The Bagthorpe Saga: Absolute Zero. Helen Cresswell

must apologise for this interruption, ladies and gentlemen,” he said into the microphone.

      “Oh, and do accept my own apologies too,” chipped in Grandma. “I think I have said all that I wanted to say. Thank you.”

      She sat down. She looked almost as if she expected a round of applause. She was the only person in the whole hall who looked pleased with herself. The regulars were beginning to murmur again.

      “If we are all ready, then,” said the caller, “we’ll start the next game. Eyes down for the lucky winner of another sensational prize. And the first number – wait for it – all the fives, fifty-five.”

      Jack numbly crossed this off his own card and waited for the inevitable. The caller, he realised, was going to carry on as if the interruption had never occurred. He was going to pretend Grandma had never spoken. And Jack knew that when Grandma was anywhere, people knew she was. She was not ignorable. To a point he could sympathise with the man. He was probably not, he reflected, very bright. He certainly had not been able to think of a single word to say in reply to Grandma. But then, if he spent every day of his life calling out numbers, perhaps he was not very good with words any more. Perhaps he had lost his conversation.

      What Grandma did next was the worst thing she could possibly have done. Her big mistake was not realising that every single person in that hall took this game at least as seriously as she herself. They were all obviously better losers (they could not be worse) but they were all playing to win. Tension builds up very high in a Bingo Hall after even the first few numbers have been called. If only Grandma had sat and sulked till the game was over, and then stood up and said her piece, the worst that could have happened was that she would have been asked to leave. She might even have got her money back at the door.

      As it was, she came very near getting lynched. She, Mrs Fosdyke and Jack could all have got lynched. She stood up, right in the middle of a call of “Lucky for some – thirteen!” and shouted “Stop!” at the top of her considerable voice.

      “Sit down!” and “Shut up!” – these, and other less politely phrased requests and exclamations came from all parts of the hall. Several of the players themselves stood up and waved their arms while making their protests and thus set other people off doing the same thing and within thirty seconds flat everyone in there had, with the exception of the halt and the lame, got on his or her feet yelling. The caller was yelling too, into his microphone, but yelling must have affected its vibrations because you couldn’t hear the words at all, only a kind of booming. It was probably as well.

      From then on, everything happened more or less as Mr Bagthorpe had predicted it would. A riot broke out. The interesting thing was, and Jack could not help noticing this at the time, that although people started hurling abuse and even hitting one another, nobody did this to Grandma herself. Standing there with her umbrella aloft in the manner of the Statue of Liberty, she seemed in some curious way to be above it all, even though it was she who had set the whole thing off.

      Somebody obviously panicked and rang the police, and they arrived quickly, about ten of them, and gradually quietened people down. The bald-headed caller was still booming into his microphone and making gestures with his hands as if tearing at the hair he had once had. When everyone else had sat down quietly under the watchful eyes of the police he sounded suddenly very silly, booming like that, and stopped abruptly.

      In the ensuing silence the people on Grandma’s row stood up quite politely and let the trio pass to the gangway, and they were escorted out of the hall by two policemen. In the foyer one of them, a sergeant, took out a notebook.

      “Now then,” he said, “what’s it all about?”

      “It wasn’t Grandma’s fault,” said Jack instantly.

      “Oh, I don’t know, officer, I really don’t know!” Mrs Fosdyke, incredibly, was close to tears. “I shouldn’t never have brought her.”

      “I think perhaps we’d better go along to the station,” said the sergeant.

      He gave certain orders to the constable, who went back into the hall. Grandma, Mrs Fosdyke and Jack walked in silence to the swing doors. Several police cars were standing out there, one with its blue light flashing.

      Grandma had gone very quiet and dignified. Mrs Fosdyke kept sniffing all the way to the station. Jack was torn between enjoyment of being in the novel situation of riding as an apprehended criminal in a police car, and a sinking feeling that he had let Uncle Parker and everybody else down.

      At the station Grandma kept up her silent dignity for a while, but after a cup of tea seemed to thaw and consented to give her version of what had transpired. She stood up.

      “I solemnly swear that all I shall say will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God,” she began. “Shouldn’t I have a Bible to hold while I say that?”

      “Oh, there’s no call for that at all, Madam,” the sergeant told her. “Not at this stage.”

      “I think I have seen enough television films about policemen and criminals,” Grandma told him, “to know something of procedure. I suppose I should not be surprised that the Bible is no longer required. It is yet another sign of the times.”

      In the end she gave a very good account, Jack thought. And when she told what she had said to the Bingo man, and the requests she had made, they all sounded very reasonable, and nothing like riot-raising speeches. Jack could tell from the policemen’s faces that they were thinking this too.

      “First time you’d played, then, was it, Mrs Bagthorpe?” asked one of them. “I can see how it must have been confusing.”

      “Precisely,” she nodded. “I simply thought that some consideration should be shown to a beginner. And I thought that young man very rude indeed when he just carried on as if I had never spoken.”

      All in all, the interview went very well. At the end of the day, it was clear that the only word Grandma had spoken which could be even loosely interpreted as riot-raising and provocative, was the single word “Stop!”, and even Jack could see that this would not stand up very well in Court.