The Leader

by Guy Walters

  Just as it occurred to Armstrong that he was being fleeced, his two pursuers walked into the room, opening the door so violently that it bashed into the wall.

  ‘Do you mind?’ barked the proprietress.

  ‘Sorry, madam,’ said one of the men. ‘Don’t know me own strength!’

  London, the voice was London, thought Armstrong. Had they been following him for the past week? No. He surely would have noticed them before.

  ‘Well that’s not good enough,’ said the proprietress. ‘That’s no way to come in here! Anyway, we’re full.’

  ‘But . . .’

  Armstrong had to resist the temptation to smile. This dragon of a teashop owner was doing his work for him.

  ‘I’m not having your sort in here,’ she snapped. ‘Come on! Out!’

  Missing only a broom with which to hit them over the head, Mrs Shipway dispatched Armstrong’s pursuers out of the shop.

  ‘And don’t come back!’

  She slammed the door on them, using more force on it than they had done. Armstrong saw the men standing outside, talking to each other. That was one of the disadvantages of being a secret policeman, he thought, not being able to say who you were. However, despite the levity of the moment, Armstrong did not allow himself to relax. They would doubtless wait for him outside, all day if necessary. He needed to get moving, before one of them went round the back. He had to assume they weren’t fools.

  The one problem was his small suitcase. If he took that to the lavatory, it would look suspicious. He would just have to abandon it – there was nothing in it that would identify him, besides an ivory hairbrush bearing his initials that had been given to him by his father. Too bad. Everything he needed was in his briefcase – he would have to take that with him, even if it did look odd. He turned to his new companion.

  ‘Do you know if there is a lavatory here?’

  ‘Yes – at the back of the room.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Armstrong. ‘In the meantime, do please order whatever you like, won’t you?’

  The woman nodded, her face suggesting that Armstrong should be in no doubt that she would do so. As he walked to the lavatory, hoping that it had a window, he imagined the argument that would follow when they found that he had bolted. He expected Mrs Shipway would make the poor woman pay up. That would teach her, he thought, teach her to be so greedy.

  He opened the door to the lavatory, thanking God when he immediately spotted daylight coming through a frosted window just to the right of the lavatory itself and above the basin. Great – it looked big enough. He locked the door and put his briefcase on the floor, then leaned over the basin and pushed up the lower sash, already wondering whether he should go back to the station or perhaps catch a coach.

  The window stopped moving after a mere five inches. Armstrong briefly shut his eyes. It must have some sort of stopper or wedge. In heaven’s name, he thought, how many old women had attempted to escape coughing up for a pot of tea? He looked up and down the runners, but could see no obstacle. Perhaps it was just stiff. Another heave, but still it wouldn’t budge.

  Hit it, that was what you had to do, hit the frame. That normally loosened it. But that would make a racket. Once again, too bad – by the time they had opened the door to investigate, he would be long gone. He bashed the window frame with the side of his fist, wincing at the ensuing din. Another heave – still it wouldn’t move. He tried pulling down on the upper sash, but that was even more reluctant. Perhaps he should flush his papers down the lavatory and then confront his pursuers. No – too foolhardy. He could get this bloody window open.

  He hit it again, harder this time. They must have heard that. Another heave and then up it shot, so rapidly that it hit the top of the frame. Armstrong took a deep breath. Through the window he could see a small yard, at the end of which was a door set in a high brick wall. It had better not be locked.

  He climbed over the basin and then through the window, taking his briefcase with him. He looked up and around, praying for the absence of faces in overlooking windows. There were none, or at least none he had seen. Keep moving, keep moving.

  Like the window, the door was reluctant but not locked. Armstrong stepped into a cobbled alleyway that ran between the backs of houses and shops. To his right he could see a busier road, and started to head towards it. He’d go to the bus station, but he wouldn’t take a bus to Cardiff. He needed to go somewhere else. He needed to see Philip to make sure that his son was safe, and stayed safe.

  * * *

  Mary had died in April 1931 giving birth to Philip. She had suffered a heart attack during the delivery, and was dead before Philip had uttered his first scream. Armstrong had known something was wrong as soon as he saw the consultant’s face, but had naturally assumed it was about the baby.

  ‘Captain Armstrong?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you like to sit down?’

  ‘Why?’

  The consultant didn’t labour the point, recognising that this was clearly a man who made up his own mind.

  ‘Your wife, sir, I’m sorry . . . I’m afraid we lost her. She died just as your son was being born.’

  He didn’t ask how it had happened because it didn’t seem to matter. The consultant carried on speaking, but Armstrong didn’t hear. It occurred to him, even then, that he had found out the sex of his baby in the same sentence that revealed that Mary had died. So he had a boy, and if it was a boy he was going to be called Philip, after Mary’s late father. A boy called Philip. And a dead wife called Mary. It was he, Armstrong, who should have died; he was the one who had killed in the past, who had seen death close at hand, day in, day out. He was ready for it, he had nearly been there so many times, and it was she who had stopped him, had given him his life back, had given him a son, had now paid the highest price, just for him. It was wrong. Why did she have to be taken away when she was capable of giving so much?

  It was Mary who had nursed him after he had suffered his breakdown in the winter of 1923. The shellshock had hit him just outside Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly. It was Bonfire Night, and someone had thrown a firecracker that had happened to explode a few feet away. He couldn’t remember a thing after that, but the doctors told him that he’d collapsed in the street and had had some sort of fit. He was probably overdoing it, they said, an MP’s life was a busy one. Take it easy for a bit – you’ll see.

  He didn’t take it easy, because he knew that the attacks could come at any moment, and the best way to stop them was to keep going. He medicated himself with whisky, the best part of a bottle a day, but deep down he knew that he was losing, that some day he would have to give up, that it would beat him.

  And beat him it did, just before Christmas, at a dinner in his constituency to celebrate his return to Parliament in that month’s general election. He’d been feeling particularly shaky that day, and the chairman’s wife, who was sitting next to him, noticed that he couldn’t keep his knife and fork still enough to cut his beef. As he stank of whisky, she thought him drunk.

  He collapsed just before he was to give his speech. Perhaps it was the racket of the brass band, perhaps it was the whisky, perhaps it was purely the stress, but he crumpled all the same, hit the floor of the marquee and screamed, in a way that told the veterans present all they needed to know. All the chairman’s wife could do was to ask the band to play a little louder, in fact a lot louder if you please.

  A week later, heavily sedated, he woke up and looked into the face of the woman who was to become his wife in less than twelve months. He found it impossible, no matter how hard he tried to maintain a professional relationship, not to fall in love with this person who was doing so much for him, caring for him, spending all this time with him. They chatted easily, and they could make each other laugh. He felt young again; he trusted her, because she knew everything about him, and he didn’t feel ashamed of his illness.

  He surprised himself when he kissed her. It happened during his physiotherapy, when he w
as learning to walk again. He had been making good progress and could walk well – if a little unsteadily – without a cane. However, on the day in question he made as if to fall, and she held him. He could see the slight shock in her brown eyes at the firmness of his grip, a shock that was increased by his pulling her round to face him.

  As soon as he had kissed her, he felt a fool. He was just another lecherous soldier, making a pathetic pass at a pretty nurse. It must have happened to her hundreds of times. She would beat him off, get herself transferred to another ward, and then he would lose her.

  Armstrong looked out of the window as the coach climbed up into the Malvern Hills. She had kissed him back, of course, and in a way that kiss had killed her. Seven years later he had to bury her, throw a sod on top of her coffin, wondering all the time whether she’d heard Philip’s first cry, whether she had known, even for a few seconds, that she was a mother.

  Ten minutes after getting off the coach, he found himself knocking on the door of a substantial townhouse.

  ‘James!’

  ‘Hello, Elizabeth.’

  ‘You should have phoned! How lovely to see you, though. Come in, come in! What are you doing here?’

  Armstrong took off his hat and kissed his mother-in-law on the cheek.

  ‘I’ll tell you in a second – is Philip here?’

  ‘He’s upstairs with a friend,’ she replied. ‘Shall I go and get him?’

  ‘No, it’s all right, I’ll go up on my own.’

  Armstrong crept up the stairs as quietly as he could, stopping when he reached Philip’s door. From inside he could hear the distinctive sounds of two young boys playing soldiers – the simulated explosions and machine-gun fire, the drone of an aeroplane accompanied by the whistle of a bomb falling.

  He gently eased open the door before jumping into the room and uttering a loud ‘Boo!’

  It took Philip a second or two to recover from the shock.

  ‘Daddy!’ he shouted, getting up. ‘Daddy!’

  Armstrong bent down and picked his son up.

  ‘You’re getting heavy!’

  ‘Not that heavy! Not as heavy as you!’

  ‘Not long now.’

  Armstrong put Philip down and held him by his shoulders.

  ‘Now then, young man, would you like to go to France?’

  ‘France, Daddy?’

  ‘That’s right, France, with Grandma.’

  ‘Are you coming as well?’

  Armstrong shook his head.

  ‘Not straight away, but I shall catch you up. I promise.’

  Chapter Two

  Rule Britannia

  June 1937

  THE LEADER WALKED with a pronounced limp, something he did his best to hide. He had badly broken one of his ankles in May 1915, when he had crash-landed his Morris Farman Longhorn aircraft in front of his mother at Shoreham-on-Sea. He had only just gained his pilot’s certificate, and had to leave the Royal Flying Corps and return to his old regiment – the 16th Lancers – before his leg had fully healed. The trenches were no place for an injured leg, and its worsening condition meant that he was sent back to England in March 1916. Two operations saved the limb, which had been given a fifty-fifty chance of being amputated. Thereafter, the man who was to become the Leader walked with one leg an inch and a half shorter than the other.

  Although the presence of the limp surprised many, it had no such effect on the four men who stood up as the Leader entered the Cabinet Room in Downing Street that morning. They were his oldest colleagues, men who had been especially loyal to the movement, men who were now Members of Parliament and, more importantly, members of the five-strong Emergency Cabinet. All four were wearing the full ‘Action Press’ uniform, which consisted of black army officer’s tunic, black shirt and tie, black breeches and riding boots. The tunic was held together by a thick black belt fastened with a large silver buckle. Around the upper left arm of each man was the Party’s armband, bearing the symbol of the black circle with silver lightning flash through it. Critics back in the early days had called it the ‘flash in the pan’ – not a remark that would be made today. On the table in front of them, alongside their papers and red ministerial boxes, lay the four men’s headgear – black peaked hats, also bearing the Party symbol.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen!’ the Leader boomed, his white teeth flashing underneath his neatly trimmed moustache.

  ‘Good morning, Leader,’ replied the men in unison, along with the most erect fascist salutes they could muster.

  Mosley returned the salute and sat down.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ he commanded. ‘Now then – God, it’s hot today, pour me a glass of water, would you? Thank you . . . I’d like to talk about a problem that affects us all – a problem that we know to be the root cause of our present troubles. I’m speaking of course about immigrants.’

  The four men smiled and the Leader smiled back at them. They all knew that ‘immigrants’ meant ‘Jews’.

  ‘You know that my solution,’ Mosley continued, ‘is to create some sort of national homeland for them. It is my firm belief that this would put an end to all the friction between us and them. This friction has changed the Jew into . . . into a gangster, and I fear that it has brought about a certain, shall we say, brutality in our own people. Let’s not forget those riots earlier this year and who was responsible for them. All this is bad for the immigrants and bad for us. We need to deal with it immediately, get things moving.’

  One of the four caught the Leader’s eye.

  ‘Major-General?’

  The man who spoke was Major-General John Fuller, nicknamed ‘Bony’ because of his remarkable thinness. He had been chief of staff of the British Tank Corps in the Great War, and had masterminded the Cambrai offensive in 1917. Since the war, he had written extensively on tank warfare, arguing that tanks should be used in lightning concentrated thrusts. That call had been rejected by the British army, but it had gained a lot more currency in the newly formed Panzer Corps in Germany, especially with a young Panzer leader called Heinz Guderian. Fuller had joined the British Union in 1934, and had been a prolific lecturer and writer for the movement. It was only natural, then, for the Leader to place such a man in charge of the armed forces. Fuller was an excellent man, Mosley thought, truly first-rate, and what was essential was that the forces were loyal to him, saw him as one of their own.

  ‘There is of course a practical issue here,’ said Fuller, his voice much deeper than his slight frame would suggest. ‘There must be tens – hundreds – of thousands of Jewish immigrants in Britain. Transporting them overseas would use up an immense amount of resources, resources that we need to get the country back on its feet.’

  ‘Then why don’t we get the Jews to do that?’

  The voice was cold, clipped, unpleasant. It belonged to the Minister for Information, William Joyce. He had a huge scar on his right cheek, running from his ear to his mouth, and his chin bore a pronounced dimple. He made up for his lack of height by being highly muscled, and his ability as a fierce and vitriolic speaker had gained him the position of Propaganda Director for the movement in 1933.

  ‘Get them to do what exactly?’ the Leader asked.

  ‘Some real work, for a change! We should put them in camps where they can build machinery, houses – things the country needs.’

  ‘I like it,’ said the Leader, sitting back and grinning. ‘It would certainly put them to good use.’

  ‘Dr Goebbels tells me they’re planning to do the same thing over there,’ said Joyce. ‘Get them out of their banks and shops, and make them actually contribute rather than just . . . steal.’

  ‘So they’re going to put all of them in camps?’ asked Mosley.

  ‘Precisely,’ Joyce replied.

  The Leader nodded to himself, chewing it over.

  ‘I wonder how long it would take us to build such camps?’ he asked, scribbling a note on some paper headed with both the royal coat of arms and the fascist lightning flash.

&
nbsp; The Leader looked over to his Home Secretary for a response. A tubby man with a large moustache, Neil Francis Hawkins had been a surgical instruments salesman before he had taken over the running of the movement’s enterprises as secretary, managing director and chairman of the Party’s trust. A safe pair of hands, the Leader thought, an honourable man, and loyal, deeply loyal.

  ‘I’d say a month, maybe two,’ said Francis Hawkins. ‘After all, we can get them to build the camps themselves!’

  The five men laughed in unison.

  ‘Excellent!’ the Leader boomed. ‘Excellent! These camps could of course be built near existing factories, so they can supplement the work forces.’

  He scribbled down another note.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’d like you, Thomson, to liaise with some of the more sympathetic industrialists about this.’

  Alexander Raven Thomson, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was the movement’s ‘philosopher’. He had studied philosophy and economics at universities in Germany, America and Scotland, and he saw in the Leader a man who could realise his dream of building a corporate state, a society modelled on the lines of an insect community, in which there was a ‘communal spirit shared by every member of the hive’.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll have no problems there,’ he said, sucking on his pipe. ‘Incidentally, how many Jews do we have at the moment?’

  ‘Our latest estimate puts them at around three hundred and fifty thousand,’ said Francis Hawkins, ‘with about two thirds of them in London, mostly in the East End, of course.’

  ‘Christ!’ the Leader exclaimed. ‘It’s worse than I thought! And no doubt these are only the ones we know about. There are probably thousands more entering the country illegally every month. Where do they all end up?’

  ‘Major cities mostly – Leeds, Manchester, Cardiff, Bristol, Newcastle, Hull. There are areas in some cities where the Jews are actually in the majority.’

  ‘Disgraceful!’ the Leader snarled.

  ‘Don’t forget they’re north of the border as well,’ Raven Thomson chipped in, speaking slowly and authoritatively. ‘They seem to be doing their best to infect the Clyde. I’m afraid not even we Scots are immune from their pernicious influence.’