Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (10 page)

“They fly so ’igh, they reach the sky, and like my dreams they fade and die! Fortune’s always ’iding! I’ve looked everywhere! I’m forever blowin’ bubbles, pre’y
babbools
, in the
air
!”

Laughing uproariously, the man beseeched a grimacing Simon to sup more of the gin, and with a brief parody of reluctance that he genuinely felt, the bemused writer tipped the rest of the foul-tasting alcohol down his throat, as the watching East Enders cheered him. Minutes of unpleasant stomach rumblings followed, until the class-conscious Savoy staff, to whom Simon was known, realised that he was fighting the urge to be sick, and despite his protests, they hurried to fetch him water, whiskey and ice – German bombs be damned.

Before resentment could fall on their haven, Simon extended some notes and bought a full bottle of Scotch, which he insisted be passed around the bunker. With a quick one-sip-pass procedure, morale soared. The Savoy waiters, less sullen than management over the earlier confrontation, followed up with silver trays carrying ornate pots of delicious, real tea for the East Enders who had commandeered the hotel bunker, drawing deep sighs of pleasure from those for whom only ersatz was available. Soon after, more platters arrived, this time laden with thickly buttered bread for the children. Brandishing money delicately, to ensure compliance from the staff but while avoiding ostentation in a somewhat more Marxist-friendly environ than he was accustomed, Simon replenished the whiskey supply and observed the happy interactions in the room.
Unity, sans division
, the writer thought.
These people are genuine, warm, and real. My brothers in this human family, no more or less than a chap at the Oxford & Cambridge Club, or any of the clubs on Pall Mall. This is humanity at its realest, not the kids upstairs flying planes to bomb people for the agendas of their political masters.

No religion or even politics down here, in this basement.
What would it take for whole communities, countries and creeds to feel this solidarity
?

Cannabis, the sensation that had reignited in America and helped bring hemp’s recreational usage back to prominence in a quiet, steady British counter-culture, had helped dispel much of the prejudice, entitlement and arrogance that had eluded the careful eye of Simon’s mother, undermining her care during the once-restlessly energetic yet gentle soul’s dedicated mothering of the studious boy. It took root in his thoughts and expectations. Bravado and projection replaced genuine yet understated confidence; much of that which had been endearing in him ceased to be seen, to his mother’s despondency. A bachelor of the arts, the blissfully apathetic raconteur left university, having renounced his faith and openly claiming to feel
no connection, either socially or intellectually
with the student life and further study. Personal failures and parental despair combined to sober the-21yr old frustrated essayist and tentative poet. Cannabis, ironically sought following the conclusion of his stimulant-filled student years, had finally levelled him out, and provided the introspection needed to dispel the lesser demons of his nature.
Reefer Madness
, such insanity – freely distributed for the mass-consumer audience of the west! Curiosity pushed the wealthy young man’s interest in the plant to an isolated purchase, and thence to regular use. Wracked by introspection, the young man struggled through several months of instability and self-doubt before readjusting his focus to chase goals. Once humorous,
Reefer Madness
no longer amused him, and he dedicated an entire afternoon to writing an ultimately unpublished critique of the film, that descended into an impassioned defence of the plant. He began to watch with keen interest, as the critically-panned debacle of sheer slapstick silliness successfully struck terror into the hearts of a large section of non-marijuana smoking people in the west. The dichotomy of his own understanding and perception only increased the profound sense of gratitude Simon felt for the directional change his life was going in. It had helped him escape from earlier attachments to the advantage of his upbringing, and destroyed the arrogance that, he realised with shock, had served to cloud years of his judgement. Thus, positive energy led to forward momentum; the mental readjustment silenced doubts, which in turn brought peace, and hope.

In the basement shelter of the Savoy, sat drinking whiskey with a ragtag mob of cheery cockneys, singing songs in the dingy cell of their enforced troglodytism –
hope
in humanity is exactly what the writer felt.

“Pretty bubbles in the air,” he burst out loudly into the general buzz of conversation, having refrained from prior participation. “They fly
so high
, they reach
the sky
…” and then warping the clear elocution of his cultured tone into a self-parodying East End London accent, “and like those
krauts
they’ll fade, and
die
, the
Führer’s
always ’iding… RAF looked everywhere…
We’re Forever Blowin’ Bubbles
, pretty bubbles, in the air!”

With delight, the laughing group took up the chorus from their basement mate, who mused that perhaps without the transcendental perspective changes that cannabis had brought him, he would not have experienced the connection of that moment with people that in all likelihood, he would not have deigned to converse with.

German bombs strafed the bricks and concrete of England’s primary proud, sprawling settlement, with terrible fire and light and noise burning demonically in the London night. Safe in the Savoy shelter, cocooned from the world’s malice, it was with a warm glow that the writer took his rest that night, moved as he was by goodwill and his sense of amity, shared in solidarity by circumstance with a group of people whom he had never met, and quite possibly, would never lay eyes on again.

The next day, upon leaving the Savoy and heading east, his naked eyes witnessed true carnage for the first time. Hope seemed obscene, and was dashed in his heart as the spiteful carnage that others had inflicted on the world as they lay insulated beneath the ground revealed itself to him with as bleak a visage as was imaginable.

It was that nightmare image of Guernica; the new face of war and indiscriminate suffering. England jolted out of its peace by the screaming ‘Jericho siren’ of bombs. Human warfare no longer required the personal application of violence; passionless murder meted out from afar, from the skies, undiscerning in its application of thoughtless evil. Whole streets turned to rubble; houses demolished, corpses stricken and inanimate with the pulsing life force extinguished… a shell of human habitat, and a shadow of life.

Dusty, grime-covered cockneys stared at Simon through hollow eyes, and at the hordes of curious West Enders who’d travelled to see Göring’s destruction of the capital.

Is this is what things have come to? Is this western civilisation?

“You seen this?” A Jewish East Ender shouted at him, covered in brick dust. Simon had been quietly asking the locals to share their feelings with him, as they all silently gazed upon the debris.

Dumbstruck, he nodded. The journalist felt any consolation offered would sound hollow to this man, whose grief was more palpable than those around him, his bloodshot eyes already carrying the haunted look of a survivor. The acrid stench of a chemical smoke and the hot dust of the ruined street hung heavy in the air; poisonous toxicity merged with destructive inferno, blackened and burned. Simon could taste its noxious bitterness in his dry mouth. The visual consequences equalled the olfactory assault; a settlement razed, yet ruined scientifically, with chemical malice. It assaulted every sense possessed by the body and mind with more awful power than he could have ever imagined.

The angry Jewish cockney lumbered over, his eyes red and wild.

“Well, you tell the world this,” the middle aged East Ender had snarled at him, his shaking finger pointed at Simon’s face. “That Mr ’itler can drop as many bombs as ’e bleedin’ well
likes
, the people of Britain won’t submit to a bunch of German
ponces
. Tell that fat bastard Göring what a
Jew
in London says to ’im. German
cunt
. Even if you come here yourselves, we aint done
by a long chalk
.”

Simon heard similar defiance from others that day. It had been heart-warming.

But the awful power of bombing raids was seared into his memory.

“My friend George fought in Spain,” he would later tell his mother, “… and he wrote in a
Time & Tide
piece; “
the horror we feel of these things has led to this conclusion: if someone drops a bomb on your mother, go and drop two bombs on
his
mother. The only apparent alternatives are to smash dwelling houses to powder, blow out human entrails and burn holes in children with lumps of thermite, or to be enslaved by people who are more ready to do these things than you are yourself; as yet no-one has suggested a practicable way out…” and now I know what he meant.” Shaking his head helplessly, the journalist struggled to add anything further, and as his mother tried to embrace him, the agitated writer turned and quickly left the room.

Remembering the awful day, Simon quickly recorded a cliffnotes version of the tale, and continued with his narrative.

Hitler correctly predicted though, by dropping the civilian raids and not causing further damage, the anger simmering elsewhere under the occupation was manageable. They focused on knocking Fighter Command out; it worked. Goebbels dropped his hysterics for once, to magnanimously conclude that the diplomatic moves towards peace following Germany’s incredible triumphs in all fields, and the refusal to follow orders of ‘the criminal government’ to sink the French fleet and use mustard gas on the landing German troops, showed England’s ‘civilised Aryan spirit.’

Göring, on the other hand, bragged nastily that even if the British army had been able to withdraw back to England, and the focus not shifted to the aerial dogfights, his Luftwaffe could have bombed Britain’s capital flat.

Recording that statement, Simon fervently hoped that he would live to see Göring fall. Even if Hitler lived to a ripe old age, dying as President-Chancellor, the writer had a sudden hunger to see Fat Hermann torn down from his pedestal and put face first into the dust.
Perhaps an opportunity will present itself to Heydrich
, he mused.

Clearing his head of anger, the scribe resumed his journal:

The people were divided. With the north of England still, so the rumours had it, embroiled in savage guerrilla fighting and the random chaos of sabotage, the southern section of Britain and London itself in German control was comparatively closeted from the madness of occupation which had prior been a purely continental concern. Rationing on certain foods had been upheld and enforced, but fruit had been scarce from the onset of the war anyway, and with the Reich’s carrot and stick policies, much of the male populace had sunk into a sort of resigned slump. Those veterans of the Great War and the filth of Flanders Field and the Somme, the men of Passchendaele and Ypres, could not comprehend the apparent quiet with which the rest of the men left in the cities apparently accepted their fate. These can always be spotted, still; the ones who thus far have avoided the surprisingly well-informed forced recruitment policies of the Germans to send able-bodied workers to the factories and Organisation Todt – well-recompensed, they assured the public –they’re conspicuous at a glance. To a man they carry the unmistakeable, haunted look of inconsolable misery and heavy-hearted widespread dejection felt since the first Germans in
feldgrau
landed on British soil.

Simon stopped. That was enough for today. He knew that the spirit remained, even
here
, deep in occupied territory; peace pacts and nominal sovereignty be damned. Even those not actively resisting, out with the rebels and hiding in shelters, made do with mocking remarks about ‘Jerry’ – actual pleasure of the foreign victory was rare; even a conflicted Oswald Moseley’s fascist interests had supposedly waned. British pride still lived. But with forced factory conscription, prisoners-of-war overseas and the awful uncertainty of the future, the jokes rang hollow; less the bleak cynicism of Britain, and closer in essence to the
gallows humour
of the condemned. No matter how reassuring the radio broadcasts were, fear remained. Even those with sons, husbands and brothers in factories, captivity or shallow graves soon came to be shaken from their apathy with a real and pronounced trepidation of what might happen to them too, and to Britain entire.

About to finish, the word ‘apathy’ triggered him, and he penned a conclusion in the hope that he could properly capture the zeitgeist of the moment, wryly noting even as he did so the German origin of ‘
der geist seiner zeit.
’ The pen scribbled assuredly; words flowing with rediscovered confidence.

All men, women and children can fall prey to war’s capricious, indiscriminate evil. The inimitable George Orwell – dear Eric, of course – penned a marvellous account of the war in Spain (non-fictional, unlike the American Hemingway), a tragic prelude to Europe’s wider suffering, and victory for the fascist forces of Franco. Sadly, I believe that to date, it has sold only several hundred copies, overshadowed as the Spanish conflict was by the growing menace of Franco’s foreign allies. But had this country bothered to pay attention to that epic clash, and read this book, the warning at its conclusion might have resonated; “… all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs…”

London, much like Leeds, Bristol, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Liverpool, Manchester, and just about every other city and town within four hours’ drive of the capital have certainly been jerked out of that slumber; explosions, gunfire, artillery; the ominous stuttering of distant guns drawing closer, all the nasty apparatus of war and destruction, and the panicked anguish of the dying as war’s hell finally reached them and shattered their gentle peace.