A Plague on Both Your Houses
Page 32
The sergeant explained the plan to his government colleagues. The landlord would get the Nashes to open up, and then they would pile in. They would grab them and haul them outside, where he and his constable would be waiting to slap the handcuffs on them.
The government men were less than enthusiastic. The whole point of the exercise had been to catch Nash in the act of helping army runaways. Without achieving this, there was no hard evidence linking him to either soldier standing at the head of the procession.
Granger countered that with Nash under lock and key they would be in a much better position to cajole his guilt out of the conchie. And if that failed, they could always beat it out of him.
They might enjoy laying a fist or two on him, but the conchie implicating Nash would only be useful to the government men if they could catch the bastard in the first place, and from what they had heard about him, it would be easier said than done.
Standing on a street corner, with many hundreds of people marching past them chanting at the top of their voices, was not an ideal place to hold such a conversation. But with their main prey having disappeared into the ether, and with it only being an outside chance said ether was actually the inside of his own home, they were not in the best mental spot to come to a rational, lucid decision.
It also had to be conceded that if their quarry was not at home, the best chance they had of nabbing him later was if they did not arrest his conchie. The objector and the boy too for that matter, could still be useful bait. So somewhat reluctantly, they agreed to Granger’s plan.
Pemberton was sent off on his mission. PC Betts, the constable who had driven the Black Maria there, was literally given his marching orders. He would have to leave the vehicle with his sergeant and go to accompany the procession.
While Pemberton was fetching the landlord, Granger just had time to face the unedifying embarrassment of having to run up the main road to Bow police station to ask for reinforcements because he had just allowed a sizeable, controversial procession to set off through the streets of the capital with nobody but a solitary wet behind the ears constable to patrol it.
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A fraught half an hour later a posse of four government men and the owner of the property stood outside the front door of the Nash residence. Sergeant Granger stood in the yard at the rear of the property, truncheon in hand ready to intercept anyone making a break for it out the back. Pemberton was with him, but barely in body and not at all in spirit. He was having a much needed sit down on the Nash’s outdoor toilet, and was feeling far too ill to do anything other than notice how his seat of choice and the floor of the little shed in which it was housed, had been scrubbed particularly clean. He concluded that the flu was certainly bringing a whole new level of cleanliness to the East End.
The landlord rapped on the front door of the house. When there was no answer, he received a nod to go ahead and use his key. In he piled with his supporting players right behind him.
They were met with a void. No people. No sign of life. There wasn’t any food in the scullery. No cutlery or crockery in the kitchen. No clothes in the bedroom. Not a newspaper, tin of tobacco or anything else in the parlour.
Everything had been scrubbed and swept. The place was as a clean as a whistle. Spotless to the point where it was clear that it had been done with some pride. The men dashed upstairs. Maud’s half of the house had been cleaned and cleared too. The beds, stove and furniture were the only things remaining in the house. This had clearly not been done in the past half hour. Whoever had done this had been buying their meals off the pie man for the past day or two.
Granger was called in by the others. The back door wasn’t locked. And it was he who had the pleasure of finding the only thing that had been left in the house. Just inside the back door lay a pile of clothing, neatly folded, with a hat and a pair of shoes lying just to the side. Granger picked up a skirt, followed by stockings, a shirt, jacket, whistle & chain and truncheon. It was WPC Nash’s police uniform and accoutrements.
Chapter 44
“A whole nation of children are starving worse than in the war. The fortunate ones die. Many more infants are dying in Berlin this year. The rest are starting their life with a physical and mental inefficiency that will make life a burden…A million children have died of TB and hunger.”
Countess Blucher: English Wife
in Berlin, a private memoir…1918
Nash found the article for which he was looking.
SAVE THE CHILDREN PROCESSION ATTRACTS HUGE CROWD TO WESTMINSTER. ONE ARREST
A Save the Children procession from Bow, East London to The Houses of Parliament was led by its organiser Miss Eglantyne Webb and a young boy who was most joyous and gay in his little soldier’s outfit. The march was to highlight the need for milk to be sent to war-torn countries to feed poor children. It was quite the occasion, with large, cheering crowds attracted along the route and at Westminster. The organisers hoped that the success of the procession will help them attract a good audience to their fund-raising event next month at the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington. There was only one unsavoury incident, when some ruffians spirited away a man at the end of the march. Our reporter on the spot was able to ascertain that the man was believed to be a deserter from the army, who had been dragged away to have some rough justice dealt to him. The police were unable to apprehend the vigilantes and the man has not been found. Only one arrest was reported, that of Miss Webb for inciting the crowd during her speech outside the House.
“Little soldier’s outfit indeed,” scoffed Ruby. “Makes Freddie sound like Little Lord Fauntleroy. And I suppose Miss Webb might also have mentioned in her speech that it was the continuance of the Allied blockade, months after the war has finished that caused the need for such an event. And no mention of a conscientious objector and soldier sharing a cross. What a report! The newspapers down here are just as bad as those in London. They toe the line, even now the war is over.”
“At least Sylvia was right about the police leaving Freddie alone,” said Nash. “Didn’t even arrest Sister Buxton did they? They were in a right old mess after they missed us I’ll wager.”
“And your mates got your conchie away into the bargain.” said Ruby. “How did you manage to get those characters to help a conchie anyway?”
“Told ‘em he weren’t all the ticket. He’d copped a bit of shellshock on the line earlier in the war,” replied Nash with a matter-of-fact hunch of the shoulders.
“My husband’s a clever bastard I’ll say that for him,” said Ruby as if said spouse was not standing beside her.
“I don’t know so much. It don’t take a lot to run rings round coppers,” said Nash, with a cheeky grin on his face.
“This one it does,” said his smiling ex-copperette wife, while she meted out some police brutality care of a truncheon made from a speedily rolled up Southampton newspaper.
Dorothea, leaning forward with her arms folded and resting on the ship’s railing, glanced sideways at her new English friends, amused.
Author’s Notes:
As with my previous novels, this book has been exhaustively researched and I have stuck closely to the facts. Almost everything in this novel is I’m afraid, most terribly, historically accurate. For example, after the war had ended, horrendous photographs showing the level of starvation in Germany, started to be smuggled into Britain, very much against the government’s wishes. The Save the Children charity was founded in response to this, to provide milk for starving German children.
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A novel set mostly during the war to end all wars, about the worst pandemic in history, had the potential to be an unremittingly dark read. But throughout my research, events presented themselves that appeared at the very least rather idiosyncratic to my twenty first century mind, and often downright eccentric. So I chose to use examples to bring some light in to the proceedings. One might say literally
in the case of the women’s football match. Britain’s first ever floodlit football match, which was a woman’s match in the war, really did end in chaos after a spotlight failed and a second one had its power boosted to the point where players and crowd alike were so dazzled that in the ensuing pandemonium an urchin ran off with the ball. And a dead zoo elephant really did end up on the menu of a Dresden bar restaurant.
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My previous novel, Suffragette Autumn Women’s Spring, set from 1912-1914 had originally been intended to also cover the war years up to women finally winning the vote in 1918. As background I did a huge amount of research into the Allied Home Front during the war, and became increasingly amazed at how little the ‘Spanish’ Flu Pandemic of 1918/19, was mentioned throughout the plethora of research resources available.
When dealing with how the war finally came to an end, books concentrating on the military side of the conflict, ignore the flu. There might be the odd sentence or two about how the armies were having to cope with losses incurred from the outbreak, but that’s about all. Works specifically about the Home Front sometimes, though not always, give brief details of the flu. But like the military books, there is little analysis of the flu’s role in bringing the war to an end. Perhaps something as seemingly mundane as influenza, is not considered interesting enough to consider when writing of war.
But yes, the war was finally ended by military means, the Germans being forced to the armistice negotiation table by military defeat. But this reversal came about because the Germans could no longer feed their war effort. They could no longer feed themselves at home. Their Home Front had collapsed amidst starvation and the popular uprising that sprang from it, and this led to their military collapse.
The Allied blockade had successfully put huge pressures on German food resources for four years, but Germany had managed to keep going and they had themselves come close to starving Britain to defeat in 1917 with their successful u-boat campaign, which sank huge numbers of merchant shipping attempting to bring foodstuffs into Britain.
The final year of the war saw Britain introduce a better organised food system, firstly by introducing 423 National Kitchens across the country to feed those in need. Sylvia Pankhurst’s Cost Price restaurant was something of a template for these, though the kitchens were different in that one took the food home to consume it there. An efficient and fair rationing system followed. Germany, in comparison, had a poorly organised piecemeal soup kitchen and specific food days set-up, as well as a less well organised, less fair rationing system.
Britain’s superior food system was a huge boon to morale just when the worst ravages of the flu pandemic hit. It enabled The Home Front to keep going and to continue to feed the Military Front. Germany’s Home Front morale, in comparison, collapsed under the weight put upon it by the flu. The German state started to collapse too and starvation followed, which continued until the Allied blockade was finally lifted, well into 1919.
As Sylvia suspects in the novel, the flu was not worse in Spain. It was simply that Spain was the only country telling the truth about its effects.
The mutated virus was unusual in that it tended to attack the strong rather more than the weak because it caused the immune system to attack itself. People essentially drowned in their own fluids produced by the immune system as its response to the virus. The stronger one’s immune system, the more likely one was to die. It thus killed a disproportionate number of people who were at the peak of their powers, aged between 20 and 35. Fit young people like soldiers and those who otherwise would have been the strongest of those on the Home Front.
The flu pandemic killed approximately 50 million people worldwide. In terms of total deaths, it remains the worst outbreak of any disease in history.
The numbers directly killed by the Spanish Lady in Britain and Germany were very similar. 228,000 and 226,000 respectively. It is impossible to quantify exactly how many other Germans died as a result of malnutrition made worse by the flu, but 200,000 is a reasonable estimate.
It may have been the Spanish Flu that effectively ended the Great War.