I was impressed. It was the first time in Cambridge I’d had any inkling of social consciousness along these lines. ‘And when is it, this day of action?’ I asked.
‘Well, let’s see,’ she said. ‘When are you free?’
That was her way of letting me know another important detaiclass="underline" between us, we were the Day of Action. There was no one else, but I didn’t think that was necessarily a bad thing. It made choosing our Day relatively easy and unbureaucratic. We settled on the next Saturday. She thought a busy day in the shops and the streets made the point about the exclusion of people like me more vividly, and I’d always had trouble solving the problem of the Cambridge Saturday.
Her name was Rebecca. She said she was reading Sociology, and perhaps this was her fieldwork, but that didn’t put me off. I was raring to go, impatient to be excluded from shops I had no interest in entering.
Our first port of call on the Day of Action was W. H. Smith’s in Market Hill. Rebecca wanted to buy a clipboard, to lend a more formal edge to our inspections, but it made sense to treat the shop as our first official port of call. Someone held the door open for us, and Rebecca did her best to get me inside, but the task was beyond her. There wasn’t really a step, more of a ridge, but she was too little and too light to nudge me over. ‘Looks as if we’ve got our first failure to record,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’ What else was I going to do?
By the time Rebecca came back with her clipboard, an assistant from the shop had come over to me. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, and Rebecca answered for me. ‘This young man can’t get into your shop.’
‘Well, that’s easily taken care of, miss. I’ll give him a hand.’
‘And what’s supposed to happen if he doesn’t have a friend with him? How’s he supposed to get help when he’s stranded outside the shop?’
‘I don’t know, miss. He could shout, or ask someone passing by to alert a member of staff.’
‘And how is that supposed to make him feel, when he has to go to such trouble even to get inside?’
How was it supposed to make me feel, come to that, being used as an object lesson in this way? I felt a warm and nasty glow. Shouldn’t I being doing some of the talking? But Rebecca was in full spate. ‘Do you want this young man’s custom or not?’
‘We want it, I expect, up to a point. What is it he wants to buy?’
‘Nothing at the moment, thank you. But I’ve bought one of your sturdy and economical clipboards, and I’m writing down what you say about your disabled customers.’
‘Are you from a newspaper?’
‘No. Why? Do you only care about disadvantaged members of the public when a reporter takes an interest?’
‘Not at all,’ said the assistant, beginning to get angry at last. ‘When this young man wants to make purchase — which isn’t today, apparently — he can rely on our most devoted attention. Thank you!’
‘Thank you!’ barked Rebecca, grabbing the handle of the wheelchair and giving me rather a jolt as we set off to our next targeted business. ‘What a lackey! What a running dog! The sooner everyone like that gets stood up in front of a wall the better for the rest of us!’ She seemed to be in a high good humour, all the same, and looking forward to the next ideological scrap on my behalf.
As we went from place to place we started to vary our approach. Sometimes I would get up out of the wheelchair, with her help, and try to totter in to premises that resisted me with every blue line on the architect’s plans. We got a lot more attention after Rebecca started to mention that she was writing a piece for Broadsheet. It wasn’t much of a lie — it was as hard in those days to get an article rejected by a student newspaper as a poem. If she had ever written such a thing up it would certainly have appeared.
I tried to get a look at Rebecca’s face whenever she was in my line of sight, which was usually at times when she was using me as a reproach to a heartless world of business. I had decided that my first interpretation of her facial redness (the demon drink) had been prejudiced and wrong. Some redheads do have rather brickish complexions, of course, but I was working on a different theory. My diagnostic nose twitched and my pencil burned to label a vial of pillules.
Cashmere tufts of ideology
After a few more skirmishes with lackeys and running dogs I was beginning to get hungry. I wondered which restaurant or café we were going to patronise and upbraid. It seemed fairer, somehow, to be pointing out the defects of establishments we actually wanted to attend, though embarrassment would run much higher in a place that offered atmosphere as much as food and drink.
There was also a budgetary element involved. We couldn’t afford the Blue Boar. In fact we settled for the Corner House on King Street. Rebecca seemed much less committed to the struggle than she had been in the shops that morning, which was partly explained when she said that there was nothing on the menu she could eat, since she was a vegan.
‘Oh, I’m a vegetarian too,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure we can find something.’ I had misheard her, and now she misheard me in her turn.
‘You’re really a vegan?’ she asked. ‘I thought I was the only one in Cambridge. I’m certainly the only one in Newnham.’
‘Really? There are three of us in Downing, and I thought that was a pretty feeble showing!’ Then the word she had used finally sank in. ‘Hold on — what was it you said? You’re a vegan? What’s that?’
‘I thought you said that’s what you were!’
‘I’m a vegetarian. What’s a vegan?’
‘A vegan is a vegetarian with a bit of backbone. Sorry, that’s what my parents say but it’s true, isn’t it? Good luck being high and mighty about your lifestyle when you keep cows and hens as your slaves.’
I’d never thought about it in quite those terms, and it was a novel sensation having the ethical rug pulled from under me, when I had become spoiled by the feel of those cashmere tufts of ideology between my toes. Rebecca abandoned the disabled-access project for the time being, sitting me down to instruct me in living without cruelty instead. She took only a contemptuous glance at the menu, which was laminated and greasy. Even licking the menu at the Corner House could make you complicit in what she explained was called zooicide, the killing of living things.
‘Vegetarians are really fifth columnists, aren’t they? They commit zooicide just as much as the outright flesh-munchers. Where do you think the milk you drink comes from? Do you think the cows had no other plans for it? That they sent their calves away to school, perhaps, and had a surplus? Wake up! And how about cheese? Don’t you know what rennet is? It’s used to coagulate cheese, and it comes from a calf’s stomach! Isn’t that disgusting? Calves don’t give it away out of charity, they only want to use it to digest their own food, but then they’re killed and the lining is scraped out of their stomachs. S-c-r-a-p-e-d out. And all so that you can order a cheese omelette and feel pure. Slavery and slaughter on a single plate! Meaning no offence.’
‘Taking none,’ I said, through gritted teeth. I had indeed been about to plump for the cheese omelette. It was as if she could read my hungry mind. Admittedly the rennet question had bothered me from the moment I had heard about it. In those days vegetarian cheese seemed a purely theoretical possibility, like the eternal light-bulb and the razor blade that never lost its edge, neither of which big business would let us buy. I couldn’t find it in shops and I couldn’t expect even the most punctilious college kitchen to track it down.
Rebecca explained that her parents had been ‘almost’ founder-members of the Vegan Society, certainly among the first hundred to sign up. Her parents were Welsh speakers who had met, classically enough, at an eisteddfod. She herself had been brought up avoiding dairy produce as well as meat. Her body was uncontaminated with the pain of other species. In that respect she was like the hero of Roald Dahl’s story ‘Pig’, except of course that he ends up hanging from a hook on a conveyor belt in an abattoir with his throat slit open. I hope I haven’t spoiled the story for you.