Dominion

by C. J. Sansom

  ‘The devils we have to deal with,’ Churchill growled. He seemed sunk in gloom, his ‘black dog’ had entered the room again. He said, ‘Who knows, Beaverbrook may even tell his people to come and arrest us tonight.’

  ‘They won’t, sir. They know they’re finished. They’ll try to save their own skins now, hold on to what they can. It might be an idea, though, to ask the Americans to say they would welcome a change of government in Britain. They said it of France yesterday.’

  ‘Good idea.’ Churchill nodded, encouraged. ‘Telephone the White House now.’

  Colville hesitated. ‘It’ll need to be put carefully. Stevenson is different from the isolationist Presidents, but he’s frightened of a revolution in Europe. And Beaverbrook was right. When the Fascists resist we will need to – what did they say in the Spanish Civil War? Arm the workers?’

  ‘They’re armed already. And Attlee and Bevan’s people are committed to free elections, they always have been.’ Churchill nodded. ‘And soon we shall have them again.’ He glowered at Colville. ‘What about these Russian rumours? That Khruschev has been overthrown?’

  ‘I think they may be true, sir. Sections of the KGB and state industries say they’ve taken over Moscow and are going to create a capitalist state, like the one the Germans planned for Russia east of Astrakhan, only bigger, and nationalist. It’ll be popular. The Russians don’t want communism back.’

  ‘Who’s in charge of this?’

  ‘A couple of unknowns. The mayor of Moscow and a KGB man. My guess is such a regime would be pretty corrupt. The Soviet Union certainly was. Poland and the Baltics have declared their independence, by the way. They’re fighting both Germans and Russians.’

  Churchill shook his head sadly. ‘So it will go on, at least for a time, the endless suffering. If only we had stood firm in 1940, it could all have been over by now.’ He bowed his head.

  Colville asked, ‘Will you stand for Prime Minister in the election here?’

  ‘I don’t know. Old age is the devil. Especially without my Clemmie.’ Churchill was silent a moment, then looked sharply up at Colville. ‘But if I don’t it should be Macmillan for the Conservatives, not Eden. Anthony’s not up to it.’

  ‘It could be Bevan for Labour. A lot of their people want him, say Attlee is too old, too moderate. They could win. Full-blooded socialism.’

  ‘If that’s what the people choose, it is up to them. So long as these vile years of bloodshed and oppression can be brought to an end.’ Churchill relapsed into silence again, staring into space. After a minute Colville said gently, ‘Would you like me to leave you, sir? Set up the call to Washington?’

  ‘The Muncaster affair,’ Churchill said. ‘The man who knew the secrets of the atom bomb. You remember him?’

  ‘Yes, sir. He died in that shootout in Sussex.’

  Churchill grunted. ‘A brave man. Took his secret to the grave rather than let the Germans have it.’ He looked at Colville sharply. ‘There were those of us who badly wanted to prise the secret out of him, hoping to set up our own nuclear programme.’

  Colville sighed. ‘Well, the secret will spread eventually, it must. God help civilization then.’

  Churchill shook his head. ‘We were so afraid the Germans might get hold of what Muncaster knew, remember? But it wouldn’t have mattered in the end, would it? They’d never have had time to develop the Bomb before their whole regime collapsed into civil war.’

  ‘We didn’t know that then,’ Colville said. ‘We didn’t know it would all fall to pieces so soon.’

  Churchill grunted. ‘Well, only America has the Bomb now. The mission succeeded. What happened to the rest of those people, by the way? That woman from – where was it?’

  ‘Slovakia. She went back there in the spring. Just before the Slovak army rose against the Fascists.’

  ‘There’s still fighting there, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes. It’s pretty savage, I hear.’

  ‘And the others? The English civil servant and the Scot? I met them with Muncaster that night, I remember. The Englishman’s wife got away too, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. They were all questioned pretty closely in America, I know that. Muncaster’s older brother was dead by then. He had a stroke, in custody.’

  ‘That whole family gone, then?’

  ‘Yes. There were some questions about the Scot – he was a Communist. I think he got sent to Canada. He lost an arm in that fight. The other man and his wife got a clean bill of health, permission to stay in the States. I don’t know what happened to them after that.’ He smiled. ‘Maybe they’ll come back now.’

  Churchill sat up. He looked more cheerful now. He banged a fist on the arm of his chair. ‘Yes. The exiles will be returning soon. To help us rebuild. Rebuild! We need them all now.’

  Acknowledgements

  All novels, perhaps historical novels especially, are to some extent collaborative efforts. Dominion has benefited from the help of others more than most. First and foremost I must thank my wonderful editor and agent, Maria Rejt of Mantle/Macmillan, and Antony Topping of Greene & Heaton, and their excellent staff – especially Sophie Orme, Ali Blackburn and Susan Opie at Mantle and Chris Wellbelove at Greene & Heaton, who managed to track down a crucial 1999 Channel 4 documentary on the Great Smog of 1952.

  My thanks to Maria and Antony are all the greater for their support when, following a long period of debilitating illness, which put the book behind schedule, I was diagnosed this year with bone-marrow cancer. Along with treatment, their faith in the book and in me has allowed it to be finished in time for October 2012 publication.

  Becky Smith once again did an astonishingly speedy and accurate job of typing. Olivia Williams carried out some crucial research for me in London when I was not well enough to go there, and I am grateful for the excellent job she did.

  Once again, I thank the group of friends who read the book in manuscript and commented on it comprehensively and perceptively as usual: Roz Brody, Mike Holmes, Jan King and William Shaw.

  Lou Taylor, Professor of Dress and Textile History, and Dr Gillian Scott, both of the School of Humanities, University of Brighton, were very generous with their time in discussing aspects of social history and fashion during the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, which helped greatly in my construction of an alternate universe.

  My warm thanks to Dr Françoise Hutton for discussing the type of medication Frank might have been on, and the modern history of mental hospitals.

  Robert Edwards was very helpful in sharing his great knowledge of Sussex for the scenes set there. Martin Foster advised me, a complete ignoramus on the subject, on some basics of radio communication.

  For the second book running, Rear-Admiral John Lippiett, Chief Executive of the Mary Rose Trust, helped me with naval matters, which are important at the end of the story, and I am grateful to him for taking time out from his work in completing the final stages of the new Mary Rose Museum, which will be opening in 2013. (I can reassure him that in my planned next novel, Matthew Shardlake will keep his feet firmly on dry land.) The Museum Appeal has done wonders in raising funds, but is still £400,000 short of its target. When finished, it will have on display the greatest store of Tudor artefacts anywhere in the world, in a magnificent setting. More information and pictures can be found at www.maryrose.org. Donations for the final stages of the project can be sent via the website or to The Mary Rose Trust, HM Naval Base, Portsmouth PO1 3LX.

  Alan Purdie at the British Legion was very helpful in providing details which helped me construct the 1952 Remembrance Day Ceremony in Chapter One. It is a very different Remembrance Day in my alternate universe, but I hope I managed to retain something of the atmosphere of respect which the ceremony deserves.

  Any errors of fact in the book are, of course, my own responsibility.

  Thanks to my friend Robyn Young for discussions of history and the strategy of book-writing, and support when times were tough. Thanks also to Paul Tempest and Peter Allins
on for lending me their house to work in while building works were taking place in mine. And last but not least, to Graham Brown of Fullertons for frequent bouts of photocopying and limitless supplies of stationery.

  Bibliographical Note

  Dominion involved a greater range of background reading than any previous novel I have written.

  On British social and political history from the 1930s to the 1950s, the most useful works were Angus Calder’s The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (1971), still I think the best social history of wartime Britain. Also very useful were Juliet Gardiner’s The Thirties:An Intimate History (2010), and Wartime Britain 1939–45 (2004), and Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (2009).

  Peter Hennessy’s Never Again: Britain 1945–51 (1992) and Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (2000) are packed with fascinating information. David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain 1945–51 (2008) and Family Britain 1951–57 (2010) were also very helpful. I think Kynaston’s insight that, culturally, Britain in the decade following the Second World War retreated into a 1930s view on many social issues, is crucial. In the first decade after the war there were highly censorious attitudes to subjects like illegitimacy, homosexuality and divorce, and the belief that women belonged in the home returned after the war. In my alternate universe Britain in 1952 is even more like the 1930s, and without the social reforms and full employment created by the Attlee government of 1945–51.

  On particular topics, Juliet Nicolson’s The Great Silence (2009) is a moving and evocative account of Britain coming to terms with the terrible losses of the First World War, which so affected Sarah’s family in my book. Barbara Tate’s West End Girls (2010) is a fascinating and extraordinary memoir of life in a Soho brothel of the period, and Dilys’ establishment in Dominion owes it much. The Channel 4 documentary Killer Fog (1999) tells the extraordinary story of the Great Smog of 1952 evocatively and with compassion for the many who died. Rupert Allason’s The Branch (1983) was a very useful brief introduction to the history of the Special Branch; though I suspect the author would disagree with my portrayal of how the Branch might have developed in an authoritarian Britain, I see it as perfectly probable.

  Many novels helped me in reimagining the period, notably those of Patrick Hamilton. (The roadhouse where David and his party stop on the way to Birmingham owes something to the Kings Head in the third volume of his Gorse trilogy (1952–1955).) Norman Collins’ wonderful though sadly forgotten novel London Belongs to Me (1945) brings London uniquely to life during the traumatic years 1938–40. Noblesse Oblige, ed. Nancy Mitford (1956) includes her hilarious essay on snobbery and the use of language in contemporary society.

  The story of Britain between the 1930s and 1950s is partly the story of empire in decline. Jan Morris’ Farewell the Trumpets (1976), the final volume of her Pax Britannica Trilogy, was particularly useful and evocative. I read a number of accounts of Civil Service life during the period, of which the most useful was undoubtedly Joe Garner’s The Commonwealth Office, 1925–68 (1968). Andrew Stewart’s Britain and the Dominions in the Second World War (2008) is a useful and informative recent academic study. Peter Hennessy’s Whitehall (1989) was also very helpful.

  For Churchill and the crisis of May 1940, Roy Jenkins’ Churchill (2001) is I think the best single-volume biography to date. John Charmley’s Churchill: The End of Glory (1993) is exhaustively well-informed though exhaustingly biased against Churchill. On the other hand, Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War (2010), telling of his extraordinary callousness when it came to the Bengal famine of 1942, was a necessary douche of cold water for one like me who, remembering Churchill’s role in 1940, can perhaps incline to being too reverential.

  On the Cabinet discussions over whether to make peace in 1940 I found Andrew Roberts’ Eminent Churchillians (1994) and The Holy Fox: A Life of Lord Halifax (1991) very useful, along with John Lukacs’ Five Days in London: May 1940 (2001) and Ian Kershaw’s Fateful Choices (2007). Richard Overy’s The Battle of Britain was very helpful at the early stages of my research. I had originally considered setting this book in a Britain where the proposed German invasion of Britain in 1940, Operation Sealion, had actually taken place. There has been much debate as to whether it could have succeeded and Overy’s book finally convinced me that it could not.

  There was a substantial minority in Britain who in 1939–40, for various reasons, opposed undertaking what would inevitably be total mobilization for a life-or-death struggle against Nazi Germany. Many were pacifists; a few were Scottish Nationalists; the most important were anti-Semites and outright Nazis. Particularly helpful on these various individuals and groups were Thomas Linehan’s British Fascism 1918–39 (2000), and Richard Griffiths’ Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–39 (1993) together with his Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939–40 (1998). This book tells the story of one of the leading pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic figures, who ended up detained in prison along with Oswald Mosley and who, while there, was much exercised, like the Scottish National Party, by the question of Scottish women being sent to work in England. (Ramsay was a Scottish Conservative MP.) The SNP’s opposition to Scots being conscripted to fight the war against Nazism can be verified in studies, such as Peter Lynch’s The History of the Scottish National Party (Cardiff, 2002).

  On the history of British anti-Semitism, I found Anthony Julius’ Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (2010) to be very fair and informative in the sections leading up to 1945, though the post-war sections are, in my view, neither. Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie’s biography Beaverbrook: a Life (1992) convinced me that if there was one outstanding candidate to run a regime such as the one portrayed in this book it was Beaverbrook.

  On the subject of mental hospitals in the 1950s – that decade must have been one of the worst in which to be mentally ill, with experimental and sometimes dangerous new treatments introduced and before the radical reforms of the 1960s – I found Diana Gittins’ Madness in Its Place: Narratives of Severalls Hospital 1913–97 (1998) especially helpful, along with Dilys Smith’s Park Prewett Hospital: the History 1898–1984 (1986) and Derek McCarthy’s Certified and Detained: A True Account (2009). Interestingly all three books describe an identical regime, though from widely different points of view. Bartley Green asylum is fictitious but, I think, representative.

  The Great Smog of December 1952 was caused by unusual weather conditions over southern England, at a period when London was still belching out tons of coal smoke from homes and power stations (the weather that week was unusually cold) as well as, increasingly, traffic fumes. It was the worst smog in the capital’s history. It is now estimated that 12,000 people died, mostly from respiratory diseases. Atmospheric conditions and pollution levels would have been the same in my alternate universe. In the real world, the government covered up the number who died, but the smog was instrumental in bringing about the Clean Air Act a few years later.

  In looking at how a British Resistance Movement might have fought a collaborationist regime, the closest (though not exact) parallel has to be the French Resistance. I found John F. Sweets’ Choices in Vichy France (1994) and Matthew Cobb’s The Resistance (2009) especially helpful.

  The United States in this novel is neutral and at peace with Japan, as I believe could have happened if Britain had fallen or surrendered in 1940. This would have strengthened the predominantly Republican isolationist movement in America, which in turn could have led to Roosevelt losing the 1940 Presidential election. If, as in this book, a Democrat was at last again elected in 1952, the most likely candidate would have been the man who lost to Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson. Porter McKeever’s biography, Adlai Stevenson (1989), tells the story of one of history’s narrow losers who, in this book, becomes a winner.

  Inevitably, Dominion involved much reading about Nazi Germany. I think the best recent study of the regime is Ri
chard Evans’ three-volume history: The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), The Third Reich in Power (2005) and The Third Reich at War (2008). Toby Thacker’s Joseph Goebbels; Life and Death (2010) was very useful on the man who in my book succeeds Hitler, and on the politics of the regime generally. Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe is an excellent study, not least of the various crazy and murderous Nazi plans for the future of Russia. James Taylor and Warren Shaw’s Dictionary of the Third Reich (1987) was indispensable. Warren Shaw’s son, my friend William Shaw, was one of those who read the book in manuscript; Dominion therefore owes something to two generations of the same family.

  Russia’s War (1997) by Richard Overy, the range of whose scholarship on the Second World War is matched only by his readability, is I think the best short account of Germany’s militarily unwinnable war against the Soviet Union. Rodric Braithwaite’s Moscow 1941: a City and Its People at War (2006) is an enthralling account of Germany’s first defeat at the Battle of Moscow. In my alternate universe German forces, are able – with Britain gone from the field – to begin their offensive against Russia earlier and with more troops, and take Moscow, but then become, as I think they inevitably would, bogged down in Russia’s vastness. Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (2011) is an enthralling and important account of the role of food supplies in the winning and losing of the Second World War, again not least in Russia.

  On the development of nuclear weapons and rocketry, Michael Neufeld’s Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (2007) and James P. Delgado’s Nuclear Dawn: the Atomic Bomb from the Manhattan Project to the Cold War (2009) were very helpful for a non-scientist. C.P. Snow’s The New Men (1954) is a fascinating novel by a wartime Civil Service insider about Britain’s efforts to manufacture a nuclear bomb.