by Guy Walters
Armstrong maintained his composure as he scrabbled for a solution. Feign illness? He had no time to come up with anything more elaborate – it was the only way. He started to cough, forcing his lungs to hack away in the fume-filled air.
‘Hey, man, are you all right?’
Armstrong held up his hand to indicate that he needed no help, but continued to cough. Heads were turning, but he ignored them. The very act of coughing started to make him feel sick. Sick – that was a good idea.
He cupped his right hand over his mouth, and then covered that with his left, obscuring the fact that he was shoving two fingers down his throat, forcing them as deep as they would go. He bent down and turned away from Fraser and the passengers behind him – hopefully no one would see that his suffering was self-inflicted.
As the first wave of bile spewed out, he felt a hand come to rest on his shoulder.
‘Jeezus, man!’ he heard Fraser exclaiming. ‘Are ye all right?’
Armstrong expelled the remnants of lunch’s leek and potato soup and the KitKat on to the platform. He continued coughing, then fell to the ground and writhed around, clutching his stomach, breathing in and out rapidly.
‘Go and get help!’ Fraser shouted. ‘Get one of them policemen!’
Armstrong kept his watering eyes open just enough to detect that a crowd had gathered around him, all of whom had concerned looks on their faces.
‘What’s up with him?’
‘Looks in a bad way.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Would you like a glass of water?’
‘Is someone getting help?’
After less than a minute, Armstrong became aware of the presence of two policemen. This was it.
‘What’s happened here?’ one of the constables asked.
‘This poor fellow is having some sort of fit,’ said Fraser. ‘He just started coughing and then he was sick . . .’
‘What’s ‘is name?’
‘He’s called Carr, Andrew Carr. I only just met him.’
‘Mr Carr!’ the policeman shouted. ‘Mr Carr! Can you hear me?’
Armstrong ignored the question and continued to writhe.
‘Mr Carr!’
Still Armstrong didn’t reply.
‘Peter,’ said the policeman to his colleague, ‘get an ambulance here! This chap’s in a bad way.’
The other policeman hared off as Armstrong did his best to mask any feelings of relief. So far, so good.
‘All right, people,’ the policeman announced. ‘Move along! He’ll be all right – come on, move it! Curfew’s in half an hour! Let’s go.’
‘I should stay with him,’ said Fraser.
‘That won’t be necessary, sir – everybody’s got to go through the checkpoint, even Party members such as yourself. He’ll be taken to University College Hospital – you can see him there.’
Fraser bent down to Armstrong.
‘You hang in there, old man,’ he said. ‘I’ll come and see ye tomorrow.’
Armstrong croaked out some indistinguishable words accompanied by a faint smile of gratitude. Fraser clicked his heels together and offered him an erect fascist salute. Armstrong lifted his hand weakly in reply.
Five minutes later, Armstrong found himself being eased on to a stretcher. Within that time another train had pulled up alongside the adjacent platform, disgorging a mass of passengers who found themselves being shepherded into the same queue. Great, thought Armstrong, that could only work to his advantage.
He was carried along the length of the queue, the policeman walking next to his head. He kept his eyes shut as they reached the checkpoint.
‘What’s wrong with him then?’ came a gruff voice.
‘He’s had a fit of some sort,’ said the policeman. ‘He’s being taken to University College Hospital.’
‘Do we know his name?’
‘He’s called Andrew Carr.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘His briefcase.’
A pause, that seemed to go on for hours.
‘All right, get rid of him. I don’t fancy his smell for much longer. See him into the ambulance, Rogers, and then get back here. There are far too many bloody people to deal with and only a few minutes before the curfew! They could have given me a bit more notice!’
Relief, sheer bloody relief. As he was carried across the concourse, he looked up to see a giant portrait of the King and the Leader, both dressed in their full fascist uniforms. Underneath ran the slogan ‘Hail Britannia!’ which caused Armstrong to grimace involuntarily.
‘All right, Mr Carr,’ said the policeman. ‘You’re nearly there. You’ll be fixed up right as rain.’
As Armstrong was loaded into the back of the ambulance, along with his briefcase, the policeman gave him a fascist salute. Thank God he hadn’t tried to bribe his way out, thought Armstrong. The man was even wearing a Party armband.
A somewhat perplexed doctor put it down to food poisoning and insisted that Mr Carr spend the night in hospital. Armstrong was nervous about that, worrying that if his deception was rumbled he would be trapped. However, it was now well after the curfew, and he didn’t want to be caught tramping the streets. He would discharge himself first thing in the morning.
* * *
‘How perfectly delightful of you to come!’ said Lady Cunard, her voice ebullient, her vowels revealing the slightest hint of her American roots.
‘We wouldn’t have missed it for anything, Emerald,’ the Leader replied, kissing his diminutive hostess on each cheek.
‘And Golden Corn! You look as glowing as ever! Power suits you, my dear!’
The Leader’s wife was not the blushing sort, but at this particular instant she came close to it. ‘Golden Corn’ was Lady Cunard’s nickname for the strikingly blonde Diana, who had been an habituée of her salons for many years.
‘You’re very naughty to say that, Emerald,’ she replied, miming a smacking motion with her hand.
Lady Cunard’s eyes twinkled for a brief second before she replied.
‘Well, I hope you don’t have me locked up for it!’
The Leader and his wife forced out a laugh. The joke was a little close to the bone, but then Lady Cunard was renowned for her outrageous sense of humour. No one was immune, not even the Leader. She lived in a vast house on the corner of Grosvenor Square, and over much of the past two decades had established herself as London’s leading hostess. The Leader had attended her salons as a young man, attracted less perhaps by their assembly of men of influence than by Lady Cunard’s ability to procure the most beautiful young women in London.
Of these, Diana had been the most exquisite, and in 1932 the young baronet Sir Oswald ‘Tom’ Mosley had started a passionate affair with the then Mrs Bryan Guinness. By the time the Leader’s first wife died of peritonitis in the spring of 1933, the affair was in full blossom, and the couple married in October 1936 at the lakeside villa of Dr Goebbels near Berlin. Hitler had attended the luncheon after the ceremony – it was the second time the two men had met, and they found each other good company, Mosley delighting in the Führer’s excellent mimicry of Mussolini. Mosley thought Hitler a ‘cool customer’, and later remarked to his wife that if, in a fit of canine rage, ‘it be true that he bites the carpet, he knows to a millimetre how far his tooth is going in’.
‘Now come on through,’ said Lady Cunard. ‘There are plenty of people who are dying to meet you.’
She led them into the elegant drawing room, where their fellow guests were assembled, cocktails in hand. The Leader and his wife steeled themselves for Lady Cunard’s habit of announcing new arrivals, which she did with ‘the clarity of a toastmaster at the Lord Mayor’s banquet’, as the Leader had once described it.
‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ she boomed. ‘Our dear Leader and his wife – Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley!’
Glasses and fascist salutes were raised in unison as the Leader scanned the room. The guests were certainly familiar – the German am
bassador Joachim von Ribbentrop and his somewhat dowdy wife, Annelies; the Duke of Westminster – known as ‘Bendor’ in reference to a device on his coat of arms; the famous aviator Lord Sempill; the landowner Lord Brocket; the popular historian Arthur Bryant; the newly reappointed head of naval intelligence Admiral Sir Barry Domville; Captain Archibald Ramsay, a former Conservative MP who was now a British Union MP; and one of the Leader’s longest-serving and most loyal colleagues, Henry Allen. In addition to the men’s wives were two other guests, who were standing arm-in-arm. They made a striking couple, not least because the male half was wearing the smart black dress uniform of an SS captain, while the female half was a podgier version of Diana. This was not surprising, given that she was in fact Diana’s sister, the Honourable Unity Mitford.
For the next hour, the talk was dominated by three subjects – the Jews, Bolshevism, and relations with Germany. Although the Leader had no wish to talk about business, von Ribbentrop was able to trap him in a corner, where the German spoke at great length about Mosley’s forthcoming visit to Berlin. The Führer was looking forward to it immensely, von Ribbentrop was able to report, and the Leader and his wife would have a most enjoyable trip. Although the Leader found von Ribbentrop a bore, he was nevertheless patient with him, all the time thinking about what he had been told a few weeks ago by Sir Roger Ousby – that the ambassador had a serious infatuation with the Queen, and would regularly send her seventeen carnations. Sir Roger had been unable to establish the significance of the quantity, although his spies in the Palace were working on it.
Dinner was a sumptuous affair, washed down with a conversation largely concerned with the Jewish menace and the threat of communism. Stressing that everything he was about to say was to go no further than the table, the Leader held forth, once in a while allowing a fellow guest to add his or her tuppenceworth. Without wishing to reveal too much about his recent Cabinet meeting, Mosley said that plans were afoot to allow the Government the opportunity to deal with the twin dangers of Jewry and Bolshevism. Looking pointedly at von Ribbentrop, he suggested that Britain would need to work together with Germany on these problems, rather than letting the good Führer do all the hard work on his own. After all, he said, both countries, along with Italy, were at the start of a great adventure, an adventure that would lead to nothing less than the whole world embracing the glory of fascism.
The historian Arthur Bryant told the company that even in Germany the Jewish problem had not been fully dealt with, although he commended the ambassador for the steps that had been taken so far. The Jews had, after all, ‘an inherited instinct to skim the cream rather than to waste vain time and effort in making enduring things’. It was time that this lack of productive work was rectified, he said, a sentiment heartily endorsed by the table. Bryant went further, stating that the Jews were sexually amoral and were extremely promiscuous. He told the table that German Jews held private parties at which ‘mattresses were strewn about and petting was only the beginning’.
The Duke of Westminster, who smoked a large cigar the whole way through dinner, readily agreed, saying that the Jews were foul, and that he was glad the recent Treaty of London had averted a ‘Jewish war’, because that was exactly what the Jews wanted. Lords Brocket and Sempill agreed, and both chipped in with enthusiastic tributes to the Führer and wished the Leader well in whatever solution he and his Cabinet came up with. Sir Barry Domville described the Jews as a ‘beastly little race’, a view echoed for more forcefully by Unity Mitford.
‘The Jews in England,’ she warned the group, ‘are more clever with their propaganda than in other countries.’ She added that British Jews worked ‘behind the scenes’, and that she wished her dear brother-in-law well in dealing with them. It would be difficult, she said, because they never came into the open and so it was hard for the public to see them ‘in their true dreadfulness’. She then went on to recount, to much amusement, how she had heard that some Jews in Germany had been made to cut grass with their teeth, and how she herself, when in Germany, had deliberately misdirected a heavily laden Jewish woman away from the railway station. This brought more laughter, as well as a proud wink from her SS boyfriend.
Henry Allen was a little more reserved, telling the table that although it was true to say that the Jews certainly had a destabilising effect on society, it would be wrong to go so far as to suggest that they were evil. This caused an uproar, with the rest of the table saying that that was exactly what they were, and that Allen had better wake to up the fact. Allen gave way gracefully, and said that he was willing to be proved wrong. This brought forth a litany of Jewish crimes, especially from Captain Ramsay, who knowledgeably informed the group that the Jews, in league with the Freemasons, were behind the Bolshevik revolution, and that eradicating the Jewish influence from these shores was the only way to save the country from the evil of communism.
As the evening wore on, the tone became more light-hearted and jokes circulated. The one that caused the greatest laugh was told by Lord Brocket, who said that a friend who had recently stayed at the Metropole in Brighton had told him that there ‘wasn’t enough foreskin there to cover a thruppeny-bit’. However, the star turn of the evening was provided by Captain Ramsay, who sat down at the Steinway and sang, to the tune of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’:
Land of dope and Jewry,
Land that once was free,
All the Jew boys praise thee
While they plunder thee.
Land of Jewish finance,
Fooled by Jewish lies,
In press and books and movies
While our birthright dies.
Longer still and longer
Is the rope they get
But, by the God of battles
Twill serve to hang them yet.
Ramsay was soon joined in the singing by the others, and as Lady Cunard’s guests left at around two a.m., many were humming the tune. Ramsay promised to make some copies of the lyrics over the weekend, which he would post out on Monday morning. The only person who said that he did not require a copy was Henry Allen, who told Ramsay that the lyrics were so excellent that he would easily be able to remember them. A lie, of course, because Allen had resolved over dinner that he wanted no more of this. It was not the wine talking, but the conversation of his fellow guests that had convinced him that the most honourable thing he could do was to work against everything he had helped to build up.
* * *
Armstrong discharged himself from hospital at seven o’clock the following morning. The doctor strongly advised him to remain for another twenty-four hours, but ‘Andrew Carr’ insisted that he had important Party business to attend to, and that he would not allow a mere stomach bug to deter him from carrying out the orders of the Leader. Armstrong could see the hate in the doctor’s eyes, and he was glad of it. It was that hate that would ensure the coup’s success, a hate that was coursing through all those who desperately wanted to see a return to freedom and an end to an atmosphere in which nobody could be trusted.
He found a telephone box outside the hospital, and was grateful for the temporary shelter it afforded. He felt naked out on the streets, aware that it would take just one pair of eyes to spot him. The Blackshirt uniform would remain effective for only so long, and he needed to get off the streets as soon as possible.
Armstrong called the operator, asking to be connected to a number in south-west London.
‘Chelsea 9261,’ came a familiar and welcome voice.
‘Ted?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s James Armstrong.’
Ted Frost paused, and then exclaimed: ‘Good God! James! Christ almighty! Where in God’s name are you?’
‘Listen, I’ve got to be quick – I’m in London, I need to come over.’
This time there was a longer pause.
‘I’ll understand if you don’t want me–’ Armstrong started, although if he was honest with himself, he wouldn’t understand at all.
‘Of course you
bloody can!’
‘Thank you, Ted.’
‘Not at all. Get here as soon as you can!’
‘I’ll get a taxi,’ said Armstrong. ‘Still at number thirty-seven?’
‘Yes. We’ll have some breakfast ready for you if you want.’
‘Good – see you in a bit.’
Armstrong didn’t find Ted quite as welcoming as he had hoped. There was nothing specific, just an underlying tone of wariness. When Ted had opened the door, he had paused before ushering Armstrong in. The handshake was not warm, but slightly formal. The introduction to Bridget, who Armstrong knew well, was laboured and awkward. Bridget’s smile was forced, and she displayed little of the affectionate warmth that Armstrong was used to. Both were smoking, and Armstrong thought that Ted’s breath betrayed a hint of whisky. Rather than dwell on it, he put their state down to the misgivings they might reasonably have over harbouring a wanted man. After all, Ted and Bridget were decent people, and decent people did not welcome fugitives into their homes, even if they were on the same side.
‘Are you all right, Ted?’ Armstrong asked.
‘Fine! Just slightly surprised to see you, that’s all. And, er, I don’t deny that I’m a little startled to see you dressed up like that!’
Armstrong briefly closed his eyes – that was why they seemed so off.
‘I’m so sorry, Ted. It’s a disguise. I haven’t gone all Mosleyite on you, I promise.’
‘So how did you end up wearing—’
‘Can I explain this over breakfast?’ Armstrong suggested. ‘I haven’t really had a thing to eat since lunch yesterday.’
‘Good God, of course! Eggs, bacon – whisky – what do you want?’
‘Everything,’ said Armstrong. ‘Although perhaps not the whisky.’