The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

  In any case The Sherlock Holmes had been taken over by another sort of ‘detective’, the ones who looked down their noses at the men of the Yard every bit as much as the fictional sleuth had done. There were always representatives of the Department in The Holmes, as there were anywhere ‘foreigners’ were to be found in number. There was probably always at least one incognito in the Red Lion too, just to keep an eye on the ‘colleagues’. That was one reason why tonight Stark wanted to drink somewhere else, where he wouldn’t have Lavery pressing him volubly for his thoughts on a case that by rights should never have been theirs. And might not be for much longer. Stark had thoughts all right, but none he felt like uttering aloud. At least not in ‘mixed’ company.

  He was headed for his local. A local was a rare thing these days, but all the more to be treasured for that: as close as you could get nowadays to a pub in the old style – a home from home, where people said what they thought without worrying who was listening. That, Stark thought wryly, was real social security.

  The cold nip in the air only sharpened the thin sour smell of stale urine that rose from the gutters as Stark turned the corner of Gaitskell Street and saw the welcoming lights of the pub. Like everything else in this world, it had seen better days but Del, who ran the place, did his best. He had even got hold of a can or two of paint and spruced up the outside with a lick of cream gloss on the brickwork and a splash of dark vermillion on two welcoming words above the door, ‘The Rose’.

  He had taken care not to disguise the ostentatiously empty space left when they had covered up ‘and Crown’.

  Chapter 8

  Even as the lights began to wink out in the government offices opposite, as Harry Stark flicked upwards the brown Bakelite switch that extinguished the naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling of his corner turret, the figure crouched on the muddy shore of the Thames stretched out a hand and began to climb.

  Mudlarks were extinct. The all-caring state had created housing and jobs that deliberately eliminated that subspecies of London humanity who had for centuries eked an existence foraging for washed-up flotsam from freighters, groats from the days of Elizabeth or sesterces slipped from the leather purses of Roman merchants come to buy slaves at the markets of Londinium. The past was another country. It could not be visited without a visa.

  The real reason the mudlarks had been swept away, most folk said, was that the river presented an easier frontier. Banning foraging meant there was no excuse for anyone who might hope to slip on board an upstream freight barge, even though these days they too were inspected by the sniffer-dog teams at Westminster Bridge.

  But when the mists came in from the North Sea and mingled with the output of the metropolis’s myriad smoking chimneys to form what was famous worldwide as a ‘London peculiar’, there was precious little even the strongest searchlight could do to penetrate it. Which was what the figure crouched in the mud by the bottom rung of the ladder below the embankment had been counting on.

  It was not easy, especially with a burden to bear. But it was because of that unusual unwieldy cargo that to approach from any other direction would have attracted unwelcome attention. Had anyone been watching, which thankfully on such an evening with the fog building, squeezing the breath from the lungs and replacing it with foul air clogged with soot and colly, there was not, they might have seen a slight, nimble figure clamber over the embankment wall like some lithe-limbed river serpent and scurry for the darkness.

  Of the darkness, there was more than enough. A mountain of shadow smothering the already impenetrable fog. A mountain of colossal, geometric proportions. A vast behemoth of dirty brown brick, an oblong devoid of other form or design save for the great tower that topped it, a huge ugly square-sided chimney that rose forever into the opaque hell of the heavens, belching from its uppermost orifice great toxic clouds of black fumes that the ambient atmosphere recognised as kin and embraced.

  Close up, almost touching the brickwork, a sinister low hum could be heard emanating from the depths of its bulk, as if the great edifice itself were somehow alive. In reality the hum was nowhere near as loud as most east Londoners would have liked, nor as constant. Starved of the plentiful supplies of coal from the mines of Lancashire and North Wales for which it had been intended, and forced to operate on irregular deliveries aboard freighters from Stettin and Gdansk, the great turbines within provided less than adequate electricity for their half of the city. Bankside Power Station was a crippled giant.

  But one hell of a blank canvas. With speed born of practice, and no little trepidation, the agile figure, invisible at the base of the brickwork, unpacked and unfolded the semi-rigid card sheets from inside a large flatpack folder. From the backpack came a small, light aluminium ladder. The soft clunk it made when it hit the wall caused the figure to freeze an instant. Out in the fog, on the river, red and white lights glowed faint and a dull amorphous yellow glow moved in the murk swinging now this way, now that, like the single eye of a blind Cyclops. Then it passed.

  Quick now. There was little time. But this was also no time to rush. The job required exactitude. No room for sloppiness. The pieces held in place, the outline only just visible now. A ghostly shape waiting to be given body. Adjust the facemask. Make sure the plastic welders’ goggles are sealed against the face. An accident could cause partial blindness. Another noise, a soft patter. Footsteps in the fog. Multiple. Drunks reeling home from the pub? Stopped. Muted voices. Too quiet for drunks. Silent now. A pair of lovers with nowhere to go seeking the solace of the flesh in the anonymity of the filthy night? Or a conscientious pair of beat policeman marking their territory rather than toasting their toes by the station paraffin heater? The last was most dangerous. But also least likely. The footsteps resumed. Approaching? No, retreating. Fading softly away.

  Back to work. Time for the spray, Shake the can gently, wrapped in rags to mute the sound of the weight within stirring the paint. Spray. Not too close. Not too far. Even. Consistency was the key. Keep it even. Not too much, no drips, not even on the card. Then wait before peeling away. A few minutes, that was all. A few minutes standing there in the dark. Not daring to breathe in. Solvent fumes mixing with the murk, adding to the chemical cocktail in the air. They had thought long and hard about the methodology: the stencil. Quick, accurate and in theory, once the design was made, the cut-outs completed, so easy anyone could do it.

  Then quick again, easy does it, dismantling as important as assembling. Packing away. Eyes a-twinkle, heart-thumping, adrenalin pumping. Then slip away, out of the shadow and over the wall, bags slung over shoulder, the cargo as precious as ever but its job done for now. One last look before dropping down the ladder, gazing through the dismal dark up at a spectre of the past, once more incarnate in the present, two-dimensional in paint on brickwork, four-dimensional in the minds of men, and women. A challenge to history. Giving it the V-sign.

  V for Victory.

  V made by two fingers.

  IN YOUR FACE.

  Chapter 9

  In the public bar of the Rose there was a warm fug and the usual smattering of folk either standing at the counter or seated around the little tables with their heavy cast-iron legs that had been there since the pub opened two days short of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. On another planet, in another universe.

  Stark nodded to a few regulars he knew by sight but not by name: the bloke with the wall eye and the frozen cheek, the result of some industrial accident; the little fellow in his eighties whose face was as crumpled as yesterday’s newspaper, eyes screwed up tight into what looked like ecstasy and might have been despair but was almost certainly just old age and apathy; the one with the lank hair and the permanently black eye who talked to no one but was never silent, muttering incessantly into his beer. At the far end of the bar were the little coterie Stark styled ‘the intellectuals’: a trades union official, a retired schoolteacher and a bit-part actor. And Del himself, robust, rotund, red-faced and profoundly devoted to a life with no more
surprises.

  Stark pulled up a bar stool and ordered a pint of Red Barrel. Del nodded to him as he pulled back the stiff hand-pump that forced the ale up from the cellar.

  ‘Evening, Harry. Cold one, ain’t it.’

  ‘It is, Del. It is,’ Stark replied and took a long slow pull on his pint, savouring the bitterness of the beer and the cosy familiarity of the surroundings, the same old faces, hard, craggy, factory faces mostly, save for ‘the intellectuals’ of course, the trades union man in his shiny Slovakian suit, the teacher in his worn cords and the actor in imported jeans.

  Everyone who drank regularly in the Rose knew Harry was a policeman. The Westminster tabloids might call members of the Metropolitan People’s Police ‘PeePees’, and the nickname had caught on among their own readers and folk ‘up North’, but amongst those who had – even before the Wall – always felt the ‘East End’ was proper London, as opposed to the cosmopolitan bit ‘up West’, politics had had no effect on tradition. Even those classes that were historically not overly fond of the police, they still called them the names they always had: cops, rozzers, ‘Peelers’ even, though most just settled for ‘the Old Bill’. The nickname for the grey men from ‘the Department’ however, was all theirs. DoSSers were just DoSSers. People knew the difference.

  A tall man in an overcoat came in behind Stark and grunted rather than spoke the brief word ‘beer’, indicating dismissively with his hands that a half of anything would do. Del served him, watched as he carried it to a solitary seat in the corner, looked back at Stark hunched introspectively over his pint and sighed; he knew when people wanted to talk, and when they didn’t. It was an essential part of the trade. He turned back to the intellectuals whose conversation was growing unusually heated. Stark drew nearer, more out of idle curiosity than a desire to get involved.

  ‘A blockbuster! That’s what they’re calling it. As if it was some other new-fangled bloody bomb. I call it a downright provocation. Absolutely disgusting.’ Davy Hindsmith, a convener for the Tube drivers’ union, old guard and nearing retirement, was never a man to pull his punches. He clearly did not agree with the opinions of the man opposite him, and at least two decades his junior. Ken Atkinson was in his late twenties and intensely proud when anyone in the pub – or in the street – recognised him from the bit part he played in Ups and Downs, an ETV soap opera set on a Sussex collective farm.

  ‘Come on, Davy old man. That’s just advertising speech, the way the Yanks do it. They’re always inventing new words. Just think of the challenge. For the actor. Playing a role like that.’

  ‘Playing is bloody right. Playing bloody Mickey Mouse with history. It’s a diabolical liberty.’

  Stark had no idea what they were on about and wasn’t about to ask. He had noticed Lizzie who worked behind the bar evenings Thursday through Saturday come in, trailing a cold draught in her wake. She rubbed her hands together, hung her thin raincoat on a hook, and with a nod to Del, slipped through the hatch in the bar counter and began arranging glasses.

  Stark ventured a brief smile but she wasn’t looking his way. He liked Lizzie Goldsmith. She was a pretty girl, with an air of vulnerability underneath the bluff exterior she put up as a defence against some of the more predatory customers. She had a trim figure, dark eyes and high cheekbones that in certain lights gave her face an exotic look, though in others could make it look frail and haunted. Once Stark had imagined he saw bruising there and wondered if someone was knocking her about, but even his most oblique attempts to hedge around the subject were greeted with a sarcastic comment that suggested he should mind his own business.

  Since then their relationship had improved as a result. Having rearranged the ranks of upturned jug-handled pint glasses and filled the sink with water to rinse the used ones as they came back, Lizzie looked along the bar, and nodded to him. Del was too engrossed in the conversation of the pair at the end to pay attention to Stark’s empty glass and with a smile Lizzie took it off him and refilled it.

  ‘Cheers, love,’ said Stark. ‘A man could die of thirst around here.’

  ‘At least they won’t show it over here.’

  ‘It’ll end up on television though. Sooner or later.’

  Hindsmith threw his eyes to ceiling. ‘More’s the pity.’ Stark was waiting for him to say they should never have taken down the jamming masts that back in the fifties had tried in vain to block the broadcasts from the powerful BBC transmitters in West London’s White City. He didn’t.

  Lizzie mouthed at Stark, to ask, ‘What are they talking about?’

  He shrugged. It took Del to join in, silently mouthing in his own right two words that had been on Harry Stark’s mind all day but which he had not heard pronounced out loud on more than half a dozen occasions in his lifetime: ‘Winston Churchill.’

  Chapter 10

  ‘Say the name out loud, why don’t you?’ said Hindsmith. ‘You can now, you know. What with all this glasnost or whatever they call it this new bloke in the Kremlin wants to see. Revisionism, that’s what I call it. Spreading rumours about old Uncle Joe, blackening a good man’s name. Start down that road and see where it takes you.’

  ‘Where might that be, precisely?’ said Atkinson, the actor.

  Hindsmith spluttered into his beer.

  ‘Here. Where we are now. Letting the bloody Americans rewrite history. Making a film. Called Bulldog Breed, about a dead rottweiler, singing the praises of one of the bloodiest old imperialists who ever sat in Downing Street. And that’s saying something.’

  ‘You can’t be sure they’re singing his praises. Nobody knows the plot yet. It doesn’t come out for another month.’

  ‘I’ll bet you two of your fancy so-called “British” pounds it’ll be a whitewash job. The Yanks reckon Moscow’s blinked first. Try and put a pair of tarnished wings on the old devil and they reckon they can stir the shit with impunity. Before you know it they’ll have their cowboy actor president grandstanding, calling for ‘that Wall’ to come down, so they can turn us all into capitalist wage slaves, consumer cannon fodder for the capitalist exploitation economy. Just you wait.’

  Stark could hardly believe his ears. Del was looking distinctly unhappy. The other customers were conspicuously paying attention to their own business. A conversation like this in a public place was almost unheard of. Stark reckoned Del would have put the mockers on it in a flash if the bloke holding forth hadn’t been a card-carrying communist and redder than red-blooded member of the Socialist Labour Party elite.

  ‘It’s just a film,’ said Atkinson.

  ‘Just a film? There’s no such thing as just a film. That’s what that evil little cripple Goebbels said when he got Leni Rie-fenstahl to knock out a few reels for him. Ever seen Triumph of the Will?’ Atkinson shook his head. The Nazi propaganda piece was infamous but not available for public viewing.

  ‘Well I have. And let me tell you, it’s dangerous. Just like this will be. You pretend to be an artist, man, for God’s sake. You should know more than anyone how easy it is to get people on board. Half the country follows your daft soap opera. Let me tell you, this will be a serious attempt to turn black into white, to mislead people about the historical truth.’

  ‘What is the truth?’

  Stark had the feeling the young actor was trying to make a philosophical point, but Hindsmith just looked at him as if he’d just announced he had a fairy godmother.

  ‘The truth is that Winston Bloody Churchill – and I mean bloody – was a two-faced bastard who did the dirty on his most important ally. The minute the Krauts got rid of their Charlie Chaplin lookalike in that bomb attack back in ’44, the old son of the aristocracy thought he saw a chance to team up with the Prussian posh boys and take over the world. Put Uncle Joe back in his place, and a damper on the working man’s aspirations once and for all.’

  A deathly hush had descended over the rest of the crowd at the bar. Davy was reading from the history book, the way they had all learned it at school. Mark Holt, the re
tired teacher, was nodding sagely, though Stark noted he had his eyes firmly closed.

  ‘Might have done it and all, the Yanks, the empire and the Junkers all pushing the profit motive right the way back to the Urals. Except Zhukov and his boys were on a roll, weren’t they? Took Berlin and kept on rolling, all the way to the sea. And with popular support roaring them on. Half the German troops didn’t know which way they were supposed to be facing.’

  ‘Yes, well, up to a point.’ Stark knew the point and part of him inwardly admired the young actor’s bravery in making it. ‘I mean it did take them the best part of another four years. The popular support wasn’t quite overwhelming.’

  Hindsmith stared at him as if he’d been slapped in the face. ‘Load of bloody reactionaries trying to play the old nationalist card, particularly on this side of the channel. The communists in Italy and France stood up to be counted. Even under the old bowler-hatted bastard some of our lads were bold enough to go out on strike.’

  Stark knew the continuation of the war, just when most people thought it was coming to an end, had been highly unpopular. His father had admitted as much. The way it was taught in school was that Churchill had ridden roughshod over popular sentiment.

  ‘The Yanks couldn’t take it, didn’t have the balls. Zhukov and co. would have rolled right on up to Northumberland and beyond if they hadn’t threatened to use their bloody weapon of mass destruction. They were like rats in a barrel trapped around that embassy of theirs in Grosvenor Square.’