Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (28 page)

“
Te quiero mucho, me querida
…” he breathed softly into her ear. He felt her smile play across the skin of his torso. His attempts at
Castellano
Spanish – having given up on Catalan after only a day or two – always amused her, whether he tried in vain to adopt the fast lilt and rolled ‘r’s of the
Española
tongue, or delivered the Castilian words in his own distinctive Edinburgh lilt, ‘tay kee YAIR OH moochoh?’

“I know, darling.”

They lay in silence, comforted by the other’s warmth. Despite it, William felt a coldness that had not yet gripped him with such raw fear, as tonight; seeing Big Duncan such a lacklustre specimen, broken by circumstance – when
Mary
still had spirit – had shaken him to the core. Not in any way that would jeopardise their mission, as-yet undefined though it was, but indiscernibly. Almost imperceptibly but in some real, definite way, like a sprained wrist the night before a football match; not enough to directly hamper the player, but a niggling setback and drain of focus and will nonetheless. It was tangible. Nothing Duncan could have said would deter any of them, but his pervasive hopelessness had made William consider the hopelessness of their own situation for the first time, and the ugly, barbaric reality of Britain for the coming 1941.

But still, he had to be strong, for her. He’d vowed – they all did – that no matter what, they’d look after each other, and they’d protect Mary from harm. She could never again experience the evil of men, unless she had a gun in her hand in even combat and only by her own volition. But then, the fascists came to England, they seized Britain, and he had been totally unable to protect her.

Like so many other proud men with families and loved ones.

“Mary… I translated a poem from Goethe earlier. Read it to the boys… thought it was fitting in our current predicament, with the Germans and all… and being written in warning by a great German himself…”

She winced a little at the ‘great German’ line, in the split second that it took her brain to correctly process and translate the sentence, but she gave no mention to it. Instead, she planted her luscious lips on the tight skin of his chest, staring up into his eyes with all the considerable warmth of her nature and visage.

He smiled down at her, before raising his eyes to the ceiling. The effort to maintain eye contact with Mary while reciting his own take on Goethe was too much for his competing senses; cognitive and visual alike.
Here goes
, he thought:

“With iron will; to our dismay,
By brazen fate, endowed with fame,
He’ll conquer worlds, and yet one day,
Be flung to hell from whence he came.
In that great anguish, he just may
Resist in vain, yet he will fail,
And they will perish in the fray,
All those who followed in his trail…”

He looked down to see that her beaming expression had turned wistful.

“I hope so, my darling,” she smiled. But there was a sadness in her that suggested her hopes were minimal. Her warmth was superficial; its reality was love and fear, affection and, William realised sadly, a concurrent deficit of hope. They had been dashed by life, and the menace of an unwritten future.

As well they might be, William thought, his heart breaking. This veteran of the
Mujeres Libres
, and then Female Secretariat in the POUM, and trench fighter until the ban – serving as a cook and a medic, just to be close, defying the ban whenever possible. Ideologically, the communists – he, Jack and Alan at any rate – had found they identified more with Anarchism than communism per se, having been swept up by the incredible buzz of arrival in Barcelona, 1936. And then they met Mary, of the
Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista
as the Castilian name had it… and her passion… her beauty, spirit and beliefs had bowled over Jack and William, after all the long hours and nights and weeks and months and years up in Jack’s bedroom of his family home, debating ideology and dissecting slogans and meanings, exasperating Jack’s mother and sister with their endless earnestness and obsessive recitals. In Catalonia, she won them over; William mused that all three of them fell in love with her that first week. This girl with fire in her brown eyes, flecked with green. Dazzling, radiant,
brilliant
.

“She’s amazing,” Alan had proclaimed loudly in a packed café bar on the Ramblas, drinking his fourth cupful of the sweet Andalusian spirit that was not yet banned. It was morning. Duncan had left to join the brigades in the Madrid defence, reminding them all as he left that they were communists. They stayed, wrapped up in the revolutionary fervour and camaraderie, and, slightly amazed, got drunk.

“I think I’m in love,” the Geordie added.

“For how long this time,” Jack enquired. “Piss off, Tyneside. Your affairs of the heart are as profound and long-lasting as a Charlie Chaplin film. Almost to the minute, in fact.”

“Latent anti-Semitism right there,” William butted in, pointing with his glass of Hierbas, the Ibiza liquor, which he spilled. “That does it. It’s you and I for Mary then, Alan. Two horse race. Jack’s knackered.”

Alan belched loudly. “What, she’s a Jew? No way. I thought this country had them all purged in…” he clicked his fingers impatiently, swaying. “…1666. Torquemada, and all that.”

Jack and William shared a look, suppressing grins.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Jack added wryly. “It got pretty hot for them.”

William raised his little tin cup. “A
toast
, to the victims of the Spanish Inquisition… all of Spain’s Jews who burned to death in England… in the Great Fire of London.”

Alan went to join in the toast with a spontaneous little cheer, before comprehension dawned on him.

“Oh
howay
you pair of bastards. Whatever bloody year it was, then. Too bad for your cockneys, Jack, though there’s not enough fires in London if you ask me.” He knocked his drink back, and called for a refill mid-conversation. “Anyway,
Mary
. She’s completely changed the way I think about Marx’s theories!”

“Aye,” William had agreed, stopping to hug a passing Italian militiaman with an eye-patch who was sharing their hotel with them. The man fobbed yet another Hierbas onto the Scot, and kissed his cheek, yelling ‘
No pasarán! Fascista maricones
!’ William yelled it back, roaring with laughter, and the little café took up the chant with gusto.

“These POUM fellows are great people!” William added, once the haiku died down.

Jack had weighed in, and the consequences would change all their lives for good. “Well, I was going to suggest we join the CNT… our communists are working for centralism and efficiency of state, and from what we can tell, anarchy definitely cares more about total liberty and equality. That’s more what we’ve been looking for! But it will never catch on in Britain – imagine it!”

They’d all agreed, laughing, a little sadly. And then Jack continued, fatefully, “But the POUM… that
is
Marxism and liberty… that
is equality
. Look at Mary!”

“I think I will!” Alan roared, slapping him on the back, and spilling the rest of his own newly acquired drink over a Spaniard militiaman behind him, whom he embraced fondly without missing a beat. The Spaniard replaced Alan’s drink, calling him
hermano
.

And they had stormed out into the thronging Barcelona streets to join the POUM. The headquarters was not far away, down the bottom of the Ramblas towards the Columbus monument, and there was no scarcity of drinks, songs and camaraderie in the POUM section to reinforce their confidence in the defection. Before long, they shipped out on a packed train, and found themselves sharing a trench with Mary and a battalion of mostly Catalans. A handful of other odds and sods from all over Europe made up the numbers, from Frenchies to Italians, even a few Jerries who’d similarly defected from the International Brigades and allied to the Catalan Marxists’ cause; wanted exiles who had fled Hitler’s Germany before being extended the legendary Gestapo hospitality at Prinz Albrecht-Strasse.

For them, even more so than the Italians and Spanish it seemed, the war in Spain was deeply personal and irreconcilable, with fervent Nazis on the other side, and the chance to fight the mortal enemy of their own country in a way that was impossible in Germany itself. Their fate was sealed, parallel with the foreign Republic they fought for. They would win, and live, or lose and die.

Good people.

“Babe,” William murmured in the present, his thoughts lingering in the arid climate of blood-drenched Spain. “Do you remember Willi? German Willi?”

If he expected a smile, or laugh of recognition and warmth, he was left disappointed. She wriggled a little in bed beside him, and her tone was flat.

“I remember him.”

And so she did. Young Wilhelm, they called him, or
Heini Villi
. He’d been older than they by several years, but had retained the boyish face of an unshaven child yet to sprout his first chin hairs. Willi was from Nuremberg, which nobody could quite believe; it being a heartland of National Socialism, after all, and they put him through lengthy mock interrogations as a Fifth Columnist. Once he’d stood with the Hitler salute for a rendition of
Deutschland Über Alles
, while they roundly booed him and threw pebbles from all sides of the trench.

Prone to wild mood swings, his cheerfulness and gentle nature suddenly gave way to bouts of brooding and anger, and in combat he fought as though driven by some bad memory of darkness past. Wilhelm died in the May Days, back in Barcelona. He’d been killed by a communist – it was safe to assume – who shot him from an upstairs window as he walked down one of the Ramblas side streets on which they’d all sang together; anarchist, Marxist and Stalinist alike, only seven months prior. No division then; comrades, brothers all. William had shed tears at the news, that terrible night, as they traversed the outer town to find shelter elsewhere, away from the bitter intrigues of the Ramblas and the ‘political’ quarters.

“We’ve been fucking betrayed,” Alan screamed, grabbing at the gun that had been taken from him by a white-faced William. Jack steered them down an alleyway, from doorway to doorway, until eventually they stole out to non-politically tainted territory and marched northwest, Alan’s vile muttered curses the only sound from a shell-shocked group.

Jack expended great energy dissuading Alan from tearing up their CPGB cards, which they knew could prove to be, quite literally, lifesaving. They reached a neutral hotel, miles from the Ramblas and booked a room, in which they stewed quietly, bile rising in their throats. Willi had twisted, wriggled, contorted on the cobblestones; choking out his last breaths in the dust. Mary, for the first time, just stayed quiet. She was numb with shock.

At least
, the Catalan thought now,
he never saw it coming. Wilhelm was lucky in a way – he missed 1939. Nor did he see the POUM members rounded up, shot or imprisoned. Nor the fascist tanks rolling through the streets. Nor the rapes, the tortures, the evil. Nor did he live to see the Nazis invading the very country to which they fled their nightmare
.

“He’s dead, William,” she whispered, sadly. “Another dead boy
en un sueño loco
…” and with that, her voice trailed off.

She kissed his chest again, fighting back tears and he held her, tightly, as though he’d never let her go.

That first day… a dream. It seemed like a lifetime, some kind of bizarre and distant hallucinatory dreamworld; like a shamanic peyote cactus trip experience that transcended them to some Quixotic, far-flung fantasy, in which everything good and true and honest and
just
that could possibly happen to humanity, every beautiful feeling and acceptance of solidarity and love,
did
happen. So distant, yet still there on their skin, on their hands and tongues and in their eyes and thoughts and dreams… nothing could possibly express how it felt; no words or storytelling could begin to encapsulate how special it was, excitement palpable, riding into the horizon of change and inventing history as they went along; how
invigorating
it was that there was no concept of class, or man-made constructs like money or status, neither barriers and divisions, nor race, how none of them were British or Jews or Italians or even Spaniards and Catalans, simply human beings all, and all equal…

There was no question of what it meant for all of us, William thought with deep pride and sorrow. It was the sense of destiny, of belonging; for the first time in
history
, The People had risen together and triumphed over the forces of tyranny; institutions of evil and suppression, the church, the state and all central authorities and ruling elites. Catalonia was the nuclei of some kind of elemental force that had triumphed over the worst instincts in humanity and kicked them screaming to the curb. A central authority still reigned in Madrid, holding the rest of Spain together in its democratic social paradigm – even with the rebels under Franco and Mola securing huge swathes of land across the peninsula – but it was liberal; it was accepting, even
supportive.
Catalonia’s own people broke free and reigned in true anarchy; the real meaning of ‘no man left behind’, not military jargon, but the real belief that human beings of that land could live in
egalitarian
peace
.

Such cathartic times… walking through Barcelona the first day, singing and dancing, shouting, chanting slogans, hugged and embraced by everyone. Strong smells of tobacco and marijuana smoke; unwashed bodies, energy, excitement, emotions at fever-pitch. Meeting Mary, hearing this beautiful Spanish girl – they didn’t know yet to distinguish – outpouring her passions and the triumph of solidarity which to them had only been a pipedream in their English pubs and bedrooms and walks through the park. To their surprise and delight, Alan, completely overcome and drunk, embracing them both with tears in his eyes, “this is how life is supposed to be!
This
is how life is supposed to be!”