“Yeah?”
“Thanks mate. Thanks for this…”
Bill’s mouth curled into a half-smile.
“Night.”
The light turned off, leaving Charlie in the dark warmth, lit by the light of a low, crackling fire; flames flickering patterns against the wall.
Bill went into his own bedroom, turning on a gas light.
On the chest of drawers, he deposited the medals down with the others he’d amassed, and considered the other framed photographs he owned that stood there. There was one of his wife, Maureen. She was smiling, happy. Another of their wedding day. They had married quietly, with a few friends present in a small ceremony in a Whitechapel Church whose name Bill could no longer recall. He gazed at the smooth, unwrinkled photograph. She was beautiful. He himself had a face as unlined as the picture in its cheap frame.
He sighed. Her death in the influenza epidemic that followed the Great War had been as hard a blow as any dealt him in the trenches. He still bitterly missed her. Not a day passed without his thoughts inevitably drifting to sweet Maureen, like a dull ache.
Something stirred in him.
Bill looked in his wardrobe, where a collection of old, dapper suits of charcoal grey, in a tapered cut rested in pristine condition. Tweed, and bottle blue blazer jackets and coats had been slid to the far right; one garish pinstripe suit had pride of place in the centre, and on the left, Bill’s army uniform. He took out the field blouse, slipping into it for the first time since November 1918.
The return from France. The quiet months. A year. Being able to smile again. Songs, laughter. Then Maureen’s illness. The sharp, searing pain. Then, alone. Daggers, stabbing, slicing. And then, the numbness.
Long months of quiet. Years. Two decades. The pain disconnected. Solitude became normality.
Bill stared into his full-length mirror, and felt the flush of long dormant feelings aroused beneath his prickling skin.
Turning back to his chest of drawers cabinet, he raised the picture of Maureen to the light. He remembered singing to her, as she lay stricken, dying. All the confusion of the long years of war, the hatred and death, stuck knee-deep in the mud and blood.
“I’m forever blowing bubbles,” he murmured, reliving as he did so his crooning to her, stroking her soft hair as she lay barely moving on her deathbed. He crooned, into her ear. Crooned through her pain. Their favourite new song. Forever blowing bubbles… Pretty bubbles in the air. They fly so high, they reach the sky, then like my dreams they fade and die…
At that, the first tears in years trickled down his burning face, sliding inexorably into the unkempt growth of hair that grew so wildly around handsome features.
The shrill ring of the telephone pierced the tranquillity of the Royal Oak’s royal suite.
Heydrich started in surprise. Having long-since finished his daily meetings – a repetitive succession of expository projections-of-force, over his SS counterparts and various bureaucrats alike – his explicit instructions were that no calls were to disturb him, unless from the Führer himself. He had even, struggling to contain his laughter, told the Hotel staff to insist even to Reichsmarschall Göring and Reichsführer-SS Himmler that he was resting, and not to be disturbed unless urgent.
This call was significant. With deep concern, Heydrich picked up the phone, his small blue eyes already narrowed in suspicion.
“Reichsprotektor. Hallo?”
Ten seconds later, his face became grave, and then some time after, the smugness returned.
“Tomorrow, yes? And before… yes… that is definite?”
Heydrich lightly picked up a thickly-buttered scone, which he smeared jam over, before demolishing it in four bites, all done whilst listening to the phone call in high good humour. An incredulous smile had curled over his high, horsey features. After another minute of listening keenly, the voice in his ear finally petered out.
“Why, thank you for this call. That is most interesting, my friend. Most interesting indeed…”
Heydrich promptly rang off, and stepped to the window, looking out over the Thames thoughtfully. The electric light of street lamps scattered across the Embankment and Westminster lit up the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, and he stared across the magnificent vista of London, his eyes filmed with thought.
“Most interesting…” he murmured. In his mind’s eye, a plan began to form.
The flash of the dark blackout curtains let a streak of pale light permeate the room, and Charlie awoke instantly, with the instinct of one accustomed to sleeping in hostile environments, instantly alert to danger. His eyes came into focus, to see Bill stood holding a tray, smiling at him.
“Morning Charlie…”
“Morning, Bill…” Charlie groaned, as a wave of soreness from his battering suddenly seized him. “Bloody hell.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like shit,” Charlie tried to laugh. “Like a football that has been kicked around for too long, ready for the bin.”
“Try to get this down you.” Bill told him, offering the breakfast tray. Charlie accepted it gratefully; the older man had prepared tea, a plate of buttered toast and an egg.
“Strewth, Bill… I aint eaten an egg for over a year!”
Bill smiled indulgently. “You must be ravenous.”
“Ta, Bill.”
Charlie began to scoff the toast and egg greedily, wolfing it down like a starved urchin.
“Bill,” he asked, between hefty mouthfuls. “Why you helping me like this? Especially after I sounded off at you like a bleedin’ berk.”
“What could I do, leave you there?”
Charlie shrugged. “A lesser bloke would have. Can I ask you some’ing, Bill? Are all those medals yours? The ones that was up there.”
“Oh,” Bill looked embarrassed. “I only took them in… well… I just felt they shouldn’t be out on display. Like it’s pride. Nothing to do with you being here, lad.”
Charlie chuckled at that. “Bloody hell Bill, I wouldn’t give a monkey’s even if you ’ad taken ’em out cos you thought I was a tea leaf. You put me up, di’n’t ya? You gave me a roof, mate.”
He finished his meal, and sipped the tea gratefully.
“You still ain’t answered though,” the boy added with a wink, which stretched the skin of his sore face and made him wince.
Bill sighed. He got up, and stood by the window, looking out.
“Yes.”
“You won ’em all?”
“All won for defending King and Country.”
Bill shook his head sorrowfully, his back to Charlie, who frowned in slack-jawed amazement. The sardonic tone Bill had answered with was mired in resentment, bitterness and pain. How could he feel that way?
“But… you aint proud of all them medals, Bill? I would be.”
The older man continued to stare out of the window. Charlie’s tone was pleading, almost begging him to… he didn’t know what; admit, confess, change his views… whatever it was…
“But you’re an ’ero, Bill. You’re a war hero.”
Bill Wilson turned to him, with steady gaze, a fire burning in his eyes. Charlie felt a tingling of his senses to look at him. It was as though the old drunk he’d seen staggering out of the pub was now a man of extreme gravitas, from whom emanated an almost elemental power.
His deep, steady voice rumbled with quiet force.
“Medals can’t bring your mates back. I didn’t receive a medal for holding my brother in my arms, watching him die in the mud; choking his final moments away as his own blood clogged his throat… they gave him a medal for dying, though. Thanks, boy. With deepest, heartfelt sympathy from the people who caused the war, profited from the war, then celebrated the war. They gave out medals, but it was our blood spilt in the stinking mud that earned them. And for what? You expect me to be proud. You don’t understand. No… war is carnage. No one wins, not the soldiers anyhow. I don’t know why a new generation of idiots have inflicted that hell on us again… le
d by the two biggest idiots of all, Hitler and Göring, who personally experienced the horrors of the last one and still unleashed it on the world.” Bill shook his head, reliving hell in his mind’s eye. “Perhaps they cared more about losing than us survivors did about winning. No, I’m not proud. I’m not a hero… I never was. Just a man who was put in hell with a few million other brothers, and told to kill…”
Bill stood motionless, his eyes betraying the horror of some nightmarish reminiscence. Charlie was stunned, stammering.
“You’re still an ’ero to me, Bill.”
The hazel and yellow eyes rested on him again, steadfastly. Anger burned in them like forest fire.
“I’m no hero. I never was. I’m just an old soldier, whose life was stolen; a tool of the government, thrown in there as a young man and told to kill. It’s all an illusion. None of it’s valid, son. Don’t believe the establishment’s lies… rulers rarely love, and those who gain power always do so to wield it…”
Memories of noise and gore, gunfire, explosions and screams filled his head, and he let the hellish reel of devilish images play across his mind for another moment in the nightmarish past before forcing himself back into the present.
“Sneak home and pray you’ll never know, the hell where youth and laughter go…” Bill concluded with quiet bitterness, quoting Siegfried Sassoon.
“Sorry to hear that, Bill,” Charlie said, quietly, watching him.
Bill nodded.
“Long time ago, boy,” he said with some effort, managing a small smile. “So… what exactly happened to you last night then? I imagine it was our two friends… Arthur’s newest regulars.”
“Yeah, it were them two Germans that was in the pub yesterday, Bill. They jumped me just before you came along.”
“Why did they do that?” he wondered. Charlie already had his answer worked out; the experience had not inspired much in the way of reflection for him, nor had it needed analysis.
“They’re pricks, aint they? Just a pair of ’orrible pricks. Enjoyin’ ’emselves as Lords of the Manor, in their fancy kraut uniforms like coppers on a power trip. They were trying to get a rise out of me earlier, and when I left I knocked his drink over. Truth is I didn’t mean to do it, it’s just this stupid leg of mine.”
And Charlie, to his intense embarrassment, found tears stinging his eyes again.
To his surprise, Bill grinned.
“Come on lad. We’ll have the last laugh.”
“Oh yeah, sure. They’ll beat me up every chance they get, the evil bastards. They really enjoyed it. I saw them taking a rise out of you earlier, Bill.”
“Who doesn’t?” he shrugged, carelessly.
“Why do you take it, Bill?” his guest asked, confused. The man he had seen last night and this morning was so far removed from the drunken wastrel he had imagined Bill to be, it was difficult to reconcile what he remembered with sudden clarity; this man, whose slight East End-accented voice was not so unlike his own, was an overlooked and even mocked figure, who was given precious little respect from his peers.
Bill shrugged, carelessly, but there was still a pained look in his eyes.
“I don’t know Charlie, I don’t know.”
Charlie didn’t know what to say. Momentarily, Bill indicated he was ready to take his leave.
“Right, you’d better rest up here until you get well, lad.”
“Thank you Bill,” he said, with genuine gratitude. “I think you should be proud of yourself, you’re a real gentleman.”
“Kind of you to say, my boy… right, I’ve got to get on.”
“Going to the pub?”
That grin again. “I think so, boy.” And he disappeared.
The two Germans had promised an early return the next day; that meant between late morning and the mid-afternoon shutdown. An idea forming in his mind, Bill strolled into his bedroom, and took out his very best suit; a charcoal grey three piece, with matching tie. At the base of his wardrobe, he found an old fedora ringed with white that matched his best suit. Humming to himself, Bill murmured the words to Forever Blowing Bubbles as he finished trimming the last of his beard with a comb and scissors, until only a very short, neat mat of black hair covered the lower half of his face. He inspected his face; it was as though ten years had been removed in an instant. Still humming pleasantly, Bill dressed in his finest clothes, and gazed into the mirror with a mixture of amusement and real surprise. A real gentleman, Maureen’s voice told him. You look like a million pounds, my Bill.
The truck passed a checkpoint filled with guards who looked different to the SS they had thus far seen. Looking out through the bars of a veritable prison transport truck, Naomi saw long-coated grey figures in steel helmets, with sub-machine guns slung over their shoulders. They looked like fighter versions of the SS tormentors she had already, in the space of one night come to know too well.
Barbed wire is a cruel visage. A threatening deterrent to the outside world, and a bald statement of malice to any and all trapped within its confines. As the truck rolled on, and the green countryside began to recede, the perimeter of their destination came into view, and Naomi shuddered to see the spiked barbs. Once within the confines of the outer perimeter, the road stretched on until the grass stopped entirely, and lumpy, ugly military-style buildings loomed into view, behind more fencing topped by evil spikes.
The paddy wagon paused before a closed gate, with Arbeit Macht Frei adorning the entry. Work makes free, she translated in her mind, and a chill ran down her spine. Her memory was jogged unpleasantly, with little persuasion. It was the same sign as at Dachau.
One of the guards standing sentient came to check the driver’s papers. These men were clad in the more familiar SS garb.
An SS man with the blank collar patch grinned at the assembled group of ragged prisoners, most of whom bore some signs of physical abuse.
“Welcome home, asocials. This is your natural habitat.”
He glanced out of both windows, at the partitioned sections lined with barrack huts. Around half of them seemed to be populated, Naomi surmised. Thin, unsmiling figures in ashen-grey and black striped pyjamas. It was like a scene from the wartime propaganda newsreel at the cinema; the images seared into her memory, the visions of her darkest dreams.
“Welcome to Catterick Konzentrationslager.”
The transport shuddered to a juttering halt.
“Out! Get out, now!” a guard shouted coarsely, banging the floor of the transport as the door swung open. Rough hands shoved the forlorn group out onto the asphalt, including the silent children.
The same guard barked at them, pacing restlessly in his polished jackboots. His uniform, too, slightly differed from the SD.
“It means Death’s Head,” one of the prisoners had whispered to her. “Those pirate logos they wear at the German camps. If we see the skull and crossbones on their tops we are as good as dead.”
But apart from the peaked caps, that insignia was nowhere to be seen. The guards in whose care they were so rudely deposited shared the blank collar patch, or sported the small SS lightning runes. Even in her fear, she noted how perverse it was that she was glad to see that hated symbol.
A tall guard with a duelling scar sliced across his right cheek towered over them, as he grimly led them into internment. The ‘SD’ diamond was on his sleeve, but all eyes were focused on the riding whip he carried that swung past the holstered luger pistol at his hip. Behind her, Naomi heard the older couple with young children praying quietly for deliverance and guidance from the Lord.
Naomi doubted He was listening.
They passed through a makeshift reception and front office building, where they were signed in and registered at the camp with the correct paperwork, and then led down an obscenely bright corridor that stunk of disinfectant to a shower area. Two guards stood sentinel at the door.
“Get undressed, clothes off!” the guard that had led them from reception barked. His voice echoed in an eerily quiet building.
“Why is this necessary?” came a scared, male voice that Naomi identified as from Barnsley, or south Yorkshire. It was as though fear had made him speak clearly, with no trace of the heavy regional dialect or usual glottal stops. The effect of fear changes people.
“Get undressed,” the guard screamed.
“What for!” was the return cry from the family, and the small children began to sob loudly, terrified out of their wits.
Noting the potent mix of fear and despair that could escalate, one of the SS guarding the doors stepped in to pacify the situation.
“Do not worry! You are to be deloused. We must delouse you in order for you to enter the camp. You are to wash, and change into the designated clothing prescribed you as per your entry into Protective Custody!”
The wailing stopped. The first guard quickly seized the initiative over the people in his ward, his red face bulging in turmoil like a swollen puff adder ready to strike.
“Get undressed! And the children! Remove their clothing!”
In a huddle of confusion, the transport of twelve prisoners brought from Leeds of which Naomi was part was soon joined with two others, and almost forty scared, naked and helpless people soon crowded into the showers, with the men separated into an adjacent room.
The buzz of frightened murmurs grew steadily louder.
“What’s going on,” a scared girl of perhaps twenty whispered to Naomi, who, similarly wide-eyed, had no answer to give.
The horrendous screaming that ensued almost burst their eardrums. Freezing cold water burst from the pipes and drenched the huddle of terrified prisoners, before dying out as quickly as it had started, with several final belching spurts of ejaculated ice water, finally draining away to leave a shivering huddle of frightened women and children, trembling in the metallic, icy room.
The great metal door at the other side of the room swung open with a great groaning creak, to reveal a blonde female guard. Naomi noted the ‘pirate’s logo’ she’d been warned about, and voiced a silent prayer.
“Everybody out! This way!” the small German woman roared, the noise belying her relatively small frame.
Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! Page 46