by C. J. Carey
Praise for Widowland
‘A triumph. It not only equals Fatherland and The Handmaid’s Tale but, by placing literary heroines at its heart, supersedes them. As witty as it is withering, as thrilling as it is consummately imagined’
Amanda Craig
‘A very smart reimagined history executed with plenty of wit, energy and originality plus there’s a rather subtle message for today. Excellent!’
Henry Porter
‘Reading this terrific, Orwellian novel you almost hold your breath. The engaging heroine, vivid scenario and enthralling plot are underpinned by a serious political sensibility – one which turns an accomplished thriller into a warning’
Bel Mooney
‘A terrifying, vividly imagined story of a Nazi Britain that might have been. Tense, utterly convincing and, in the end, very moving’
Nicci French
‘A fascinating, refreshing ‘‘what if’’ alternative history cum Orwellian dystopia. Carey’s expert knowledge of both Nazi Germany and literature shines through – and the world she creates is at once believable and terrifying’
David Young
‘Not just a page-turning thriller, Widowland is the most important feminist novel to be published in decades. It speaks as much about contemporary tyranny and misogyny as it does about the re-imagined past that Carey has so skilfully created’
Jane Harris
‘Clever, gripping and brilliantly imagined – a brave, bookish heroine takes on the forces of a chillingly convincing post-war dystopia’
Clare Chambers
‘A brilliantly convincing and gripping dystopian vision. Fantastically detailed and assured . . . a terrific novel’
Elizabeth Buchan
‘Widowland is a fully-realised 1950s dystopia brimming with crackling detail, a gripping thriller and, at a moment when we’re having to face our own Imperial past, a slyly vivid account of living under a colonial power’
Miranda Carter
‘I am in awe at the author’s imagination, her ability to conjure and so cleverly convey an entire world – it manages to feel both chillingly dystopian and utterly realistic’
Sabine Durrant
‘C. J. Carey plays with history and makes brilliant points about literature and feminism. Her amazing knowledge of Nazi ideology makes the story disturbingly relevant to the present day’
Kate Saunders
‘A very stylish and exciting counterfactual set around the coronation of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson. Hitler is still alive and in charge. Rose is a terrific heroine’
Adèle Geras
‘Carey’s immensely broad knowledge of the post-war period and meticulous attention to detail makes this imagined world chillingly believable. I was captivated’
Elizabeth Fremantle
This ebook published in 2021 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © 2021 Thynker Ltd.
The moral right of C. J. Carey to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Lines from What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing
by Peter Ginna, published by University of Chicago Press, 2017,
are reproduced by permission of the publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
HB ISBN 978 1 52941 198 0
TPB ISBN 978 1 52941 199 7
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 52941 201 7
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination
or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover by Nathan Burton
Ebook by CC Book Production
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
For Caradoc King
It might seem amazing that women and girls should return to work at spinning wheels and weaving looms. But this is wholly natural. It was something that could have been foreseen. This work must be taken up again by women and girls . . .
Alfred Rosenberg, 1936
Widow: Origin: Old English widewe, from an Indo-European root meaning ‘be empty’; compare with Sanskrit vidh ‘be destitute’, Latin viduus ‘bereft’. Printing: a last word or short last line of a paragraph falling at the top of a page or column and considered undesirable
The art of editing lies in exercising taste, making aesthetic judgments and attuning oneself . . . to the sensibility and psychology of an author.
Peter Ginna, What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing
CONTENTS
Praise for Widowland
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraphs
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
PART TWO
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
PART THREE
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Monday, 12th April 1953
A biting east wind lifted the flags on the Government buildings in a listless parody of celebration. All the way from Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall they rippled and stirred, turning the dingy ministerial blocks into a river of arterial red. The splash of scarlet sat savagely on London’s watercolour cityscape: on the dirt-darkened Victorian facades and dappled stone of Horse Guards, the russet Tudor buildings and ruddy-bricked reaches of Holborn, and around the Temple’s closeted, mediaeval squares. It was a sharp, commanding shout of colour that smothered the city’s ancient greys and browns and obliterated its subtleties of ochre and rose.
The big day was approaching and there seemed no end to the festivities. All along the Thames decorations were being hung. Bunting was entwined between the plane trees, and ribbons twisted through the Victorian wrought-iron railings of the Embankment. The House of Commons itself was decked out like a dowager queen in a flutter of pennants and flags.
Every shop had its royal picture posted in the window, tastefully framed, and every taxi that passed up Whitehall had a patriotic streamer dancing on its prow.
> Flags were nothing new in the Protectorate. When the Anglo-Saxon Alliance was first formed, its emblem – a black A on a red background – was displayed in front of every building. No sooner were they run up the poles, however, than the flags were vandalized, ripped to ribbons and left in puddles in the street. Disrespecting or damaging the flag was swiftly made an act of treason, punishable by death, and the order came down that people found guilty of tampering should be hanged from the same flagpole that they had attacked – a deterrent that was as grisly as it was ineffective. After the first shock Londoners took as much notice of the bodies suspended above them as their forebears had taken of the heads that used to be stuck on spikes on London Bridge.
But that was then.
A lot can change in thirteen years.
It had been threatening a downpour all day. The chill in the air, and the absence of anything cheerful to look at, meant people shrouded their faces with scarves and huddled into their coats, keeping their eyes down, skirting the craters in the potholed roads. March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers. Wasn’t that how the saying went? Judging by the regular deluges that had drenched the past few weeks, April was certainly shaping up to be a traditional English spring. At least (as some older people thought) there was something traditional about it.
High above Whitehall, in a block that had once been the War Office, Rose Ransom stared down at the tops of the buses and the heads of the pedestrians below. She was a solemn-looking woman of twenty-nine. Her eyes were dreamy and her face, poised above the typewriter, was pensive, as though she was seeking inspiration for the page she was composing, though nothing could be further from the truth. Rose was fortunate enough to possess the kind of physiognomy that gave nothing away. It was an untroubled demeanour, not so much serene as enigmatic. She had a perfect oval face framed by neat dark blonde hair and grave eyes of indeterminate blue, like a lake that reflects back precisely the colour of the sky. From her mother she had inherited a smooth, peachy complexion that meant she could pass for a decade younger and from her father an air of unreadable composure that belied whatever turmoil stirred within.
‘Come and see this, Rosie! It’s amazing!’
Rose turned. Across the office, a commotion was going on and Helena Bishop, a lively blonde, was predictably at the centre of it. Any event was enough to distract most office workers, but that day’s novelty was exceptional. A pair of technicians had wheeled in a squat box of wooden veneer encasing a bulbous fisheye of screen with two dials set beneath. Once a technician had plugged in the set and switched it on, the glass spattered with static before brightening to a monochrome glow. A murmur of excitement went up as every worker abandoned their desk and crowded round, nudging and jostling to get a better view of the tiny screen.
Like most people in the English territories, they had never seen a television close up before, and were eager to get a good look.
At first it was nothing more than a snowstorm, but after warming up, a picture emerged, sliding upwards in horizontal lines until someone twiddled the tuning button and it shuddered to a stop.
‘Would you look at that!’
The entire office was transfixed. The murky image resolved into a man in evening dress, reading aloud with patrician jollity.
‘Anticipation is mounting in London as the first crowds begin to line the Coronation route. Early birds are pitching their tents to ensure they get the best view of the royal couple as they make their way from the abbey.’
All across the nation, the same scene was being played out. The Coronation of Edward VIII and Queen Wallis was scheduled for 2nd May and the Government had announced that every citizen in the land would have access to a television to watch it. To that end thousands of sets had been installed: in workplaces, factories and public houses. In schools, offices and shops. For the first time in thirteen years, every adult and child had been given a day off to see the royal couple crowned. There was more than a fortnight until the big day, but excitement was already at fever pitch.
‘Come on, Rosie!’
Rose grinned across at Helena with appropriate enthusiasm and shook her head. In a split-second calculation she judged it safe to linger at her desk rather than join her colleagues across the room. She bent over the typewriter and pretended to write.
Television was nothing exciting to Rose. Unlike the others, she had seen plenty of TV sets close up, due to her friendship with the Assistant Cultural Commissioner, Martin Kreuz. Friendship with Martin meant not only television shows, but entry to special access exhibitions and theatrical premieres. Art exhibitions at the top galleries. VIP parties and meals out. Martin Kreuz may be Rose’s superior and twenty years her senior, but he was a cultured man and endlessly generous in sharing the benefits of his position with her. There were numerous advantages to knowing him.
And the disadvantages? She tried not to think about them.
Her gaze drifted restlessly back through the barred and smeared windows to the street outside. The Culture Ministry building itself was a monstrosity, scabrous with soot and girdled with an iron fence laced with barbed wire, but a few metres along from it the Palladian columns of the Banqueting House retained something of their original dignity. This was the place where, as every schoolchild knew, three hundred years previously, Charles I had been beheaded. The famous occasion when the English killed their king was on every school curriculum and the place was constantly beset by throngs of kids milling around as their teachers held forth, chatting amongst themselves and pricking up their ears for details of the beheading.
Some of Charles I’s more recent descendants, King George VI, his queen, Elizabeth, their two daughters and a rabble of minor royals, had been accorded far less ceremony in their demise. But as far as Rose was aware, no child learned their fate in school.
Most people had no idea what had become of them. Or cared.
It was Protector Rosenberg who featured in the history lessons now. The Leader’s oldest friend, who had been with him in the beer halls and marched alongside him in the earliest days of the movement. The man dubbed the Leader’s Delegate for Spiritual and Ideological Training, who had guided and shaped the development of the Party, its philosophy and its ideals. The thinker who embodied the Party’s connection to the past and the future. Rosenberg was a visionary, and when the Leader made him Protector, he had resolved that his dream of a perfect society would find its ultimate expression in England.
Now, more than a decade later, Rosenberg’s vision was complete. A whole generation was growing up who had never known anything but the Alliance. German came as easily as English to their lips. As Martin was so used to explaining, the Alliance was the perfect fruition of the history of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. In a way, he liked to say, it was the end of history. The ultimate ‘special relationship’. Two peoples who had once been a single race had come together again in a seamless join.
As neatly as if King Charles’s head was restored to his body.
Not that anyone cared about history. The only thing that mattered was that order was restored, and whatever people thought of that order, it meant that life ran smoothly. Food appeared on the table and the buses and trams arrived on time. The blossom on the horse chestnuts in Green Park turned up as punctually as ever and birds still sang each spring.
‘I see the march of technology leaves you unmoved.’
The sardonic voice emerged from Oliver Ellis, who occupied the desk next to Rose. He had a dark, unruly thatch of hair, a brooding demeanour to match, and a wit that was acid enough to eat through shrapnel. Generally, Rose appreciated Oliver’s barbs; they were mostly aimed at hapless colleagues or at diktats of more than usual idiocy from the Cultural Commissioner’s office. But sometimes, she guessed, she must be the target of his humour too.
That was how men like Oliver worked.
He stood up, adjusted his horn-rimmed spectacles and frowned. ‘Aren’t you coming to look at our marvel?’
‘I’ve seen a television already,�
�� she replied coolly, adjusting the paper in her typewriter.
‘Of course you have. I forgot. Friends in high places.’
He followed her gaze out of the window, where it was raining harder, and pedestrians were raising their umbrellas against the sky, as if seeking protection from something fiercer than an English spring.
‘God forbid it rains on the big day.’
‘There ought to be a law against it,’ said Rose.
‘Probably is.’ Oliver unhooked his jacket from his chair and pulled it on. ‘Alliance regulation number 8,651. Prohibition of Precipitation on Coronation.’
She smiled. ‘SS Stipulations on Sunshine Standards.’
‘Rain Restrictions Regarding Royalty,’ he countered.
She couldn’t stop herself laughing. Oliver was good with words. But they all were.
That’s why they were here.
Oliver had been an undergraduate at Cambridge before the war and, when the fighting began, he was given a desk job in the old dispensation that meant he missed any action and survived to serve the new regime. Men of Oliver’s type were unusual. Many males between seventeen and thirty-five who hadn’t died resisting the Alliance had been sent to work abroad, causing a notable gender imbalance in England.
The country now had two women for every man.
Perhaps this was why, as the Leader put it, ‘Women are the most important citizens in this land.’ And lest anyone forget, his comment was carved into the pediment of a vast bronze statue erected on the northern end of Westminster Bridge.
It was an impressive installation. Where once the chariot of Boudica had stood, now the Valkyrie figure of the Leader’s niece Geli was planted, heavy thighs draped in a classical toga, head encircled with a laurel crown, staring broodily out at the muddy waters of the Thames. Just as France had its Madeleine – a representation of perfect womanhood – England had her Geli. Geli was young, intelligent, talented and beautiful. She symbolized everything that was fine about femininity. She was the apogee of womanhood. In essence, she embodied the spirit of England.