A Twist in the Tale by Jeffrey Archer Page B

don’t
cook as well as you, Mum,” said Mark as he placed the sliced potatoes on the
top of the Lancashire hot-pot. “Still, it’s only a year.”
    During the next
month Mark attended several interviews at hotels around the country without
success. It was then that his father discovered that his old company sergeant
was head porter at the Savoy: immediately Arthur started to pull a few strings.
    “If the boy’s
any good,” Arthur’s old comrade-in-arms assured him over a pint, “he could end
up as a head porter, even a hotel manager.” Arthur seemed well satisfied, even
though Mark was still assuring his friends that he would be joining them a year
to the day.
    On September I st , 1959, Arthur and Mark Hapgood travelled together by bus to Coventry station. Arthur shook hands with the boy
and promised him, “Your mother and I will make sure it’s a special Christmas
this year when they give you your first leave.
    And don’t worry
– you’ll be in good hands with ‘Serge’. He’ll teach you a thing or two.
    Just remember
to keep your nose clean.”
    Mark said
nothing and returned a thin smile as he boarded the train. “You’ll never regret
it . . .” were the last words Mark heard his father say as the train pulled out
of the station.
    Mark regretted
it from the moment he set foot in the hotel.
    As a junior
porter he started his day at six in the morning and ended at six in the
evening. He was entitled to a fifteen-minute mid-morning break, a
forty-five-minute lunch break and another fifteen minute break around
mid-afternoon. After the first month had passed he could not recall when he had
been granted all three breaks on the same day, and he quickly learned that
there was no one to whom he could protest. His duties consisted of carrying
guests’ cases up to their rooms, then lugging them back down again the moment
they wanted to leave. With an average of three hundred people staying in the
hotel each night the process was endless.
    The pay turned
out to be half what his friends were getting back home and as he had to hand
over all his tips to the head porter, however much overtime Mark put in, he
never saw an extra penny. On the only occasion he dared to mention it to the
head porter he was met with the words, “Your time will come, lad.”
    It did not
worry Mark that his uniform didn’t fit or that his room was six foot by six
foot and overlooked Charing Cross Station, or even
that he didn’t get a share of the tips; but it did worry him that there was
nothing he could do to please the head porter-however clean he kept his nose.
    Sergeant Crann , who considered the Savoy nor thing more than an extension of his old platoon, didn’t have a lot of time
for young men under his command who hadn’t done their national service.
    “But I wasn’t eligible to do national service,”
insisted Mark. “No one born after 1939 was called up.”
    “Don’t make
excuses, lad.”
    “It’s not an
excuse, Sarge . It’s the truth.”
    “And don’t call
me ‘Serge’. I’m ‘Sergeant Crann ’ to you, and don’t
you forget it.”
    “Yes, Sergeant Crann .”
    At the end of
each day Mark would return to his little box-room with its small bed, small
chair and tiny chest of drawers, and collapse exhausted. The only picture in
the room – of the Laughing Cavalier was on the calendar that hung above Mark’s
bed. The date of September 1st, 1960, was circled in red to remind him when he
would be allowed to rejoin his friends at the factory back home. Each night before
falling asleep he would cross out the offending day like a prisoner making
scratch marks on a wall.
    At Christmas
Mark returned home for a four-day break, and when his mother saw the general
state of the boy she tried to talk his father into allowing Mark to give up the
job early, but Arthur remained implacable.
    “We made an
agreement. I can’t be expected to get him a job at the factory if he isn’t
responsible enough to keep to his part of a