Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (26 page)

They rolled on through the stillness, imaginations running wild. As the car edged through the last grim, quiet lanes of lower Whitechapel, William piped up from the backseat.

“I loosely translated a Goethe poem that applies to our predicament.”

“Let’s hear it then, old boy,” was Jack’s instant reply. He could sense that his friend was nervous, and felt a small rush of gratitude that Alan hadn’t objected to German poetry. Indeed, there was even the ghost of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth as William began to recite. They’d just finished praising the prose when the car slipped south past the Commercial Road and on to the turn southeast to the docks.

Fortunately, they passed through to the Docklands outskirts completely without incident – seeing neither German patrols nor London police, whom they feared would be compelled to check papers for anyone heading to the vitally important industrial nerve-centre of the docks. Alan drove slowly to maximise the precious petrol that they had been given. They were stored in one of the munitions dumps, and only Alan and Jack knew their location, for the sake of plausible deniability in the event of enemy capture. Of course, the combined civil and military administration – as yet not publicly declared by Germany – had issued their own coupon currency for essentials, and had fixed the German Reichsmark at 9.6 to the British pound, but Alan’s coupons that the Colonel had provided had already been traded in for a significant amount of petroleum gasoline; certainly enough given the average life expectancy of an Auxiliary fighter.

“Forgot how grim all this shite was,” William observed.

Jack knew that Duncan lived near Millwall to the west of the Isle of Dogs, in one of the terraced streets wedged in near the Phoenix Heights that was filled with the classic London two-up two-down homes in neat, squat rows. The big docker used to drink in a pub on Cuba Street, an old tavern called the Dock House, in which all the three of them had shared a boozy night together with several of the other communists on the eve of setting off for Spain. William’s status as intellectual of the group hadn’t stopped him from competing with Alan in a drinking contest, with the bravado and melodramatic pre-war uninhibited zeal that suggested this was their last night of celebration on Earth; the end result had been a sort of bleary truce at nine o’clock in the morning, a full three hours after both had vomited outside into the street, yet shown no subsequent inclination to quit, staggering back inside to where fresh pints of ale were waiting for them, and the mocking applause of their friends. Ice water had been needed to get them in shape to travel down to catch the Calais ferry. Even big Duncan had nursed a hangover that lasted long after the boat began to drift along the coast of France.

But to their dismay, in the present, the three partisans arrived to find the Dock House tavern closed down. It seemed somehow indecent to mourn the loss of a pub with so many human lives extinguished in war, so they cruised on without comment, a silent pact of sorts, on through the eerie dockland terraces and past factories and warehouses that had been blasted by the Germans, and were still being rebuilt; the black scars of incendiary flame and inferno from the skies defacing the mutilated area that had been the hub of London’s supply and production, one of the beating hearts of a vast and great empire.

They came upon
The Islander
pub, and found nothing but begrimed rubble; an eyesore of man-made ruin. Broken brick in a mound of dust and ruined, jagged blocks were all that remained of a former hub of life. No attempt had been made to remedy what was clearly a direct hit sustained by the building, and obviously, a kind of grim torpor must have set in for the locals on the visual evidence that Jack, William and Alan silently observed. The lack of reconstruction – even on a popular pub – showed just how apathetic the British defeat must have been for the proletarian communities – sons, husbands, brothers in France, or in continental factories, in hiding or resisting up north. All those who remained had internalised the torment and grief.

In the third pub, they got lucky. Nestled in the far corner of the public bar, in one of the three booths along the northeast corner was the unmistakeable wide-domed, pronounced forehead and colossal frame of Duncan McGrath. The man was gigantic.

There was another half full pint glass in front of him, but the high back of the booth obscured him from view and from the threshold, none of them could see who it was. Sharing a glance, William and Alan strolled over. Jack stepped briskly to the bar; “all right!” he chirped to the barman, in an accent dripping with as much Bow Bells as he could muster, drawling his cockney. It would only have served as an impediment to be viewed with suspicion; three unknowns strolling into a docklands pub to confront a worker during foreign occupation. Who knows what would happen if they were suspected of being informants. Stories were in circulation of awful retribution meted out to collaborators; obscured, of course, by the typical routine of urban legends, exaggerations and chinese whispers.

But in the Docklands pub, neither Jack, William nor Alan could afford to wrongly expose themselves to suspicion.

Duncan saw them long before they reached him, but gave no indication until they were at the table. They approached him with faint smiles. Alan did not waste time with formalities.

“So you are still alive, you stubborn
bastard
?”

Duncan put his pint glass down, carefully, as though his great size necessitated exaggerated care with the frail glass. “Just about, Alan. Sometimes I wish I weren’t though, truth be told…”

He stood up, and any misgivings they’d had seemed in vain. The three men embraced like old comrades, and Duncan introduced them to his drinking buddy; much younger than he, but older than the three young veterans who’d once shared party allegiance with the bear-sized man now squeezed into a corner of the booth. This companion of McGrath looked like a boxer, with the stern eyes, big squashed nose and confident air of a prize-fighter.

Meanwhile, Jack brought five pints over, and the introductions were restarted. A jovial Duncan drew attention to his friend.

“Geordie, Billy, Jack the lad; this is another Jack,” he smiled, pointing out each man in turn.

They all shook hands with the stranger, who said “Jack Dash, good to meet you, brothers.”

William surmised him to be thirty-five or thereabouts. He had a white face, high hairline and a wide, rounded nose; unfortunate, William thought to himself. A big nose was the last thing you could afford in a German colony.

The man had the air of a worker with serious ideological views; you could tell the sort from a mile away. In the infectious spirit of the 1930s and the solutions offered by political extremes, to channel one’s dissatisfaction and drive into some kind of revolutionary movement was the crowning act of self-vindication. It made William’s head hurt, now; looking at this slightly older man with his weathered leather jacket – much like Alan’s, though his bore dust of the trenches – and small flat cap in the worker’s style, he remembered his own days in the early ‘30s,
devouring every word that Marx, Bakunin, Godwin, Volin, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had ever committed to print. Heads swirling with slogans and theories, debating the best hybrid of all the facts and the avenue down which to pursue the People’s Movement
… all hot air and bluster. He’d seen what happened in reality; just a power grab from the opposing end of the social and political spectrums. Communists labelling fellow anti-fascists,
fascists
. Torture, murder. The anarchists later banned; that anti-authoritarian system the natural state of being to the Catalan peasants.
In William’s disillusionment, he considered communists and any kind of political thinking worker a naïve, idealistic fool if they hadn’t been to Spain or Russia and witnessed firsthand what Stalin’s vision truly was. They justified Franco’s claims that he’d purged Spain of the godless infidel savages, and
this
with the camaraderie of the first anarchist uprising and outpouring of popular sentiment, the glowing workers’ solidarity of Barcelona in 1936, and the essential decency of the Spaniard! Political extremism and centralism on their own ‘side’ had condemned them and their vision just as much as the combined fascist and Catholic extremists on the other.

It made William uneasy, now, looking as the fiercely garbed proletarian in his jacket. He imagined the slogans and the communist spiel that would come outpouring in a cascade of worker’s pride if he set him off. Another pathetically eager, pro-Soviet zealot. If he revealed that their old militia had been labelled Trotskyite-fascists, the tough-looking little man would probably smash his pint glass over Jack or Alan’s head. Yet, William mused scornfully,
still
be unable to articulate why Trotsky, Lenin’s chief lieutenant and proponent of permanent socialist revolution, was a ‘fascist’ – unless that term now jointly included all people exiled or murdered by Stalin’s regime.

Duncan was speaking.

“So… what brings my old comrades back around here? Makes for miserable bloody sightseeing.” He gestured round at the unprepossessing pub, its stone and sawdust surfaces and naked electric lights resulting in an ugly yellow ambience. The pub’s patrons looked tired, and were for the most part stationary and inexpressive.

Jack, perched next to his namesake Dash, leaned across the table pointedly. There seemed little point prolonging the inevitable entreaty, and besides, none of them felt particularly nostalgic for the days when they pledged their loyalty to Comintern.

“We need to speak to you about something important. We know we can trust you. What we don’t know is whether we can trust
him
.” He turned to the older man beside him. “With no offence intended, Jack.”

“None taken, brother,” the oddly fierce little Jack Dash replied. “And rest assured if this matter concerns a topic not quite… how shall I say, to be in the best interests of this city’s masters – new or old, mind – of either German or capitalist persuasion… you have nothing to worry about, mate.”

He raised his own glass, and took a mighty swig out of it. Jack glanced at Duncan, who nodded his assurance.

“We wondered if you were interested in–“ Jack began, before William interjected with a hiss to speak quietly, and he leaned in. “… interested in resuming your role in fighting the forces of tyranny, and the like.”

Duncan McGrath’s face betrayed nothing. William wondered what had happened to the big man who’d been so enthused about travelling for the noble cause. There was once not a prouder proletarian in the docks, nor one so versed in the slogans and theories.

Seeing a vital force broken in a person, an internal light extinguished, was commonplace in wartime. But not in people as proud and as fierce as Big Duncan. Not in people who’d fought tooth and nail for their beliefs, bitterness only growing as they saw the collective effort come to naught, thirst for blood rising with time. But William recognised it in his face. There was no sign of the old Duncan McGrath.

If Jack saw it, much like Duncan, he too gave nothing away.

“We have the means and the information that could potentially make a difference. But it’s not without danger.”

As Alan waited expectantly, Duncan McGrath sipped his pint unhurriedly, as though lost in thought. Finally, he swivelled round and addressed Alan.

“Make a
difference
. Really? Overthrow the German Army? Kill Hitler? What?”

Alan was astonished, but scrambled to find his voice. “Well, bloody right man! If we can’t kill a quarter of a million men, we can kill a quarter of a thousand, or quarter of a hundred, and if everyone did their bit then yes I reckon we would overthrow the German
bloody
army!”

Duncan was calm. “But they won’t.”

Even his friend Jack was staring hard at Duncan now, emotions warring on his face. Alan looked across the table to him.

“You, Dash – is what I’m saying right or what?”

He nodded slowly. “It’s right, brother.”

“Well tell this big
lump
would you man? You’d never think he’d already fought these bastards in Spain, the way he sounds!”

Even as he entreated, he could see in Duncan’s eyes that it was useless. The big man was almost lethargic; everything in his posture and speech was withdrawn and laboured, a shell of the vital man he’d been.

He raised one palm. “Let’s be honest, lads. You’re not going to recruit Jack here without me, because that’s not how it works. You can’t be sure of him without your old comrade joining up too, so let’s forget using a brother worker here as some kind of bait to lure me in…”

He took a mighty swig of his pint again, with the eyes of all at the table settled on him, and sighed regretfully. Whether it was to do with the empty glass, or the situation at large, none could tell. He resumed, consigned to the fact that an explanation was needed in his incredulous company.

“Look. Nothing changes, nothing ever will. This isn’t Russia –“

“Fuck Russia” Alan snapped, and the pub went quiet. Workers in flat caps turned, and cast surreptitious glance over, ears straining to overhear more. Alan noticed, and belched sneeringly with a scorn that William quietly marvelled at. Jack laid a hand on his friend’s arm, and McGrath continued in the same slow, quiet tone.

“Perhaps, perhaps not. Whatever; the point being is that Marxism in any guise or form will never triumph in Western Europe now. We fought in Spain, and lost. Some of us went to fight under Britain’s flag in France, and lost. And now fascism is everywhere; worse, it’s this bloody Nazi nonsense about pure blood and racial superiority and all that bloody cobblers. Regular people, workers and petit bourgeois alike are just getting on with it. Carrying on, feeding their families. That’s just the sad truth. The fighting’s over for most people, and you won’t radicalise them to think otherwise. You’re trying to turn back the tide, like some bloody Ancient Greek hero trying to fight Poseidon. You might as well fight gravity. These buggers are in charge now, and forget flags; the international working class lost.”