by Ken Follett
‘On the contrary, I want everyone to know all about you from the start. If you are a liability, I will get out of politics.’
‘No, no! I’d hate to think I made you give up your ambitions.’
‘It won’t come to that,’ he said, but once again he could see that he had not succeeded in assuaging her anxiety.
Back in Nutley Street, the Leckwith family sat around the radio in the kitchen. Daisy held Lloyd’s hand. ‘I came here a lot while you were away,’ she said. ‘We used to listen to swing music and talk about you.’
The thought made Lloyd feel very lucky.
Churchill came on. The familiar rasp was stirring. For five grim years that voice had given people strength and hope and courage. Lloyd felt despairing: even he was tempted to vote for this man.
‘My friends,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘I must tell you that a socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom.’
Well, that was routine knockabout stuff. All new ideas were condemned as foreign imports. But what would Churchill offer people? Labour had a plan, but what did the Conservatives propose?
‘Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism,’ Churchill said.
Lloyd’s mother, Ethel, said: ‘Surely he’s not going to pretend we’re like the Nazis?’
‘I think he is, though,’ Bernie said. ‘He’ll say we’ve defeated the enemy abroad, now we must defeat the enemy in our midst. Standard conservative tactic.’
‘People won’t believe that,’ Ethel said.
Lloyd said: ‘Hush!’
Churchill said: ‘A socialist state, once thoroughly completed in all its details and its aspects, could not afford to suffer opposition.’
‘This is outrageous,’ said Ethel.
‘But I will go farther,’ said Churchill. ‘I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no socialist system can be established without a political police.’
‘Political police?’ Ethel said indignantly. ‘Where is he getting this stuff from?’
Bernie said: ‘This is good, in a way. He can’t find anything to criticize in our manifesto, therefore he’s attacking us for things we aren’t actually proposing to do. Bloody liar.’
Lloyd shouted: ‘Listen!’
Churchill said: ‘They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo.’
Suddenly they were all on their feet, shouting protests. The Prime Minister was drowned out. ‘Bastard!’ Bernie yelled, shaking his fist at the Marconi radio set. ‘Bastard, bastard!’
When they had quietened down, Ethel said: ‘Is that going to be their campaign? Just lies about us?’
‘It bloody well is,’ said Bernie.
Lloyd said: ‘But will people believe it?’
(iv)
In southern New Mexico, not far from El Paso, there is a desert called Jornada del Muerto, the Voyage of the Dead. All day long the cruel sun beats down on needlethorn mesquite and sword-leafed yucca plants. The inhabitants are scorpions and rattlesnakes, fire ants and tarantula spiders. Here the men of the Manhattan Project tested the most dreadful weapon the human race had ever devised.
Greg Peshkov was with the scientists watching from ten thousand yards away. He had two hopes: first, that the bomb would work; and second, that ten thousand yards was far enough.
The countdown started at nine minutes past five in the morning, Mountain War Time, on Monday 16 July. It was dawn, and there were streaks of gold in the sky to the east.
The test was codenamed Trinity. When Greg had asked why, the senior scientist, the pointy-eared Jewish New Yorker J. Robert Oppenheimer, had quoted a poem by John Donne: ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God.’
‘Oppie’ was the cleverest person Greg had ever met. The most brilliant physicist of his generation, he also spoke six languages. He had read Karl Marx’s Capital in the original German. The kind of thing he did for fun was learn Sanskrit. Greg liked and admired him. Most physicists were geeks but Oppie, like Greg himself, was an exception: tall, handsome, charming, and a real ladykiller.
In the middle of the desert, Oppie had instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to build a one-hundred-foot tower of steel struts in concrete footings. On top was an oak platform. The bomb had been winched up to the platform on Saturday.
The scientists never used the word ‘bomb’. They called it ‘the gadget’. At its heart was a ball of plutonium, a metal that did not exist in nature but was created as a by-product in nuclear piles. The ball weighed ten pounds and contained all the plutonium in the world. Someone had calculated that it was worth a billion dollars.
Thirty-two detonators on the surface of the ball would go off simultaneously, creating such powerful inward pressure that the plutonium would become more dense and go critical.
No one really knew what would happen next.
The scientists were running a betting pool, dollar a ticket, on the force of the explosion measured in equivalent tons of TNT. Edward Teller bet 45,000 tons. Oppie bet 300 tons. The official forecast was 20,000 tons. The night before, Enrico Fermi had offered to take side bets on whether the blast would wipe out the entire state of New Mexico. General Groves had not found it funny.
The scientists had had a perfectly serious discussion about whether the explosion would ignite the atmosphere of the entire earth, and destroy the planet; but they had come to the conclusion that it would not. If they were wrong, Greg just hoped it would happen fast.
The trial had originally been scheduled for 4 July. However, every time they tested a component, it failed; so the big day had been postponed several times. Back at Los Alamos, on Saturday, a mock-up they called the Chinese Copy had refused to ignite. In the betting pool, Norman Ramsey had picked zero, gambling that the bomb would be a dud.
Today detonation had been scheduled for 2 a.m., but at that time there had been a thunderstorm – in the desert! Rain would bring the radioactive fallout down on the heads of the watching scientists, so the blast was postponed.
The storm had ended at dawn.
Greg was at a bunker called S-10000, which was the control room. Like most of the scientists, he was standing outside for a better view. Hope and fear struggled for mastery of his heart. If the bomb was a dud, the efforts of hundreds of people – plus about two billion dollars – would have gone for nothing. And if the bomb was not a dud, they might all be killed in the next few minutes.
Beside him was Wilhelm Frunze, the young German scientist he had first met in Chicago. ‘What would have happened, Will, if lightning had struck the bomb?’
Frunze shrugged. ‘No one knows.’
A green Verey rocket shot into the sky, startling Greg.
‘Five-minute warning,’ Frunze said.
Security had been haphazard. Santa Fe, the nearest town to Los Alamos, was crawling with well-dressed FBI agents. Leaning nonchalantly against walls in their tweed jackets and neckties, they were obvious to local residents, who wore blue jeans and cowboy boots.
The Bureau was also illegally tapping the phones of hundreds of people involved in the Manhattan Project. This bewildered Greg. How could the nation’s premier law enforcement agency systematically commit criminal acts?
Nevertheless, army security and the FBI had identified some spies and quietly removed them from the project, including Barney McHugh. But had they found them all? Greg did not know. Groves had been forced to take risks. If he had fired everyone the FBI asked him to, there would not have been enough scientists left to build the bomb.
Unfortunately, most scientists were radicals, socialists and liberals. There was hardly a conservative among them. And they believed that the truths discovered by science were for humankind to share, and should never be kept secret in the service of one regime or country. So, while the American government was keeping this huge project top secret, the scientists held discussion groups about sharing nuclear technology with all the nations of the world. Oppie himself was suspect: the only reason he was not in the Communist Party was that he never j
oined clubs.
Right now Oppie was lying on the ground next to his kid brother, Frank, also an outstanding physicist, also a Communist. They both held pieces of welding glass through which to observe the explosion. Greg and Frunze had similar pieces of glass. Some of the scientists were wearing sunglasses.
Another rocket went off. ‘One minute,’ said Frunze.
Greg heard Oppie say: ‘Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.’
He wondered if those would be Oppie’s last words.
Greg and Frunze lay on the sandy earth near Oppie and Frank. They all held their visors of welding glass in front of their eyes and gazed towards the test site.
Facing death, Greg thought about his mother, his father, and his sister Daisy in London. He wondered how much they would miss him. He thought, with mild regret, of Margaret Cowdry, who had dumped him for a guy who was willing to marry her. But most of all he thought of Jacky Jakes and his son, Georgy, now nine years old. He passionately wanted to watch Georgy grow up. He realized Georgy was the main reason he was hoping to stay alive. Stealthily, the child had crept into his soul and stolen his love. The strength of this feeling surprised Greg.
A gong chimed, a strangely inappropriate sound in the desert.
‘Ten seconds.’
Greg suffered an impulse to get up and run away. Silly though it was – how far could he get in ten seconds? – he had to force himself to lie still.
The bomb went off at five twenty-nine and forty-five seconds.
First there was an awesome flash, impossibly bright, the fiercest glare Greg had ever seen, stronger than the sun.
Then a weird dome of fire seemed to come out of the ground. With terrifying speed it grew monstrously high. It reached the level of the mountains and continued to rise, rapidly dwarfing the peaks.
Greg whispered: ‘Jesus . . .’
The dome morphed into a square. The light was still brighter than noonday, and the distant mountains were so vividly illuminated that Greg could see every fold and crevice and rock.
Then the shape changed again. A pillar appeared below, seeming to push miles into the sky, like the fist of God. The cloud of boiling fire above the pillar spread like an umbrella, until the whole thing looked like a mushroom seven miles tall. The colours in the cloud were hellish orange, green and purple.
Greg was hit by a wave of heat, as if the Almighty had opened a giant oven. At the same moment the bang of the explosion reached his ears like the crack of doom. But that was only the beginning. A noise like supernaturally loud thunder rolled over the desert, drowning all other sound.
The blazing cloud began to diminish but the thunder went on and on, impossibly sustained, until Greg wondered if this was the sound of the end of the world.
At last it faded away, and the mushroom cloud began to disperse.
Greg heard Frank Oppenheimer say: ‘It worked.’
Oppie said: ‘Yes, it worked.’
The two brothers shook hands.
And the world is still here, Greg thought.
But it has been forever changed.
(v)
Lloyd Williams and Daisy went to Hoxton Town Hall on the morning of 26 July to watch the votes being counted.
If Lloyd lost, Daisy was going to break off the engagement.
He fervently denied that she was a political liability, but she knew better. Lloyd’s political enemies made a point of calling her ‘Lady Aberowen’. Voters reacted to her American accent by looking indignant, as if she had no right to take part in British politics. Even Labour Party members treated her differently, asking if she would prefer coffee when they were all drinking tea.
As Lloyd had forecast, she was often able to overcome people’s initial hostility, by being natural and charming, and helping the other women wash up the tea cups. But was that enough? The election results would give the only definite answer.
She was not going to marry him if it meant his giving up his life’s work. He said he was willing to do it, but it was a hopeless foundation for marriage. Daisy shuddered with horror as she imagined him doing some other job, working at a bank or in the civil service, miserably unhappy and trying to pretend it was not her fault. It did not bear thinking about.
Unfortunately, everyone thought the Conservatives were going to win the election.
Some things had gone Labour’s way in the campaign. Churchill’s ‘Gestapo’ speech had backfired. Even Conservatives had been dismayed. Clement Attlee, broadcasting the following evening for Labour, had been coolly ironic. ‘When I listened to the Prime Minister’s speech last night, in which he gave such a travesty of the policy of the Labour Party, I realized at once what was his object. He wanted the voters to understand how great was the difference between Winston Churchill, the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr Churchill, the party leader of the Conservatives. He feared lest those who had accepted his leadership in war might be tempted out of gratitude to follow him further. I thank him for having disillusioned them so thoroughly.’ Attlee’s magisterial disdain had made Churchill seem a rabble-rouser. People had had too much of blood-red passion, Daisy thought; they would surely prefer temperate common sense in peacetime.
A Gallup poll taken the day before voting showed Labour winning, but no one believed it. The idea that you could forecast the result by asking a small number of electors seemed a bit unlikely. The News Chronicle, which had published the poll, was predicting a tie.
All the other papers said the Conservatives would win.
Daisy had never before taken any interest in the mechanics of democracy, but her fate was in the balance now, and she watched, mesmerized, as the voting papers were taken out of the boxes, sorted, counted, bundled, and counted again. The man in charge was called the Returning Officer, as if he had been away for a while. He was, in fact, the Town Clerk. Observers from each of the parties monitored the proceedings to make sure there was no carelessness or dishonesty. The process was long, and Daisy felt tortured by suspense.
At half past ten, they heard the first result from elsewhere. Harold Macmillan, a protégé of Churchill’s and a wartime Cabinet Minister, had lost Stockton-on-Tees to Labour. Fifteen minutes later there was news of a huge swing to Labour in Birmingham. No radios were allowed into the hall, so Daisy and Lloyd were relying on rumours filtering in from outside, and Daisy was not sure what to believe.
It was midday when the Returning Officer called the candidates and their agents into a corner of the room, to give them the result before making the announcement publicly. Daisy wanted to go with Lloyd but she was not permitted.
The man spoke quietly to all of them. As well as Lloyd and the sitting MP, there was a Conservative and a Communist. Daisy studied their faces, but could not guess who had won. They all went up on to the platform, and the room fell silent. Daisy felt nauseous.
‘I, Michael Charles Davies, being the duly appointed Returning Officer for the Parliamentary Constituency of Hoxton . . .’
Daisy stood with the Labour Party observers and stared at Lloyd. Was she about to lose him? The thought squeezed her heart and made her breathless with fear. In her life she had twice chosen a man who was disastrously wrong. Charlie Farquharson had been the opposite of her father, nice but weak. Boy Fitzherbert had been much like her father, wilful and selfish. Now, at last, she had found Lloyd, who was both strong and kind. She had not picked him for his social status or for what he could do for her, but simply because he was an extraordinarily good man. He was gentle, he was smart, he was trustworthy, and he adored her. It had taken her a long time to realize that he was what she was looking for. How foolish she had been.
The Returning Officer read out the number of votes cast for each candidate. They were listed alphabetically, so Williams came last. Daisy was so anxious that she could not keep the numbers in her head. ‘Reginald Sidney Blenkinsop, five thousand four hundred and twenty-seven . . .’
When Lloyd’s vote was read out, the Labour Party people all around Daisy burst out che
ering. It took her a moment to realize that meant he had won. Then she saw his solemn expression turn into a broad grin. Daisy began to clap and cheer louder than anyone. He had won! And she did not have to leave him! She felt as if her life had been saved.
‘I therefore declare that Lloyd Williams is duly elected Member of Parliament for Hoxton.’
Lloyd was a Member of Parliament. Daisy watched proudly as he stepped forward and made an acceptance speech. There was a formula for such speeches, she realized, and he tediously thanked the Returning Officer and his staff, then thanked his losing opponents for a fair fight. She was impatient to hug him. He finished with a few sentences about the task that lay ahead, of rebuilding war-torn Britain and creating a fairer society. He stood down to more applause.
Coming off the stage, he walked straight to Daisy, put his arms around her, and kissed her.
She said: ‘Well done, my darling,’ then she found she could no longer speak.
After a while they went outside and caught a bus to Labour Party headquarters at Transport House. There they learned that Labour had already won 106 seats.
It was a landslide.
Every pundit had been wrong, and everyone’s expectations were confounded. When all the results were in, Labour had 393 seats, the Conservatives 210. The Liberals had twelve and the Communists one – Stepney. Labour had an overwhelming majority.
At seven o’clock in the evening Winston Churchill, Britain’s great war leader, went to Buckingham Palace and resigned as Prime Minister.
Daisy thought of one of Churchill’s jibes about Attlee: ‘An empty car drew up and Clem got out.’ The man he called a nonentity had thrashed him.
At half past seven Clement Attlee went to the palace in his own car, driven by his wife, Violet, and King George VI asked him to become Prime Minister.
In the house in Nutley Street, after they had all listened to the news on the radio, Lloyd turned to Daisy and said: ‘Well, that’s that. Can we get married now?’
‘Yes,’ said Daisy. ‘As quick as you like.’
(vi)
Volodya and Zoya’s wedding reception was held in one of the smaller banqueting halls in the Kremlin.
