Eva Ibbotson - The Abominables

Perry didn’t need a bullhorn.

“Remove them yourself,” he roared back, “if you can.” And he held up a handful of wiring. All the drivers had disabled their engines, and it would take many hours to make them work again. They had a good laugh at that.

“You are all under arrest,” came the voice from the bullhorn, “and we are now obliged to take you into custody.”

The policemen took out their batons and began to walk forward. A couple of the drivers clenched their fists, and the driver of the removal van produced a large wrench from his overalls. It was going to get ugly. The remaining demonstrators started booing the police and chanting, “Save the yetis.”

Then something made the advancing police stop. A big black car rounded the monument and drove toward the blockading lorries, right between the line of men in their blue uniforms and the grim-faced drivers. There was a little flag on the hood of the car. A young, fit-looking man jumped out of the front passenger seat and ran round the car to open one of the rear doors. Out stepped a tall, well-dressed man with thinning hair and a face that reminded one of a rather sad sheep. Ellen, who had been watching everything from the cab of Perry’s lorry, thought she had seen him somewhere. He walked toward Perry and stopped in front of him.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but one would rather like to drive in and have one’s dinner.”

Ellen had never seen Perry flustered before, but she saw it now. He actually stammered. “W-well, sir … I’m afraid you can’t. The yetis are going to die if we don’t stop it somehow.”

“Ah, the yetis. I read about that. A nasty business.”

There was a silence, which seemed to go on for a very long time.

“Coldwater Straits, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ah, jolly good. That’s in BAT, I believe. Now if I can just squeeze past, then perhaps I could have a word with Mother.”

Perry stepped aside, and the tall man pressed himself through the narrow gap between the lorry and the railings and disappeared into the palace.

Everything went very quiet. The police didn’t move; the drivers didn’t move.

“In bat? Cricketer, is he?” growled the removal van man.

“Why did you let him through?” called Con. “You said it was a picket.”

“That bloke,” said Perry, “is the only hope we have left.”

Time passed very slowly. The few demonstrators that remained gathered in small groups and talked quietly among themselves. Some reporters arrived, and a van from one of the television networks.

Somewhere in the palace, in a comfortable sitting room with thick carpets and a fire burning in the grate, a delicate hand put down the teacup it had been holding and reached for the telephone.

For the rest of their lives, there was one moment that Con and Ellen always remembered. As the evening settled down and became night, and all over London the streetlights blinked into life, the people outside the palace waited: Perry and the drivers, the remaining demonstrators — quite a lot of them schoolchildren who knew that their parents would be worried sick — and the policemen. Only the uniformed driver of the big black car didn’t wait. He drove off to put his car in the garage and have his supper.

And then, from one of the doors in the façade of the palace, the gray-haired official emerged and crossed the wide front terrace toward them. They watched him in utter silence as he approached the railings and stopped. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit and brought out an embossed envelope. He poked it rather unceremoniously through the railings into Con’s hand, turned on his heel, and departed.

Con saw the royal seal, a magnificent coat of arms with a lion and a unicorn on it. He handed it to Perry.

“You read it, Perry. I daren’t.”

Perry read it, and in a strange, choked voice as though he were getting a cold he said, “All right, Con, up you go. They have a right to hear this.”

He gave Con a leg up onto the top of the cab and, from there, Con scrambled onto the roof of the lorry. He didn’t need to shout this time, for every face was turned toward him, and the only sound was the ever-present thrum of the big city.

“We have an answer,” he cried. “I shall read it to you:

“We have this day in accordance with the petition of our subjects instructed George Ullaby RN, commander of Her Majesty’s Research Vessel Seadog, stationed in the Weddell Sea, to proceed with all possible speed to Coldwater Straits and in liaison with the staff of the British Antarctic Territory Research Station, there to prevent by any legitimate means at their disposal the unlawful, cruel, and inhumane destruction of the yetis.

“We thereby require and request, in recognition of the granting of this petition and in anticipation of the successful outcome of this mission, that the vehicles at present obstructing the entrances to our Royal Residence might be removed with dispatch, because the bin-men come on Fridays.

“We did it,” said Con. “Thank you, oh, thank you all so very much.”

And he started to cry.

It was quite a party. The police gave up any attempt to be proper police. There was so much hugging and backslapping going on that they really couldn’t call it an unlawful assembly. You can’t arrest people for laughing and dancing — well, not in England you can’t. Some of the constables got straight to work helping the drivers fix their lorries, sharing jokes about what they had seen on the roads of Great Britain — lorry drivers and policemen are out in all weathers. The Newlands teacher, who had become a royalist, borrowed the bullhorn and started to sing “God Save the Queen.” The old gentleman offered the homeless man a drink from his Thermos, which turned out to contain a pretty decent Speyside malt whiskey, and before you could say knife , they had decided to set up a kennel in the country to breed Jack Russells, which after a long argument was the only breed they could both agree was a really nice little dog.

There were some unfortunate moments — there always are at a real shindig. Some of the Newlands Progressive pupils went skinny-dipping in the Serpentine and persuaded three girls from the convent school to come along. A small boy from the prep school was violently sick after winning a packet of cigarettes off one of the Bermeyside kids in a hastily assembled game of Texas Hold ’Em poker on the flatbed of the low-loader. Still, a party is a party. What can you do?

But before long the celebrations came to an end, and Con and Ellen were on their way home to Perry’s little flat, hardly able to keep their eyes open, and still unable to believe that there was real hope for their threatened friends far away on the treacherous ice.

N THE TERRIBLE, BLEAK ICE OF THEantarctic, the yetis had given up all hope. It was their third night on the ice without food and shelter, and it didn’t seem possible that Lucy could live through another one. She was quite unconscious; her breath came in shallow, rasping pants, and even in that terrible cold she burned with fever. Grandma’s teeth were chattering so much that Uncle Otto had had to jam a piece of ice between them to stop her jaw from breaking. Clarence lay beside Lucy, despairing and as still as a stone. Only Ambrose, who had loved people so much, still believed that somehow they would be rescued.