The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

  The market still struggled on, even though there were few among the deliverymen from the collective farms of Kent and Sussex who recalled the days when bananas were a regular sight. Stark frequented it rarely, only when his mother asked him to pick up some apples or pears in season. But he would be glad to see it now.

  Gingerly, he climbed down from the platform onto the track once again and, taking care to tread on the sleepers – he was in less of a hurry now and with both hands free was less afraid of losing his balance – headed into the darkness of the tunnel. The chief question on his mind was whether the electrified lines here would still be live or whether the power would only stretch as far as the next station. At some stage in the extraordinary operation of dividing the city the power supply to the Tube had obviously been rearranged. How on earth that might have been done, he had no idea, but it would have eased his mind considerably to know what it meant in terms of the rail close to his feet. And then ahead of him, brought into unexpectedly sudden view by some quirk of tunneller’s topography, was the station platform, crowded with early-morning passengers.

  And there, advancing rapidly towards him was a train. Stark held his breath and then exhaled with relief as the familiar red-fronted, dirty but undefaced carriage with an equally familiar cranking rattle, shuddered to a halt. He thought for a moment he saw a look of open-mouthed incomprehension on the face of the man in the driver’s compartment at the vision of someone striding out of the unbreachable abyss.

  Then the driver did what ninety per cent of his compatriots would do under the circumstances. He turned away and climbed out of his cab. He was at the end of his line. He had seen something he shouldn’t have; therefore, he pretended he hadn’t.

  Stark sighed; he was home.

  Chapter 42

  In the Mansion House office of the General Secretary of the Socialist Labour Party, Arthur Harkness adjusted his heavy black-framed glasses in the gilt-framed mirror that had once reflected the images of Lords Mayor of London. He swept back his silver-grey hair with one hand, adjusted his tie, wine-red as always, set off by the bleached white of his well-pressed shirt, and the sedate, sober black of his suit.

  His father may have been a miner in the Welsh valleys used to grime and dust but the son, even in late middle age, was a man who cared about his appearance. Appearances mattered. What the people saw was what determined their attitude. Look too much like one of them and God knew what might happen.

  He allowed himself a slight, internal, smile at the unconscious reference to the deity. He had not been brought up a strict Methodist. Upbringing left its marks, the relentless tedium of Sunday school as much as the ingrained cynicism that came with seeing generation after generation of good men ground to dust and an early grave by long hours down mine shafts in conditions little better than those of the pack donkeys that were their closest companions.

  All for the benefit of the toffee-nosed swaggering gentry, stuck-up sons of earls and dukes who owed their fortunes to ancestors who’d been no more than protection racketeers licensed by mafia bosses who called themselves kings. Them and the new ones, barons who boasted they’d picked themselves up by their boot strings when all they’d done was climb over the corpses of the poor and greedy conned into deserting their rural idyll with the promise of fool’s gold to be earned in factories. Or in the mine shafts.

  Harkness knew the weaknesses of the common people, and knew it was his job to protect them from themselves, from their baser instincts. That was the job of any true Bolshevik: to guide the masses on the path of fairness for all, to take them on that journey to an egalitarian socialism, no matter how hard it might sometimes seem, no matter what sacrifices for some – and occasionally for all – it might entail.

  He had been doing that job for nearly half a century now, at first as a young organiser in a communist party that existed on the fringes of legality, then, perforce, in the armed forces, in the reluctant service of the capitalists against the greater evil of fascism, and then, when the plutocrats turned traitor and showed their real colours, as a deserter in the underground, working for the betrayed ally right up to the glorious moment when the Red Flag had flown over Whitehall. He had been there to see it and the tears had flooded his eyes.

  Then the Mansion House, scarred but remarkably little damaged by the inferno that had swept around it, had still been home to the Lord Mayor of London, an absurd pseudo-noble title bestowed in rotation on one after another of the plutocrats who dominated what they called the City, and through it the financial markets and commodities of half the world. Now it was his home; his official home at any rate, for Harkness liked to pride himself on being a modest man and still kept a suitable property outside the capital, a simple farmhouse on the Kent Weald, even if the demands of his security people – excessive in his own opinion – required the isolation of some 100 hectares surrounding, in which only chosen members of the politburo were allowed to reside. Such were the constraints, however, of public service.

  It was not as if he had been simply anointed in power. Over the first fifteen years of the Republic he had worked his way up through the cadres, played a leading role in the (admittedly) sleight-of-hand manoeuvring that had seen the old Labour Party first infiltrated by and then merged with the communists to become, in accord with the new geopolitics, the natural party of government. Arthur Harkness had been an enthusiastic apologist of the Anti-Capitalist Protection Barrier. Sad though he was that his own home county remained under the old regime’s new incarnation, he was – like all good politicians, he often reflected – at heart a pragmatist. Perhaps one day the dream of global revolution would be a reality, but in the meantime there was what the German comrades called Realpolitik, and he was damn good at it. So good, in fact, that he was about to celebrate twenty-five years as leader of his party and therefore, by definition, of his country.

  He had served well, he liked to think, and indeed so he had been repeatedly told, not only by his own faithful, but by the fraternal allies whose might guaranteed the security of the socialist system. It was unthinkable that they should fail him, even more unthinkable than that he should ever fail them. That was not the way of the world. And Arthur Harkness was determined that the way of the world should be preserved. He rankled at those pathetic greed-driven commentators from up North who said he had made the Mansion House a bastion of ‘die-hard communist conservatism’. Had they read no books? Did they know no politics? Communism and conservatism were antipathetic in eternity. Some things didn’t change and that was a principle he would fight to the last to defend, and no fickle faint heart who might have wafted to temporary power in the Kremlin was going to alter it. Maybe they had forgotten what had happened to Khrushchev; and he had been lucky.

  No, as he stared in the mirror, he could hold up his head with pride. The handful of dissenters and would-be unionists were as irrelevant as royalists, and almost as foolish. The Department of Social Security did what it said on its charter: it kept society secure. Today was his young nation’s finest hour. Forty, he told himself, was an age of maturity for a man, and so it might be for a state. He liked that idea and indeed had let it leak out to others in the politburo so that he felt it might not even be surprising to see something of the sort even crop up on placards in the crowd – the people liked that sort of thing: ideas that percolated down from the top.

  ‘Life begins at 40’. So it would be for the English Democratic Republic. Those who had said the partition would never last had long since come to accept it; even the Northerners had learned to live with it. It was already five years since he had paid a state visit to Durham, toured the Northern capital like any other foreign dignitary, even looked in – briefly of course – on his old home village, which had been tarted up for his arrival he had noted, and he had been treated with full honours. There had been protesters of course, but only a few, and he had noted with satisfaction how efficiently the Northern police had kept them out of his sight. His own men could hardly have done better,
he had said publicly, though he had thought privately that in a well-mannered – and well-run – state, the slightest hint of popular displeasure at a visiting foreign dignitary should have been ruthlessly suppressed.

  As they would be today if there was any nonsense. It was Harkness’s turn to host a visiting dignitary. And not just any dignitary but arguably the most important man in the world, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Certainly the most important man in Arthur Harkness’s world. After himself, of course. The only trouble was that the current man in the job seemed to have forgotten what the job was. All this talk of glasnost, transparency, led to the risk of forgetting that the minds of men were blank sheets: anyone could write on them. And more often than not they wrote the wrong things. What was it the old bastard Churchill himself had said? ‘History will be kind to me, because I intend to write it.’ Thank God he hadn’t got the chance. And now the Americans were making a film to glorify the old bugger, to exhume some symbol that might stir his, Arthur Harkness’s, people, into some pipedream of so-called reunification.

  The danger was it might work. Already there had been that absurd piece of graffiti on Bankside power station. And he had heard rumours of another, though he was not sure where. He had a horrible feeling from the expressions of the craven yes-men who surrounded him that they were scared to tell him. Anyway he hoped they were gone now. Or heads would roll. Any rumbling of dissent, and attempt to exploit the appearance – and surely it was superficial appearance only – of ‘new thinking’ in Moscow, was to be crushed relentlessly. He had put his best man on the job. Charles Marchmain knew what he was doing.

  There was a knock on the door. ‘Enter,’ he called.

  ‘Comrade General Secretary,’ the junior official who timorously entered said. Harkness liked it when they used his title as party leader. It was, after all, the office to which the honour was due, not the man. Besides, it emphasised that the party and state were one. ‘The guest delegation is ready for the preliminary talks.’

  Harkness nodded a gruff acknowledgement. He saw no reason for these particular talks. It was a formality, of course, part of the routine of such visits, that the fraternal leaders would talk in private before the public celebrations. But what was there to say, beyond ‘congratulations’, and it was not as if he found this new man convivial. ‘Businesslike’ might be the way some people had chosen to describe him, but as far as Harkness was concerned they had no business to transact.

  Trade, economic, military relations were all as they always had been. And internal affairs were not on the agenda. Not like they had been in Paris or Amsterdam in 1968 when control had been lost, things had got out of hand and fraternal assistance was urgently required to ensure the stability necessary for continuing progress towards the socialist ideal. It was unimaginable that anything like that could happen here, in England. Arthur Harkness ran a tight ship. And he intended to keep it that way. There were six hours still to go before they stood on the rostrum together to take the salute. He did not intend to spend all of it in needless talks, nor indeed any of it being browbeaten.

  ‘Tell them to wait,’ he replied.

  Chapter 43

  Stark stood on the fast emptying platform of Covent Garden Underground station and took a long look at the mouth of the tunnel he had emerged from. He could no longer think of the world beyond the Wall as ‘over there’. It was beneath his feet.

  It was as if he was Alice in Wonderland, suddenly thrown back up through the rabbit hole into the real world. Only the piece of paper in his hand proved that it had not all been a dream: a map of the London Underground as nobody had known it for four decades. On it, with a stub of pencil, he drew two little square boxes on the Northern Line south of Leicester Square. That was where he had been: how he had got there was another matter altogether. He shoved it into his jacket pocket.

  Almost nobody had looked at the figure who climbed onto the end of the platform. Perhaps they had taken him for a maintenance worker. Perhaps, like the train driver, they just didn’t want to know. Today was Republic Day, the fortieth, a day for celebration. Compulsory celebration. Certainly not a day to be asking questions. He let himself melt into the flow towards the escalators and up into an unexpected flood of sunshine. Even heaven was smiling on the Socialist Paradise.

  He was grateful for the anonymity of the crowds. Not least, he reflected with a certain irony, because they shielded him from the ubiquitous uniformed police. There were uniformed constables on every corner and God only knew how many ‘colleagues’ from the Department in plainclothes among the crowds. Not to mention the unseen ranks of ‘informals’. The knees of Stark’s trousers were torn, his clothes were covered in dust and grime and there were thin smears of dried blood on his wrists. The last thing he wanted was to attract attention from police who would be looking to weed out beggars from the crowds of citizens dressed in their Sunday best.

  The side streets leading down to the Strand were lined with battered buses that had brought factory workers in from Dagenham for the parade. They unloaded here and let the ‘volunteers’ walk or take the Tube. It added to the appearance of spontaneity, though nobody – not even the Northern television crews – was fooled. Stark passed lines of grumpy middle-aged men trudging along trailing their ‘home-made’ placards behind them: ‘No More War’, in black letters on red, ‘The EDR – a bulwark of peace and socialism’, ‘40 years of progress’, ‘40: for a mature socialist society’.

  Almost all of them had been shipped in wholesale by their factory managers eager to prove provincial party loyalty to the regime, thereby securing another year’s untrammelled rule over fiefdoms as far flung as Yeovil and Yarmouth. The workers themselves by and large were philosophical about the wasted holiday, treating it at least as a day out in the big city.

  Several carried the national flag, the socialist red rose imposed over the red-on-white cross of St George. Stark had heard it had been old Harkness himself, despite being a Welshman by birth, who had thought up the idea of holding the national holiday on 23 April, the traditional birthday of Shakespeare, ‘the first people’s playwright’, and St George’s Day. Religion be damned, St George was also conveniently the patron saint of Russia.

  It was when he reached the Strand itself, already closed to traffic for the parade, that he saw a placard that took his breath. For a moment he thought the world had gone mad. Here was a factory worker from Dagenham carrying a picture of Churchill. But it was not the same as the stencil on Bankside or the one he had seen on the Wall. This was a crude caricature – a baby face with a cigar and bowler hat and a glass of champagne, the classic capitalist. Across it was scratched a big bold letter ‘X’ and below the words ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks’. The party had finally decided on its response to Hollywood’s Bulldog Breed movie.

  Stark found a phone box, rummaged in his pocket for change and found a ten pence piece. He could have called the emergency police number but that would have raised even more flags. Particularly on a day like today. Lavery picked up: ‘Where the hell have you been, boss? I would have sent out the search parties if I’d had anybody to send. Virtually the whole force is on duty …’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Stark. ‘I’m okay. But I’ve got a lead.’

  ‘I’m not sure, boss, not today. We haven’t got the manpower.’

  ‘Don’t need manpower, Lavery. Not for this one. It’s something I’ve got to look into. On my own. Understand?’

  The line was silent.

  ‘Look, Dick. You know how it is. Sometimes things just come up. Stuff you have to do on your own.’ Stark wondered if Lavery would assume he was having an affair. Fat chance. ‘Just trust me, mate. Tell them I’ve phoned in sick. On my deathbed, if you have to.’

  ‘If you’re sure about this, boss.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ He put the phone down. He was anything but sure.

  The doormen outside the Savoy Hotel were never going to turn a blind eye to someone in St
ark’s state of dress entering what was one of the Republic’s prime hotels for foreigners. No sooner had Stark turned into the short drive that separated the entrance proper from the Strand than two men in nondescript grey suits blocked his way.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ the first said, with distinct verbal inverted commas around the ‘sir’. ‘Residents only.’

  Reluctantly, though he had known there would be no alternative, Stark reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew his warrant card. Luckily his underground captors had not taken it, as they had his weapon.

  The man in the suit took it, examined it closely, then handed it to his colleague, who merely shrugged, handed it back and waved Stark through. Stark was aware of them shaking their heads as they stared at his ripped and dirty trousers. The official doorman standing in front of the revolving door in a top hat that had seen better days gave him an astonished look and glanced back and forth at his colleagues. Stark went through the same procedure and entered the grand if faded foyer of the English Democratic Republic’s most famous hotel.

  Ignoring the stares from hotel employees and foreign guests alike Stark marched across the fraying Persian rugs laid out on the chipped marble floor to the lift. When at last, with a grinding of gears, the ancient mechanism delivered the lift to the ground floor, Stark entered, pulled the iron cage gate across behind him and pressed the button for the fourth floor. He hoped Ben Fairweather had not gone out early for the parade. He was about to get a visitor.

  Chapter 44

  ‘What’s happening, Harry? Where are we going?’

  ‘On an excursion. I’m taking you to see the people you wanted to meet.’