Hollow Crown

by David Roberts

  ‘You mean, they’ll think we’re going to support Mosley?’

  ‘Well, we don’t look “working class”.’

  ‘But I thought you said Communism was for all the people.’

  ‘Not class enemies, you ass. People still remember the General Strike, you know.’

  Edward narrowly missed running over a child which had rolled out of its mother’s arms into the road. He raised his hat and apologized to the woman, who swore at him.

  ‘Mmm, maybe you’re right but, damn it, I don’t like to be intimidated.’

  Obstructed by the ever-increasing crowds which overflowed the pavements and colonized the roads, they slowed to walking pace and even Edward began to feel uncomfortable. This was not the good-humoured crowd of the Peace Pledge marches of the previous year. These people were earnest and determined. They came level with a policeman who held out his hand to halt them. ‘You can’t take this motor car any further, sir. It wouldn’t be safe. I suggest you leave it round the back of Goodman’s Yard. It ought to be safe there.’

  It was with some relief that Edward obeyed, feeling that the officer had enabled him to surrender his car without loss of face. Even on foot, Edward and Verity stood out from the rest. Fenton had recommended an old suit, sensibly fearing the violence which might be offered it by the mob, but it was perfectly cut and his tie was perfectly knotted. His hat, one of Lock’s best grey homburgs, was perfectly placed on his head which Lionel, his barber at Trumpers, had only recently shorn. He wore no spats but he might as well have done. He was immediately recognizable as a man about town who ought not to have ventured into this other world of cloth caps and threadbare jackets.

  Verity had her own ideas about what to wear on marches. Long experience had taught her that comfortable shoes were the first priority and that the hats she liked – wide of brim and often heaped with fruit or feathers – attracted derision and usually ended up in the gutter. Instead, she wore a tight little brown felt hat. Her faintly military coat had heavily padded shoulders but again, her whole outfit suggested money. It was too bad, she thought, that comrades had to look so dreary. She wanted to show solidarity with the less well-off but considered it would be hypocritical to ‘dress down’. Like it or leave it, she was who she was. She held her chin a little bit higher and clung on to Edward’s arm a little bit tighter.

  It was a considerable relief to both of them when they heard a yell and caught sight of Tommie signalling to them. The man of God pushed his way through the mob with the practised ease of a fly half and greeted them with slaps on the back. Edward winced. ‘Sorry, old boy. Didn’t mean to hurt you but isn’t this glorious?’

  He was excited and, when Tommie got excited, he tended to get physical.

  ‘Yes,’ Verity said, the sparkle in his eyes energizing her. ‘We haven’t missed the fun, have we?’

  ‘No, no! But there are hundreds of police. They have orders to keep us well away from the BUF but they won’t succeed. We’re all just a bit fed up with Mosley’s posturing.’

  ‘So what’s going to happen?’ Edward felt nervous. He wasn’t a natural political agitator. He certainly wasn’t a Communist and he felt Verity had put him in a false position but, on the other hand, it was right he should stand up against the National Socialists as Mosley now called his party – that or the British Union. He had dropped the word Fascist, not wanting to be too closely associated with the Nazis. He had even changed the Party’s emblem from the Roman ‘fasces’ to a lightning flash in a circle, which the Communists had labelled the flash-in-the-pan.

  The sound of bells from half a hundred City churches, summoning Londoners to worship another god than mammon, rebuked them for what they were about to do. ‘Oughtn’t you to be in church?’ Edward asked Tommie – Verity thought rather meanly. ‘It is Sunday.’

  Tommie looked momentarily downcast and Edward immediately regretted his jibe.

  ‘I think the Lord would want me to stand up for the just against the unjust,’ he said. ‘He didn’t himself spend many hours in the Temple, you know. He liked to be among the people,’ he added stiffly and Edward was silenced for a moment.

  ‘Where are we going exactly?’ he inquired at last.

  Verity said, ‘Jack Spot – you know who I mean?’

  ‘He’s one of your Party’s organizers, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, we’re meeting him and other Party workers in Cable Street. I think the idea is to build a barricade to stop the Mosleyites marching through the East End.’

  ‘I see,’ Edward said, wondering if he could make an excuse and leave before the bricks started flying. ‘I thought this was just going to be a peaceful demonstration, not a revolution.’

  ‘Don’t be so wet, Edward,’ Verity said crossly. ‘Tommie and I will look after you if you’re scared.’

  ‘It’s not that, it’s just that . . . ’

  They had turned down Chamber Street and a dull roar, like the sea breaking on a distant shore, came on their ears. It thrilled and excited Verity and she wondered if Edward might be right: perhaps this was the revolution. They increased their pace, as did those around them, suddenly fearful they might be missing something. When they turned into Cable Street, an amazing sight greeted them. A wall of furniture, corrugated iron and scrap metal had been thrown up across the street and a man whom Verity identified as Jack Spot, the Communist agitator, was standing on it shouting and waving what looked like a chair leg. He was conducting the crowd in the chant which Marshal Petain had coined in 1916 at Verdun but which Verity had first heard in Spain: ‘They shall not pass!’

  ‘No pasaran!’ A shiver of recognition ran down her spine and, letting go of Edward’s arm, she thrust herself forward towards the barricade, carried along by others equally caught up in the moment as herself. Edward looked round and, finding he had lost her, turned to speak to Tommie but he too had disappeared. He sighed but was not unduly alarmed. He took it that, given Verity had survived the siege of Toledo, she would not come to much harm in this crowd of like-minded thinkers. He made his way into Dock Street to get out of the worst of the crowd. When he had been walking for five minutes, he saw that he had come out, as it were ‘behind the lines’, at the Royal Mint. There were crowds here too but of a very different kind to the mob of chanting anti-Fascists he had left in Cable Street. He was faced with rank upon rank of Mosley youths and, Edward noted with some surprise and not a little disgust, several hundred young women, all dressed in uniform – black shirts, broad belts, breeches and boots. He guessed there might have been as many as three thousand.

  As he watched, there was a roar of engines and Mosley himself appeared, standing upright in an open Bentley with a police motor-cycle escort. The Bentley came to a halt and Mosley solemnly got out with two or three men who were not in uniform and began to inspect his troops. Edward recognized William Joyce, chief propaganda officer of the BUF, among them. Mosley was wearing the uniform he had designed himself – a black military-style jacket with an armband of red and white, which he said signified ‘action within the circle of unity’ whatever that meant. His breeches were grey and, inevitably, he wore jackboots. Edward thought he looked rather absurd and – his greatest criticism – un-English. The would-be dictator solemnly walked up and down the ranks of blackshirts inspecting them as though they were a regiment of soldiers rather than a private army of thugs.

  Edward said out loud, ‘That has to be the rummest thing!’

  ‘It is a bit odd, isn’t it?’

  He looked round in surprise. He was hardly aware he had spoken aloud but obviously he had and now he saw who had answered him. It was none other than Sir Geoffrey Hepple-Keen.

  ‘For goodness sake – what are you doing here?’ he exclaimed.

  ‘I might say the same of you,’ Hepple-Keen replied mildly. ‘I’m here on official business.’

  Edward looked at him searchingly. ‘You’re not a policeman. You’re an MP.’

  ‘I’m a politician and this is politics.’


  Just as Edward was going to press him to be more explicit, a man appeared on a rooftop brandishing a red flag. As Edward watched, he gave the clenched fist salute of the Communists and then bent over to pick up either a stone or a roof tile, which he threw as cleanly as though he were aiming a cricket ball at the stumps. By some amazing fluke, the missile hit Mosley on the shoulder. He had just returned to his car and was standing in the front ready to take the salute. He staggered and then righted himself. As if it had been a signal, from behind the barricade came a shower of stones which rattled against the Bentley, one smashing the windscreen. Mosley looked round in bewilderment, as if he could hardly credit what was happening. His chauffeur rapidly backed the car out of range and, as he did so,Mosley lost his balance and fell back on the seat. Edward laughed and turned to Hepple-Keen to see his reaction, but he had disappeared.

  The situation was now getting out of hand. Missiles were pouring over the barricade and the sound of shouting seemed to suggest that the artillery attack presaged an all-out charge. To do the blackshirts justice, they remained in ranks and had not yet retaliated but their leaders were looking towards Mosley for instructions. More police arrived and a senior police officer who, Edward learned later, was Sir Philip Game, Chief Police Commissioner, went over to talk to him. Edward could not hear what was said but Mosley was gesticulating violently towards the barricade so it was not difficult to guess what he was demanding. He had permission to march down Cable Street and he was now prevented from doing so by a rabble of Communists and anti-Fascists. The Commissioner scratched his head but at last gave an order. From out of nowhere, it seemed to Edward, the street was full of mounted policemen and, at a word from their commander, they charged the barricade. It was an awesome sight and Edward wondered if London had seen anything like it since the Gordon riots a hundred and fifty years earlier.

  He decided he ought to try and find Verity and warn her that she and her friends were in serious danger but, of course, they must have realized that. In any case, there wasn’t time. Many of the horses had not been able to break through the barricade but one particularly determined group, supported by officers on foot brandishing batons, had made a gap at the far end, furthest away from where Edward was standing. By the time he had doubled back the way he had come and made his way round the barricade, the fight had degenerated into chaos. The rioters were throwing marbles and broken glass under the horses’ hooves and women appeared at an upstairs window and began pelting the police with stones. One horse stumbled and fell. Edward could not see its rider as the fallen horse was quickly surrounded by rioters, but he feared the worst. Several policemen had been hit by missiles and were lying in the road being tended to by their colleagues. Dodging stones and bottles, Edward made his way to an upturned lorry where Jack Spot was rallying his troops. He thought it most likely that Verity would be as near the centre of the storm as possible. Oddly enough, as though this was at the very eye of the storm, there was relative quiet here and he was able to shout to Spot: ‘The police are never going to let you anywhere near the blackshirts. Oughtn’t you to retreat and fight another day?’

  ‘Never!’ gasped the little man, still clutching his chair leg. ‘They shall not pass. London will not allow Jew baiters through and . . . ’

  At that moment a police horse jumped right over the barricade and one of its hooves caught Edward on the forehead and knocked him to the ground. He could only have been unconscious for a few seconds but, when he came to, he found he was being dragged unceremoniously into Grace’s Alley. ‘The Old Mahogany Bar’, in what had once been Wilton’s Music Hall but was now a Methodist Mission, was serving as the protesters’ headquarters. The ‘barley-sugar’ pillars were draped in red banners and the mahogany bar – which gave the place its name and which the Methodists had been canny enough to retain from its less respectable days – served as a huge desk from which the leaders dispensed badges and instructions. Absurdly, Edward thought for a moment of what Fenton would say when he saw the state of his suit and he tried to laugh.

  ‘Oh, so you’re awake,’ a voice said briskly. It was Verity and she was not pleased. ‘I’ve had to desert my post to look after you.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said meekly.

  ‘Thanks, boys,’ she said to the two lads who had been manhandling him. ‘He’s all right. You can leave him to me.’

  Edward noticed that, in a quaint gesture totally inappropriate to the situation, they touched their caps to her before running off. Verity might be a paid-up, card-carrying member of the Communist Party but she was always going to be a lady to men like these and the thought amused him.

  ‘I was trying to find you,’ he said plaintively.

  ‘Oh, you were attempting to rescue me, were you?’ she said callously. ‘Quite the little hero. Oh well,’ she relented, ‘I suppose you meant well. Anyway, you’ve been wounded in the war against Fascism and you’ll probably have a scar to prove it. Do you know, I saw something very strange on the barricades,’ she said, mopping his head with something soft. ‘Ugh. You’ve ruined my best silk handkerchief. Here, give me yours. You really are the limit, Edward.’

  ‘What did you see that was strange?’ he said, feeling rather sick and giddy.

  ‘You remember when I went to that horrible dinner party at the German Embassy when we were investigating General Craig’s murder?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, hardly able to concentrate.

  ‘Do you remember I said I was sitting next to a really awful man called Stille – Major Stille?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I’m sure he was a major in the SS or something. Anyway, he was the most frightening man I’ve ever met.’

  ‘And you saw him here, with Mosley?’

  ‘No, that’s the queer thing. He was this side of the barricade. We can’t even see the blackshirts from here. But what was so queer was he was tossing bricks and urging us to do the same.’

  ‘Golly, that’s odd. Do you think he’s changed sides?’

  ‘Has that horse addled your brains? Of course he’s not changed sides. He’s an agent provocateur. We had them in Spain.’

  ‘Is he still there?’ Edward tried to raise himself to take a look.

  ‘No, lie still. He caught my eye just as I saw him and smiled and then, as I started to shout for someone to get hold of him, he made himself scarce.’

  ‘He smiled at you?’

  ‘Sort of like a challenge – as though he was taunting me.’

  ‘What was he wearing?’

  ‘Nazi uniform. What do you think he was wearing? He was dressed like anyone else, of course.’

  ‘Perhaps you were mistaken. Maybe it wasn’t Stille.’

  ‘It was Stille all right,’ she said grimly.

  ‘Well, do you know who I saw the other side of the barricade?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sir Geoffrey Hepple-Keen, that’s who.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Of course, I didn’t tell you. He is a very right-wing Conservative MP – a friend of Scannon. He was at Haling when I was there. That’s where I met him.’

  ‘Was he with Mosley?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Edward said, feeling distinctly woozy, ‘I don’t think so. He was standing beside me, at least for a moment.’

  He sat on the ground and felt very sick. Verity looked at him anxiously. ‘Oh God. Are you all right? I suppose I had better get you home.’ She looked round wildly and to her amazement saw Fenton.

  ‘Can I help, miss?’ he inquired.

  ‘Yes you can. Lord Edward’s taken a bit of a knock from a horse’s hoof and he’s feeling a bit sick. Gosh, am I glad to see you. Where have you sprung from?’

  ‘Mr Fox telephoned me this morning after you had departed and suggested you might be glad of – as he put it – “back-up”. So I thought I would make my way here by public transport and see if I could locate you.’

  ‘Gosh! Who needs guardian angels when they’ve got you?’

  ‘Very kind
of you to say so, miss.’

  ‘The car’s about half a mile away, in Goodman’s Yard. Do you think you can find it?’

  ‘Without any difficulty, miss.’

  6

  ‘You don’t want all this toast, do you, Edward? . . . Thanks.’

  It was the next morning and Verity was sitting on Edward’s bed eating his breakfast. They were discussing the riot.

  ‘It’s an odd thing,’ he said, ‘but you’re the only girl I know who perches herself on a fellow’s bed at breakfast for reasons of greed and not for the immoral purposes which modern literature prescribes.’

  ‘Fenton doesn’t approve.’

  ‘Of you visiting me while I’m still in my pyjamas or for eating my toast and marmalade?’

  ‘Both, I should think but mainly the former. He doesn’t say anything but he looks. Am I the only lady who is to be seen on your bed before luncheon?’

  He felt a twinge of guilt recalling that someone had actually been in his bed only a few nights before, though why he should feel guilty, when he was perfectly aware that Verity too had had lovers, he really couldn’t say. He prevaricated. ‘Now you’re being impertinent. Ouch!’ he added, as she cuffed him.

  ‘Oh sorry, I forgot. How is your poor head?’

  ‘As well as one might expect after being trampled on by a two-ton police horse.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate. You suffered what the medical men call a “glancing blow” from the animal’s hoof and, quite honestly, I think you deserved it.’

  As soon as they had reached Albany the previous day, Fenton had insisted on calling the doctor. He had seemed to think Verity was personally responsible for his master being wounded and would hardly let her in his rooms. Once the doctor had arrived and checked that he had only suffered bruising and would recover after a good night’s sleep, Fenton had sent her packing, politely but firmly. He had not liked it when she had turned up to see the patient before nine this morning.