Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (54 page)

Jack tried to imagine how many people were sat enraptured by the wireless; perhaps with children on their laps. Was this what it had come to, he thought despairingly? Were our children now having the thoughtful, honeyed words of Josef Goebbels implanted into their impressionable minds? Were the British people – as he saw it, even a Scotland separated from the rest would still have the insidious fascist ideology seeping through the ranks of its children – were they to live in a society whose children grew to love the Party more than their family? Whose children owed loyalty to the state and the Gestapo, yet not the people who raised them to hope, dream and love?

As Mary re-entered the room, white-faced, Goebbels now delivered his finale; the speech had been uncharacteristically short for him, but he was too astute, too deviously cunning to have not catered to the British sensibility.

“The Jewish capitalist in the west – king of the banks, the media, the asphalt culture! – and the Jewish socialist in the East; it is the same creature, joining forces to destroy civilisations and bring European culture under its thumb. The German Reich, Italy, Spain, France and now England are united as one, able to purge the insidious enemy from within, and to tackle the external Bolshevik menace. We will not attack; but if, along the border in the General Government and East Prussia, if
Bolshevik formations appear massed across occupied Poland or the Baltic states, ready to invade Europe and spread their sickly, savage disease of communism with its evil ideologies and the horrific mass-slaughter of tens of millions of people that it has caused, by a secret police agency the NKVD led by Jews and controlled by Jews… if this provocation and threat on our Christian civilisation appears, together, the forces of western Europe can combine to preemptively strike this menace from the Earth, and prevent the Bolshevisation of Europe from the Judeo-Slavic swine!

In the merciless slaughter of Christians and Slavs alike, tens of millions dead, and the slaughter they spread across continental Europe before the defenders of justice triumphed;
Jewry once again reveals itself as the incarnation of evil, as the plastic demon of decay and the bearer of an international culture-destroying chaos. But together, our proud and free nations will stand together to prevent its evil sickness and its murderous footsoldiers from swarming like locusts across our lands.

We will triumph! The Aryan will triumph over the freemasonry of international world Jewry, and the British Empire of England, Scotland, Wales and whatever Irish states wish to be part of it, the Rome-Berlin axis and its allies will all triumph over the evil dangers we face, and if the Jew once more threatens our civilisation, we will rise up and let the storm break loose!

For King and country! For Britain! For Germany! For Christian civilisation and the triumph of our people –
Heil Hitler
!”

The radio crackled for a brief moment, and then promptly cut out, leaving a mesmerising static in his wake. Neither Alan, nor Jack, nor William and Mary shared looks this time, nor could they speak; none could find words to adequately express the quiet horror that had consumed them. A slow chill crept up William’s spine, as he fully comprehended the potentially devastating effect that the Goebbels speech had, and he looked at Mary, she whose Jewish blood ran cold in her veins. He expected an outpouring of fiery contempt from her at any moment, as they’d seen so many times in the trench fighting with fascists, or in the treacherous environ of Barcelona as the communists betrayed their POUM allies… but all she could do was stare dumbly back, and a single, silent tear trickled down a cheek drained of colour to the scarlet of lips set in fear.

Eventually, William spoke, and when he did, both the wide-eyed, shaken Alan and equally disquieted Jack’s memories were stirred unpleasantly with recognition as he paraphrased a familiar orator, his own voice trembling.

“You know what Goebbels has just done? He just committed psychological mass-murder.”

Part III

Paul had just left the grounds of St. Mary’s when he was seized. Hands grabbed around his torso, but before he could instinctively lash out he was spun around to face an all-too-familiar face.

“Bloody hell…” but his momentary irritation quickly subsided into amusement.

“Did I make you jump,” Naomi asked coquettishly. She leaned in to kiss him deeply, her hot, wet tongue burning in his mouth, and despite himself he felt his desire grow.

“Christ, Naomi…” he exclaimed, breaking free of her. “What are you doing here? Are you crazy? If anyone sees–”

“Then they’ll see a young lady kissing a young gentleman,” she snapped, fiercely. “Which there is still no law against.”

“Are you crazy?” He asked again, softly. Paul pulled her into a copse of trees, and embraced her fondly.

“Darling, this isn’t wise. It’s better we’re not seen together, remember? It’s bad enough the nosey old girl knows.”

The day before, as they made a particularly loud racket downstairs, a lady who owned one of the other converted flats had called round. Paul called her ‘Old Doris’, and on explaining who she was to Naomi, gave way to rare expressions of bitter obscenity and personal loathing. She had knocked, with a loud, maddening rhythmic pattern until he answered, and unbeknownst to him, Naomi had followed behind him, almost resigned to her fate. Her fears were unjustified; it was merely the old gossip of the block. But the old gossip spotted her.

The neighbour asked to be introduced, in a roundabout, impertinent manner. Paul had blocked his doorway, refusal implicit in his body language. Slipping three shillings into her hand, which caused her thick, vulgar eyebrows to shoot up and almost into her hairline, Paul told her that she had best forget she had seen anyone, and to have a good day.

Later that night, the old woman adopted a knowing, lofty air when the ladies knitting together came round to the topic of the handsome young teacher who lived opposite.

“I can’t say a word, it would be improper,” she said, haughtily. “But alas, my dears, I fear that even if you had seen many less moons, that the place in his heart is occupied by another anyway…”

In the copse of trees, that
other
leaned in to kiss Paul with a fierceness that surprised him.

As she broke free, holding an impossibly unwavering gaze at an uncomfortably close distance, he laughed uneasily.

“You are crazy.”

“I will be if I stay in that house any longer.”

“But it’s for your own good, you must understand,” he pleaded.

“Shut up and kiss me,” she snapped.

As they left the trees and walked towards the direction of his flat, two boys who were playing at the edge of a small wood that was wedged in an estate interregnum that hadn’t quite been fully knocked down yet, spotted them, and hid behind the trees to watch, not quite believing what they saw.

“Look, there’s
Miss
! It is her!” One of them said, a ten year old blond boy with fleshy, red cheeks and a lazy eye. His friend, a taller, bespectacled boy with freckles crowed too.

“She’s with Heggerty. I don’t believe it, ‘Eggy and Miss!”

“Miss Rosenberg and Eyeball Paul, I don’t believe it either!” the first boy shouted with laughter, touched with a small stab of jealousy, to his vague confusion.

“I thought she left because of illness…” the bespectacled boy said thoughtfully.

“She looks all right to me!”

“Yeah.”

Even Charlie was affected. A crippled malcontent, Charlie Lightfoot had left school at 15 just three months before old Neville declared
Peace In Our Time
, and he’d thought it was the start of a great new era; finally, an end to moping about the Great War and a brighter outlook, and a fresh start for a lad with an eye for a bargain and a salesman’s touch.

Alas, it had been neither, and with the feverish conscriptions following Hitler’s absorption of the rest of Czecho-Slovakia after gaining back the largely ethnic-German Sudetenland where – to general confusion in England – it was now understood that most of the Czech defences were located in the event of military action from the Reich, Charlie had among the first to head down to the recruitment office, certain that with the current predicament facing them the army would be sure to turn a blind eye to his blatant lies; that the gangly, hobbling cockney kid was Of Military Age. But unbeknownst to him, only a handful of divisions were set to be shipped across to France, and by the time Dunkirk was ongoing, it was too little too late.

“Look lad, I’m telling you for the last time. You’re unfit for active service in the forces!”

He’d nagged, then begged and pleaded, to no avail. Charlie had caused such a fuss that his friends from Whitechapel had left him there, embarrassed. Eventually the officer who had rejected his application lost his patience.

“Clear off! Pack it in or I’ll have you nicked, you ’orrible little prat!”

Thus, deemed “Unsuitable for Military Conscription into His Majesty’s British Armed Forces,” having failed to meet the physical requirements of soldiery with his leg, Charlie was aimless.

“You’d have been able to slip in with a Pals Battalion in the last war, boy,” his bedridden father told him, wheezing. “They let us in as mates. Course, most of us never made it back.”

It was their last conversation. Old Ted Lightfoot had died the next day.

Such battalions no longer existed; enthusiasm for them had understandably waned given that most had been decimated by war’s end, and, with no home left in any case, the unsuitable and now orphaned Charlie had slunk quietly out of the East End, mortified by the thought of being seen by the people he grew up around as a shirker or a deserter. He shuddered at the thought of a white feather. No guv’nor, he decided, not for all the tea in China.

Central London, however, had not been kind. Untold millions had moved there over the centuries to make their fortunes, or die, unloved, unwanted and unmourned, in the gutters and dirty streets. Only several kilometres to the west, Charlie had felt like he was in a different world, until the day his savings ran down to bare bones. The landlord had been sympathetic.

“Just one more week,” he’d begged. “I’ll sort this out.”

His landlord leaned close. The huge moustache had quivered across his snarling features, burst blood vessels burning red on his nose. “Clear off. You’re just another wrong’un, and we don’t need you round here bothering decent folk.”

So, that had been that. The onset of darkness and an icy rain had only accentuated the descent of a deep and profound despair that fell on Charlie with the sinking sensation that
this
was that very moment that so many of London’s down and outs had experienced; the beginning of the end. He headed north; in a fit of pique and recklessness, he’d decided to have a drink, and the Royal Oak had been a welcome haven from his troubles. A chance meeting with an old acquaintance that had migrated northwest to Camden to start a transport business led to some infrequent work; Charlie saw it as the divine intervention of a God he’d rejected on the death of his father. He had materials to sell. London was occupied, to all intents and purposes, but the dread policing and mass-arrests hadn’t come in with the force first feared, as far as most could tell; at any rate, few streets ran red with blood. It could be worse.

Today felt like a new start; Charlie almost even smiled himself as a little girl in a frilly dress came skipping past him, followed by her visibly wearied father. He, at least, bore the marks of the occupation heedless of something as intangible as the weather. That haunted look, that familiar look. Even sunlight could not pierce its caked layers of misery that ran deeper than skin.

Minutes passed, and the traffic of passers-by on the lively road slowly thinned. Charlie began to get impatient. He badly wanted a drink, but with strict priorities, the daily quota must be met before any thoughts of relaxation and beer be allowed to sabotage his efforts. The consequences, then as ever, were dire and occupied or otherwise, London was no place to be down. The cold cobbles and public indifference to the socially ostracised; the beggars, the down and outs, was the same in Berlin, Paris, New York. Once you leave society, acceptance – of self and from others – is difficult, and Charlie, like most others who occupied the place in the social hierarchy lower than underclass, had a heightened sensitivity to rejection.

More
waiting. Pigeons fluttered around the quiet street, their wings flapping, a slight rustle in the silence of the street. Clad in a threadbare topcoat that had belonged to his father and which was still, aged 18, too big for his frame, Charlie paced from side to side with growing irritation, allowing himself no more than a few metres from his clumsily erected stall. Should’ve stayed in the East End, he thought. They’d have at least respected me for ducking and diving, trying to make a bob.

Somewhere, internally, a small voice suggested that he find a way of making himself useful to the Germans, and he quickly silenced it, cursed it, buried it; pacing faster. He’d never sell out. Too many had done that; many the same scavengers who’d made profit from the pre-invasion panic. They were viewed with contempt, though rarely expressed openly. And they were many; men on street corners, accepting the odd muttered curse word as they tried to sell the English language copies of
Der Stürmer
and the
Völkischer Beobachter
; Streicher’s outrageous anti-Semitic pornography and Goebbels’ effortless switches between hysterical diatribes and honeyed seduction. Bobbies patrolling with Jerries in uniform.
Birds chatting Jerry soldiers up for cigarettes, walking arm in arm. Panting, gasping, sweating under them at night. Fucking disgusting. I’d be no different; a skivvy boy and a traitor. Fuck that for a laugh
.