“I think I’m in love,” the Geordie added.
“For how long this time,” Jack enquired. “Piss off, Tyneside. Your affairs of the heart are as profound and long-lasting as a Charlie Chaplin film. Almost to the minute, in fact.”
“Latent anti-Semitism right there,” William butted in, pointing with his glass of Hierbas, the Ibiza liquor, which he spilled. “That does it. It’s you and I for Mary then, Alan. Two horse race. Jack’s knackered.”
Alan belched loudly. “What, she’s a Jew? No way. I thought this country had them all purged in…” he clicked his fingers impatiently, swaying. “…1666. Torquemada, and all that.”
Jack and William shared a look, suppressing grins.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Jack added wryly. “It got pretty hot for them.”
William raised his little tin cup. “A toast, to the victims of the Spanish Inquisition… all of Spain’s Jews who burned to death in England… in the Great Fire of London.”
Alan went to join in the toast with a spontaneous little cheer, before comprehension dawned on him.
“Oh howay you pair of bastards. Whatever bloody year it was, then. Too bad for your cockneys, Jack, though there’s not enough fires in London if you ask me.” He knocked his drink back, and called for a refill mid-conversation. “Anyway, Mary. She’s completely changed the way I think about Marx’s theories!”
“Aye,” William had agreed, stopping to hug a passing Italian militiaman with an eye-patch who was sharing their hotel with them. The man fobbed yet another Hierbas onto the Scot, and kissed his cheek, yelling ‘No pasarán! Fascista maricones!’ William yelled it back, roaring with laughter, and the little café took up the chant with gusto.
“These POUM fellows are great people!” William added, once the haiku died down.
Jack had weighed in, and the consequences would change all their lives for good. “Well, I was going to suggest we join the CNT… our communists are working for centralism and efficiency of state, and from what we can tell, anarchy definitely cares more about total liberty and equality. That’s more what we’ve been looking for! But it will never catch on in Britain – imagine it!”
They’d all agreed, laughing, a little sadly. And then Jack continued, fatefully, “But the POUM… that is Marxism and liberty… that is equality. Look at Mary!”
“I think I will!” Alan roared, slapping him on the back, and spilling the rest of his own newly acquired drink over a Spaniard militiaman behind him, whom he embraced fondly without missing a beat. The Spaniard replaced Alan’s drink, calling him hermano.
And they had stormed out into the thronging Barcelona streets to join the POUM. The headquarters was not far away, down the bottom of the Ramblas towards the Columbus monument, and there was no scarcity of drinks, songs and camaraderie in the POUM section to reinforce their confidence in the defection. Before long, they shipped out on a packed train, and found themselves sharing a trench with Mary and a battalion of mostly Catalans. A handful of other odds and sods from all over Europe made up the numbers, from Frenchies to Italians, even a few Jerries who’d similarly defected from the International Brigades and allied to the Catalan Marxists’ cause; wanted exiles who had fled Hitler’s Germany before being extended the legendary Gestapo hospitality at Prinz Albrecht-Strasse.
For them, even more so than the Italians and Spanish it seemed, the war in Spain was deeply personal and irreconcilable, with fervent Nazis on the other side, and the chance to fight the mortal enemy of their own country in a way that was impossible in Germany itself. Their fate was sealed, parallel with the foreign Republic they fought for. They would win, and live, or lose and die.
Good people.
“Babe,” William murmured in the present, his thoughts lingering in the arid climate of blood-drenched Spain. “Do you remember Willi? German Willi?”
If he expected a smile, or laugh of recognition and warmth, he was left disappointed. She wriggled a little in bed beside him, and her tone was flat.
“I remember him.”
And so she did. Young Wilhelm, they called him, or Heini Villi. He’d been older than they by several years, but had retained the boyish face of an unshaven child yet to sprout his first chin hairs. Willi was from Nuremberg, which nobody could quite believe; it being a heartland of National Socialism, after all, and they put him through lengthy mock interrogations as a Fifth Columnist. Once he’d stood with the Hitler salute for a rendition of Deutschland Über Alles, while they roundly booed him and threw pebbles from all sides of the trench.
Prone to wild mood swings, his cheerfulness and gentle nature suddenly gave way to bouts of brooding and anger, and in combat he fought as though driven by some bad memory of darkness past. Wilhelm died in the May Days, back in Barcelona. He’d been killed by a communist – it was safe to assume – who shot him from an upstairs window as he walked down one of the Ramblas side streets on which they’d all sang together; anarchist, Marxist and Stalinist alike, only seven months prior. No division then; comrades, brothers all. William had shed tears at the news, that terrible night, as they traversed the outer town to find shelter elsewhere, away from the bitter intrigues of the Ramblas and the ‘political’ quarters.
“We’ve been fucking betrayed,” Alan screamed, grabbing at the gun that had been taken from him by a white-faced William. Jack steered them down an alleyway, from doorway to doorway, until eventually they stole out to non-politically tainted territory and marched northwest, Alan’s vile muttered curses the only sound from a shell-shocked group.
Jack expended great energy dissuading Alan from tearing up their CPGB cards, which they knew could prove to be, quite literally, lifesaving. They reached a neutral hotel, miles from the Ramblas and booked a room, in which they stewed quietly, bile rising in their throats. Willi had twisted, wriggled, contorted on the cobblestones; choking out his last breaths in the dust. Mary, for the first time, just stayed quiet. She was numb with shock.
At least, the Catalan thought now, he never saw it coming. Wilhelm was lucky in a way – he missed 1939. Nor did he see the POUM members rounded up, shot or imprisoned. Nor the fascist tanks rolling through the streets. Nor the rapes, the tortures, the evil. Nor did he live to see the Nazis invading the very country to which they fled their nightmare.
“He’s dead, William,” she whispered, sadly. “Another dead boy en un sueño loco…” and with that, her voice trailed off.
She kissed his chest again, fighting back tears and he held her, tightly, as though he’d never let her go.
That first day… a dream. It seemed like a lifetime, some kind of bizarre and distant hallucinatory dreamworld; like a shamanic peyote cactus trip experience that transcended them to some Quixotic, far-flung fantasy, in which everything good and true and honest and just that could possibly happen to humanity, every beautiful feeling and acceptance of solidarity and love, did happen. So distant, yet still there on their skin, on their hands and tongues and in their eyes and thoughts and dreams… nothing could possibly express how it felt; no words or storytelling could begin to encapsulate how special it was, excitement palpable, riding into the horizon of change and inventing history as they went along; how invigorating it was that there was no concept of class, or man-made constructs like money or status, neither barriers and divisions, nor race, how none of them were British or Jews or Italians or even Spaniards and Catalans, simply human beings all, and all equal…
There was no question of what it meant for all of us, William thought with deep pride and sorrow. It was the sense of destiny, of belonging; for the first time in history, The People had risen together and triumphed over the forces of tyranny; institutions of evil and suppression, the church, the state and all central authorities and ruling elites. Catalonia was the nuclei of some kind of elemental force that had triumphed over the worst instincts in humanity and kicked them screaming to the curb. A central authority still reigned in Madrid, holding the rest of Spain together in its democratic social paradigm – even
with the rebels under Franco and Mola securing huge swathes of land across the peninsula – but it was liberal; it was accepting, even supportive. Catalonia’s own people broke free and reigned in true anarchy; the real meaning of ‘no man left behind’, not military jargon, but the real belief that human beings of that land could live in egalitarian peace.
Such cathartic times… walking through Barcelona the first day, singing and dancing, shouting, chanting slogans, hugged and embraced by everyone. Strong smells of tobacco and marijuana smoke; unwashed bodies, energy, excitement, emotions at fever-pitch. Meeting Mary, hearing this beautiful Spanish girl – they didn’t know yet to distinguish – outpouring her passions and the triumph of solidarity which to them had only been a pipedream in their English pubs and bedrooms and walks through the park. To their surprise and delight, Alan, completely overcome and drunk, embracing them both with tears in his eyes, “this is how life is supposed to be! This is how life is supposed to be!”
Now, it didn’t matter what your beliefs were, what vantage point you gazed from or what your role in this brave new world was, or how it viewed you; from catharsis of the soul to the crushing of it; in little over four years, the world had turned the other cheek, or looked and watched and then fought too late, to stop merciless power from unleashing its tyranny of racial and ideological persecution, treacherous diplomacy and military aggression, pitiless malice, blasting the libertarian goodness into oblivion with the roar of bombs and bullets.
Naomi’s day could not have been better, up until that point.
Leeds was radiant, glowing green. The bomb damage at the Woodpecker Pub on her tram line leading into the city centre had ceased to be of interest to anyone, let alone a saddening sight, and it seemed people were finally beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel. Even Naomi was hopeful. She’d been teaching unimpeded for five weeks without interference, and the sight of German uniforms was a rarity.
With the resistance underground, and the sparse battles – more isolated ambushes now, was the rumour – were situated so far past the city’s northern outskirts that by this stage, nobody in Leeds could hear the sounds of bombardment. Nothing of the wartime reality existed in this present, and the sun, bizarrely, continued to shine with a continental European summer’s heat, with the English autumnal chill having not yet struck.
So it was with a spring in her step that she skipped into the headmaster’s office to see Mr Clifford, who had summoned her for a meet after the day’s lessons were at an end.
The old dandy of a headmaster was perusing some notes at his desk; a sheaf of some quality, thick paper that looked bizarrely out of place in the immediate aftermath of wartime. Naomi couldn’t make out the unfamiliar seal. Though she rapped the door before entering, Mr Clifford took his time as he leisurely inspected his papers before deigning to raise his head to the striking young woman he’d summoned. When he finally did, she noticed the distracted, discomfited look in his eyes. He was unsettled. The man’s usual steely composure had been affected in some way.
“Do come in, Naomi, and take a seat…” his voice trailed off, uncertain.
“Thanks.”
Mr Clifford sighed. Young for a head at 41, his eyes were only just beginning to betray his age, with crow’s feet adoring the smooth skin around them that he’d managed to carry into his late thirties. A thick but sleek mop of wavy hair split in a centre-parting so equidistant she suspected it had been measured with a ruler, and high cheekbones set on a stern but boyish face, Clifford was a dandy, though he could quickly become a rather forbidding figure. But the older man had always had a good rapport with the amiable, witty Naomi, and his deep, stentorian voice was softer than usual when he addressed her, though he quickly recovered and maintained his typical lack of any modicum of hesitance.
“Look Naomi, I’m going to get straight to the point. We’ve received a letter from something called the Race & Resettlement office, of all things… what that office has to do with employment or the education system in this country, I have no idea, but unfortunately it seems to supersede any existing legal framework and our dear friends from the continent seem to have enforced it with some success from London.”
She continued to look puzzled. Noting it, he hurried to explain.
“In the letter – this letter,” he said, holding one of the pages aloft of the high quality paper, so she could see the two hated lightning runes at its base. The seal had been an eagle, she saw now, with the swastika held in its talons. “They have made a direct enquiry about, well… I’m very sorry to say this, but they’ve highlighted your ethnic background… which in the system to be imposed… hopefully only while the governments arrange a deal, but nonetheless in the here and now… means that your presence in this school in itself contravenes these new rulings.”
Naomi’s mouth fell open. After all these weeks, just as things were starting to look up, her world was to fall apart like a paper shack in a storm. She had been waking up and enjoying the pale sun on her face again, walking through the park filling her lungs with fresh air, relishing the continuance of some semblance of normal life. That was now over. Mr Clifford made no effort to provide her with a honeyed explanation, but his voice was notably tinged with regret.
“As you can imagine, Naomi, I’m not in a position to lie about such matters. This race office is part of the SS machine; teachers and educational authorities start lying to them and all hell’s liable to break loose. So…” for the first time, he dropped his gaze, absentmindedly shuffling the sheaf of stacked papers. “After serious deliberation, I have concluded that the only way forward is – and it really does pain me to say this, it pains me to say this – I’m going to have to ask you to leave St Mary’s. For the time being, at the very least, just until this thing clears. Which it hopefully will, sooner than later. I am so sorry, but I really have no choice.”
Naomi was stunned. After all the initial fears, time had deadened her senses and the comparative calm of the period had led to her believe that things were on the way up. The outrageous anti-Semitic materials had been quietly shelved by the teachers, and no one had bothered to check them. Even the persecution of her people, if you could call them that, now seemed abstract, a distant nightmare. Something other than real, like an urban myth or a bedtime horror story to teach children; a grotesque cautionary tale, to be sanitised and packaged as future entertainment. But now it touched her. This madness, whatever it was.
She found her voice, which to her surprise had a choked quality.
“But… how can they? How? They’ve only been here a matter of weeks?
“I know, they’re awfully efficient aren’t they?” He chuckled without humour. “On things such as war and matters of race and ethnicity, this new breed of German seems to be quite formidable organisers. They’re more robot than human.
“They’re not human,” Naomi said lowly. He nodded in sympathy, but evaded the point.
“I believe they are working with the Inland Revenue. Unfortunately, with a Jewish name such as yours you stick out like a sore thumb. It’s a perishing shame… you have been an excellent member of our team.”
“What, and that’s it?” she cried, suddenly flaring up. “I’m meant to just grab my stuff and leave? Who’ll take my classes? What about my kids?”
But Mr Clifford’s face lost its increasingly avuncular look, and in his more familiar deadpan expression Naomi saw no hope for pleas to prevail upon his better nature. Nor could she charm him, she knew; he alone of the male staff had never so much as cast an admiring glance in her direction. He was utterly devoid of lust, it seemed. And in this case, of true empathy.
“We’ll manage, Naomi. You’ve not had them for half a term, anyway, children can cope. I really am sorry. We will of course pay you until the end of term, and provide you with a small settlement – off the record – but alas, beyond that, I really must insist on your resignation.”
She left his office in a daze.
Outside, the walked outside th
e school gates, fighting the urge to throw up, until finally she succumbed, half-stumbling into one of the rhododendron bushes on a grass verge at the edge of the school grounds. She got back to a level-footing, shakily, and began tottering away in the direction of Hyde Park for the tram.
“Naomi, Naomi wait!”
Paul ran several hundred feet to catch up with her. Naomi was embarrassed to be seen in a state, and would have preferred to lick her wounds privately. But Paul was Paul.
He reached her, not yet out of breath but with a slight catch in his voice.
“I’ve just heard the news. It’s awful Naomi, simply awful.”
She murmured something indistinct. He shrugged, helplessly, and then added with vehemence.
“No, it’s bloody awful. Jerry bastards.” He bit into the latter word with venom, the Leeds accent spitting it in the phonetically blunt Yorkshire style.
“I feel like I’m dreaming, Paul,” she said weakly. A gust of wind blew a great tuft of hair over her face as she looked around, as though panicking. “What have I done? What is it with these people? Who are they?”
“Come ’ere, you,” he told her gently.
He held her tightly to him, and despite her best efforts, tears welled up in her dark eyes. She blinked furiously.
“What am I to do?” she asked quietly, from his armpit. He felt, more than heard her sigh, and quickly suppressed the resulting train of thought.
“Well… first thing is to get you somewhere safe. I know this might sound off, but you shouldn’t go back to your parents. If they need help I’ll get it ’em, if they need a new roof over their ’eads. You shouldn’t stay at yours, either, just in case. If–” and as his voice rose, she looked up at him in alarm as the words sank in, her eyes pleading for clarification. He spoke soothingly. “Relax… relax. I just mean, in case this got worse, if they were trying to slowly tighten the noose without drawing attention to it, gradually…”
Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! Page 22