Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [10]
'Money is the root of all evil,' he said with a thin smile. 'At least that's what it says in the Good Book. But, you can't take any of it with you, can you?'
It wasn't at all the answer that I had expected. If truth be known, I wasn't sure exactly what I had expected to hear in reply. 'Then why ... ?' The question was only half-formed when Bryce interrupted.
'The differences?' he asked pointedly.
'Yes.'
'Ah, well,' there was a long pause and something of a sharp intake of breath, as though this was a conversation he had been engaged in on more than one occasion. Perhaps, usually, with himself. 'That's the way the world spins round. It doesn't revolve around us you know, lad. The world goes around the Sun – this bloke called Galileo proved that.'
A philosopher and renaissance man, clearly. Bryce that is, not Galileo.
I smiled, 'Then let me put it another way,' I asked. 'Why should First,
Second and Third Classes of berth exist in a post-Galilean society?' It was only after I had said it that I realised that "berth" might also be heard as "birth". Bryce had spotted it too, and had a ready answer for me.
'Now that's a question worthy of Conditions of the Working Classes in England,' he noted. 'Oh, I've read my history, Doctor. Not to grammar school standard, maybe, but afterwards. Always dead keen on the Romans, so I was. They knew how to build decent real-estate, them lads. Provided full employment for the people too. That's something your average socialist like me can never manage to do outside of the confines of his head, and that's a fact.' He paused. 'And, do you know why? Because the world will never be rid of lazy people and scum no matter how much we like to think that it will. Choices, that's what it's all about.'
'The choice to do nothing isn't a valid one?' I asked.
'I've been described as a self-taught intellectual, usually by John and Jerry here and their college-pudding mates on the board,' replied Bryce. 'But it's not true. Not in the slightest, because, do you know what, in my own mind I was an intellectual when I were but six years old. I just didn't know what the word meant!'
Clever. Again, I smiled warmly, indicating that he should continue.
'My old dad, now, he was a riveter in the shipyards. He worked on tankers and big cruise liners like this one, grafting away on the causeway in all bloody weathers. In the winter, he used to come home and have to sit in a tin bath for three hours in near boiling water just to thaw out. Big man. Big hands. Good heart. Spent all his life building ships that went all around the world but he, himself, never went anywhere. Except for France. Fought for his country in a war that he didn't understand the causes of, and didn't much care about. Him and his brothers and all their cousins. They just pointed their guns in the direction that the generals told them to, shot lots of Germans, survived the gas attacks and the hand grenades and the barbed-wire and the mud. Then they all came home to "a land fit for heroes" to live in one bedroom tenements with the wife and ten children.' He paused. 'I know just how lucky I am to have been born when I was and where I was. And I know how lucky I am to have left behind what I did.'
It was an impassioned speech, and a good one. 'You don't like wars,' I
observed, and Bryce shook his head, sadly.
'No lad, I don't. People get killed in them.'
Another point in his favour, clearly. 'Did you serve yourself?' I asked.
Bryce was expecting the question and nodded with a resigned sigh. 'If you can call it that. North Africa. Desert tank division, Monty's boys, you know. We fought against Rommel's Panzers. When I say we, I didn't do a lot of it. I was nineteen and scared. First day I saw a German tank lumbering into view I dropped my load and ran away like buggery. But I came back. God knows why. I didn't understand what it was