A Shock to the System

accommodation for expatriate staff. There hung about the Department an air of resigned insufficiency, a tendency to live in a past which had never quite delivered its promise.

While some young men would have found this atmosphere depressing, Graham recognised how well it suited his talents. He would have little intellectual competition, and his achievements would shine more brightly in a prevailing atmosphere of defeat. It was an ideal position from which he could play the system, from which he could continue to be ‘a success’.

His age was also on his side, at a time when youth was becoming fashionable. Rationed straight-talking and studied casualness of dress fostered for him an image amongst senior management of something between enfant terrible and whizz-kid, a phenomenon which was impressive, even to those who distrusted it.

As a result, he collected special commendations and increments, and achieved his first promotion, to Assistant

Personnel Officer, after only four years with the company, in the process leap-frogging other contenders over ten years his senior. His rise did not always make him friends, but none could deny his intelligence and skill in the complex board-game of company politics.

By the age of twenty-five he was earning more than his father and had the money to enjoy the much- discussed excitements of ‘Swinging London’. Though almost too old for the ‘Beatles generation’, he participated in the clubs, parties and pop concerts with his customary controlled abandon. He started to shop in Carnaby Street, finding the gaudy expanse of a flowered tie or the ill-disguised evidence of beads about his neck more valuable counters in the game of confusing his superiors.

He also took some advantage of the supposedly new sexual licence, though not as much as he liked to imply to older colleagues. One or two mini-skirted dolly-birds came back to his flat (he was by now buying one of his own in a modern block in Chelsea), but these random couplings were not as guilt-free as he would have wished. A Calvinist streak, inherited from his parents and inspired by their unimpeachable example, left him with the unfashionable conviction that sex should be allied to marriage.

But marriage, when it came in 1967, continued the image of ‘a success’. In the June of that year, when Procol Harum topped the charts with the moody pretentiousness of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, Graham met at a party Merrily Hinchcliffe, the beautiful waiflike daughter of television actress Lilian Hinchcliffe and sister of pop journalist, Charmian Hinchcliffe. By the beginning of September, when Scott McKenzie, from every juke-box and radio, urged visitors to San Francisco to wear some flowers in their hair, he had married her.

At the wedding, held in Chelsea Register Office, Merrily obeyed the musical injunction and was crowned with a garland of Michaelmas daisies. Her dress, of plain white Indian muslin, left no doubt that she wore no brassiere.

Graham, for his part, had on a see-through patterned shirt beneath a gold-frogged guardsman’s jacket and, around his neck, a small brass temple bell.

They made a fine couple — Graham nearly six foot, darkhaired and handsome to those who did not look too closely at the narrowness of his eyes, Merrily a blonde wisp of thistledown on his arm. So they figured in the wedding photographs, kept framed and fading through the years ahead.

Graham’s parents, stiff respectively in three-piece and two-piece suits of the sort people they knew wore to weddings, gaped throughout the proceedings. The presence at the reception of Lilian Hinchcliffe, informally famous in a turquoise kaftan, and Charmian, in a totally transparent blouse, urging a tame pop group to yet another chorus of ‘All You Need Is Love’, left them in no doubt that their son had arrived socially. They talked a little to some of his (also three-piece-suited) Crasoco colleagues, such as his immediate boss, George Brewer, but generally found the occasion bewildering. When Graham and Merrily set off in his latest car, a Mini-Moke, for what they called ‘four weeks of love and freedom on the Continent’, Mr. and Mrs. Marshall returned to Mitcham, doubting whether they would ever see their son again.

Graham and Merrily, after a wedding which was a hymn against materialism, had their month of ‘dropping out’, mostly on the Greek island of Mykonos (which had yet to go completely gay), and returned, she to the expensive flat in Chelsea and he to his well-paid job at Crasoco.

A year later they sold the flat at a handsome profit and moved to a three-bedroomed house in Barnes. Within another year they had a son, Henry, and in 1970 Merrily gave birth to a daughter, Emma. By that time they had also accumulated a colour television, a hi-fi, a washing-machine and a dishwasher, and changed the Mini-Moke (whose unworldly zip-on top leaked rather badly in the rain) for a Citroen DS.

Through the ’Seventies, which coincided exactly with his thirties, Graham Marshall’s main concern was work. Deploying his old skills with a new toughness born of experience, he continued to climb up the Crasoco management ladder from his unchallenged outpost in Personnel. Promotions and increments rippled along in a predictable sequence. He kept his finger on the company’s pulse, noting whose opinions carried weight and whose were ignored. He went on management training courses, where he demonstrated great aptitude for the sterile exercises which were then fashionable. He was offered the chance of going on computer courses, but turned them down on the grounds that ‘some gnome could always be summoned from the computer room to produce the figures’.

In this opinion he echoed George Brewer. Indeed, he kept very close to George Brewer and made himself an indispensable assistant when his mentor was elevated to the post of Head of Personnel. It meant rather more sessions than Graham might have wished of drinking in the company bar, lighting his boss’s nasty little cigarettes, helping out with The Times crossword and agreeing with George’s plans for Crasoco’s future, but Graham knew it was worth it. The occasional insincerity could only strengthen his position in the system.

He did not agree with all of George Brewer’s opinions, but usually kept his own counsel. George was a businessman of the old school, who constantly bemoaned the dearth of ‘gentlemen’ in the oil industry. He liked to conduct his affairs over lavish lunches and to spend the minimum of time in the office. Though always ready with an ‘Old boy’ and bonhomous arm clapped around the shoulders, he was less good at the minutiae of grading systems, budgeting and job evaluation. Increasingly he was grateful to Graham for taking the burden of some of these tedious details off his shoulders.

George’s antipathy to computers was almost Luddite in its intensity. They represented to him the threat of the unknown, and he was constantly heard to remark, ‘I’m glad I’ll have retired before the bloody things take over completely.’ The whole Operations Research Department (or O R.), computers and those who tended them alike, he dismissed under the derisive sobriquet of ‘Space Invaders’.

In the early ’Seventies, under George’s predecessor, most of the Personnel Records had been put on to computer, a proceeding which George regarded as ‘more trouble than it was worth’. There was a feeling in certain areas of the company that the system was now outdated and should be replaced with something more modern, but George resisted the change. ‘Over my dead body,’ he would splutter after a few whiskies in the bar. ‘Not while I’m in charge. I don’t care what they do after I’ve gone.’

And Graham Marshall, the Head of Personnel’s customary companion, would nod agreement while he made his plans for what would happen after George had gone. The system would be modernised. Though he knew nothing of their technicalities, Graham recognised the power that computers could bestow. And it was a power he intended to harness when he was in a position to do so.

Because there was little doubt by the end of the ’Seventies in the Department, or elsewhere in the company, that Graham Marshall was poised to take over George Brewer’s job (and the five-thousand-pound increase in salary it entailed), when the incumbent reached retirement age in 1982.

That prospect paid for the years of nodding and curbing his true opinions, for the long and, since George’s wife had died, increasingly difficult business of getting away from his boss in the evenings. It would all have been worthwhile when Graham was appointed Head of Personnel.

Since George had not reached this eminence until the age of fifty-three, and Graham would be only forty-two when he achieved it, there seemed little doubt that he was destined for even higher reaches of management.

On the strength of these expectations, early in 1980, Graham and Merrily Marshall took out a thirty- thousand-pound endowment mortgage on a much grander, though rather dilapidated, house in Boileau Avenue, Barnes. It would mean a couple of years of economy, but when he got the new job, things would ease considerably.

There was no doubt that Graham Marshall would continue to be, in his parents’ oft-repeated words, ‘a