by Martin Howe
Les smiled, looked round at the others then stamped the three forms, clipped them together and tossed them into an overflowing tray on the corner of the desk. He stood up and faced Tony.
“Now this is the serious bit. Straight faces everyone. Raise your right hand. Do you Tony Cox pledge, in front of these witnesses, to give your undying support to our King, George the Fifth, to the British Empire, and to the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley?”
“I do.”
“Do you pledge to accept the rules and standing orders associated with membership of the Fascist movement?”
“I do.”
“Do you promise not to associate with any other political organizations on pain of expulsion from the movement?”
“I do.”
“That’s it, you’re in. Relax. There’s only the hardest bit to come. It’s a bob a month in your division, I’m afraid, paid in advance. Archie here will be only too glad to relieve you of this month’s subs, won’t you Archie?”
“It’ll be a pleasure.”
Tony handed over a shilling. It was everything he had. All he was thinking about was how he could get out of going to the pub.
“Here’s your membership card and badge. Alf should be able to fill you in on the uniform. You’re entitled to the basic kit you know, only get everything else when you’re promoted. Welcome to the BUF.”
They shook hands. Archie slapped him on the shoulder and said “Good to have you with us. Give my regards to Alf. Tell him I’ll be along to one of his meetings before long to see how he’s getting on.”
Eric grabbed him by the arm and led him out through the waiting room. As he was leaving he turned and said, “Nice touch, Les, the flowers on the table. Gives it a homely feel,” he winked at Tony.
“Wasn’t my idea, believe me. Don’t have flowers in a vase where I live, I can tell you. Supposed to make us more appealing to the ladies, as if we needed that,” he chuckled. “Would be nice to have a young lady come through, brighten things up a bit, but haven’t seen hide nor hair of one all day.”
“What’s new eh! Anyway, it’s an absolute picture Les, an absolute picture.”
“Get away with you, you young bastard. Tony take him out of my sight.”
Tony hadn’t been sure about Eric Baines at first, thinking him overbearing, loud and just too friendly. However, after four pints in the “Castle Arms” he had changed his mind. He liked him and Eric seemed to have taken to him. All they had in common was a love of football and the Party. Eric had played in the youth team of a London club, when he was in his early teens. He hadn’t got anywhere but had kept himself in shape ever since. He was keen to get a BUF League going, but was being kept too busy, so he said, by Union business. He’d been in more or less from the beginning and was already a unit leader in “I” division of the Defence Force or “Mosley’s Biff Boys” as he called them.
“Got this scar on my face fighting the Reds in Stepney. Tried to stop us selling the Party rag. We showed ’em, but one bastard caught me with a razor. Still hasn’t healed properly and that was a couple of months ago. Any way my mate, Stevie Briggs, did for that particular swine. Doubt if he’s out of hospital yet.”
His booming laugh echoed round the small snug and brought the landlord in from the public bar.
“Go on, tell us the joke – it’s been a dull day in here so far.”
He stayed leaning across the bar listening to their conversation until a bell rang in the saloon.
“No rest for the wicked.”
“The Biff Boys is the only place to be for me. It’s where you get noticed. Old Mosley’s not averse to a spot of fisticuffs himself if no one is looking. He’s quite handy. I’ve seen him sort out a number of hecklers who got up his nose. Can’t do it so much now. Too risky. Police and press everywhere.”
He downed his pint in one, wiped his mouth, belched, and stood up to look for the landlord.
“Never here when you want them, all over you when you don’t,” he steadied himself against the bar, “Same again?”
“I’m fine thanks, still got most of this one.”
“Too polite, laddy, too refined. We’ll soon sort that out. Let me tell you from my vast experience of life that there are three things you need to get on with us lot: one a loud mouth, two the fists to back it up and three the ability to drink any man under the table. And I mean any man including the old man himself, Sir Oswald. He likes army lags like me who’ve seen something of the world. Done their bit for King and Empire. Thinks we’ll inherit the earth and won’t have a thing said against us. Suits me fine.”
He sat down with two more pints of beer.
“I have another thing they like. I’m a convert to the cause. I know the enemy.”
Tony was puzzled.
“I used to be a Communist myself. Yeh, you’re right to look surprised. I was a signed up follower of old Comrade Joe. Hard to believe, innit? Find it hard myself at times. But they were bloody useless, so disorganized, no discipline. Not something they’d have you believe, but it’s true. Seen it with my own eyes. Lived the life and couldn’t stand it. Hang on, I’m going for a piss.”
Tony was overawed. He had never met anyone as animated, as alive, who had done so much with his life and was prepared to talk to him about it. His father had fought in the war but never mentioned it, kept everything buttoned up. The closest match to Eric of the people he knew was Alf, but Archie was right, Alf wasn’t a man of action, a leader of men, he was very much a follower. Tony wasn’t really sure about himself. He knew he was unhappy with the way things were going, but it was a timid, uncertain, unfocused feeling. Maybe things were about to change. He felt ready and was flattered.
“Woah I needed that. You know what I really hated about those red bastards, don’t you?”
Tony shook his head.
“The leaders were Jews, or nearly all of them anyway. They kept joining, recruiting more of their own. It sickened me in the end. I had to get out.”
Tony said very little. He sat, sipped his beer and listened to Eric talk. He’d been right about his scar, it hadn’t healed. It was still a flaming red gash across his left cheek. Not unattractive, thought Tony, like the man himself. Eric was medium height, stocky, well-built and looked as if he could take care of himself. He had a square weather-beaten face, from his time as a cabin boy in the Merchant Navy spent staring at the horizon, so he said. His eyelashes were long, and many women had been distracted by them, not noticing his dull brown eyes. He wore his greased black hair swept back from a heavily furrowed forehead. And he had a thin dark moustache. This was, as Tony had noticed, as much a part of the uniform of a British fascist as the blackshirt itself.
Tony remembered it as one of those rare timeless afternoons. He felt as if he could have sat there forever, but his reverie had ended abruptly. Three men in blackshirts came in looking for Eric.
“It’s time to be heading back to London. Train leaves in half an hour.”
Eric had introduced Tony to them as, “our latest recruit. One who is bound to go far.”
One of the men had been a Major General and was an important figure on the top body of the BUF, the Policy Directorate. He seemed to know Eric. Tony was impressed.
That was the man Tony had just seen entering the Black House with Oswald Mosley. It was time for another pint. Tony was at the bar placing his order, when Eric burst in through the double doors, smiled and clapped him on the shoulder.
Chapter 3
DEAD AND BURIED
4th March 1995
“Can I book you in for tonight?”
David was sprawled across a compact highly patterned red and yellow sofa staring through half-closed eyes at the television. He was watching the news, but his head was leaning so far back that it was very hard to tell if he was awake.
“Maybe, it depends what tim
e you come to bed.”
“Oh, come on, it’s Saturday night. Say yes.”
“Depends how I feel.”
David shook his head and looked away. Feigning an expression of baleful dejection he spoke to his wife in a whining falsetto.
“Susan, I’ve been here before. This booking system is not worth the paper it’s written on.”
He burst out laughing and took a sip of red wine.
“I’m feeling quite pissed.”
A brief smile passed across Susan’s tired face. She was holding back her long blonde hair with one hand as David spoke and let it fall as she looked up from the book she had been reading to reply.
“Alright, just for you.”
“For you as well I hope?”
“You never know my luck, it may be in tonight, maybe not.”
“Recreational sex, don’t you just love it?”
“With you darling?”
The dark wooden rafters of the small bedroom always unnerved David, causing him to duck involuntarily as he came through the door. It was unsettling, because it was unnecessary. He’d been coming here all his life and many years ago had tested the height of every beam with his brother and it was only in the corner next to the window that he had to bow his head. David stood there now, slightly hunched, staring out on to the deserted moonlit street that ran down the hill towards the village church. His grandfather’s church, as he always thought of it, even though the man himself had been dead for twenty years. He’d go there tomorrow, on his “regular pilgrimage” as Susan called it. She sometimes came with him out of a sense of duty, but then she had never known the old man, never fallen under his spell.
Pleasantly drunk, David swayed slightly and tried to remember when he had last seen his grandfather. It should have been easy, he had died so unexpectedly and in such peculiar circumstances that the date of his death was etched on his memory – December 3rd 1975. He had been sixteen years old, in emotional turmoil, unhappy and uncertain. At odds with his parents, forever fighting with them, he frequently disappeared from home for days, often ending up here at his grandfather’s flat in the village of Dumpton Gap. These escapes had helped calm him down, his life starting to make some sort of sense, in large part due to his elderly relative’s ability to listen and advise. David had eventually taken his words to heart and stopped running away, buckling down at school and starting to work for his looming O-levels. This change in attitude happened only a few months before his grandfather’s death and ever since he had deeply regretted the time he had missed spending with him, thanks to his good behaviour. His final recollection of the man was bittersweet and imprecise.
Why he had died was one of the imponderable questions that plagued him when drunk or depressed. It was a source of intense frustration. For David was a strong believer in personal progress. He was reconciled to getting older, but only if the reward was a greater self-awareness, coupled with insights into his past. Age and increasing maturity, however, were not providing any answers to the questions about his grandfather, who as the love of his life was never far from his thoughts even now and still hurt him, twisting his powers of recall. He knew it was why he kept coming back to stay in his flat. It was a holiday rental now. He had so many disparate memories that he could never let go.
David sat on his grandfather’s battered brown leather sofa in front of a raging fire in the high-ceilinged sitting room of the old Vicarage. He was dressed in green-striped pyjamas and a blue and red dressing gown pulled tight round his shoulders. A steaming mug of cocoa rested perilously on the stained arm of the settee, while his grandfather sat smoking and reading the Daily Telegraph in his favourite armchair illuminated by a tall standard lamp with a threadbare tan shade. Beside David, balanced on the brown cushions, was a pile of his grandfather’s Mickey Mouse comics. He knew them all by heart and savoured each and every one of them. He was happy, thumbing through the pages, not reading the words just looking at the cartoon figures. Impressions of that time were indelibly fixed in his mind: the popping of the logs on the fire, the smell of wood smoke as it blew back into the room every time the wind gusted outside, the ticking of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, the sweet chocolate residue at the bottom of the mug, that he used to scrape up with his finger and then lick clean. It had been a magical time that he would willingly have revisited. Or so he had thought. Now he was not so sure. A grown man in his fifties, intelligent and knowledgeable, owning and treasuring so many childish comics had recently started to seem strange to David. It wasn’t as if they had been old comics from when he was a boy in the Thirties. After their grandfather’s death, David and his brother Freddy had squabbled over the magazines and his father had said no one was going to have them, as they were worth “a bob or two.” David could still remember his own sense of triumph, tinged with disappointment, at the look of annoyance on his father’s face when he returned from a special trip to London where he had attempted to sell them, with the news that they were valueless as they weren’t that old. He’d dumped them in a bin in disgust rather than carry the heavy bundle all the way back home.
David had asked his grandfather once why he had so many children’s comics. He had replied that they were for his boys to read, whenever they stayed with him.
The light suddenly came on and David started.
“Oh God, the windows are wide open.”
The room plunged back into darkness and he fumbled to find the cord that closed the curtains.
“There’s no one out there, you know.”
David turned, massaging his aching neck. Susan stood there with two cups of tea in her hands, her black cotton dressing gown hanging open.
“Oh you never know in places like this.”
She smiled.
“By the way there’s not much hot water left if you want a bath.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t look so sad, I don’t mind. Where do you want your tea?”
“Over there. I’ll have one in the morning.”
As David sat on the end of the bed and undressed, Susan stood in front of the full-length mirror on the door of the wardrobe and gently prodded her stomach with her fingers.
“What do you think – not too bad for someone of my age?”
“Let’s see.”
Susan slipped off her dressing gown and turned to face him, her right hand hovering tentatively by her side.
“Not bad. A nice pair.”
Susan laughed.
“You never give up do you? You’re so predictable.”
“It helps if you breathe in though.”
“You bastard!”
Self-consciously she hugged her balled-up dressing gown, before throwing it at David and rushing over to the bed.
“I don’t know what you expect after two children?”
Susan slithered beneath the bedclothes.
“Move over. You’re bloody lucky I don’t have any stretch marks.”
David stood up.
“You don’t know how lucky you are.”
He slipped off his underpants and threw them into the corner of the room. He then lay across the bed. Susan pulled her legs out of the way and he crawled forward until his forearms rested on the floor and the top of his head touched his hands. He then raised his feet.
“I don’t know why you bother. It doesn’t do any good.”
“How do you know?” David muttered as the blood rushed to his head and he began to feel the pressure build up behind his eyes. The veins in his temples throbbed.
“At my age you can’t afford not to try anything that might do some good. I think it’s stabilized.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“It has. I should know. Nowhere near as much hair comes out when I wash it as it used to.”
“That’s because there’s less to come out.”
“Shut up, will you. I�
��m busy.”
Susan leaned back against the wooden headboard and sipped her tea. She stared at her husband’s naked body; it had been his strongest suit when they had first met and it had very nearly not been enough for her. If she was honest his whole demeanour had put her off. It had taken time and effort on his part before she’d begun to see him in a better light, and his muscular physique had been the deciding factor. Susan smiled to herself. Thinking back she did wonder how they’d got together. He wasn’t really good-looking then – his face thin and angular, with a large nose, framed by long, dark wavy hair. His eyes though had attracted her, soft sugar-brown, staring, ever attentive, framed by long thick curling eyelashes. Many times she’d had to look away, embarrassed by their intensity. He was much more handsome now with his receding hair cut short, a few wrinkles around the eyes and a crease or two across the forehead. Ageing had made him less austere-looking, fuller in the face, friendlier. When they had first met he’d seemed blinkered, forever brushing hair back from his face, introverted and reticent. Whereas in truth, he’d been something different, behaving towards her with a confidence and intense physicality that were overwhelming. The first time they slept together, three or four weeks after they had met – it annoyed both of them that they couldn’t remember the exact date, couldn’t celebrate the anniversary properly – he had picked her up and carried her up the stairs before flinging her onto the bed, an old door, resting on piles of bricks and covered in a thick sheet of foam rubber, that had knocked noisily against the wall as they wriggled and giggled with delight. Six feet tall with strong forearms, in the end he’d been impossible to resist.
He was still in reasonable shape. This recent fixation with his thinning hair was faintly ridiculous, as she didn’t care. She’d told him, but he hadn’t believed her, and it had spurred him on to experiment with even more outlandish remedies.