The Storytellers Read Free Page B

acknowledged. “Mr Betsworth?”
    The man ignored the question.
    â€œNow I want you to understand something,” he said. “This meeting is not taking place.”
    Harvey was used to ‘off the record’ briefings, when someone wanted to raise an issue and not be identified as having done so. But the assertion that a meeting which was taking place was simultaneously not taking place stretched even his journalistic imagination.
    â€œSo you shouldn’t be speaking to me?” Harvey replied.
    But again, his interlocutor disregarded the question.
    â€œLet us walk a ways,” Mr Betsworth said instead. “It is far too cold to be standing around.”
    With that Harvey heartily agreed and started walking beside the stranger in the direction from which he must have come.
    â€œWhat do you know about communism?”
    The inquiry surprised Harvey and he half-wondered if he had slipped into a version of Alice’s Wonderland, where Peter Betsworth was part unsmiling Cheshire Cat, able to appear and disappear at will, and part Mad Hatter, intent on asking unfathomable questions, such as why was a raven like a writing desk, to which he himself had no answer.
    â€œA certain amount,” was his guarded reply and as he offered it up,he realized how little he knew.
    â€œWell, all you need to know,” his walking companion instructed, “is that communism is an ideology used by those who badly want it, to steal power from those who already have it, by persuading those without it that they will be better off in consequence.”
    â€œPower to the people,” mouthed Harvey and as quickly wished he hadn’t.
    â€œQuite,” snorted Peter Betsworth acidly.
    â€œLike early Christianity before it was co-opted by the Roman Empire,” Harvey added in an attempt to advance his intellectual game.
    â€œHardly!” exclaimed the unsmiling Cheshire Cat. “We are a Christian nation and it is our values they are trying to undermine.”
    â€œThey?”
    â€œCommunist infiltrators,” came the reply, which was the first straight answer to a question Harvey had so far received. “And believe me,” the nondescript man added with unexpected passion, “they exist.”
    â€œYou have evidence?” Harvey asked.
    As George Gilder had beaten into him from the start, to be presented as a probable fact, an assertion had to have support from at least two unrelated and credible sources. Naturally this was not always easy to come by and an attributable quote could often be used to smoke out the truth, as well as – unfortunately – to muddy the waters. Journalism was no exact science and to imagine it ran without an agenda was wishful thinking. But if his editor thought Peter Betsworth was sitting on a story that affected the nation then he probably was.
    â€œThe present Chancellor of the Exchequer and the recently retired leaders of the Transport and General Workers’ and Amalgamated Engineering Unions were all members of the Communist Party,” Peter Betsworth continued in a tone so dry, he might have been listingsoiled items for the laundry. “Did you know that?”
    â€œI had heard that the Chancellor fought the nationalists in Spain as a young man,” Harvey conceded, but the raw announcement shocked him. Three of the most powerful men in the land, ex-communists! The standing joke in recent years was that the unions ran the country and with some 2 million members, the TGWU was the largest.
    â€œAnd the problem goes far deeper than young men’s fancies, I am afraid,” his companion continued. “Communism and its variations are rife within the union movement.”
    â€œTo what end?” Harvey asked. “I can’t see the point.”
    â€œYou do have a lot to learn,” Peter Betsworth snorted, clearly startled at The Sentinel journalist’s obvious lack of grasp. “Did you not study communism at