Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (15 page)

Trying to collecting her wits, Naomi prepared to stand back up, silently waiting for the dizziness to subside. Before she could manage it, the boy leaned down to spit in her face. The huge gobbet of mucus ran down her nose and mouth; she spluttered and coughed as some entered her oral cavity, momentarily shocked. Seconds later, her senses returned and tears started flowing freely; hot on her wet face as she cried in painful shame and degradation.

Snarling, her attacker showed no pity.

“Get out of here, Jew scum. This park isn’t for you.”

The boy was eleven; as Naomi realised later, he didn’t know
why
he hated her, or even what a Jew
was
. He just
knew
, with a surefire certainty in his cocksure confidence of his arrogant, eleven-year-old mind, that a
Jew
was
bad
, and she was a
Jew
, ergo she was scum and he
hated
her.

As a young adult, Naomi became a teacher to help inspire children; to aid the creativity and channelled passions of their fertile minds. Now, the kids would read these Protocols; that 11yr old boy would be joined by an army of thousands, countless thousands, even millions. How long until the twisted poison of language could scar purity, and forever pervert the children of Britain into a hateful, vengeful, violent clique of racists?

Jewish life was
life unworthy of life
.

How could she have ever ignored and belittled this work? So maleficient was its content, to perniciously penetrate the conscious fears of all European nations – and presumably the rest of the world – to transcend cultural differences, and encompass all facets of cultural decay and parasitic operation to insidiously affect the thinking of – and thence bind together –
all
peoples of Britain, America and Europe to the modern form of anti-Semitism and scientific racial loathing. From the medieval beliefs of sacrifice and well-poisoning to this modern resurrection of ancient fears, with its sinister new ambition and devilish upgrade in scale; Naomi realised with trepidation that once more, her people truly
had
been chosen.

Maisie had the cheerful disposition of a girl who’d been blessed with an intelligent sibling, a loving mother and enough combined personality and looks to never be short of friends or popularity. That disposition had been sorely tested just ten minutes prior, with the visit to her shop on Tottenham Court Road from a gang of swaggering Blackshirts; BUF party members, old guard, enjoying their newfound hero status with its legal license to be loutish.

“Here we go,” she murmured to herself as the doorbell tinkled.

The fascists strolled in, glancing contemptuously at the modestly dressed young lady tending the shop. The youngest lad amongst them had a swarthy face, what looked like severe vitamin D deficiency and the kind of greasy, hook-nosed gargoyle visage that could have leapt off the pages of
Der Stürmer
to rape an Aryan child. He looked every inch the Jewish Demon that Hitler’s government wished to implant in the nightmares of every Aryan child in the Reich. The man’s face alone, sat perched on top of a skinny frame with its long torso and contrastingly short limbs, made her wonder exactly what
master race
it was that the Germans spoke of.

“Heil Hitler,” the runt in lead sneered at her. She responded by scowling.

Maisie had quickly found that it was these types who were more liable to be the loud, zealous defenders of Reich racial policy; slithering little imbeciles with slack jaws and Slavic features. The tall Wehrmacht soldiers on patrol merely looked wary, or bored; even resentful that after having their hatreds directed against ‘world Jewry’ for seven years that they instead had to fight, and then stand guard over, fellow Saxons; stuck in the ugly, grey-skied chilly environ of England when they could all be slaughtering Russian Jews in the east, or drinking champagne in the sunlit summer of Paris. As for the BUF muscle – including the three big ones that sauntered into the shop with the young man – they were now Britain’s SA.

“Heil Hitler,” the second of the two shaven-headed mountain-sized lumps grunted at her, without saluting.

“My name’s not Hitler,” she replied flatly, with a wan smile.

The strategically-shaved silverback gorilla was about to retort, the loose skin of his huge face bunching up angrily, when his friend who resembled the runt of the litter quickly interjected to complete the self-glorifying tale that he’d been in the process of droning through as they entered the shop.

“…
wha’ a
lit’wl fackin’ kike
. Where he belongs, the
fackin’ floor like a snake
. Next time I’ll make him lick the road, clean the street with his tongue the
cunt
. He was trembling in his fackin’ boots wasn’e?
Eh
, ’e was
fackin’
shiverin’…”

The dark-haired man spoke with an exaggerated cockney; the overeager drawl and self-conscious bite into each pronunciation betrayed him as a
mockney
of the highest order. His act was transparent; posturing with the pathetically eager air of a schoolboy whom had attached himself to the biggest bullies on the playground, just being in proximity to him made Maisie nauseous. His desperation to please, or to flaunt, gave rise to a slight shrillness and rising intonation in his voice, which was universally viewed as an incredibly unappealing trait on the English side of the Atlantic. Like most forms of mockney, it would have been a slow, sneering drawl but for his obviously ingratiating intent; eagerness lending haste to his foul stream of verbal incontinence.

“Good to see the filth show us the proper respect, these days…” he declared, drawling his leer, “not lookin’ d’aan their noses at us. You could be anything in the old days, as long as you had a bit of bees an’ ’oney… queer, rent boy, Jew, commie… not now, o’ course!”

“Not now,” one of his goons intoned dumbly.

“Thanks be to God, for Adolf Hitler,” the runt smirked with relish, playing with a coin between his fingers. Maisie had only ever seen one person do this before as habit, and the man had been a thief from Bermondsey, openly proud of his sleight of hand.

Surreptitiously ogling the shopgirl, the undersized runt of the fascist’s drew nearer, until Maisie was awarded a close-up view, to her regret. The man’s unappealing visage was only heightened at close range. His pockmarked cheeks were slightly flushed with red, like a child left outside for too long in winter, or a drunk whose blood vessels had mutinied in the face of excessive alcohol consumption and committed mass-hari kiri. Sporting a lined forehead, heavy bags under his watery eyes and a crooked nose, she realised with surprise that the man whom she’d thought was an arrogant, slimy teenage boy must be well into his forties. His oily skin was weatherbeaten, flecked with scar tissue and dotted with small, almost imperceptible spots. Maisie mused that she could have played braille with the blackheads on the crooked spire of his bent, off-centre nose. All in all, the man was a gargoyle.

“Hello,” she said with the unmistakeable air of sardonic cordiality. It was wasted on the fascist.

“
Awroight
,” he drawled, barely glancing at her as she moved around the shop, gazing disinterestedly at the various items the owner had added to what was essentially a tobacconists, in an attempt to make good during rationing. The fascist bit down on the ‘t’ at the end of the word, a letter usually omitted in the quick, natural pronunciation of real East Ender cockneys; as a result, it seemed he was almost self-parodying the mockney-cockney routine.

“All right,” she replied scornfully, mocking him.

“’ow’s it ga’an then,
lav
?” he asked disingenuously, without looking round.

“It’s going.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, it’s ga’an quite well, all things considered.”

“That’s an intriguing opinion. Not a valid one, but it’s interesting.”

A small double-take of surprise, and then the fascist chuckled again. “Well, you and everyone else will come to see sense soon enough, love. Don’t you worry your pretty little ’ead about that…”

“Who or whatever ‘sense’ is, coming from you I can only hope I don’t see it.”

The swarthy man opened his mouth to retort, and then decided against it, scrutinising the girl with a grin. She realised he had probably been a confrontational mental midget for much of his life, and only now was he realising that he actually wielded some real, tangible power. Seeing him in this light, she shuddered slightly to see his volte-face, hoping he wasn’t planning a methodical attack, be it verbal or otherwise.

Maisie cast a disdainful glance at his friends; big, thickly set, close cropped hair, boulders for heads, and all clad in ominous black. They looked like bear wrestlers. The greasy braggart, on the other hand, looked like a Jewish troglodyte. If ever an ugly caricature of Slavic ‘untermenschen’ came to life from the pornographic pages of
Der Stürmer
, it was this fascist. Maisie couldn’t understand the dynamic of the scene playing out before her eyes. How were
they
waiting around for
him
, listening to and tolerating his inane, nasty fluff? And all a member of the exclusive blood family, Mussolini’s baby of 1922 that had grown to monstrous proportions. It should have died in Rome, stillborn and unmourned, buried in an unmarked grave.

“I’ve read about you somewhere,” she blurted out suddenly, impulse once more getting the best of her.

The monster nearest her uncrossed the massive arms that were straining at his shirt sleeves, and looked over at the shopgirl with dull eyes. “What?”

“You were…” Her eyes flashed, as though having a brainwave. “Aha! You… were under a bridge, waiting for the Billy Goats Gruff.”

If Maisie expected an explosion of rage, at least after the period of silence required for the big man to register the joke, she was left sorely disappointed. The bear wrestler, scratching the cleft under his ear where a bushy sideburn grew, merely grunted incoherently, and then asked her to explain the remark. She shook her head, and he dropped the issue, scowling suspiciously as he lapsed into a brooding silence. The young man, however, took umbrage to her humour, and decided to cow her into the proper deference that he felt was only right and due.

“Well, you’re pretty funny aren’t you?” He leered at her with yellow, if evenly sized teeth.

That was
something
, Maisie thought.
If there’s one thing that’s right with him, his yellow teeth are perfectly even. Not jagged, or crooked. The colour of bananas, perhaps, but at least they’re even
.

She smiled, maddeningly pleasant.

“I don’t know… my brother used to tell me my jokes were rubbish, and he wouldn’t make me an honorary boy.”

She shrugged, regretfully, flicking a strand of curly fair hair out of her eyes. “He laughed, but said it was because they were so bad. Jokes
so bad
they were funny, y’know? Then we’d play-fight.”

“So you’re a fighter,” he sneered, looking to his pals and awarding her a profile of his misshapen head and teeth. “Shame you weren’t in France.”

She pretended to consider. “That
did
occur to me… though at the time I must admit I was glad. Too many
fascists
there. The risk of coming across some violent, racist idiot was
far
too great. It’s a real shame how things turned out.”

Ratlike eyes bulging; the slimy runt could not answer at first, absorbing the impertinent retort with barely concealed anger. Yet the eruption of rage never came; controlling his breathing, the runt simply stared at Maisie for twelve seconds, before his eyes lost their fury and began insolently roving over her body at leisure. This was a more effective insult than verbal barbs, and one that she couldn’t simply toss back at him with scorn. Fascists, of varying nationalities,
de facto
ruled Britain. He was a party member. That’s how it worked. He was in power. For all her bluff, she was just a shop girl.

Mortified, she sat back behind the counter, so that only her head was visible to the odious fascist. Deliberating, the runt flexed his jaw, and then performed some further theatrics to simulate rumination, in the pretence that he was in the process of considering her situation with some significance, wielding some as-yet unspecified power over Maisie.

“Well…” he finally said, “… you’re obviously not a
Jew
at any rate. Which is a shame, cos I’d
lav
to paint a big star on your window, perhaps come in and trash the place every naa’an’ again”. He glanced at her little pile of books behind the counter. “Perhaps take a piss. Or see if your little book piles are harbouring any
subversive material
… that would be fun.” That leer again, the two curled slabs of raw meat that were his lips twisting grotesquely. She wondered if he was born with them. He added, “Best to be sure that things are properly above board, after all.”

She nodded slowly, as though in sympathy with his burden as a defender of All Things Fascist.

“Well, future plans aside, if you’re not here to buy anything, I’d ‘lav’ it if you and your friends here…” she stopped herself, before using a profanity. They wouldn't make her lose her dignity. Not this idiot. Not this bullying, sneering little nobody; a child in a man’s body, albeit a malnourished, misshapen one. Not this cretin.

“… Would pack it in. And leave. Thanks!”

She smiled sweetly, noting to her satisfaction that his eyebrows rose in surprise at her coolness. Much to her own amazement, the fascist duly turned and walked out, his friends following, rewarding her bravery with one last, lingering sneer.

Her mood though, had dipped as they left, emitting menacing vibrations even in exit. She knew it wouldn’t be long before the hundreds, or even thousands of idiots like the young weasel of a fascist who had bothered her would grow accustomed to their roles as legally accepted bullies. That was the nature of brutal regimes and dehumanisation. How many
Sturmabteilung
brownshirts had been good sons and brothers, nephews and friends, in Munich, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Berlin? How many nice boys in Madrid and Barcelona, Rome and Paris – capitals of European culture – had taken to the worldview of scientific racial superiority and right-wing political extremism? And how many in the nightmare Germany had become warped and transmutated into powerful men of ugly actions; how many good sons grew to beat communists with coshes, fire bullets in street skirmishes, throw glass and chairs in beer hall brawls, and force Jews to lick pavements, sweep up the broken glass of their own shops and houses, parade them through the streets with bloody noses and humiliating placards, burn their properties on
Kristallnacht
, support the legal privations inflicted and contribute to the persecutions and misery; all done with the sole intent of unifying one tribe by robbing their fellow man of dignity?