Children of the Sun

by Max Schaefer

  Three black men now stood with folded arms. ‘If a skinhead said to me …’ one was saying, ‘I would put it back on to him …’ He enumerated oppressive structures on his fingers. Philip said, ‘You have to stop this now. It’s too painfully ’90s.’ He lit up and took a drag. ‘Christ, we were fucking humourless.’

  The youngest black man said, ‘I can’t shed my skin so I think these skinheads should take their fucking uniforms off.’

  ‘You and me both, sweetheart,’ Philip yawned, passing Tom the spliff.

  ‘See?’ I told Adam, stopping the tape. ‘When you go out in your gear you’re the oppressor. When you go to your club.’

  ‘Not these days. Not in London. Anyway, at least I smile at people.’

  ‘I smile,’ I said, lying on the floor, and Philip said:

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘What club?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Adam’ (I inhaled and coughed) ‘goes to a skinhead night. In Vauxhall.’

  ‘That sounds fun,’ said Philip. ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘I’ve not been.’

  ‘Oh, you have to, surely.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m invited.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ said Adam. ‘But you’ll be disappointed again.’

  ‘Again?’ Tom asked. (God, I thought hazily, you are on the ball.)

  ‘So what goes on at this club?’ Philip said.

  ‘Not in front of the child,’ I told him.

  ‘James …’

  ‘Is it like a sex club?’ said Tom.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Adam smiled at him in a way I didn’t much like. ‘More a club with sex.’

  ‘So that’s what the nazi obsession’s about,’ Tom murmured to Sonny. ‘James is jealous of his boyfriend, fucking all those skinheads.’

  ‘Nah, I’m way too busy fucking yours.’ This sounded louder and less casual than I had intended.

  ‘That’s not funny, James,’ Philip said, and told Tom, ‘Ignore him, babe.’

  Adam stroked my head. ‘James is tired. He hasn’t slept much recently.’

  ‘Imagine,’ said Tom, ‘how he’d cope if he had a job.’

  There was a general silence at that. Eventually I asked, ‘Shall I put some music on?’

  ‘Not,’ said Philip, ‘if it’s fucking Skrewdriver.’

  ‘I was thinking Tom Robinson. I found him on iTunes.’

  ‘Darling, I remember him from the first time round. He was shit.’

  ‘He was lovely. I want to marry him.’

  ‘He was lovely. And very important. But the music was shit.’

  I reached for the joint and smoked, regarding him. ‘It’s weird thinking you were around for this stuff. You remember the Winter of Discontent.’

  ‘I was twelve. Not exactly manning the barricades.’

  ‘It’s just, you get into this mode, reading about it, where it’s all like history. You know? And then you think Oh, hold on, I was fourteen when Nicky died. Tom Robinson’s on the radio. Pat Harrington has his little website. All the nazis are still around. Nick Griffin’s still going, John Tyndall.’

  ‘It wasn’t that long ago.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Did you see they got arrested? Griffin and Tyndall?’

  ‘Fat lot of good it’ll do.’

  ‘What time is it?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said: ‘where do you live again? Catford?’

  ‘Greenwich.’

  ‘Only my geography isn’t very good outside London.’

  ‘It’s Zone Two. Like here.’

  ‘James knows where it is,’ said Philip, standing up. He massaged Tom’s shoulders. ‘Anyway, this one’s coming to mine.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure how late trains run to Kent.’

  As he put his coat on Philip said, ‘You know what you’ve done? Speaking of history: it’s exactly what you’ve lost sight of. Nicky wasn’t an Übermensch conjured up in a black mass on some moor. Skinheads were produced by socioeconomic circumstance, like every bloody thing else. The Blitz. The redevelopment of the East End, which dismantled old social networks. Post-war immigration. Teddy boys, mods and rockers, rude boys, hippies, punks. Unemployment. The collapse of the social contract.’

  ‘I know that. It’s why I was reading about the strikes. But it’s not enough. It explains why people like Nicky existed but not what it was like to be Nicky.’

  ‘Then focus on that. Not the bloody occult. Nicky’s out with his mates and they start queer-bashing. What goes through his head? He’s in a club and sees a black and a white man snogging. What does he think? No, fuck “think”: what does he feel? Does he feel sick, does it turn him on? Both? What’s it like to be Nicky in his body — fucking and fighting? But enough with the magick, because if one thing’s obvious from that programme, Nicky was a very pedestrian kind of nazi.’

  ‘What do you mean,’ I said, ‘“was”?’

  Philip stared at me.

  ‘The Register Office can’t find his death certificate.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake.’

  ‘Funny, though, isn’t it? Look, all I’m saying is you can’t separate ideas from reality that neatly. Ideas create reality. It’s all connected.’

  ‘Everything’s fucking connected. We know that by now, surely? Chaos theory: you have a wank and there’s an earthquake off Sumatra. Doesn’t tell us anything, apart from maybe you should wank less. I think I’m drunk. Come on, darling,’ he said to Tom. ‘Let’s go.’

  Adam said: ‘We can wash up in the morning. Let’s just get it in the sink.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m turning into a nazi, do you?’

  ‘No. But it’s all you talk about these days. It does sometimes look like displacement activity. What is it you don’t want to think about?’

  I dreamed, not of Charlie Sargent or an urge to kill, but of Nick Griffin. I was staying with his family; I’d written an article about them that would soon be published. Now we sat round the dining table while Griffin read it. I’d been friendly with him, to get his confidence, and I knew he would feel betrayed. I wanted to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ but the article was honest.

  I stirred, pulled away from Adam muttering, ‘You’re too hot’; drifted off again with my back to him, staring at the fractured orange round the window frame. The smell of musk. A pearl-white manikin between a woman’s thighs. Trees flashing past beside a road. By our will, destroyed, someone murmured — a ringing bell. I woke with an erection and a fierce thirst, peed in the dark in case the bathroom fan woke Adam. All I need now, I thought, is a black man on his knees.

  My laptop glimmered with fresh proposals: to consolidate my debt, show me college boys missing their girlfriends, ask me, Did Six Million Really Die? One message, sent late from a Hotmail address, read simply Stay away. Was it from one of the message boards? I typed a reply — Stay away from what? — but thought better and deleted it. Instead I logged on to the website and, with Long in mind, tried new search terms, and got a few results. Friends of the Dark Lord especially welcome, read one. 10 mins from M25 junction 8.

  I had bookmarked arealnazi’s profile. Skinhead thug, I read again. Hurt you & rape you & leave you bleeding. I am not play acting.

  Nicky in his body.

  I clicked on Send Message. I wrote: Hi.

  Hill Farm

  It is Saturday, 29 September 1984, and the coach, heavy with sour air, makes a left turn out of the valley road that a few skins who have been here before recognize as the last. They cheer as it begins to climb, and empty beer cans roll haphazardly down the aisle.

  Tony stretches. His calves feel thick inside his boots, as if his blood has pooled in them. ‘Fucking made it,’ says Glenn happily. Tony turns to face him. ‘Yeah,’ he says, and looks away again at the ploughed earth that runs beside the road in broad tracks, like an ancient motorway.

  Before the crest of the hill they pull in, and drive round the farm buildings to park on the grass behind. Another coach is here already, and there are
cars and minibuses and a burger van, which even at 11 a.m. has a queue. The skins stand, grabbing bags, and someone farts loudly and laughs. Ahead, Dave stuffs away the Searchlight he was reading. A man in glasses meets them off the steps. ‘Have your tickets ready as you come down, please lads,’ he calls through the door. ‘If anyone doesn’t have a ticket I can sell them one now for a fiver. If anyone doesn’t have a fiver they can sod off back to London.’

  *

  Glenn says: ‘How many people do you think are here?’

  ‘Fuck knows.’ There must be at least 500, mainly skins but others too, older and in average clothes, who stand in clusters of their own sipping from polystyrene cups: Front activists. A few women, also, and skin girls, and girlfriends who aren’t skin yet.

  Glenn tails Tony round the complex. There are more buildings than he expected, quaint old ones and modern additions. Sellotaped on the back door of the main house is a notice, private, and underneath: toilets available in car park. In a corner of the abutting courtyard large wooden doors open on a barn, where a stage has been set up. Men in jeans are hanging flags: Union Jacks, long banners with the NF logo. Glenn winks at him.

  Outside, a tug-of-war is taking place. ‘That’s Ian Stuart,’ says Glenn, and runs to join the onlookers. And it is him, at the head of one team: boot heels dug into mud, angled like an inverse Soviet statue, comfortably tossing out asides. Even if you didn’t know who he was you’d sense the presence he carries so easily, holding the crowd’s attention. At the rear of Ian’s team, Steve strains at the rope with almost the same psychotic energy he had as a teenager, any shortfall made up for by his increased mass. Stripped down for the effort, he displays his black Skrewdriver Security T-shirt taut around his belly. Nicky Crane’s, on the other hand, is presumably still zipped under his bomber jacket. ‘Get a move on you cunts,’ Nicky yells, grinning from the sideline, and the other team’s leader, who Tony doesn’t recognize, calls over his shoulder: ‘Come on, we’ve nearly got them.’ With a shaky lurch they gain an inch or two. ‘I’m not fucking having that,’ says Ian. ‘All right lads, one last push. One, two—’ Glenn cups his hands to his mouth and shouts, ‘Go on Ian!’ But it doesn’t decide the match, and Tony, who has spotted Dave at the bookstall, leaves Glenn watching.

  The stall is three tables in a row. Posters hang from their edges and the wall behind. There are piles of NF News, Nationalism Today, Holocaust News, something called Rising. At least fifty copies of one booklet, Yesterday & Tomorrow: Roots of the National-Revolution, are displayed in neat stacks. Tony picks up a magazine called The Scorpion, whose cover shows a good-looking couple in camouflage. But inside are long essays in close type: ‘Who’s Afraid of Ayn Rand?’, ‘The One-Dimensional Philosophers’.

  ‘There’s a song I wrote in there,’ says a young man behind the counter.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Tony flicks through it again, but instead of lyrics he finds ‘Interview with Doctor Ishakamusabarashango’ above a picture of a black man in a bow-tie and specs. He puts it down. ‘That one any better?’ he asks Dave, who looks up from his book, The Turner Diaries, and laughs.

  ‘Yeah it looks good,’ he says. ‘It’s a novel about race war.’

  ‘Go on,’ says the young man, ‘it’s only a quid.’

  Tony says: ‘There any action in it?’

  ‘The hero flies a plane into the Pentagon.’

  ‘Spoiled it now haven’t you.’

  The salesman laughs. ‘Actually, it’s well worth reading. The author is an exceptional mind. It’s very honest about what the revolution will be like — not for the squeamish. But you don’t look squeamish types. You ex-BM?’

  He is mid-twenties, somewhere between Dave’s age and Tony’s, in an open-necked shirt and student jacket. With some facial hair he could be a communist. Dave says, ‘I don’t like to say “ex”.’

  ‘Fair enough. But you’re not paying dues any more. You thinking of joining the Front?’

  Tony says, ‘We’re just here for the music.’

  ‘You should think about it. We need more people like you.’

  ‘What, skinheads?’

  ‘We had an article a while back: “Skinheads, the New Warriors”.’ He looks the two of them over, as if deciding whether the phrase applies. ‘The Front’s not what it used to be,’ he adds, ‘a bunch of reactionary old Tories. It’s changing. We’ve got rid of Webster and a young leadership, a radical leadership, has taken over. We’re building a real revolutionary organization. We’re going to need soldiers.’ He puts out his hand. ‘I’m Nick, by the way.’

  ‘Dave.’

  ‘Tony. Thought I recognized you. This is your place isn’t it?’

  ‘My dad’s.’

  ‘It’s fucking huge.’

  ‘It’s average for a farm around here. I’m serious about joining. We need a different kind of member now. We’re not interested in pissing about. Take a copy of the paper. You can pay me later. Have you got any questions I can answer?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Tony. ‘Where the fuck are we?’

  Nick laughs again. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘I’ll show you,’ and steps out from behind the stall. ‘Bring the book,’ he tells Dave, who is putting it down. ‘We can sort that out later.’

  He leads them up the hill, away from the farm buildings, where sound tests have now started. Tony is starting to feel hungry. He lags a few feet behind; Nick is striding forward and Dave keeping up, asking some question. Dave has filled out a bit in the last year or so, still slim but no longer skinny. It’s a few days since he last shaved his head; the stubble reaches down his neck in a pale orange V. The gap between twenty-eight and twenty-two seems somehow greater than between twenty-three and seventeen.

  They stop at the top of the hill, Nick stamping his feet as if to mark the spot. ‘Right,’ he says, like a teacher on a school outing. ‘You’re in Suffolk, which is part of East Anglia, right, the big bulge on the right-hand side of the map? Named after the Angles, Anglo-Saxons who settled here from Germany around the fifth century. If you head that way’ — he points across the road — ‘for about ten miles you hit the North Sea. Nearest small town is Huntingfield, over to the north-east, nearest big town is Ipswich, which you probably drove through, to the south. This is Hill Farm, and down there is, you’ll never guess, Valley Farm. Down the hill that way is Ubbeston Wood, which is ancient forest, symbol of what the Front stands for. Other direction, a bit down the coast, is Sizewell nuclear power station. Symbol of what the Front is against.’

  Dave looks across the field. ‘What do you grow here?’

  ‘Me? Nothing. My dad’s an accountant. But anyway, this land’s between crops. See how it’s ploughed up? They just harvested the sugar beet and in a while they’ll probably plant wheat. This is clay land, good arable country.’

  The expectant soil rolls away from them to the west, the east.

  Nick says: ‘Breathe in. Go on. Look around you. This is what it’s about. This is what we’re fighting for.’

  He tells them: ‘If you think things are bad now, they’re going to get a lot worse. Immigration’s not going to slow down, capitalism’s not going to slow down. Ten years from now we’ll have massive unemployment, a much more repressive state, terror in the inner cities — and the oil we’re pumping from the North Sea over there is going to start to run out. The white people of this country will be very poor, and nearly outnumbered. Now that’s the moment, when things are in crisis, when large numbers of whites might rise up and fight back. But they’ll only do that if there are people to lead them.

  ‘So whose job will it be? It could never have been the old National Front. They didn’t have an ideology, they just knocked together whatever mishmash of policies made their supporters happy. The BNP’s no better, just smaller. Tyndall doesn’t have a revolutionary bone in his body. But we do — the new NF leadership. We’re a new generation. We’re revolutionaries. For the first time in its history the Front really knows where it’s going.’

  Tony says, �
��What’s the difference?’

  ‘Ideology. Hard work. Listen, I joined the Front ten years ago and in that time we had I don’t know how many marches and rallies. But as for actually thinking about and discussing what we stood for, I can remember three one-day sessions. Three, in ten years. Now we take ideology seriously. We’ve got day-long seminars every month when we actually sit down and read thinkers like Julius Evola and Franco Freda. We seriously debate alternative systems: distributism, feudalism, Strasserism, Nasserism. We’re taking all these ideas and we’re bringing them together into something new, into a fully developed ideology. Look,’ he says to Dave, ‘what do you stand for?’

  Dave pauses before saying: ‘Britain.’

  ‘And what does Britain need?’

  ‘To get rid of the niggers and Jews. And the reds and the Pakis.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because the blacks are taking things white people need — British people. They’re taking jobs when there’s millions of whites unemployed. Taking council houses white people can’t get. Making Britain foreign.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s exactly right. Well, for the old Front, that turned into “I fucking hate blacks”. But it’s not the blacks’ fault. It’s capitalism’s fault, it’s the international moneymen and big corporations that bring them here to undercut British workers, because they’ll work for half the wage a white man will.

  ‘And I’ll tell you a secret: the blacks don’t want to be here either! You look at surveys and the majority of blacks, when given a choice, say well hang on a minute, actually I would rather go home. And why wouldn’t they? They’d have to be mad not to. It’s not their country, it’s not their culture, it’s a lot more bloody sunny in Africa, and people here don’t like them.

  ‘Now in America a group of blacks have got together and said enough’s enough, we don’t want to be mixed against our will into white culture any more, we want to be separate. And what we say to them, the Front, is: good on you. You’re black nationalists, we’re white nationalists, we both want the same thing, which is to preserve our own people, our race, against the international capitalists out to destroy both of us. So let’s see how we can help each other. How we can learn from each other, and share our ideas and our experiences.