In England’s green and pleasant land.
Willie’s chest swelled with pride and a he felt the prickle of a tear in the corner of his eye. As the hymn ended, Jasper began winding the gramophone up again.
‘They’re back,’ someone shouted from the gallery, and faces turned again to the windows and guns were levelled between sandbags and over pocked stone ledges. Willie and Eliza ran up the stairs to see what was happening. The SS were moving into place for their next attack behind the churchyard walls and, rumbling slowly across the village green, was the yellow bulldozer, its solid steel scoop raised to provide cover to the driver, its power enough to breach the church itself.
The record started again and members of the choir began to sing more fervently and other parishioners joined in. The words now seemed apposite and the voices gained power and defiance and Willie didn’t care that a tear ran down his cheek.
‘Positions,’ shouted the Colonel, and Eliza put her arms around Willie’s neck and kissed him on the lips.
‘Later,’ she said.
He nodded and took the gun from the holster.
Then the gunfire started and the singing stopped.
Chapter 41
Ollerton
The noise of battle inside the church was intense. People screamed, wounded moaned, smoke was acrid. The Colonel kept shouting above the din for the defenders to mark their targets.
‘Make the bullets count,’ he shouted.
On the other gallery, Richard Marshall yelled the same instruction. Conserve ammunition; don’t waste the precious bullets that they had.
Willie was frustrated at being unable to use a rifle. He was a poor observer, although he did note that the attackers were also being sparing in their use of firepower. The sabotage had worked. But their lack of ammunition would count for nothing if the walls were breached and they poured in with fixed bayonets.
The bulldozer had knocked down part of the front wall of the churchyard and was pushing flat ancient gravestones. Bob Harvey in the church tower had shot dead the first driver and had then been wounded by concentrated fire from houses opposite as he tried to line up a shot on the replacement. Sally Beevers, who had opted to stay with him during what they all felt would be the last attack, administered first aid although he refused to relinquish his post. Granite chips had cut his face and a bullet had creased his scalp and Susan feared he was more badly hurt than he would admit.
Gunfire from the gallery had killed or wounded another driver of the bulldozer and a third was now steering blind and crouching so low behind the controls that no one could see him. A grenade tossed from the roof exploded by a wheel and the vehicle began to veer left on a twisted axle but it would still hit the church. Two firebombs followed and engulfed the cab and the trooper driving fell screaming among the graves, his uniform ablaze. Willie’s elation at success was dulled by the horror of the death.
‘Thank God,’ said the Colonel, and an explosion behind them rocked the walls.
While they had concentrated on the threat of the bulldozer, troopers had mounted a concerted attack on the sacristy. Willie glanced into the body of the church and saw Eliza leading the sawn-off shotgun reserve, old Jasper Meredith trailing behind with his hand scythe.
Willie ran for the stairs and, halfway down, heard a second explosion from a follow-up grenade that had been lobbed into the sacristy. As he reached the ground floor, the building was rocked by another large explosion.
They had targeted the cellar entrance, as well. They had attacked the blind heavy wooden door down the steps, through which he and Kevin had brought the ammunition and the body of Susan Jenkins. Across the hall, Eliza disappeared into the smoke and dust clouds and he could hear the blast of shotguns and the rattle of a sub-machinegun. Richard and Alison Marshall were suddenly by his side and Willie nodded and they diverted to the boiler room, where the wounded were housed.
Canvas bags of grenades had been thrown against the doors of both the sacristy and the cellar. The sacristy door had already been blown open once and had been propped closed with a heavy bench that was smashed into pieces. A long, heavy sliver flew into the neck of Mrs Frobisher, who had been manning the nearest sandbagged window with her husband. She lay screaming as blood poured from the wound and her husband lay dazed among the debris. Bert Bramley, a farmer, and Mr Jennings, a music teacher, who had been at the other window, were stunned. They were unable to take any precautions when another grenade was thrown through the open door.
Mr and Mrs Frobisher died immediately while Bert, who had been thrown against Mr Jennings, sheltered the music teacher from most of the blast, which he took in his back. Bert started screaming and didn’t stop.
Eliza entered the sacristy as the first trooper crossed the step. She slipped on Mrs Frobisher’s blood and fell to the floor. The trooper fired his submachinegun and the bullets hit Billy Freeman who was behind her. She fired both barrels from the floor and the trooper was thrown back outside. She broke the gun and reloaded and Trevor Armitage went past her and fired from the hip at a second trooper and she was aware of more uniforms in the doorway and others at the windows. An explosion and a burst of flame outside meant that Wobbly Bob, up on the roof, was dropping grenades and petrol bombs.
Another burst of gunfire threw 17-year-old Trevor back across the room and Jamie Smithson, the survivor from the attack on the Farmer’s Arms, stepped over her to fire the fourth sawn-off through the open and shattered doorway. Eliza got to her knees as a trooper with a bayonet fixed to his assault rifle attacked Jamie, who parried with his empty weapon and fell back over the body of wounded Trevor Armitage. A wraith went past her, a hand scythe swung and the blade swept up between the trooper’s legs. The soldier dropped his rifle and screamed as he staggered backwards, hands reaching for the wound, and was caught in a blast of gunfire from his own side.
A gun poked through a window and Eliza blasted the face behind it and finally regained her feet, breaking the shotgun again and reaching for more shells. The screams of Bert Bramley had been constant but suddenly subsided as Mr Jennings pushed the farmer’s body from him and staggered upright, an assault rifle gripped in his hands.
The music teacher ran to the doorway where another trooper was poised to throw a grenade. He shot him at close range, throwing the soldier backwards, and the grenade dropped between them. Mr Jennings seemed frozen at the sight and when it exploded he was thrown backwards into the sacristy.
Eliza reached the doorway but there were no more attackers. Bodies littered the ground outside, one still burning from a petrol bomb. Jasper picked up the rifle of the soldier he had attacked and crouched beside her, hefted the weapon to his shoulder and aimed but the hammer only clicked. He glanced up at Eliza and she nodded. The opposition was running out of ammunition.
The blast that blew in the door to the cellar did not carry into the boiler room where the wounded lay. An internal door cushioned its destructive force. Troopers had sneaked close under cover of the wrecked lorry and now one threw a second grenade through the opening, expecting it to clear the interior of opposition. Instead, it blew down the second door.
A sergeant led two troopers, with bayonets fixed to their rifles, down the outside steps and into the cellar and more waited beyond the lorry. Grenades and firebombs were thrown from the roof to deadly effect. Three troopers were injured or burnt and three more opted to go down the cellar steps. More started the dash across the graveyard and two went down from bullets fired from a window and from a high-powered shell from Bob Harvey in the church tower.
Marjorie Humphrey was tending the wounded when the grenades exploded.
‘No,’ she shouted as the troopers entered and held her hands up. ‘These are wounded people. We have no guns.’
A trooper fired a single shot from his rifle and she was thrown backwards to the floor.
‘Save your ammo,’ the sergeant shouted to the two soldiers.
He ran through the cellar towards the steps leading up to the chur
ch; one soldier followed, the other stopped to bayonet a wounded man who lay helpless on the floor. Barry Wilson reached out for the leg of the sergeant as he ran past, causing him to fall to the ground. A grenade the sergeant had been carrying in his hand, rolled on the stone flags of the floor and Barry, ignoring the pain of his wounds, grabbed it. The trooper who had been following was ready to bayonet him when his legs buckled and he fell as Kevin Andrews, who was also among the wounded, swung a heavy shovel at his knees.
The bayonet skimmed Barry’s shoulder as the trooper went sprawling. The landlord’s son pulled the pin, pushed it under the soldier’s body, and heaved himself on the man’s back, forcing him flat. The sergeant regained his feet and levelled his submachinegun but was thrown forward by a bullet in the back from Willie who had jumped down the stone stairs. Richard Marshall behind him aimed and fired his rifle across the room at the second trooper but more were clattering down the steps outside. The soldier who was lying on the grenade fought and screamed but Barry held him down until it exploded. Barry was thrown sideways by the blast but received no further injury.
Kevin crawled across the floor to get the sergeant’s submachinegun; others took the guns that had been dropped by the two troopers, and they and Willie, Richard and Alison blasted the open doorway with fire, killing or wounding the men attempting an entry.
Richard and Alison ran across the cellar and pushed their way past the bodies on the steps to continue to fire at those now retreating across the graveyard. Willie took ammunition from the sergeant, the submachinegun from Kevin, and followed. He couldn’t use the weapon himself but handed it to Richard when he ran out of bullets, and then used the last five shots in the revolver he carried, marking his targets carefully. Two men and three women joined them with assault rifles but the attack had been abandoned.
Willie was deaf from the gunfire in the cellar and his nostrils were stinging from the smoke. His body ached and he didn’t know and didn’t care if he had been wounded again. He looked at the faces of the men and women around him and saw them drained of everything but desperation. People moaned and cried in the cellar and he realised he had been standing, not on a step, but the head of a dead soldier.
Shots were now sporadic. Was it over?
Chapter 42
The Manchester Evening News ran pictures from Ollerton on their front page in an early edition that was on the streets by one thirty. The northern offices of The Daily Mirror, The Daily Herald and The Guardian did the same, producing early afternoon editions. They reported the situation without comment, letting the facts and photographs tell the story. They also carried stories of the television broadcast that The Beatles had made and reports of unrest from Scotland and Europe.
The official responses were also faithfully recorded but they read as limp propaganda lies. The editors had ignored or delayed accepting the D Notices which had been threatened, until the newspapers had gone to the distributors and were beyond the manpower of the State Police to recover and suppress. The State Police demanded that the civil police confiscate deliveries from newsagents and street sellers but ordinary officers were reluctant to help. By the time policemen got round to visiting shops and outlets, the papers had already been avidly bought and read and were in circulation.
State Police occupied the BBC Television studios in Manchester, as well as those of Granada, to ensure nothing more was screened that might be inflammatory, a move that angered the journalists working in television and radio with the result that the occupation itself became news on national channels broadcast from London. There was no escaping Ollerton, the stand taken by the most popular rock and roll band on both sides of the Atlantic, and the apparently growing troubles in Scotland and Europe.
Millions across the country heard the reports. Other radio stations, operating from Ireland and Luxembourg and international waters, were more detailed. Voice of America was measured and treated the news as if this was the verge of a momentous occasion; Radio Free Britain was strident and called for revolution.
Apparatchiks of the Mosley regime, who had enjoyed a quarter of a century of having things their own way, were taken by surprise that quickly developed into shock. Once the Jewish removals had been completed, the British had been easy to rule. They were not a recalcitrant or excitable race and citizens grew used to turning a blind eye to government misdemeanours, as long as they were not too severe; and the severe ones were never publicised.
But they had also learned to read between the lines of newspaper reports, pick out which gossip was true and which was fanciful, and had become disillusioned with the regime in power and the preening bullies who were local Party members. They had begun to look with envy to the free state of Ireland and the new democracy of America and questioned why the bulk of the British Army should serve in distant places around the globe to maintain an empire that was beginning to look increasingly repressive and out of date.
They also knew of the excesses perpetrated by Hitler and the Nazis across mainland Europe, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It couldn’t happen here, they had said, and the guilt of knowing it had happened elsewhere, with the approval of their government, had seeped into the national consciousness.
Ollerton made them face reality. Enough was enough.
The Officer Commanding the 3rd Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment, whose headquarters were at Chester, supported by the 4th Battalion of the Cheshire Territorials, blocked the movement of the 2nd Battalion of the Caledonian SS before they could leave the city. The Chief Constable of Cheshire issued instructions to his Force that members of the State Police should be taken into protective custody for their own safety, after what had happened to Gestapo officers in Scotland, and because feelings may be running high over Ollerton.
Sergeant Ted Devlin was delighted to be part of the team of officers, led by a Divisional Chief Inspector, who implemented the order at Knutsford. They took the Gestapo men singly or in pairs, without any trouble. None seemed to have the stomach for a confrontation when they were outnumbered by burly bobbies who were icily polite but insistent. Only Detective Inspector Grayson produced his handgun as if he might use it but was persuaded to comply.
‘There is unrest in the town,’ the Chief Inspector lied. ‘The order is for your own good. And when this all blows over …’
‘When this all blows over, I shall remember the people I have to deal with,’ said Grayson.
Devlin took advantage of the activity and confusion to open the door of Simon Humphrey’s cell.
‘Can you walk?’ he said, and Simon nodded. He told him about the television broadcast. ‘There’s fighting in Scotland and there’s been an outcry about Ollerton. They’re still fighting in the village. They’re in the church and the SS can’t get them out.’
‘Where’s the Gestapo?’
‘In protective custody. Take the stairs, lad. They lead up to the courts. No one’s there. Once you’re outside, you’re on your own.’
Simon stared at the open door and back to the sergeant.
‘You’ll get into trouble.’
‘Maybe so, maybe not. Try Ashford’s. Somebody there might help.’
In London, Guy Burgess issued the order, on behalf of the Prime Minister, to invoke Operation Valkyrie, and units of the Territorial Army, who were already on standby for such an eventuality, began to occupy centres of broadcasting and communication, power stations, railway stations and Town Halls across the country to ensure national security. They forcibly replaced the State Police units at the TV and radio stations in Manchester.
Burgess visited Philby again in his fourth floor suite in Broadway Buildings.
‘This is moving damn quick,’ he said.
‘Civil unrest is always unpredictable,’ said Philby.
‘It has been very predictable for 25 years. There has been none.’
‘Which makes this situation all the more volatile. It can be controlled or it can explode.’ Burgess drank down a large malt whisky and reached for th
e bottle. Philby said, ‘Now is not the time, Guy.’
Burgess’s hand shook a little but he did not pick up the bottle.
Philby said, ‘Do you know the last dictator we had? Cromwell. He ruled the nation with 11 major-generals for five years. Three years after he died, the populace dug up his body and cut his head off.’
‘I don’t suppose his major-generals were too popular, either,’ said Burgess. He smiled. ‘I’ve just done my sums. There will be 11 of us at the meeting of the Chiefs of the General Staff. Plus our own Cromwell.’
Chapter 43
Ollerton
The casualties inside the church were too many to count. Injured men and women lay inside the redoubt for the wounded, waiting for their turn on the doctor’s bloodstained table in the Lady Chapel, being cared for by elderly women and youngsters with rudimentary first aid training they had learned at school.
Within the Lady Chapel, Frank Beevers worked without anaesthetic; cutting, stitching and binding. Anyone he considered was a hopeless case was placed before the altar. Six people lay there, within sight of God, being comforted by relatives and friends.
The boiler room was filled with the severely wounded and the crypt, lit by a solitary light bulb and flickering candles, was crowded with the dead. Colonel Jimmy Humphrey sat alongside the body of his wife. A man and a woman sat in similar positions of mourning alongside the bodies of loved ones.
The sacristy resembled an abattoir. Pews from the upper galleries had been broken and thrown into the body of the church and the wood had been used to block up the doorway. Similar repairs had been made to the cellar entrance into the boiler house.
Their hope was that the enemy had run out of ammunition and, although they had little themselves, they could keep the troopers out as long as the barricaded doors held. Wobbly Bob was still on the roof, along with two other men and a 14-year-old boy. They had two grenades each and three petrol bombs between them. Bob Harvey remained in the tower with Sally. He had two shells left for the Mauser. Eliza and a re-formed sawn-off shotgun reserve comprised entirely of women had one full load each in their weapons. Val Halford distributed the four spare longbows that she had, including her husband’s, but Willie suggested the new recruits have only two arrows each. Val, being the expert, had five and was determined to make them count for her husband’s sake.
The Heydrich Sanction Page 29