Fear Naught
1924-1926:
Stanley Baldwin (Conservative)
1926-1926:
A. J. Cook (MFGB leading General Strike Committee)
1926-1928:
Admiral John Jellicoe (Emergency Administration)
1928-1934:
Oliver Locker-Lampson (Imperial Sentinels)
def 1928: (Coalition with Conservatives) Neville Chamberlain (Constitutionalist), William Joynson-Hicks (Conservative), Havelock Wilson (British Worker's League)
1930: Second Instrument of Government passed; Parliament officially dissolved
1934-1941:
Arthur Wellesley (Imperial Sentinels)
defeated in power struggle 1934: Oliver Locker-Lampson ("Hands Off Britain" Imperial Sentinels)
1941-1948:
William Joyce (Imperial Sentinels)
1942: Monarchy abolished; official foundation of British Imperial State
1948-1948: Oliver Locker-Lampson (Free Britain)
1948-1948:
de jure Arnold Leese (Imperial Sentinels), de facto collapsed authority
1948-
0000: Gen. Harry Crerar, Gen. William H. Simpson, & Gen. Iona Yakir (Allied Powers Administration)
The radio microphone crackled to life in the old man's hands. It worked, of course. The scarred bastard wanted all the recievers in perfect condition, and all the aerials fixed up properly, because even as Red bombs fell and Yank troops landed and children wasted away in the streets for want of bread, everyone in the land had to hear Their Master's Voice every evening on the dot, even if very few people still tuned in, now that you could get a cheap American wireless smuggled all the way from Dundee.
"People of Britain..." His raspy voice blared out, first falteringly, then proudly. "People of Britain--good people of Britain--I am speaking to you, tonight..." Some great blast--artillery?--roared in the background, and he had to pause, scrabbling with one hand for his note-cards as they fell off the shaking table.
"Good people of Britain, this is the voice of liberty speaking."
"My name--you may remember it--my name is Oliver Locker-Lampson. I was--I still am, by law--the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, a state which has been destroyed by a band of decievers who claimed they only wished to protect it. I am speaking to those citizens that are still loyal to Britain, to what it stands for and should always stand for."
Some banked fire rose to life in the old man's eyes as he spoke. His voice, and his grip on the microphone, became firmer.
"You have been decieved, every last one of you! Decived by an army of liars and cheats, who should never have been let into the government into the first place! The primary goal, indeed, the only goal, of the Sentinels was to clear out the Red menace, an alien element in Britain, that sought to undermine British strength at home and abroad through economic parasitism and sowing division. It was never to scatter spies into every corner of a man's life, to ghettoise the most civilised of our citizens out of incomprehensible fear, or to wage war on half the world! Now, the Communist threat is stronger than ever, with Trotsky's forces in Calais salivating at the chance to ravage our women and plunder our cities!"
"All of this could have been prevented. It was a choice, an incorrect one, to align ourselves with the Axial powers of Germany and Italy. In Britain, we had our own way of doing things--we were fighting with the same danger, but not in the same deadly form. Our antidotes to the Communist peril were not the deadly scourges used on the Continent, that slowly wither away the user by their excesses, but subtler tonics that invigorated what did not need to be cut away. The wholesale importation of these systems--just as alien to the British race as Communism--by opportunistic, foreign-controlled mountebanks, was never inevitable!"
A few short, sharp bursts of gunfire echoed through the corridors of the broadcasting station. The old man, however, had thoroughly regained his momentum by this point, and could hardly make them out over his own words.
"Look at where they have led us! Our King, forced to abdicate for offending the sensibilities of the second Cromwell who now sits in Whitehall! Our church, disestablished and forced out of public life for the crime of upstaging the holy State! Our people, starving, cold, haunted, orphaned, blasted by bombs, not only abandoned, told to die by a government with a head and heart of stone. What began as national reawakening has been peverted into national suicide. We may have been battered down, but we're still Englishmen, and I trust that we will not go quietly into the night that is being prepared for us--I for one, am not."
"As I speak, thousands of secret patriots are rising up, ready to take control of key positions and seize power. They have already struck a vital blow to the very heart of the beast itself. Join them! It was not the Master who won the great battles of the last decade, from crushing the agents of Moscow to winning the Greater Ulster campaign. It was you, the ordinary citizen of Britain! I leave it in your hands to decide--do you want to live under the bloody banner of the swastika, or under the Union Jack?"
By now, the outside world had faded from view for the old man. The peeling plaster opposite, the rusting mic grating against his hand, the hammering and yelling from outside the door--all of these were out of sight.
"We are--we remain--a nation that is strong! A nation that can carve out the rot within it!"
He was back there, at the Albert Hall. Blue banners, snapping in the breeze, waving over hundreds of cheering faces...
"Do we need some ex-American, dancing to the tune of a mad piper in Berlin, to rule over us? Will we Britons ever be slaves?"
The blueshirted legions, marching on below the stage, hailing him, ready to wipe out the Red threat, to crush Cook, to dispense with that fool Chamberlain, to make a Britain the heroes of the War could be proud of, a leader that understood the fighting Tommy, enabled to do away with the old men with their old lies and old slowness...
"Together, we can break the chains holding us to Hitler, and work
with the Americans to fight the
real enemy of civilisation. All I am asking is for you to follow me again!"
Behind the stage, captains of industry, leaders of politics, great men, all backing what was right, all willing to help that inner cadre of experienced men, himself, and so many others, standing besides him on that day, that glorious day, Blakeney and Churchill and Agent Knight and Admiral Hall and Baron Queenborough and...
"All you need is to--"
...and the Duke of Wellington. And Joyce, behind him, always behind him.
The microphone slipped from his hands.
There had been photos. He wasn't meant to see them. He suspected no-one was. Webster, that bizarre woman, had bribed a guard to take them, and sent them around to her friends, secretly, as trophies.
Look what we have done! This is it, our crowning glory!
It was in Donegal, perhaps, that camp. It could have been Scotland, with the mountains behind it, but it was probably Donegal, because the grass around it, in the photos, looked too lush. He remembered that--how wrong it seemed to have the fullness of nature outside the barbed wire, and inside it, watched over by grim-faced riflemen, these skeletal two-thirds-dead figures, each one with badges proclaiming them COMMUNIST, SABOTEUR, ALIEN...
There was a chimney, behind them, in one of the photos. The American wirelesses had said quite a few things about what the camps in Scotland used their chimneys for. The old man couldn't say if it was the same kind of chimney. It seemed likely, though. He couldn't be sure--he'd burned the photos already, out of--out of something--and the chimney wasn't quite the bit that had stuck with him.
What he remembered was the photo of the guard hut, sparsely appointed, with two portraits on the wall. Well, one portrait. It was a composite of two scenes. Joyce, and his own hand on Joyce's shoulder, gazing proudly down like a father at his son, at what they had both achieved.
The sounds of the corridor had gone from too loud to too quiet. The bangs were single, and regular, and accompanied by muffled noises.
Eventually, the old man found the microphone under the desk.
"People of Britain--Good people of Britain--if anyone, who is listening, deserves to be called that--"
"Good people of Britain--forget me. I never deserved your trust, and should never have recieved it. All of this is because of me, and the choices I made. Nothing of what comes next should involve me."
The old man's hand gripped white around the microphone. Footsteps approached, just at the edge of his hearing.
"The Lord permitted the salvation of Sodom if ten righteous men could be found, and I sincerely hope that they exist among you, and act now, to prove it. For them, at least, it is not too late."
The door scraped across the floor.
"For me, it is."
