Revolt

by Vernon Coleman

  Tom and Dorothy Cobleigh had a neighbour whose 5-yearold daughter, Enid, although illiterate and innumerate, had already collected degrees in advanced mathematics and Telescreen appreciation. The most popular degree course was in The History of Nail Varnish Application Technology. (Sadly, suspects couldn’t buy nail varnish even if they had the money. The few small manufacturers supplied only stores which were available only to sprouts.)

  ***

  Tom didn’t say anything. Sprouts always liked to sneer.

  ‘Why isn’t the screen switched on?’ demanded the inspector, indicating the screen on the wall above the fireplace. The sprouts didn’t miss anything. Suspects were supposed to have their screens switched on all the time so that they could watch the BBC whenever they were at home. Public places were all fitted with Telescreens too.

  For a while there had been a few pirate stations, broadcasting illegally from hidden sites, but they had quickly been closed down in the interests of free speech. Now the BBC was the only approved broadcaster and in practical terms that meant the only broadcaster. More hated than ever, no one called the organisation the Beeb or Auntie any more. No one felt fondly towards such an overtly propagandist organisation and no one trusted anything heard on the Telescreen. Suspects who wanted to know what was going on gleaned what information they could from rumours passed mouth to mouth and shared face to face. The rumours were sometimes accurate but more often they were not. Naturally, since no one knew whether what they were hearing was true or untrue this meant that everything they heard was as worthless as the information broadcast on the BBC.

  The only way to access what had once been known as the Internet, was through the State-approved search engine, which blocked all unapproved sites and put EUDCE approved sites at the top of all searches. The quality and reliability of information available was so poor that most suspects wouldn’t have bothered with it even if they had been able to afford reliable equipment or had a reliable electricity supply.

  Sprouts were entitled to ask suspects questions about recent BBC news items. They were empowered to stop suspects in the street and ask five questions. Any suspect who scored less than 40% was given three penalty points on their roaming licence and required to be tested once a week on their knowledge of Telescreen topics. Accumulate twelve penalty points and your roaming licence was automatically endorsed and you weren’t allowed to leave home without passing a new citizenship examination. Tom knew people who hadn’t been out of their homes for years.

  Roaming licences (the successors to identity cards) had been made compulsory soon after the Treaty of Lisbon was extended by the commissioners. (The Treaty of Lisbon had given the European Union complete power to introduce new laws. It had been the end of British sovereignty.) The roaming licences had to be renewed annually. There was, of course, a charge.

  ‘It is turned on but the community windmill has stopped working again so we have no electricity,’ explained Tom. ‘It’s the fourth time this week.’

  ‘Your community windmill has broken down?’ The sprout made it sound as though it was Tom’s fault.

  Tom pointed to the window, through which stale, warm air drifted very slowly. There was no glass in the window and the old shower curtain which they used to keep out the rain and snow had been pulled to one side. The predominant smell in the room was of woodsmoke. Despite the heat there were stoves and fires burning in many of the homes in the area. There was no other way to heat water or to cook food. ‘There’s no wind,’ he explained.

  ‘Don’t you have battery back ups?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No grid support?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll be on rationing here anyway.’ It was a boast rather than a question. Only the gated communities where sprouts lived enjoyed constant electricity supplies. It really wasn’t difficult to understand why sprouts were so loyal to EUDCE. If a sprout lost his job he had to move out of the gated community and into the ‘real’ world outside.

  The sprout moved towards the narrow staircase.

  ‘Where’s the gate?’ He pointed to the top of the staircase.

  ‘Ah,’ said Tom. ‘The gate.’

  ‘EUDCE Health and Safety Regulation HS9547/726,’ said the sprout, pleased to have found fault so easily. ‘Every intradwelling staircase containing more than three riser treads must be fitted with a gate at the top of the most elevated portion of the staircase and a safety harness, with approved guidance system, should be available for anyone ascending or descending the staircase.’

  ‘The approved gates and harnesses are very expensive,’ said Tom.

  Smirking with satisfaction, the sprout made a note in his notebook and then, climbing very gingerly, headed·up towards the first floor.

  ‘We should get danger money for jobs like this,’ he muttered, loudly enough for Tom to hear.

  Chapter 8

  Later, when it was all over and what had happened had become the past instead of the future, people often asked how it all started; how the Revolution began. The truth is, of course, that it is always a straw that breaks the camel’s back. And straws always appear to be small, insignificant things.

  They were on the landing at the top of the stairs.

  ‘I need to inspect every item of bedding and every item of clothing,’ said Perovskite. ‘How many bedrooms do you have?’

  ‘Two medium sized ones and a very small one,’ replied Tom.

  ‘Three,’ said the sprout, writing this down in his notebook.

  ‘One of them is very small. Hardly big enough to take a bed. It’s what used to be called a box room.’

  ‘Three bedrooms,’ insisted the sprout. ‘You and your wife sleep together?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And your aunt has a room of her own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you have a bedroom lying empty?’

  ‘It’s a very small room,’ insisted Tom. ‘We just keep junk in it.’

  ‘If you have junk it should be sent for recycling,’ said Tchotchke.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I will send round a Residential Placement Officer,’ said Perovskite. ‘We will arrange for someone to use that room. Maybe a couple or even a family.’

  ‘It’s a very small room!’ insisted Tom. ‘Would you like to look at it? Please take a look, and you will see how small it is.’ He opened the door to the third bedroom. It was dark inside. The glass in the window had been broken during the riots which had taken place five years earlier. It wasn’t possible to buy glass so Tom and a friend called Keith had fixed up a metal screen at the window. The screen was made out of the flattened out roof of a Volkswagen. Keith spent his days chopping up unwanted vehicles and creating windows, doors and furniture out of them. With thousands of unwanted cars abandoned on the streets there was never any shortage of materials.

  ‘There is no need for me to look,’ snapped Perovskite who, like all his colleagues, found facts could be a nuisance. They had to be written down and stored and could get in the way afterwards. ‘It is against the law to deprive fellow citizens of available accommodation.’ As he spoke he punched a very podgy right forefinger into Tom’s sternum. He punched so hard that Tom automatically backed away a little. ‘Do you know the penalty?’ He leant forwards to poke Tom again. ‘The automatic penalty for a first offence is an increase in your tax rate. The penalty for a second offence is confiscation. What is your State tax rate at the moment?’

  ‘Eighty per cent,’ said Tom. Four fifths of any cash he and his wife Dorothy earned went straight to the State. They received no benefits and no allowances. English citizens had been taxed, taxed and taxed again to satisfy the ever-growing needs of EUDCE and, in particular, the weaker, poorer Eastern European regions which had joined EUDCE for the subsidies and grants they knew they would be entitled to claim. EUDCE’s commissioners had welcomed these countries, despite the fact that they were likely to be a drain on the State for many years, for two reasons. First, because a bigger EUD
CE gave those controlling it extra power. In the same way that company executives like to expand their companies because this gives them a good excuse to buy bigger jets and pay themselves more, so EUDCE bureaucrats wanted a larger State. And, secondly, because the introduction of new, poorer countries diminished the power of the older, more established nations such as France, Germany (and what was left of the United Kingdom).

  Even before the administrative needs of EUDCE grew to mammoth proportions citizens had been taxed on their income, taxed on what they spent, taxed on what they saved or invested and taxed again when they had the effrontery to die. Now EUDCE was taxing people out of existence. Businesses all over the northern regions had been destroyed by high taxes and red tape and millions working in the private sector had given up official work and were taking small, part time jobs where they were often paid in kind rather than money. In the end all that was left was the red tape and the legions of tax collectors sitting around with nothing much to do.

  The sprouts, meanwhile, were paying themselves more and more; giving one another increasingly extravagant expense accounts and huge bonuses for failure (‘to help soothe the disappointment and guard against feelings of personal inadequacy it is essential to increase bonuses in times of departmental failure,’ read the most significant report on the issue). And there were the index-linked pensions to be paid too.

  Private enterprise had been bled to death and with the failure of non-state industries the basis of society had disappeared. Those who ran EUDCE, the insatiable monster, ever hungry for power and money, were blind to the problems and unable to see that when you kill the golden geese there are no more golden eggs.

  ‘Your tax rate will go up immediately by another five per cent,’ said the sprout. ‘That’s eighty five per cent.’

  ‘I can’t afford that,’ protested Tom.

  ‘That’s your problem,’ said the sprout smugly, with a careless shrug. He strode into the bedroom Tom shared with his wife. ‘This is your bedroom?’ Inside, he looked around. There wasn’t much to see. A double bed. Two small bedside tables, each containing two drawers. A rickety wardrobe and a chest of drawers. ‘These people don’t realise how lucky they are to have us to make all their decisions for them,’ Perovskite said to Tchotchke, speaking over Tom as though he wasn’t there. The sprouts tended to do that a good deal. Perovskite strode across to the chest of drawers and tapped it on the top with his pad. ‘What’s in here?’ he demanded.

  ‘Clothes. Nightwear. A few jumpers. My underclothes. My wife’s underclothes.’

  The inspector opened a drawer. It contained two rather elderly jumpers. Both had holes in the sleeves and were frayed around the neck and cuffs. The sprout checked that the jumpers still had their labels, closed the drawer and opened the drawer to its left. It contained Dorothy’s underwear: three brassieres, half a dozen pairs of knickers, two slips. They were all neatly folded but old and worn. Everything Tom and his wife owned was old and worn. The sprout picked out a brassiere and examined it carefully. ‘She’s a good size. Do you like women with big breasts?’ He looked at Tom. Tom said nothing. Perovskite caressed the material for a moment, then examined the label and held it up.

  ‘The label on this one still carries an old imperial measurement,’ he said. ‘38D. That’s inches!’ He spat out the word ‘inches’ as though he didn’t want it in his mouth for a moment more than was necessary.

  ‘It’s a very old bra,’ explained Tom. ‘But you’ll see that the label also carries official EUDCE sizes.’

  The inspector folded the brassiere and stuffed it into his pocket. ‘This must go for recycling,’ he said. ‘As you should know it is an offence to possess clothing which still contains imperial measurements. They’re a remnant of English imperialism.’

  Tom said nothing. He cursed silently. Sprouts always looked for items carrying imperial measurements. It was the easy way for them to obtain convictions and to show that they were doing their jobs. An easy way for them to bully suspects. And an easy way for them to help themselves to valuable bits and pieces from people’s homes. Anything which contained imperial measurements could be confiscated. Tom knew someone who had been arrested and deported for having a set of scales in his bathroom which still measured weight in pounds and stones. Such things were supposed to be burnt or otherwise destroyed after they’d been confiscated but everyone knew they weren’t. The same people who had made a fortune confiscating and reselling expensive penknives while working at airports now made money confiscating, relabeling and reselling a whole range of illegal items. Even books which contained imperial measurements were confiscated and then resold on the black market.

  Tchotchke pulled out another brassiere and examined the label on that one. He turned to Tom, smiled and put that into his pocket too. He didn’t say anything.

  Only one of the brassieres in Dorothy’s drawer was legally acceptable. Obviously disappointed Tchotchke put that back into the drawer. ‘Is she wearing a soutien-gorge today?’ He used the French word for brassiere. Sprouts always used French words when they could, even if they didn’t speak the language properly. It was an open sign of their loyalty to Brussels and their contempt for England and everything English. Tom had noticed that the British born sprouts were even more likely to use French words than the foreign born ones. And of the British born sprouts it was the Scots who were particularly likely to speak French whenever they could, though their mixture of accents meant that most of the time no one knew what they were trying to say. The Scots had become more bitter than ever when they had discovered that their Regional Parliament was merely a formal consequence of being a EUDCE region, rather than a prelude to the independence they thought they were going to be given.

  ‘Yes, I think so. Yes, of course.’

  ‘She must bring it into the Label offices for label inspection and authorisation or for confiscation.’

  ‘She can’t afford new bras,’ said Tom. ‘All our money goes on food and keeping the house warm during the winter.’

  ‘Then she’ll have to let her big boobies hang free won’t she,’ said Perovskite with a sneer. He went through the rest of the clothes and the bedding quite quickly. He confiscated a pair of Tom’s trousers because the labels on them, though metric, were worn and almost unreadable, and three pairs of socks because they didn’t have any labels at all.

  ‘My socks have never had labels,’ protested Tom.

  ‘All items of clothing and soft furnishing must be labelled,’ insisted Perovskite pompously. ‘And it is an offence to remove or deface EUDCE approved labelling.’ On the landing he turned and poked Tom in the chest again with his right forefinger. ‘One way or another you’re in quite a lot of trouble,’ he said. Tchotchke snorted and sneered.

  Tom didn’t say anything. There was never any point in arguing with a sprout. The laws, and there were plenty of them, were always on their side. He suddenly remembered the slogan ‘the customer is always right’ from the 1950’s. They’d effectively changed it to ‘the sprout is always right’. Whole armies of people were employed solely to castigate, admonish, rebuke, reprove, berate and scold. Adults were treated like children and sprouts were treated like gods. It was widely accepted that the weight of a huge, intolerant and committed bureaucracy lay behind every order and every form, but the public voice was unheard. Every institutional demand, however meaningless and trivial, pointless and wrong-headed in concept, was carved in stone and delivered by truck. There was never room for dissent, discussion or such old-fashioned luxuries as logic and common sense. The mandarins and apparatchiks ruled and what, in a free society, might have grown into genuine, healthy, opposition had rotted and turned into a pustulant mess of resentments.

  As Perovskite prodded again, Tom stepped backwards to get out of the way a little, and to minimise the pain of the poking. As he felt his foot dancing in mid-air he turned and saw that the stairs were directly behind him. He then half stumbled and half fell to one side in his attempt to prevent himself falling down
the stairs. It was, in its way, an elegant pirouette.

  Perovskite, still pushing forwards with his outstretched finger, suddenly found that there was nothing for him to push against. The chest he had intended to prod was no longer there to be prodded. He too stumbled, but instead of falling onto the landing he fell forwards, tripped over the outstretched legs of the fallen Tom and, with a shout and a great deal of noise, tumbled forwards and down the narrow stairs, bumping into the wall a good deal as he did so.

  The second sprout, Tchotchke, rushed down after him, followed closely by Tom.

  When Tom got to the bottom of the stairs he thought at first that Perovskite was dead. His eyes were closed and he was lying in a very uncomfortable looking way. But when Tom knelt down beside him and felt for a pulse in the man’s neck he could feel the regular, rhythmic thump which told him that the man’s heart was still beating strongly.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Tom asked, anxiously.

  Slowly, the sprout opened his eyes and looked around him. ‘I can’t move my legs,’ he said. He lifted his head a little. ‘I can’t move my hands.’

  ‘Don’t move,’ said Tom. ‘I’ll ring for an ambulance.’

  ‘Where is he going to move, you idiot,’ demanded Tchotchke. ‘And how? He’s already told you that he can’t move his arms or legs. Tell them who it’s for.’ The two-tier ambulance service, like all other State services, provided aid solely for sprouts.