AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

For earlier Chapters and an explanation of this dreadful story, see blog: The Cardiff Grandma. WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the previous episode, Wolfcastle comes to, while far away an over-the-hill clairvoyant named Madame Pom de Terre... Now, a briefing on the telephone exchange exchange student exchange.
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 48

It had seemed to be a better life, a way out of the poverty and servitude often associated with such roles as poor servant or quality controller in one of the many foreign owned embroidery factories that were becoming the only viable source of employment in the less unfashionable parts of Bangladesh. The ‘reps’ would arrive each month with suitcases full of glossy brochures and mouths full of tales about how wonderful it all was back in Cymru and how great the lives of those ‘chosing’ to attend the Welsh university would so clearly be if they did just that – chose to attend the Welsh University. The Cymru government was funding the recruitment drive to the tune of several large sack-fulls of cash each month. The VC had personally announced that he’d find a large amount of money to add to the kitty. Most people knew better than to ask just where the money he’d supply may have actually come from.

So in would pour the reps and, after much cajoling, compelling and coercing, out would stream a fresh bunch of new students ready for a new start to their old lives. They had no idea that in fact what they had signed up to was a contract of deployment rather than a simple student enrolment and visa form. This wasn’t entirely the fault of the wannabe students – in a stroke of semi genius the forms had only been produced in Welsh and hardly anyone at all could read them. Upon arriving in Cymru the new ‘recruits’ would find themselves bussed immediately to one of the holding camps such as Camp MRI or Camp CAT Scan. The closest they come to the Welsh University would be a glimpse of it behind its haze of razorwire as they passed it in the back of one of the old Army trucks as they wizzed through the empty Caerdydd streets at 4am.

The ‘cheap’ labour, as it was known in semi-official circles (and indeed in official semi-circles) was considered essential to the further economic development of Cymru. Ever since the militant unionization of the Asian call centres, and following the bitter industrial disputes and strike actions that had swept through the region, the cost of employing cheap foreign labour in their own country had gone up sixfold in as many months. Luring unsuspecting foreign nationals in to the nation, having gotten them to sign up to documents they had no hope of understanding, and then removing their passports, identity cards and other documents, had been working well. Those who had cooked up the plan and sat atop the hierarchy that now claimed to ‘run’ the endeavor, were content that the workers themselves were happy. They deduced this be virtue of never hearing reports to the contrary. The fact that the workers were singularly unhappy but were in great fear of actually voicing such viewpoints was something else that those in charge never got to hear about. All, it seemed, was going well then. But really it was going “Well then!”

That was the whole problem: that brisk tone of satisfaction, as if a confirmation had just been confirmed, a conundrum undrummed, a task completed. That thrill of accomplishment fades quickly, though, and is soon replaced by a suspicion that there must be more and someone is just not telling you, an icy feeling of “Well, then…??” So, though it might have seemed all was going well then, it was really teetering on the brink of --and ???

And nobody was ready for it.