Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK!

by Daniel S. Fletcher

  “Bloody hell…” but his momentary irritation quickly subsided into amusement.

  “Did I make you jump,” Naomi asked coquettishly. She leaned in to kiss him deeply, her hot, wet tongue burning in his mouth, and despite himself he felt his desire grow.

  “Christ, Naomi…” he exclaimed, breaking free of her. “What are you doing here? Are you crazy? If anyone sees–”

  “Then they’ll see a young lady kissing a young gentleman,” she snapped, fiercely. “Which there is still no law against.”

  “Are you crazy?” He asked again, softly. Paul pulled her into a copse of trees, and embraced her fondly.

  “Darling, this isn’t wise. It’s better we’re not seen together, remember? It’s bad enough the nosey old girl knows.”

  The day before, as they made a particularly loud racket downstairs, a lady who owned one of the other converted flats had called round. Paul called her ‘Old Doris’, and on explaining who she was to Naomi, gave way to rare expressions of bitter obscenity and personal loathing. She had knocked, with a loud, maddening rhythmic pattern until he answered, and unbeknownst to him, Naomi had followed behind him, almost resigned to her fate. Her fears were unjustified; it was merely the old gossip of the block. But the old gossip spotted her.

  The neighbour asked to be introduced, in a roundabout, impertinent manner. Paul had blocked his doorway, refusal implicit in his body language. Slipping three shillings into her hand, which caused her thick, vulgar eyebrows to shoot up and almost into her hairline, Paul told her that she had best forget she had seen anyone, and to have a good day.

  Later that night, the old woman adopted a knowing, lofty air when the ladies knitting together came round to the topic of the handsome young teacher who lived opposite.

  “I can’t say a word, it would be improper,” she said, haughtily. “But alas, my dears, I fear that even if you had seen many less moons, that the place in his heart is occupied by another anyway…”

  In the copse of trees, that other leaned in to kiss Paul with a fierceness that surprised him.

  As she broke free, holding an impossibly unwavering gaze at an uncomfortably close distance, he laughed uneasily.

  “You are crazy.”

  “I will be if I stay in that house any longer.”

  “But it’s for your own good, you must understand,” he pleaded.

  “Shut up and kiss me,” she snapped.

  As they left the trees and walked towards the direction of his flat, two boys who were playing at the edge of a small wood that was wedged in an estate interregnum that hadn’t quite been fully knocked down yet, spotted them, and hid behind the trees to watch, not quite believing what they saw.

  “Look, there’s Miss! It is her!” One of them said, a ten year old blond boy with fleshy, red cheeks and a lazy eye. His friend, a taller, bespectacled boy with freckles crowed too.

  “She’s with Heggerty. I don’t believe it, ‘Eggy and Miss!”

  “Miss Rosenberg and Eyeball Paul, I don’t believe it either!” the first boy shouted with laughter, touched with a small stab of jealousy, to his vague confusion.

  “I thought she left because of illness…” the bespectacled boy said thoughtfully.

  “She looks all right to me!”

  “Yeah.”

  An Indian summer had well and truly set in for the south of England, and north-central London’s wide streets had blissfully returned to their dry and windswept state, yellowed leaves rustling underfoot in the drum roll of feet. In these conditions, an enforced gaiety was possible, even genuine for many of those who had not opportunistically become collaborators in their way, the definitions of which varied greatly. Some maintained that simply operating a business that directly profited from German custom was enough to be labelled a traitor, let alone fraternisation, an ugly, whispered taboo, a curse word. But for all, the weather allowed for a fragile collective cheeriness, even happiness, to the delight of children too young to understand the black shadow that had crept across the lives and heart of their elders in recent months who were able to smile in the joy of the Sun’s warmth, and to see those smiles reflected back at them. On a sunlit street with happy children, no occupation exists.

  Even Charlie was affected. A crippled malcontent, Charlie Lightfoot had left school at 15 just three months before old Neville declared Peace In Our Time, and he’d thought it was the start of a great new era; finally, an end to moping about the Great War and a brighter outlook, and a fresh start for a lad with an eye for a bargain and a salesman’s touch.

  Alas, it had been neither, and with the feverish conscriptions following Hitler’s absorption of the rest of Czecho-Slovakia after gaining back the largely ethnic-German Sudetenland where – to general confusion in England – it was now understood that most of the Czech defences were located in the event of military action from the Reich, Charlie had among the first to head down to the recruitment office, certain that with the current predicament facing them the army would be sure to turn a blind eye to his blatant lies; that the gangly, hobbling cockney kid was Of Military Age. But unbeknownst to him, only a handful of divisions were set to be shipped across to France, and by the time Dunkirk was ongoing, it was too little too late.

  “Look lad, I’m telling you for the last time. You’re unfit for active service in the forces!”

  He’d nagged, then begged and pleaded, to no avail. Charlie had caused such a fuss that his friends from Whitechapel had left him there, embarrassed. Eventually the officer who had rejected his application lost his patience.

  “Clear off! Pack it in or I’ll have you nicked, you ’orrible little prat!”

  Thus, deemed “Unsuitable for Military Conscription into His Majesty’s British Armed Forces,” having failed to meet the physical requirements of soldiery with his leg, Charlie was aimless.

  “You’d have been able to slip in with a Pals Battalion in the last war, boy,” his bedridden father told him, wheezing. “They let us in as mates. Course, most of us never made it back.”

  It was their last conversation. Old Ted Lightfoot had died the next day.

  Such battalions no longer existed; enthusiasm for them had understandably waned given that most had been decimated by war’s end, and, with no home left in any case, the unsuitable and now orphaned Charlie had slunk quietly out of the East End, mortified by the thought of being seen by the people he grew up around as a shirker or a deserter. He shuddered at the thought of a white feather. No guv’nor, he decided, not for all the tea in China.

  Central London, however, had not been kind. Untold millions had moved there over the centuries to make their fortunes, or die, unloved, unwanted and unmourned, in the gutters and dirty streets. Only several kilometres to the west, Charlie had felt like he was in a different world, until the day his savings ran down to bare bones. The landlord had been sympathetic.

  “Just one more week,” he’d begged. “I’ll sort this out.”

  His landlord leaned close. The huge moustache had quivered across his snarling features, burst blood vessels burning red on his nose. “Clear off. You’re just another wrong’un, and we don’t need you round here bothering decent folk.”

  So, that had been that. The onset of darkness and an icy rain had only accentuated the descent of a deep and profound despair that fell on Charlie with the sinking sensation that this was that very moment that so many of London’s down and outs had experienced; the beginning of the end. He headed north; in a fit of pique and recklessness, he’d decided to have a drink, and the Royal Oak had been a welcome haven from his troubles. A chance meeting with an old acquaintance that had migrated northwest to Camden to start a transport business led to some infrequent work; Charlie saw it as the divine intervention of a God he’d rejected on the death of his father. He had materials to sell. London was occupied, to all intents and purposes, but the dread policing and mass-arrests hadn’t come in with the force first feared, as far as most could tell; at any rate, few streets ran red with blood. It could
be worse.

  Today felt like a new start; Charlie almost even smiled himself as a little girl in a frilly dress came skipping past him, followed by her visibly wearied father. He, at least, bore the marks of the occupation heedless of something as intangible as the weather. That haunted look, that familiar look. Even sunlight could not pierce its caked layers of misery that ran deeper than skin.

  Minutes passed, and the traffic of passers-by on the lively road slowly thinned. Charlie began to get impatient. He badly wanted a drink, but with strict priorities, the daily quota must be met before any thoughts of relaxation and beer be allowed to sabotage his efforts. The consequences, then as ever, were dire and occupied or otherwise, London was no place to be down. The cold cobbles and public indifference to the socially ostracised; the beggars, the down and outs, was the same in Berlin, Paris, New York. Once you leave society, acceptance – of self and from others – is difficult, and Charlie, like most others who occupied the place in the social hierarchy lower than underclass, had a heightened sensitivity to rejection.

  More waiting. Pigeons fluttered around the quiet street, their wings flapping, a slight rustle in the silence of the street. Clad in a threadbare topcoat that had belonged to his father and which was still, aged 18, too big for his frame, Charlie paced from side to side with growing irritation, allowing himself no more than a few metres from his clumsily erected stall. Should’ve stayed in the East End, he thought. They’d have at least respected me for ducking and diving, trying to make a bob.

  Somewhere, internally, a small voice suggested that he find a way of making himself useful to the Germans, and he quickly silenced it, cursed it, buried it; pacing faster. He’d never sell out. Too many had done that; many the same scavengers who’d made profit from the pre-invasion panic. They were viewed with contempt, though rarely expressed openly. And they were many; men on street corners, accepting the odd muttered curse word as they tried to sell the English language copies of Der Stürmer and the Völkischer Beobachter; Streicher’s outrageous anti-Semitic pornography and Goebbels’ effortless switches between hysterical diatribes and honeyed seduction. Bobbies patrolling with Jerries in uniform. Birds chatting Jerry soldiers up for cigarettes, walking arm in arm. Panting, gasping, sweating under them at night. Fucking disgusting. I’d be no different; a skivvy boy and a traitor. Fuck that for a laugh.

  Charlie’s independence was not profitable.

  Time passed slowly, like a knife. Finally, the sun’s heat began to wane, and the autumnal breeze had an added lingering bitterness to the youth on the street, struggling to contain himself as the minutes crept by. Just as Charlie was beginning to consider spending his meagre daily earnings on a much-needed pint, a familiar figure popped into sight, almost shuffling down the street toward him in the unhurried pace of the unemployed. As he neared, the man gave no indication he saw the boy, who decided to pipe up anyway:

  “Wanna buy a scarf, Mister?”

  Charlie’s somewhat shrill voice, still with the vestiges of childhood, came out in a slight rasp from lack of use, catching slightly in his throat.

  The sudden entreaty seemed to awaken the man from his reverie.

  “No, thank you,” Bill Wilson replied, quietly.

  Even in the Royal Oak he’d never spoken to the boy, who was relatively new around these parts, and Bill noted the distinct cockney accent for the first time with interest. Then as though a switch had been flicked, the light of his interest was extinguished, and he shuffled on without further comment. Charlie watched him, confused, as the heavy cotton-lining and collar obscured Bill’s head and the older man became a shuffling, great-coated silhouette, leaving him behind in the street. He’d been surprised to hear Bill speak; usually paralytic, rendered insensible from his steady silent diet of whiskey and ale in the pub corner; another casualty of the Lost Generation. Charlie watched him shuffle away. Anger, sharp and inexplicable, suddenly gripped him.

  “Dare not spend your beer money, you draft dodger?” He spat impetuously on the ground, the fury of a child’s tantrum.

  Bill slowly turned, like a man twice his age.

  “I am a pacifist,” he said calmly. “Do you know what that means?”

  “You’re a bleeding coward, I know that much!”

  Charlie was apoplectic, almost hopping from his good leg to his bad in his pique, pouting venomously at the older man. Bill wondered if he was steeling himself to hobble over and attack.

  He smiled pleasantly, to the cockney’s confusion.

  “OK. Well… good luck with your scarves.”

  He gestured without malice at the crude stall; a wooden school desk laden with small ornaments, with an inverted ledge on which the scarves were hung; all grey, or black, and thinner than was available in the boutique shops to the north around Camden.

  The older man turned again, and shuffled towards the pub.

  “Good luck being a fucking radio, you spastic cunt,” Charlie spat viciously at his back. Such language was unheard of in Bloomsbury; “radio rental” was cockney rhyming slang for one of an imbalanced mental state, and the other phrase was so utterly repugnant to the average London ear that it was rarely heard outside of the East End and dockland pubs. It was a taboo curse that carried significant stigma.

  Bill made no sign he’d even heard. Disappearing through the doors of the Royal Oak, he left Charlie stood gormlessly in the street, alone again.

  “If it wasn’t for my leg I’d be doing my bit, you hear me?”

  Silence.

  “I’d be doing my bleedin’ bit!”

  But Charlie was shrieking at a building, on an empty street. He reddened, and the anger dissipated as quickly as it had erupted.

  “Prat,” he muttered to himself. He wasn’t entirely sure if it was aimed at Bill.

  ~

  Bill slowly trailed into the comforting familiarity of the Royal Oak’s public room, where Arthur was, as customary, polishing a glass behind the bar. Even in comparatively quiet times, the old publican had maintained an immaculate pub; gleaming and clean, with only the smell of smoke and ale betraying the place to olfactory perception as a London public house. Bill took a pipe out of the inside pocket of his heavy coat. He smiled genially, and started pouring a pint of thick ale before Bill had reached him.

  In the next room, a rather more intense scene was developing, and pulses were racing somewhat faster than in the gleaming tranquillity of the public bar.

  “We’ve got one chance at this. Just one.”

  Alan was holding court, red-faced from a particularly heroic bout of drinking that had stretched over the previous days – a continuous ‘topping up’ of the nerves and ‘Dutch courage’, he claimed – but still largely in control of his faculties. “It’s me or Jack to take the sniper shot. Sorry to say it, but has to be the best marksman. You know I’d just as happily kill the bastards with the whites of their eyes showing.” He took a mighty swig of his ale, and grimaced. “Which brings me to that point. I’m out of range. At the same time on ground level… there’s simply no option other than suicide charges with guns and grenades.” He shrugged helplessly.

  “For the Emperor – banzai…” William intoned.

  He hoped that if it came to it, he’d have the courage to kamikaze in the style of a suicide charging a Japanese warrior. He’d seen enough during trench charges in Spain, on the Aragon front, and the results were often grim; lives bled out in the hot dust, an unforgiving sun burning down on them.

  “Yes,” Jack interjected, shortly. “That’s the way. Only we do it for an ideal, not a man.”

  That settled it, as it so often had before. They had all learned to trust Jack’s judgement, his cool and steady head that even by their unnaturally high standards, was remarkable for such a young man.

  Jack clasped his hands in front of his face. “I’m trying in vain, at the moment, but…” he opened his hands, expression hopeful, “… if we can get another sniper rifle we double our chances. Doubtful we’d fail, in fact.”

/>   William and Mary both chuckled at that; Jack wasn’t sure if it was mirthless. “We wouldn’t fail.” Mary smiled.

  “Surviving’s another thing. But fail? Nah.” William raised his glass to Jack, who winked back. Bickering and tension expended vital energy, and morale was important.

  “Touché.”

  “Can’t we get Art to request one?” Alan piped up. He doubted it, but having not contributed to the discussion for several dozens of seconds, he decided it was time to sound proactive. But Jack shook his head.

  “Nothing. He’s hearing nothing but radio static.”

  “And you’ve heard nothing since?” Alan asked William, a little sourly. He’d since been informed of the Colonel’s approach to his fellow Scot to conscript the group to clandestine action. William shook his head.

  “And you have not heard from anybody?” Mary asked? Alan confirmed with a shrug. Jack explained for the umpteenth time, ad nauseum, but in the hope it would help with the Spanish beauty’s determination, one way or the other.

  “The radio is one-way at the moment, nothing incoming. No idea if any other cells are still out there or if they’re enjoying Gestapo hospitality. My guess is with orders to snuff out the local collaborators, choose if they’re bobbies, brides or bricklayers, plenty of local folk wouldn’t have been so keen to help. Especially after reprisals against the populace.”

  He shook his head. They still couldn’t leave the Greater London area, which had been encircled by Wehrmacht checkpoints and strategically placed companies. They still had no idea how successful – or otherwise – concerted organised resistance was. Or had been.

  “We’re stuck with one sniper, one normal. Mary, are you getting on with the floor plans for the Savoy?”

  “No joy,” she said, adopting the England phrase with her own lilt. “I can not get near. Everybody working there is screenéd, is watchéd. And the hotel itself is… unassailable,” she said, dredging the old word up from their times in the trenches. Her pronunciation of it was distinctly Spanish. She shrugged, a little sadly. “There is no way we can attack them inside.”