The Prime Minister removed his cigar and roared with laughter before he accompanied his guest to the door. “And, Trumper,” he said, placing a hand on Charlie’s shoulder, “should the need ever arise, don’t hesitate to contact me direct, if you think it could make the difference. Night or day. I don’t bother with sleep, you know.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Charlie, as he proceeded down the staircase.
“Good luck, Trumper, and see you feed the people.”
The Wren escorted Charlie back to his car and saluted him as he took his place in the front seat, which surprised Charlie because he was still dressed as a sergeant.
He asked the driver to take him to the Little Boltons via Chelsea Terrace. As they traveled slowly through the streets of the West End, it saddened him to find old familiar landmarks so badly damaged by the Luftwaffe, although he realized no one in London had escaped the Germans’ relentless air bombardment.
When he arrived home, Becky opened the front door and threw her arms around her husband. “What did Mr. Churchill want?” was her first question.
“How did you know I was seeing the Prime Minister?”
“Number 10 rang here first to ask where they could get hold of you. So what did he want?”
“Someone who can deliver his fruit and veg on a regular basis.”
Charlie liked his new boss from the moment they met. Although James Woolton had come to the Ministry of Food with the reputation of being a brilliant businessman, he admitted that he was not an expert in Charlie’s particular field but said his department was there to see that Charlie was given every assistance he required.
Charlie was allocated a large office on the same corridor as the minister and supplied with a staff of fourteen headed by a young personal assistant called Arthur Selwyn who hadn’t been long down from Oxford.
Charlie soon learned that Selwyn had a brain as sharp as a razor, and although he had no experience of Charlie’s world he only ever needed to be told something once.
The navy supplied Charlie with a personal secretary called Jessica Allen, who appeared to be willing to work the same hours as he did. Charlie wondered why such an attractive, intelligent girl appeared to have no social life until he studied her file more carefully and discovered that her young fiancé had been killed on the beach at Dunkirk.
Charlie quickly returned to his old routine of coming into the office at four-thirty, even before the cleaners had arrived, which allowed him to read through his papers until eight without fear of being disturbed.
Because of the special nature of his assignment and the obvious support of his minister, doors opened whenever he appeared. Within a month most of his staff were coming in by five, although Selwyn turned out to be the only one of them who also had the stamina to stick with him through the night.
For that first month Charlie did nothing but read reports and listen to Selwyn’s detailed assessment of the problems they had been facing for the best part of a year, while occasionally popping in to see the minister to clarify a point that he didn’t fully understand.
During the second month Charlie decided to visit every major port in the kingdom to find out what was holding up the distribution of food, food that was sometimes simply being left to rot for days on end in the storehouses on the docksides throughout the country. When he reached Liverpool he quickly discovered that supplies were rightly not getting priority over tanks or men when it came to movement, so he requested that his ministry should operate a fleet of its own vehicles, with no purpose other than to distribute food supplies across the nation.
Woolton somehow managed to come up with sixty-two trucks, most of them, he admitted, rejects from war surplus. “Not unlike me,” Charlie admitted. However, the minister still couldn’t spare the men to drive them.
“If men aren’t available, Minister, I need two hundred women,” Charlie suggested, and despite the cartoonists’ gentle jibes about women drivers it only took another month before the food started to move out of the docks within hours of its arrival.
The dockers themselves responded well to the women drivers, while trade union leaders never found out that Charlie spoke to them with one accent while using quite another when he was back at the ministry.
Once Charlie had begun to solve the distribution problem, he came up against two more dilemmas. On the one hand, the farmers were complaining that they couldn’t produce enough food at home because the armed forces were taking away all their best men; on the other, Charlie found he just wasn’t getting enough supplies coming in from abroad because of the success of the German U-boat campaign.
He came up with two solutions for Woolton’s consideration. “You supplied me with lorry girls, now you must give me land girls,” Charlie told him. “I need five thousand this time, because that’s what the farmers are saying they’re short of.”
The next day Woolton was interviewed on the BBC and made a special appeal to the nation for land girls. Five hundred applied in the first twenty-four hours, and the minister had the five thousand Charlie requested within ten weeks. Charlie allowed the applications to continue pouring in until he had seven thousand, and could clearly identify a smile on the face of the president of the National Farmers’ Union.
Over the second problem of lack of supplies, Charlie advised Woolton to buy rice as a substitute diet staple because of the hardship the nation was facing with a potato shortage. “But where do we find such a commodity?” asked Woolton. “China and the Far East is much too hazardous a journey for us even to consider right now.”
“I’m aware of that,” said Charlie, “but I know a supplier in Egypt who could let us have a million tons a month.”
“Can he be trusted?”
“Certainly not,” said Charlie, “But his brother still works in the East End, and if we were to intern him for a few months I reckon I could pull off some sort of deal with the family.”
“If the press ever found out what we were up to, Charlie, they’d have my guts for garters.”
“I’m not going to tell them, Minister.”