The Leader

by Guy Walters

  ‘Soon, I hope,’ said the Leader, tapping his pen violently on the table, ‘soon we shall all be free from them. Let the camps be the first part of our solution, and then let’s look at something more long-term, more permanent. I strongly believe, and I say it again, that immigration is the biggest problem we have to face.’

  ‘PJ,’ muttered William Joyce darkly. Perish Judah.

  The others drummed on the table with their fists in response. Mosley paused before continuing.

  ‘I’m going to Germany next week. I shall talk to Herr Hitler about it then, tell him that we no longer wish to be the dumping ground for these people. I’ll keep you all informed, of course. In the meantime, let’s get these camps underway and get some use out of these people. If they want to come here, then they can bloody well be made to work.’

  The Leader paused once more and then clapped his hands.

  ‘Right! Other business! Home Secretary, I believe you had something to say about the HMSSP building up some links with the Gestapo.’

  The men relaxed as Francis Hawkins started to speak.

  * * *

  Henry Allen was a quiet man, an intelligent man, and a good husband to Louisa. His father had made a small fortune out of a printing business, which had enabled him to send young Henry to Eton, where the boy had prospered. Although not from the same stock as his contemporaries, his easy manner and his right-wing views meant that he fitted in comfortably. By the time Henry left Oxford in 1922, those views had hardened, and finding himself disenchanted with the Tory party, he went in search of something stronger. He found fascism, and later Oswald Mosley, a man he regarded as nothing less than a potential saviour.

  In 1934, Allen published a book called BUF, Oswald Mosley and British Fascism, in which he hyperbolically lauded Mosley. ‘In his greatest potentiality,’ Allen wrote, ‘he stands for new and revolutionary conceptions in politics, in economics, and in life itself.’ Allen’s loyalty to Mosley saw him rewarded with a seat in Parliament, the realisation of an ambition held for many years.

  He should have been happy about his position, and for the most part he was, but as he swung his legs out of bed that morning, he was suffering under a barrage of doubt. For although Henry Allen was undoubtedly a fascist – a great believer in what he had described in his book as the ‘movement towards national integration’ – he was no hater of freedom. Yes, to his self-confessed discredit he had gone along with the brutality of the movement, but he had seen that as the price of realising his greater dream of a fascist Britain. But now that Britain had arrived, he found himself deeply disquieted. The treatment of the Jews, the censorship, the everyday scenes of Blackshirt violence – all these combined to form a nation whose people were at war with each other. Fascism was not bringing integration, thought Allen, but the very opposite – fragmentation.

  Allen walked into the bathroom and urinated. After he had finished, he started to run himself a bath. As the water gushed in, he studied himself in the mirror. He needed to trim his moustache, he thought, and not only that, he needed to lose a little weight. His cheeks looked podgy and he had developed a slight paunch over the past six months. Perhaps he would take up running again.

  He slipped into the bath and lay back, letting the hot water envelop him, appreciating its comfort with a long sigh.

  ‘You all right in there?’

  It was Louisa. He had obviously woken her up.

  ‘Fine, dear,’ he called back to the bedroom. ‘Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Loglike. That was quite a sigh, darling. Are you sure you’re OK?’

  Allen paused.

  ‘Just a little groggy.’

  He heard Louisa let out a slight chuckle.

  ‘How much did you drink?’ she asked.

  ‘Must have had at least a couple of bottles,’ he replied, which was true. But he didn’t have a hangover.

  ‘You’re a disgrace,’ said Louisa, her tone suggesting that the remark was only partly in jest.

  Allen didn’t respond.

  ‘Still alive in there?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, sitting up. ‘I was miles away.’

  ‘Where?’ Louisa asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said you were miles away – where were you?’

  ‘Oh – nowhere really.’

  ‘Henryland, was it?’

  ‘Henryland’ was Louisa’s condescending term for her husband’s extended moments of deep thought. It was hard to reach him in Henryland.

  ‘No,’ Allen replied, his tone serious. ‘I was somewhere else.’

  ‘This is intriguing.’

  He didn’t reply for a while, unsure whether to confide in her. Would she understand?

  ‘I’ll tell you when I’m out of the bath.’

  ‘Can’t wait.’

  Allen spent the next minute briskly soaping and rinsing himself. He would tell her, she would understand, even though she too was a Blackshirt, the daughter of Earl Hallowes, himself a leading member of the Party. He had met her a few years ago at a meeting of the January Club – a BUF offshoot for the aristocracy and captains of industry – and they had quickly fallen into a love that drew much strength from his money and her pedigree. As far as both parties in the marriage were concerned, the other was a committed fascist. But now Allen wanted to tell his wife that it was a mistake, a vast mistake. Fascism had attracted the wrong crowd – a crowd of dangerous idiots and fools who saw it as a route to wielding absolute power. It had become rotten, perhaps even evil.

  He stepped out of the bath and wrapped himself in a towelling robe. As he walked into the bedroom, Louisa was sitting up.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘what were you thinking?’

  Allen looked intently at his wife.

  ‘If you really want to know,’ he said, ‘I was thinking how funny it is that fascism seems to attract only beautiful women.’

  She grinned back at him.

  ‘You charmer you,’ she said. ‘Come here.’

  Allen hadn’t wanted to make love, feeling that it would be a sort of lie. He partially enjoyed it, but even as he was inside her he wanted to be as far away as possible. There was no way he could tell her what he was feeling, he realised, for the very simple reason that he couldn’t trust her. He had become a stranger, a stranger to her, to the Leader, and to the movement. It felt different, but it was beginning to feel right.

  * * *

  The bedside telephone started ringing just after four o’clock in the morning. Armstrong was a light sleeper, especially during the last few weeks, his dreams dominated by images of running towards Philip and yet never getting any closer. His waking mind knew that Philip was safely in a hotel just outside St Malo with his grandmother, but the images flooded his brain with such force that he would regularly wake up in a cold panic.

  He answered the telephone at the third ring, his heart already starting to race.

  ‘James?’

  The voice was familiar, but it sounded deeply strained.

  ‘James, it’s me, Anne. They’ve . . . they’ve . . .’

  Armstrong sat up. It was Alec’s wife.

  ‘What, Anne? What is it?’

  ‘They’ve taken him away.’

  ‘When? When did they come?’

  Armstrong had no need to ask who ‘they’ were – they would be the HMSSP.

  ‘About . . . about ten minutes ago.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Anne couldn’t reply, her voice heavy with tears.

  ‘Anne!’ Armstrong insisted, instantly regretting that he sounded so harsh. ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Not very much,’ came the reply. ‘They simply said that they . . . that they had a warrant for his arrest.’

  ‘Arrest? What for?’

  ‘Unpatriotic activities,’ Anne managed to mumble through her tears.

  Armstrong closed his eyes. How many others had been spirited away into the night and fog under that hateful term? There were many rumours now about the actions
of the HMSSP, about beatings, disappearances, torture, some even said executions. God knew what the truth was, as the truth served up by Action and The Blackshirt was a distorted version of it. Armstrong disagreed even with that notion, that the truth could be ‘distorted’. There were no gradations of truth, he said, because truth was an absolute. If something wasn’t true, no matter how closely it approximated to the actuality, then it was time to start regarding it as a lie.

  ‘Was that all they said?’ Armstrong asked.

  ‘Yes, just that, unpatriotic activities, that’s all. What’s he been up to, James? I know he’s been seeing you a lot . . .’

  ‘He’s been doing nothing, Anne, not as far as I’m aware.’

  How hateful, Armstrong thought, that husbands were being forced to lie to their wives, and yet how reassuring that Alec had been so discreet.

  ‘He’s also been away quite a bit,’ she said. ‘Said he’s been seeing a few old friends—’

  ‘Anne!’ Armstrong interrupted. How could he explain to her that the telephone might well be tapped?

  ‘Anne, please, just keep calm. I’ll be right over, as soon as the curfew ends.’

  ‘Would you do that?’

  ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘I’ll come as soon as I can.’

  ‘James?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you sure he’s not done anything? I mean . . .’

  ‘Anne – don’t worry. I’m sure it’s just a mistake.’

  ‘You . . . you think so?’

  ‘Positive. Now, you hold on, and I’ll see you in an hour or so.’

  ‘All right – but you will definitely come?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Armstrong, and put the phone down.

  It briefly crossed his mind that it was a trap, but he quickly dismissed the idea, knowing that the HMSSP would have no need to lure him over to Chelsea – they could just as easily arrest him here in Victoria.

  ‘Dear God,’ he said to himself as he got out of bed.

  How much did they know? Everything? Had one of his Army contacts betrayed them? Or did the HMSSP in fact know very little, and so had decided to go to work on Alec? Would Alec hold out? Armstrong had to assume he wouldn’t, in which case the entire nascent network was blown. The chances were that arrests were being made simultaneously up and down the country, and that a carload of secret policemen were already drawing up outside.

  He knew they would come, there was no doubt about that. If not now, then soon. He had already seen the signs, subtle signs – that face under a grey snap-brim hat he had spotted too many times, the wrong numbers late at night, his neighbours’ recently acquired wariness. Put together, they formed a picture of imminent danger, a picture that was forcing him to pack a small suitcase. He was tempted to leave now, to break the curfew, but that would be foolish, an unnecessary risk. The time for bribery had gone. Into the suitcase went a small washbag, some underwear, a few shirts and a pullover. Apart from a spare pair of trousers and some stout hiking boots, his packing was complete. He would wear a plain blue suit – it was suitably anonymous.

  He left his bedroom, and walked down the long corridor to his book-lined study. The room was dominated by a large oak desk. He sat at it and unlocked a drawer before pulling it out fully. Attached to its back was a cream envelope, from which he extracted two sheets of foolscap writing paper. At the top of each sheet was engraved ‘The Right Honourable Captain James Armstrong PC MP DSO MC’, and covering all four sides was a hand-written list.

  He looked carefully down the list, refreshing his memory. These were the names of towns and counties, and of those he had met in them over the past few weeks, men who had agreed to help him. Armstrong was delighted with the reports made to. him by Major-General Clifford and General Galwey, both of whom had sounded out and secured the assistance of army officers they knew to be anti-Mosley. It was an impressive list, thought Armstrong, but it was a fragile one nevertheless. All that was required was for a few whispers to reach the ears of the regime, and Mosley would instigate a purge, ridding the army of suspect elements. Although Mosley’s grip on power was firm, it was not yet an iron one, and Armstrong knew that anything that challenged that grip might only serve to give Mosley the excuse to tighten it.

  Every county had a name, the name of a man he hoped he could trust. Armstrong believed that trust, unlike truth, did have its gradations. These men could certainly be trusted, but whether any of them could withstand torture was a different matter. Each man knew only the identity of those in counties adjacent to his own. If one of them broke, then the network would not collapse, but would merely lose a limb, a limb that could possibly grow back. But Alec’s arrest was a severe blow, one that could see all these men in custody by the end of the day.

  He took the list to the fireplace in the drawing room. He was tempted not to burn it, but if it was found, he knew that would be the end of any chance of a return to democracy, a return to a country whose inhabitants did not live in fear of each other. The sheets burned quickly, and he broke their ashes up into minute fragments, remembering that even a burned piece of paper could still reveal some of its inked secrets.

  He yawned and walked quickly back to the bedroom. He changed out of his pyjamas and into his suit, then opened the door of a large mahogany cupboard and reached up to the top shelf, his hands scrabbling around under a pile of blankets. It was there, his Smith & Wesson from the Great War – fully loaded. He slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  It felt like the hours before a battle, his thoughts urgently flitting between what was to come and what had already happened. Part of him wanted to leave immediately, but he had to restrain himself. He hated to wait, it was not in his nature, but for the next few minutes he would have to. He had to hope that he was ahead of them, or that they were keeping him on ice.

  Fortified by a hasty bowl of Shredded Wheat and a large cup of Camp coffee, Armstrong stepped out on to the street at five past five. A bright summer morning’s sun forced him to squint as he walked up to his Daimler ‘Light Twenty’ saloon. Before he climbed in, he looked up and down the street, trying to establish whether he was being watched. It was hard to tell. All he could see was the slow progress of the milkman’s horse and cart. If someone was keeping an eye on him, they were keeping themselves well hidden.

  What Armstrong didn’t notice was the movement of a curtain in a window below his flat. For the past two weeks, Mrs Catherine Hill, a light sleeper and eccentric widow in her late sixties, had been performing her patriotic duty by keeping an eye on her upstairs neighbour. Two charming young men had popped by for a cup of tea one afternoon, and had told her that they suspected Mr Armstrong might be up to no good – something to do with Communists, they said – and so would Mrs Hill let them know whether he had any visitors, and at what times he went in and out? They gave her a number she could call any time, day or night, in case she wanted to report something urgently. Mrs Hill closed the curtain and walked over to her telephone. It felt good to do her bit, she thought, not that she was a fascist – heaven forbid! – but if there was one thing her late husband had hated more than anything else it was Bolsheviks.

  The car started easily, as it always did. Although the Daimler had cost him some £700, Armstrong maintained it was worth every penny. He turned into Victoria Street and headed towards the station. There, he turned left and accelerated sharply down Vauxhall Bridge Road, making his way towards the river. He allowed himself to breathe out a little, aware that his shoulders were abnormally tense. He would see Anne, albeit very briefly, and then get out of London.

  The side of the black van read ‘Steinberg & Son – Purveyors of Fine Groceries’. Saul Steinberg was proud of his business, although he was far more proud of Ben, his thirteen-year-old son, who had been acting as his delivery boy during the summer holidays. He had painted the ‘& Son’ on himself, his chest swelling with paternal pride. One day Ben would inherit the business, and he would doubtless make a real go of it. He had a good head, Saul reck
oned, had taken after his father.

  But such moments of optimism were few. Saul knew that there might not be a business for Ben to inherit. The pages of the order book were filling far more slowly these days, and they had only a few remaining customers up West. No reasons had been given by those who would tell them abruptly one morning, ‘I’m afraid we have a new supplier, Mr Steinberg – good day.’ Some of the housekeepers were a little more kind, would apologise profusely and remind him conspiratorially how difficult it was to employ someone from the East End these days, how the lady of the house couldn’t have it. Saul hated the euphemism, because ‘East End’ meant nothing more than ‘Jewish’.

  Saul knew from the smashed-up windows of his shop, from the Star of David repeatedly painted on his van, not to mention the graffiti – ‘Filthy Jew’, ‘Back Home Shylock’ – that times were bad, almost as bad as they were in Germany. He had cousins there, and they were telling him the most horrific stories, stories of Orthodox Jews having their beards shaved off in public, stories of beatings, even murders.

  It was happening here as well. Only the other night, his wife Anja had come home in tears, her clothes dishevelled and torn. It had taken her twenty minutes to calm down enough to tell Saul how she had been surrounded by a gang of Blackshirts. They had threatened to cut her up, to rape her, to kill her. They had called her the most terrible names, and the more she pleaded, the more they laughed. The worst thing about it, she said, was that people had walked past, not wanting to get involved – even a policeman! What was going to happen to them if even policemen were ignoring their plight? She hadn’t thought it would be like this in England. Were they to be hated wherever they went? It had taken a gang of Jewish boys to set her free, their presence giving her the opportunity to run away before a vicious fight broke out between the two gangs. It’ll get better, said Saul, hugging his wife, knowing in his heart that his words of comfort were hollow words.