Hateland

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  ODE TO SNAP

  The fools, the fools, the green-eyed fools, they could never see what we could see.

  From that bench upon that hill, we gazed through innocent eyes at an imaginary ocean that kissed the distant shore beneath the flickering mainland lights. We sat in silence, immersed in our own perfect world, whilst all around us, the real world was forever threatening to destroy us.

  Cast asunder by falsehoods and smears, we drifted away into that ocean, tied by memories, torn by pain. But fear not, our friendship cannot die, the fools cannot destroy us.

  Someday, we will be reunited by the bond their lies, ill-will and jealousy could not destroy.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to The Who for their album Quadrophenia (released 16 November 1973): lyrics that raced around my brain and made me question everything I was ever told; rhythms that tore through my veins as I rampaged through dance-halls and streets; simply great tunes that set me free and made me feel alive!

  Special thanks to Ljuba Hantke, Sheila and Frank Proud, Brian and May McGovern, and editor Kevin O'Brien at Mainstream.

  Last but by no means least, thanks also to Liverpool's favourite sons, Vinny Bingham and Lenny Higson (Do They Know It's Christmas?), Devon's own Martin 'Whizz Kid' Moore, everyone in sarf London, Glen, Ebony, Lauren, Emma's sister Siobhan, Hughie, 'The Angel of Manchester' Chemane Thomas, Steve and Lyn Daley and family, the Legion clique, Sean and Kerry Riley, Patricia and Paul Scanlon, Michael and Carol, my mother, my children Adrian, Vinney and Karis, Fr. Philip, and the Posh and Deeping boys - you know who you are!

  www. bernardomahoney. com

  CHAPTER 1

  GETTING A GRIP

  'Adolf' wanted me to meet 'The Führer', so we hopped on a tube to Arnos Grove and looked for a pub full of gardeners. Not real gardeners. Nazis posing as gardeners. In those days, the British National Party (BNP) couldn't use their own name to hire a venue. To book somewhere, even the mouldy upstairs room of a derelict pub, they'd use a pseudonym, like 'The Gardeners' Club' - something I'd always considered somewhat weak.

  I used to sneer about it to Adolf. If you believe in something so strongly, why pretend you're someone else? Why the secrecy? Why the deception? If this was the party that was going to march to power and save the Aryan nation from the blacks and the reds and the race traitors, how was the message going to be spread? Preaching to the converted in the locked back-room of a secret location seemed pretty pointless. To me, at least. Not so much to Adolf, who regarded my criticisms as unhelpful, even treacherous, a contemptible flirtation with the forces of ZOG - the Jew-run Zionist Occupation Government, which apparently ruled our land and most of the world.

  Adolf traced to my supposed 'northern' roots what he saw as my shallow commitment to the Nazi cause. A south Londoner, he regarded 'northerners' as merely borderline Aryans. He also seemed to think 'the north' began just beyond north London. In fact, I'd been dragged up in Wolverhampton, which geographers, so far as I knew, had always located in the West Midlands.

  I'd become friends with Adolf after leaving the army. We were both in our early 20s when we met. He was a friend of my older brother Paul. They had a lot in common - boozing, psychotic violence and Nazism. I could connect with the booze and the violence, but for a long time I remained unsure about what to make of the Nazism. Even at the height of my Nazi involvement, I had little understanding of the politics. Mainly, I just endorsed the far-right's anti-black racism, because I didn't really like blacks and Asians. Of course, I hardly knew any.

  I wasn't really politically minded. Since my teens, I'd had a weakness for gang warfare and a desire to be the baddest of the bad. Hanging around with Nazis helped me keep in touch with my real self. They were - so it seemed to me then - the baddest gang on the block.

  I'd met Adolf for the first time at the first of Paul's two illegal weddings. He immediately poured scorn on my 'northern' accent, but, perhaps because of our shared council-estate heritage, we got on well. Since then, although Adolf and I had spent quite a lot of time together on and off, I didn't know much about his background. If you asked him what he regarded as a personal question, he'd look at you, disgust forming on his face, and say, 'Are you a homosexual? Are you hoping to sleep with me?'

  I assumed he'd had the usual shit childhood, like mine, with some sort of father-figure stomping on his head between bouts of suicide drinking and venomous verbal abuse. But I didn't know for sure. I'd never met his father and he never spoke about him. His mother was a lovely woman. I really liked her. She hadn't held my brother Paul's behaviour against me. Some months after the wedding, Paul had stabbed Adolf in the stomach with a bayonet in front of her in her living room. Adolf recovered but, understandably, his friendship with Paul didn't.

  I'd known Adolf for around five years when we set off that evening some time in the late '80s for Arnos Grove in north London to hear a speech by Britain's would-be Führer, John Tyndall, leader of the BNP. We headed off from Adolf's flat in Stockwell, south London. I'd often suggested Adolf move away from the area, because the large number of people there from ethnic minorities (not the term Adolf used) incited him constantly to rage. He was the sort of person who wouldn't buy even a packet of mints from an Asian-owned shop ('I ain't putting money in that cunt's pocket'). If he saw a white woman on the street with a pushchair containing a non-white child he'd mutter, 'White-trash slut.' Sometimes on the street, he'd hold out his hands in theatrical despair and say, 'If I could see just one person here with Aryan blood flowing through their veins . . .'

  But his raging could be extremely funny. For Nazis, anyway. He tortured himself with conspiracy theories, making unlikely connections between them and current events. He'd work things out aloud: less stream of consciousness, more stream of fury. He was like a young Alf Garnett (the elderly ranting racist from the '60s television sitcom, Till Death Us Do Part, whose catchphrase was 'The wogs start at Calais').

  Adolf was about 5 ft 10 in., not particularly well built, but not a sparrow. Wiry - and wired. When he spoke, it was usually through clenched teeth and flecks of phlegm. The veins on his neck would protrude and pulse, and every other visible muscle would bulge and twitch. He oozed violence.

  He wasn't without contradictions. His first serious girlfriend came from Liverpool. This surprised me because, like the original Alf Garnett, he reserved special contempt and loathing for 'Scousers'. He said she was 'all right', because her grandparents had been born in London. On his first trip to Liverpool to meet her parents, he told me - seriously - he'd brought up his own supply of bottled water. He'd wanted to minimise the risk of catching typhoid, cholera and other water-borne diseases he believed rife in that part of 'the Third World'.

  'Adolf, of course, wasn't his real name, just the unsubtle nickname he'd earned for his dedication to the National Socialist cause. Unlike most so-called Nazis (including me at the time), Adolf had a good grasp of the ideology and politics of fascism. He could rant for hours (and often did) on the differences between the various Nazi and far-right groupings, as well as on the workings of ZOG. He seemed to know everyone who was anyone in 'the Movement', but he always avoided officially joining any group, largely because of his conviction that spies and informers skulked in all of them.

  In 1985, around three years after I'd first met him, Adolf had

  almost been blown to bits. In a south London street, which happened to contain the headquarters of the far-left Workers' Revolutionary Party (WRP), a bomb had exploded in the back of a car that Adolf had been travelling in with a fellow Nazi. The bomb had been hidden in a biscuit-tin packed with nails. Adolf hadn't been in the car at the time - he'd just got out to buy a takeaway from a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken shop - so he escaped with minor burns, unlike the driver, who took the fu
ll impact and was badly injured.

  The driver had been charged with making an explosive device intended to endanger life. At his trial, the prosecution claimed he'd been planning to plant the bomb at the WRP's headquarters. However, the jury believed his defence that he'd only been 'experimenting' with bomb-making as a hobby and had not built the bomb for any political use. The judge could only sentence him on the lesser charges. He got three years' imprisonment for possessing the contents of the biscuit-tin (and ten home-made grenades, seven detonators and two petrol bombs).

  Adolf escaped prosecution. The police accepted his claim he'd known nothing about the bomb on the back seat. They believed him when he said he'd just accepted a lift from a friend. Adolf told me later that his claim of innocence had been aided by the fact that, when the bomb exploded, he'd been in possession of two pieces of chicken, a large portion of chips and a milkshake. But the fact he'd never officially joined any Nazi group may also have convinced the police they were dealing with an innocent fellow-traveller.

  I'd been living in apartheid South Africa at the time of the explosion. I'd gone there to escape prosecution for wounding someone. In the end, I fled the country before the Afrikaners could jail and deport me. This had boosted my status in Adolf's eyes. He chose to believe that South Africa - the beacon of white light in the dark continent - had sent me into exile. He praised me as the only person to be expelled by the apartheid regime for being too right-wing. In fact, my forced departure from white man's heaven resulted from crimes of violence and a general disrespect for the little law that then existed there, rather than anything political.

  Adolf and I arrived at Arnos Grove and set about looking for the pub where the BNP meeting was to be held. We half-expected to encounter a crowd of shrieking leftists outside the pub. No matter what precautions were taken to keep secret a Nazi meeting's location, the anti-Nazis usually swung an invitation.

  The police tended to prevent major battles, although Adolf told me he'd sometimes been hit by a 'carrot-juice' bottle, a Socialist Worker placard or 'a lesbian'. Adolf assumed all women at anti-Nazi demos were lesbians, partly because they didn't tend to wear miniskirts, high-heels and crop-tops, and partly because he thought lesbians searched unconsciously for 'a good man' to set them right and therefore felt drawn to demos where they could encounter good men like us. It was one of his numerous theories.

  Eventually, we found the pub. All was quiet outside. Inside, we knew instantly we'd come to the right place, because the bar was dotted with pairs of skinheads sitting at different tables, all trying to pretend they didn't know each other. They remained deep under cover, observing the secret-society rule, 'Don't all sit together or the guv'nor will suss.' Around 15 pairs of men wearing boots, braces and Union Jack T-shirts suddenly descend on a pub - and it's just a coincidence. No one will ever guess.

  Then, almost as one, these unconnected people suddenly got up and made their way upstairs to the meeting. I looked at the landlord standing at the bar. He was a thick-set Irishman. I could tell he'd twigged that the members of this gardening club weren't about to discuss the pros and cons of paraffin-fuelled lawnmowers.

  Adolf and I entered the meeting room - and I wondered what I was doing there. I didn't really need another Nazi lecture. Listening to Adolf on the long tube journey up had been enough for one day. I'd already received a verbal top-up about our race, our nation's destiny and our need to be fit and ready when the call came.

  Union flags draped a table on a raised platform at the front of the room. 'The Führer' John Tyndall sat there, flanked by lieutenants. Tyndall looked like an old-fashioned schoolmaster. I could imagine kids flicking snot at his balding head when he turned to face the blackboard. I'd heard one of his speeches before. It was all about 'war on the streets', 'direct action' and 'the bulldog spirit'. Tyndall stood up, cleared his throat and began to speak. Suddenly, the pub landlord burst into the room. 'Hey, hey,' he said. 'What the fuck's going on here? I'm not having any National Front meetings in my pub. You'll all have to leave now. Come on, or I'll call the police.'

  He said he'd give us five minutes to piss off. He left the room. There was silence. People began to get up meekly from their seats. Tyndall asked sheepishly if we could continue the meeting somewhere nearby. I didn't particularly want to hear his speech, though he wasn't a bad speaker, but I'd just travelled all the way across London, and I didn't think the hardened foot-soldiers of fascism ought to be sent packing by a few mildly threatening words from a single, unarmed Irishman. It wasn't quite 'the bulldog spirit'.

  I turned to Adolf. I could tell he was thinking the same.

  Adolf said, 'Fuck this. Let's lock the door.'

  We walked towards the door, and I bolted it shut. I said loudly, 'Carry on with the meeting in here. You're not going to let some fucking paddy tell you what to do, are you?'

  Tyndall, who'd already packed his lunchbox into his briefcase and was heading for the exit, stood about five yards from me. He ordered me to open the door. I told him to fuck off. He shouted, 'Open it.' Again, I told him to fuck off. He stormed towards me and tried to bustle past to open the door. I grabbed hold of him. He tried pushing me off, so I put him in a head-lock and stood there with his head under my arm. We had a little dance as he struggled to break free. I looked down at his bald patch. Our struggle was shaking the dandruff from his remaining hair. I had his neck in a very firm grasp. He gurgled something at me, and a bit of his spit dribbled onto my arm. He kept struggling, but the more he struggled, the more I squeezed. Adolf was laughing. He kept saying, 'Fucking let go of him, Bernie.' So I did.

  Tyndall regained his erect posture. His features flashed with outrage. Flushed and sweating, he turned towards his minder, presumably because a minder should normally be mindful of such assaults on the mindee's person and dignity. The minder looked as if he was going to do or say something, so I moved towards him as if about to bash him. The minder stepped back and cowered behind his friends.

  I began shouting at Tyndall, 'Some fucking nationalist you are. One paddy tells 30 of you to leave and you scuttle off.' Tyndall began addressing his followers as if I were invisible. I kept shouting, 'You fucking wanker.'

  Tyndall ignored me and, with the little of his dignity that remained, said they'd finish their meeting elsewhere. I let him unbolt the door. Everyone trooped out after him.

  I wanted to go home, but Adolf said, 'We might as well hear what he's got to say.'

  The group walked to a nearby park. There, in darkness, Tyndall stood on a low wall and addressed his disciples. I didn't stay to the end. I'd had enough of the bulldog spirit. I said to Adolf, 'Come on. Let's go.'

  On the way back to the tube, I began raging about Tyndall and the Nazis. Adolf wouldn't stop laughing. I said, 'You can fucking laugh, Adolf, but I'm not going to another one of their fucking meetings.'

  This made him laugh even more. He said, 'Do you really think they're going to invite you?' We both started laughing. We agreed that another invitation seemed unlikely.

  I suppose this meeting was a sort of turning point for me. It wasn't that I suddenly saw the British Nazis in a new light, scales falling from my eyes. It was more a confirmation of every negative thought I'd ever had about them. I'd been chewing their shit for several years, but thankfully I'd never got round to swallowing it. And now I knew I never would. There had always been something ridiculous about my involvement with the British Nazis. For one thing, my parents were Irish Catholics - a group that hasn't always contained the most loyal defenders of the English nation. Even Adolf's blood wasn't pure St George - his dad was Irish too. In fact, almost every one of the small group of south London 'Nazis' I hung around with had either Irish, or mixed, blood.

  CHAPTER 2

  RIVERS OF BLOOD

  I'm standing in a field picking potatoes with my mother. I'm about eight years old. Around us are other pickers, all white and mostly women. On the other side of the field, a group of Asians are working. Occasionally, a white woman th
rows a potato in their direction. A few of her friends laugh. The Asians, mostly women and children, don't respond. They get on quietly with their work.

  We're on the outskirts of Wolverhampton at Bradshaw's, one of the largest fruit and vegetable farms in Europe. My father needs all his money for his beer, so to support me and my three brothers, my mother must work here at the weekends and in a factory during the week. Somehow, she manages to squeeze in a few cleaning jobs as well.

  The roar of motorbike engines makes me look up. A gang of Hell's Angels on perhaps 20 bikes has stopped on the A5 overlooking our field. I can see them looking down at us and the Asians. Then they rev up their engines and peel around, heading back down the A5 to the farm entrance. As soon as the first bike passes the gate, the Asians begin to run. In our white group, no one moves or seems to feel threatened.

  I realise the bikers want to get at the Asians. No real surprise registers in my childish mind, because everyone, apart from my mother, seems to dislike them. Every day, I hear the words, 'dirty Indians'. Perhaps their skin is brown because they're dirty, I think.

  Because of the furrows, the bikers can't drive over the field to reach the Asians. Instead, they roar up and down the two dirt tracks on either side. The Asians run from one corner to another, pursued by jeering Angels. The white pickers have stopped work to watch. Some are laughing. After five minutes or so, the Angels tire of their game and roar off. For a few minutes, the terrified Asians stay huddled together in the middle of the field. Some of the women are shaking. Others are crying. After a short while, everyone, white and Asian, goes back to picking potatoes, as if nothing's happened.

  I'm pretty sure this incident took place in 1968, but maybe it was six months earlier or later. It was certainly around the time of local MP Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech.