
    A man somewhere to Stanley’s left began to ask in a low tone, “Mr Windrush, do you consider family ties are more important than your work, or do you think one’s work is more important in all circumstances?”
    What the devil was he getting at? Was he divorced, perhaps? And who the devil was it that was asking the question? It might have been any one of three men who were looking down at their papers. As whoever was asking the question finished, they all three looked up.
    Stanley picked the one in the middle.
    “I think you must be thinking of marriage,” he began.
    “No I’m not,” said the one in the middle politely. “I’m married already. I wasn’t thinking of it at all.”
    Stanley looked hurriedly at the one on the left, but he began writing something down.
    “Would you like me to repeat the question?” mumbled the one on the right.
    So this was the one.
    “Oh, not a bit,” said Stanley hurriedly. “Yes, I think one’s work is jolly important, especially if it’s—important work. Much more important than one’s family.”
    “Do you think, Mr Windrush,” put in one of the women, “that the decay in family life today is not important?”
    “Oh good gracious no,” cried Stanley. “I think family life is terribly important. I think everybody ought to have a family, for instance.”
    “Oh,” said the woman, now a little huffy. “You know, of course, that women in the Foreign Office must be unmarried?”
    “Really, I didn’t mean it personally,” said Stanley in desperation.
    There was a short silence, and then a man on the other side cleared his throat and said:
    “How would you assess your Japanese? Fluent?”
    “Oh, er, tolerably.”
    “ Oto san wa ikaga de gozaimasu? ” 1
    “ O kage san de tassha de gozaimasu. ” 2
    “Speak up,” said the Chairman, curious to hear the peculiar fluting tones of this reply again.
    “Sorry,” said Stanley, and with musical emphasis repeated : “ O kage san de tassha de gozaimasu. ”
    “Thank you, Mr