by Lawton, John
‘ . . . And it is to the Britain of the post-war years that we must now turn. It is time to talk of many things—’
‘Of cabbages and kings,’ yelled a literate wag from the crowd.
‘Sod cabbages,’ replied a wittier wag, ‘I seen enough of the bleedin’ fings the last five years to do me a lifetime!’
Beneath the grey curls that wrapped around his face it was impossible to see whether Nikolai Rodyonovich was smiling or not.
‘After the last war we were promised—’
‘Whaddya mean “we”?’ came another voice from the crowd. ‘You’re about as English as frogs’ legs and sauerkraut!’
‘I am, as you know full well, Mr Robinson, a Russian. You yourself goaded me with this fact, as I recall, in the summer of 1938, in such abusive terms that a member of the London constabulary felt obliged to step in and restrain you!’
Troy had been the constable in question. Off duty but uniformed. Speakers’ Corner had seen too many incidents that summer of general Jew-baiting and wog-bashing. A small surge of xenophobia that was untypical of the British, and untypical of this war – Mosleyites excepted. Without telling the old man he had privately undertaken to afford him some measure of protection. It seemed curious to think that Nikolai drew a regular crowd, as though he had a personal following, year after year, but, as Troy recalled, Robinson, a Bill-Sykes lookalike with a fair, even hatred of all foreigners, had had his cake and eaten it by dubbing Nikolai a ‘Russky, Commie, thick-lipped, Jew-boy arsehole who had better bugger off back where he came from’. Nikolai had no such plans. In 1919 when Troy’s father, some ten years older than Nikolai, had raised the issue of naturalisation for the family, he had made the decision for his wife, his daughters and himself – his youngest son, after all, was British-born – but had merely urged it on his younger brother and his eldest son, both of whom he felt should decide for themselves. Neither had bothered. Hence Rod, thanks to his birth in Vienna as the Troys crossed Imperial Europe at a snail’s pace, had found himself an Austrian and a categorisable alien at the outbreak of war, and Nikolai had found it impossible to clarify his allegiance by becoming British – no one had been allowed naturalisation for nearly five years. Yet British was how he saw himself. Britain was his home. He loved it dearly. Troy doubted if this could ever be conveyed to the crowd, but why else did the old man get up on the stump week after week on the endless subject of Britain if not from love of country?
‘We,’ he said with an italicised emphasis, ‘were promised homes fit for heroes. A promise we all knew to be hollow within a few short years. Now we are told it is different. This war has been total war, it has required such a degree of motivation on the part of the British that government has been obliged to inform and to educate us almost as much as it has deceived us. And as the culmination of this new-found awareness of the basic fact of life on earth that if we do not pull together we shall most certainly sink together, they have come up with a notion that startles them, and they expect us to be startled by it too. Sir William Beveridge has spoken of a system, an organisation of our human resources that could offer us care, protection and education – from the cradle to the grave. And it goes by the name of the Welfare State. Who are we to believe? Are we to believe that Churchill will allow what he clearly believes to be a thief’s charter to become the way of the land, even the law of the land. Are we to trust the victor of Tonypandy?’
Troy heard a murmur buzz through the crowd. Churchill had survived a spectacularly ill-organised vote of no confidence in the House a couple of years ago, and since then had been virtually unassailable. He had survived cock-ups such as Dieppe, and withstood the constant pressure at home and amongst the Allies for a second front. But, as far as the public were concerned he was royalty – and behaved like it. An attack on Churchill could hardly be well received. Where was Nikolai’s argument heading?
‘Are we to trust a man who opposed the British worker in 1926, at a time when the miners were fighting for a living wage against the pay cuts imposed by profiteering mine-owners?’
The buzz had become louder. Heads began to turn. Muttered exchanges. The man next to Troy said flatly, without tone or movement, ‘He must be barmy to knock Winnie at a time like this.’ Troy glanced quickly around to see if there was a uniform in sight. If he had to step in in civvies he would likely as not get his block knocked off.
Up at the front a heckler took up the invitation that Nikolai had proffered with a pause. ‘What are you tellin’ us? Vote Labour? I don’t need no one to tell me that. What I need is a chance. I ain’t had a vote since 1935. We none of us ’ave! We’ve had the same soddin’ government for ten years!’
‘My friend,’ Nikolai resumed, ‘I have been addressing you from this stump since 1928. In all that time have I ever once urged you to vote for any given political party? Time after time Mr Robinson has called me a Commie. Have I ever once urged you to vote Communist or told you to join the Communist Party? We have witnessed these last five years the most radical transformation British society has ever undergone. We have pulled together, of course we have, or Hitler would be goose-stepping up Whitehall today. We have learnt a new measure of co-operation, and with it a new definition of democracy. Even the King has a ration book!’
Troy thought this was fatuous. When the palace had been hit during the Blitz Queen Elizabeth had remarked famously that at last she could look the East End in the eye again – such equality was illusory. Only when Buckingham Palace had been flattened and the family broken up and the young princesses stuck on a train for darkest Derbyshire with brown paper parcels and labels around their necks would Troy have seen a recognisable equality. He had no faith in this new definition of democracy. But then, unlike his uncle, he could not say with any confidence that he loved his country.
‘What will the end of this war bring?’
Another voice from the crowd rang out, ‘’Ere ’alf the time. It ain’t over yet!’
‘Will it bring a furtherance of our new-found co-operation or will we waste it all in a return to the deadlock simplicity of a two-party system that leaves the fundamental inequalities of society untouched? What, in the hands of Labour, let alone the Conservative Party, can the Beveridge idea achieve but a crude tinkering with the economics of injustice? How quickly will we be made to forget that we pulled together and survived together? That we recognised for the first time as a people the necessity of mutual aid?’
At last Troy knew Nikolai was on course, knew where this deviation had all been leading – to the argument that underlay any public speech he had made in the last thirty years, his habitual endorsement of the old Russian anarchist ideas, of the devolution to the most basic level of everything that could be made to work at that level, of the factory as a village, of the field as a workshop, of the community as the basis of a social non-order, of the end of hierarchical society, by Kropotkin out of Tolstoy and not so much as a whiff of Bolshevism. He had heard it all before. Certain that he had caught the old man’s eye he sloped off to a park bench at the back and pulled out a copy of yesterday’s Manchester Guardian, wondering whether there would be any news that had slipped by the censor or whether all the British needed to know on a fine spring morning was that careless talk still cost lives and that Mars Bars somehow contributed to the war effort, particularly if sliced like Battenberg.
Quarter of an hour later Nikolai had wound up and the crowd that had dwindled from forty or fifty to the last dozen or so of the faithful – hardly an accurate word as half of them had stayed to argue the toss – was breaking up. Troy looked up from the paper. The old man was not far off. Running his fingers through his beard as though disentangling it. In his full-length coat with its astrakhan collar, Homburg shoved back on his head, it was easy to see why the roughs so often mistook him for a Jew. All this produced in Nikolai was Jewishness, and if they had called him an Assyrian – surely the most minor of minorities – he would have found an Assyrian turn of phrase and embarked on identificatio
n and defence. Perhaps the core of anarchism was its refusal to be pinned down, its willingness to assume any identity?
‘Boy, haff I got a treat for you!’ Nikolai said as he approached.
The contrast between the Americanism and the forgetful relapse into his native accent with the ‘haff’ startled Troy.
‘Why don’t you try “what brings you here, nephew?”’
‘Ach – am I to be surprised to see you? You’re a policeman. They pop up everywhere. Now, drop the twaddle and come see what I haff for you.’
More than seldom Nikolai reminded him of Kolankiewicz. If Poland was not so much a country, more a state of mind, then Russia was less a country, less a state of mind than an hysterical heart. Nikolai led him at a brisk trot to the edge of Park Lane. There, just off the road, was a large tarpaulin concealing God Wot Not.
‘Voil√†!’ Nikolai yanked at one corner of the tarpaulin sheet and threw it clear. ‘Ecce bicycle!’
Whatever it was it was huge. A motorcycle and sidecar combination on a colossal scale. ‘What is it?’ Troy asked.
‘It is poetry, it is glory, it is heaven cast in shining silver, the wheels of man and the wings of angels. In short, a Matchless Model X 1000cc V Twin, 1936.’
‘Really?’
‘I was out at your mother’s last week – she says, by the way, that you could visit more often – and from somewhere she had got hold of five gallons of petrol. It was a pleasant afternoon, so we got that old Crossley 6, you know the two-litre 1930 model, down off its blocks and went for what your mother insists on calling a “spin in the country”. Hertfordshire can be very pretty at this time of year. We passed a row of tied cottages, and out in front of one of them was a young woman in AT S uniform with a stall of items for sale. Brown boots, a set of fishing tackle, a shotgun or two, a gramophone and, as it happens, a Matchless Model X motorbicycle combination. I asked her the purpose of the sale. She said that while she was away doing her bit for Britain her husband had sought consolation in the arms of a Land Army girl, and this was her vengeance – ah, the poetry of vengeance! I had to admire the woman’s imagination. While he was out rolling his master’s winter wheat she was selling off every last thing he owned to the first passing customer and to hell with her husband. I bought this and one of the shotguns. The boots, alas, were far too big. And I gave up fishing years ago.’
‘Can you actually start it? You must need a kick like an angry jackass.’
‘A properly tuned motorbicycle will start with a tickle, and as I, having no access to cheap petrol, spent yesterday converting her to run on alcohol – which, after all, I can make for myself – this particular baby starts if an angel breathes on her!’
Nikolai grabbed the handlebars and raised a leg high off the ground. Troy tapped him on the arm.
‘Half a mo’ – what’s that?’
‘What’s what?’
‘That other tarpaulin, wrapped around the sidecar.’
‘That’s my treat.’
‘I thought the bike was your treat?’
‘This too!’
Troy seized the initiative and peeled back the covering from the sidecar. Wedged into it nose-down was a bomb. Its tail fins stuck up at a rakish angle, pointing back at the sky from which it fell.
‘It’s a dud.’ Nikolai smiled his reassurance at Troy.
‘What do you mean it’s a dud? What’s the difference between a dud and an unexploded bomb? Have you taken complete leave of your senses trying to drive a thing like this through the middle of London? You could kill yourself and a couple of hundred others along with you!’
‘Calm down. Believe me, it is a dud. It’s one of the new German one-hundred-and-fifty pounders. Very small bomb. Devastating effect. We’ve been trying to get hold of one intact for weeks. Thing is, they go off like they’re five hundred pounds. We rather suspect that Jerry is on to something completely new’.
‘We’ meant Nikolai’s team at Imperial College, where he, Professor Troitsky, led a university Applied Physics department into the application of anything that flew or blew.
‘I picked it up off the RAOC at first light. It fell in Islington churchyard last night. Believe me, it’s safe as houses.’
That particular metaphor did nothing to reassure Troy. So many houses in Islington these days were nothing more than rubble and dust.
‘See,’ the old man said. He drew a curly stem pipe from his waistcoat pocket and tapped the casing with the bowl.
‘You’re not getting me on that thing with an unexploded bomb sitting in the sidecar. They’ll have to bury us in a sieve if it goes up!’
Halfway down Park Lane, Troy had cause to admire Nikolai’s fine-tuning of the engine. Clinging on for dear life as the old man put the bike through its paces he felt certain he could hear the bomb start to tick above the gentle sound of the engine’s purr. They rounded Apsley House at over fifty and shot off along Knightsbridge in the direction of Kensington Gore and Imperial College, nestling out of sight behind the Albert Hall. Over his shoulder, the Homburg now rammed down firmly to his eyebrows, Nikolai told Troy he felt sure they could top ninety on the straight.
21
Nikolai cleared an upright chair of a sheaf of papers, a stack of magazines and a pile of oily rags with which he had recently cleaned his motorbike and told Troy to sit down. He threw his hat neatly on to the prong of the hatstand by the door and peered into the mirror behind his desk, ruffling his beard as he had done in the park, muttering about the shortage of good barbers in wartime, all too busy with short back and sides in Aldershot, and finally, still playing with his reflection in the mirror, asked Troy what had brought him out on a Sunday morning. Troy had thought long and hard about how to broach the subject. He reached into the inside pocket of his overcoat and took out the black and white eight-by-eight of Herr Trousers.
‘This,’ he said simply. If it broke the issue with a huge short circuit and finally seized his uncle’s attention, so be it.
Nikolai shrugged off his overcoat and let it fall behind him. He took the photograph from Troy’s hands, sat himself on the edge of his desk chair and flicked on the green-shaded reading lamp. From where Troy sat it picked out his face like a limelight. He watched as Nikolai rummaged around on the complete mess that passed for a desk-top and slipped on his half-moon reading glasses, peering intently, adjusting the angle of the nosepiece and screwing up his eyes. Troy watched as a tear formed in each eye and rolled gently down his cheeks. This was not what he had anticipated. Nikolai stared at the image in the photograph, still and silent for longer than Troy could tolerate. He was about to speak for the sake of speech when the old man looked up at him.
‘When did this happen?’ he asked.
‘Almost a year ago. I . . . I didn’t realise you knew him . . . ’
‘Isn’t that why you’re here?’
Nikolai at last put the photograph down. Without self-consciousness he wiped each eye, and looked back at Troy expectantly.
‘I’m here because I’d worked out that he was some sort of boffin. Quite likely a boffin in your own field. I’ve no idea who he is, let alone that you knew him. If I’d known I’d . . . ’
‘No, no. Don’t apologise. It’s perfectly reasonable to presume that I would haff some knowledge of most people in my field. It’s a very small world. Or at least it was before the war.’
He took off his glasses and leaned back in his chair. He wiped his right eye once more with the back of his hand.
‘Do you remember when you were about eighteen – the summer of 1933 – the year your father wanted you to go up to Oxford and you steadfastly refused – I was still with Handley Page, on fighters. I went to the last Munich University conference, the last because Hitler would never again let a German scientist swap notes with a British, although truth to tell the British made me sign the Official Secrets Act before I went. There were whizzbangers, as you used to call them, from all over Europe, one or two of my own age, many, many more bright young men
almost fresh from their first degrees. I was very concerned in those days with the development of light alloys. I gave a paper on that subject – although after Handley Page had vetted it there was little left in it that a twelve-year-old couldn’t haff found in a school textbook. I haff often found it . . . how shall I say . . . a source of encouragement . . . refreshment, in its pre-cafeteria meaning . . . to find enthusiasms in the young for ideas and practices I haff advocated all my life . . . after all I haff no children. I found myself rethinking my own work at the age of fifty-odd. Some of those young men were brilliant. None more so than this young man.’
He nodded in the direction of the photograph.
‘You haven’t told me who he is,’ said Troy gently and persistently.
‘Oh . . . he was Gregor von Ranke. A Hessian. Quite, quite brilliant. So unGerman. Or at least unGerman in the way we haff come to think of the Prussian as the characteristic German. Forever quoting poetry, he brought Goethe alive for me. We spent evenings with him reading the German out loud to me and then translating it as he went. In return I would read him Blake, the story of Orc . . . fiery the angel fell . . . We wrote to each other for years afterwards. I wasted yards of paper trying to get him to leave Germany before it was too late. He was a gentle man. Nazism was anathema to him. I never understood why he would not leave.’
‘Do you know what became of him?’
‘I’d be guessing, but if Speer did not recruit him for his Todt machine I’d be very surprised and the Germans would be far stupider than I know them to be?’
‘Todt machine?’
‘Organisation. Todt organisation. Franz Todt was Hitler’s resources manager. He ran the business of the war. He was killed in a plane crash in forty-two. Since then Albert Speer has run it. It covers everything from raw materials to boffins, as you call them. In most respects Germany is very disorganised. It’s one reason we will win this war. For us it’s total. Our whole economy is geared to it. Germany’s is not. Speer is a rare example of Hitler’s much vaunted fascist efficiency. He does more than make the trains run on time.’
