A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [30]
Three possible solutions are presented to the problem: I have to choose one of them and say why I rejected the other two. Each solution comes with its own pros and cons.
Option One supports the plan to implement construction. This would appease the majority of public - though not local - opinion. It would also stain the government’s already poor record on environmental issues.
Option Two is to cave in to local pressure and shelve the plan. This would mean the loss of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, and set a precedent for future road-building projects which may prove damaging. On the plus side, a vast stretch of green-belt land would be preserved.
Option Three proposes building the road along a different route, avoiding the area of outstanding natural beauty and historical significance. This would mean a greater cost to the taxpayer - the new by-pass would be one and a half miles longer - but disarm many of the arguments put forward by the green lobby.
I decide to go with Option One, for a variety of reasons. From the point of view of my recruitment to SIS, it will not look good to Rouse and Pyman if I am seen to cave in to the interests of marginal pressure groups. Better to argue for job creation and improved transport links with the Continent than to kow-tow to the ephemeral concerns of historians and New Age travellers. Option One, in short, provides me with a better opportunity to appear tough and pragmatic rather than weak and indecisive.
So I speed-read everything in the document looking for evidence to support my decision. I learn quite quickly that the trick is to ignore the notes written by incompetent press officers (one of which stretches for four pages) and to pass over any lengthy memos to the Minister from ingratiating second-tier civil servants in London. It is more constructive to respond to the views of people in power, or to those who have direct and unignorable experience of the issue in hand.
Shrewdly, the examiners have placed some of the most important documents towards the end of the booklet. One, from a senior figure in the DTI who backs the project, follows just after a ridiculous handwritten letter - complete with spelling mistakes - from an insane geriatric with ‘grave concerns’ that the village outside Dorton where she has lived for the past sixty-five years will ‘forever lose its unique local caracter’ if the by-pass is built.
I finish fifteen minutes before the two-hour time limit expires. Towards one o’clock, a group of other candidates walk by in the corridor, talking animatedly on their way to lunch. Their voices gradually disappear like a radio losing its frequency in a tunnel.
The Hobbit asks for more paper and Keith gives it to him.
Ann finishes, her body a slump of fatigue as the time limit runs down. At five past Keith checks his watch and calls a halt. Everybody, with the exception of the Hobbit, breathes out, as if each of us has come up from a prolonged surface dive. The Hobbit jerks up his head, panicked, and continues writing.
‘Mr Frears.’
No response.
‘Candidates must stop writing please.’
‘Just finishing now,’ he says, pen scratching busily in his hand. ‘Just finishing now.’
6
Day One / Afternoon
After lunch - a ham and cheese sandwich at the National Gallery - we sit in the stifling classroom faced by a phalanx of numerical facility tests divided into three separate sections: ‘Relevant Information’, ‘Quantitative Relations’ and ‘Numerical Inferences’. Each batch of twenty questions lasts twenty-two minutes, after which Keith allows a brief interlude before starting us on the next paper. Each problem, whether it be number- or word-based, must be solved in a matter of seconds with no time available for checking the accuracy of an answer. Calculators are ‘forbidden’. It is by far the most testing part of Sisby so far and the mind-thud of intellectual fatigue is overwhelming. I crave water.
We are all of us squeezed by time, clustered in the classroom like battery hens