Flash fiction: Cold

Everything is cold here 

“Dammit.”

“What?”

“This form. It wants her place of birth.”

He was a compact man of 30 with slicked-back hair and wore a white silk shirt bought, at some expense, in Jermyn Street; the stripes of his tie were a little bright.

A.Dombrowski/Creative Commons

“You could leave it for now,” said his wife, fingering her pearl necklace. 

She glanced at the window, admiring her reflection. There was a windy wet squall outside and a spray of rain hit the pane and glistened briefly in the light from the gas fire across the room. She turned towards it; Great-Aunt Lisa was hidden by her armchair, the back of which was towards her. But she could see the old lady’s hand on the armrest, the skin pale and mottled and papery with age.

“I can’t leave it. We must get the power of attorney and sort out the will,” he replied.

“Darling, that sounds awfully mercenary.” She mauled her pearls.

“It’s not mercenary,” he said. “Everything is ours really. We don’t want her leaving it all to that wretched Thai maid or something.”

She looked across at the maid, who was sitting on the footstool in front of Great-Aunt Lisa. She was reading aloud from the local paper; every now and then she looked at the old lady and smiled.

“I don’t think Maria’s Thai,” she said. “I think she’s a Filipina.”

“For God’s sake, it’s the same thing.” He leant back in his chair. “Where the hell was she born? Not Maria. Great-Aunt Lisa. I’m sure she told us once.”

“She said in the east somewhere, I think.”

“Oh God, somewhere turgid like Norwich or Ipswich or Harwich I suppose.”

“Harwich,” said Great-Aunt Lisa, quite suddenly.

“I am sorry?” asked Maria. She looked over the top of the paper.

“I’ll put Harwich then,” he said, after a moment.

Great-Aunt Lisa had been listening to Maria read an item on the toilets being refurbished in the Market Square. But now she looked from side to side and nodded slowly.

“Harwich,” she repeated. “It was Harwich.”

Maria put down the paper. “Would you like to go to bed now?” she asked.

“Yes. Yes, time for bed.” She smiled back, a little vaguely.

*

Later, Maria straightened the coverlet and made to turn out the bedside light. As she did so her phone chirruped.

“See who that is, dear,” said Great-Aunt Lisa. “Maybe it’s your mother.”

“I will call her later, in the night. The time difference…”

“Yes.” Great-Aunt Lisa looked back at her, suddenly focused. “Are you ever sad, dear? Are you angry?”

“Why, madam?”

“Leaving your family. On the other side of the world. Leaving your mother to care for someone else’s. Isn’t it sad?”

Maria felt her employer’s gaze. Every now and then she would be lucid like this and you could see what had been – sharp, kind, shrewd.

“Yes,” she said. “But it is what we do.”

Great-Aunt Lisa nodded.

“People are cold here, aren’t they,” she said. “Everything is cold.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Maria, surprised. She blinked once or twice and sat slowly down on the bed. Great-Aunt Lisa was looking past her, straight ahead.

“My parents. They were on the platform waving. I was nine. My little brother Willy, he was four. She held him up so he could wave. Bye, Liese, they were shouting out, good luck. It took hours and hours in the train and I was seasick and then I came to Harwich. Port of Arrival, it said on the card. Harwich. There were all these ladies on the quay and they gave us tea from a big beige urn and it tasted funny. And this horrid cardboard box. You had to carry that all the time. I never opened it though. It had my gas mask in it and it looked so evil. Like a horrible insect.”

She looked at Maria. “Do you see people again when you pass over? Are they waiting?”

“We think so in our church,” said Maria.

Great-Aunt Lisa closed her eyes. “I’ll sleep now,” she said.

Maria pulled the counterpane up so that it would cover the old lady’s shoulders. She picked up the empty glass and cup from the bedside stand and turned down the light. As she did so Great-Aunt Lisa murmured:

“I never saw them again, you see. Mutti and Vati and Willy. I thought they would follow. But it was the last train.”

“Oh,” said Maria. She waited a moment, but the old lady said nothing more; after a while she fell asleep, her breathing regular. Maria went down to the kitchen. From the living room came the sound of voices.

“We must make sure the will is correct,” he was saying. “After all, we are family.”

“Yes,” his wife replied. “Of course. How funny that she was born in Harwich.”

Maria looked through the kitchen window. Another brief gust scattered raindrops on the window. Yes, she thought, it is cold here.

Harwich Memorial: Safe Haven,

by Ian Wolter

More flash fiction from Mike

Remembered Time The past is a dangerous place

A Train Journey One's sister comes to visit

Time After Time When you have to warn the children

Fashion Wokeness and subversion. With style

A Time of Darkness It doesn't repeat. But it rhymes

Another Time A tear in the fabric

Evolution The world is turning

When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square

A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike is now also on Substack at https://mikerobbinswrites.substack.com/

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Politics on the Edge

Rory Stewart’s memoir Politics on the Edge has been a huge hit. Should you read it? What does it tell us about British politics? And what should we make of Stewart himself?

Rory Stewart is now 51. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he was a soldier (briefly), diplomat, and adventurer, and lectured at both Harvard and Yale. Then in 2010 he was elected as Tory MP for a large, beautiful rural seat, Penrith and the Borders. He looked forward to progressing to a ministerial role and eventually a Cabinet seat. 

But this was where things started to go wrong.

It’s all described in Politics on the Edge (Jonathan Cape, 2023), published in the US as How Not to be a Politician. In it, Stewart describes the horrible life of a backbench MP, the authoritarian party whipping, the mad way ministers are appointed, and the steamy horrors of the Brexit period – from which he emerged with honour, but with his political career in tatters.

The reviews for Politics on the Edge have been excellent. Writing in The Guardian, former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson compared it to “Orwell down the coal mine, Swift on religious excess. We should be grateful it was written.” In the US, Andrew Moravcsik in Foreign Affairs called it “the poignant tale of a genuinely decent human being …and …the revelation that the political hypocrisy and ignorance surrounding him will thwart his efforts.” The book quickly hit the No. 1 spot in the Sunday Times bestseller list; it’s now out in paperback and is still at No. 3 in Amazon UK’s non-fiction charts after eight months. 

It's helped that Stewart’s had a high profile since he left Parliament; The Rest is Politics, the politics podcast he co-presents with Alastair Campbell, has been very popular (and has been said, by Nick Duerden in The i,  to net him £70,000 a month). And Stewart is a frequent interviewee on TV, radio and the net; the more so since the book - in fact he has spread across the media like Japanese knotweed.

But the fact that critics think it a good book does not make it one. Is it?

The short answer is yes, absolutely; anyone who cares about the way Britain is run should read it. It is also well-written and engaging. But at times it did irritate, even anger, me. And it raises too many questions it doesn’t answer.

The honourable gentleman
At the start of the book, Stewart says he wanted to enter politics as a Conservative because he wanted to make a difference. (Everyone who’s been in politics says they wanted to ‘make a difference’.) He decides the best way to find a seat is to go and see the Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron. Told that Cameron will give him a short appointment, he flies back to Britain. He does meet Cameron, who is not encouraging. He finds a seat anyway, in the Border country. A few months later, he wins it in the 2010 General Election. It’s a safe Tory seat. But his enthusiasm for the Borders and the people seems very real, and he explores the constituency on foot, in winter.

Stewart’s introduction to Parliament, however, is jarring. It starts with the new intake being summoned to a meeting with the Chief Whip, who tells them they are lobby fodder and their job is to shut up and vote the way they are told. They might be called legislators, says the Chief Whip, but they shouldn’t regard debates as occasions for open discussion, and “are not intended to overly scrutinise legislation”. Although Stewart doesn’t say so, this is surely a contempt of Parliament. As the term progresses, Stewart feels increasingly tainted by the tawdry hypocrisies of life at Westminster; the craven text messages one sends to the PM to congratulate him on a speech, or to support a colleague who has been caught with their pants down. “We attended award ceremonies hosted by MPs who had been suspended for corruption; some continued to drink with MPs accused, and later convicted, of assault and rape.” He does like some of his fellow-MPs, but friendship is rare – and not without reason: “Too many of our private conversations seemed to get back to Number 10 and the whips.”

He is under pressure to vote for things he thinks are wrong. In particular, Cameron wants MPs to vote for initial legislation on Lords reform, something he doesn’t want himself but has promised his LibDem coalition partners. Stewart, deeply conservative with a small C, is against it. I think he was wrong about that. But he’s horribly right about something else – Afghanistan; Stewart knows the country and sees that the West’s nation-building efforts are deeply unwise, that you cannot tell a people what to be. This cuts no ice with Cameron. But Stewart will eventually be vindicated. He has since argued (in the influential American journal Foreign Affairs) that the West might have achieved more had it tried to do less. From my own experience (not in Afghanistan but elsewhere), I agree.

Border country: Stewart's constituency,
Penrith and the Borders

Stewart quickly realises that as a backbench MP he has no agency. But for a long time he isn’t offered a ministerial post, even a PPS, because Cameron does not like him. After the 2015 election, however, Cameron does give him a junior ministerial position at the Department of the Environment, working under Liz Truss. It is a frustrating experience. He finds it hard to get anything done. He also finds Truss asking him for a 25-year plan for the environment, insisting it be ready in a few days. He then finds she has quietly given the task to several other people as well. So they combine their drafts –which doesn’t please her. He finds Truss is interested in no-one’s view but her own, and has a brain that transmits, albeit erratically, but does not receive. Reading this, one is appalled that she ever held ministerial office at all, let alone the Premiership.

Later, under Theresa May, Stewart becomes the Minister of State at the Department for International Development (DfID) – eventually rising to Secretary of State for International Development and a Cabinet seat. This is appropriate, as unlike other MPs he has hands-on experience in development, in Afghanistan; but he finds the job frustrating and the civil servants obstructive. In between these two development posts he serves as Prisons Minister. Here he begins improvements to security and discipline and also renationalises the Probation Service, the privatisation of which was clearly a blunder. These steps are taken with support from his boss, Justice Minister and Lord Chancellor David Gauke. Stewart has praise for very few senior politicians but he does for Gauke (and for May herself, who he served loyally to the end). Still, Stewart finds ministerial office frustrating, and thinks the way ministers are moved around is arbitrary, frequent and not conducive to good government. I’m sure he’s right.

Posh boy makes good?
But there were moments in this book when Stewart did piss me off. Early on he goes to see Cameron and notes that the Tory leader is surrounded by floppy-haired old Etonians – but what the hell does he think he is? I can’t condemn Stewart for being born posh (besides, I went to the same school as him till age 13). But he can lack self-awareness. I also questioned his judgments about international development. This was my own field for many years. He has genuine experience of it from Afghanistan, but it is deep rather than broad and while I agree with some of his views, others seem sweeping. If, as he says, he had problems with his civil servants at DFiD, this may be why. (He also recently angered me with a slighting reference on his podcast to VSO, the British equivalent of the Peace Corps; I was a volunteer for five years.)

Moreover there is austerity – which Stewart, as a Tory MP, supported. I was struck by a recent New Yorker piece by Sam Knight (What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?, March 25 2024). “Between 2010 and 2018, funding for police forces in England fell by up to a quarter,” he says, “Officers stopped investigating burglaries. …Last fall, hundreds of school buildings had to be closed for emergency repairs, because the country’s school-construction budget had been cut by 46% between 2009 and 2022.” There is much more of this in the piece. No doubt Stewart, and other Tories from the time, would argue that the huge debts incurred in the 2008 bailout had given them little option. But this is also about who was made to pay the price. “Poorer communities [that vote Labour] …suffered disproportionately,” says Knight. “In Liverpool …spending, per head, fell more than in any other city in the country. Public-health spending in Blackpool, one of the poorest local authorities in England, was cut almost five times more, per person, than in the affluent county of Surrey, just south of London, whose eleven M.P.s are all Tories.”  In short, the rich brought down the system and the poor then picked up the bill. Stewart, and every other Tory MP of the time, was complicit in this. 

In fact it would be easy to dismiss Politics on the Edge as a self-justificatory memoir by yet another posh boy who somehow thinks he has succeeded on merit. (Russell Barnes in Civil Service World described it as “400-odd pages of how right Rory Stewart was at the time, and how history will prove him to be a visionary.”)

But that would be a pity, because this memoir really does lift the lid on Parliament and government. Other books have done this before (Caroline Lucas’s Honourable Friends; Roy Hattersley’s witty Who Goes Home; Martin Bell’s An Accidental MP; and many more). But for a vision of sheer dysfunction, few accounts beat this one. No-one can read this book and continue to believe that Britain is a fully functional democracy.

Moreover Stewart has earned a hearing. Unlike other posh boys (like Cameron), he didn’t swan out of Oxford into a job as a research assistant then progress smoothly into Parliament, rising without trace. He did a lot with his life before politics. His army service was brief, but he then spent some years as a diplomat, serving in Indonesia and later as British Representative in Montenegro. He also founded, and for three years ran, an NGO in Afghanistan, where he met his American wife, Shoshana. He has written a number of books, including The Prince of the Marshes (now relaunched as Occupational Hazards), in which he describes his stretch as deputy governor of an Iraqi province in the wake of the 2003 invasion. In 2000 he took leave from the Foreign Office to make an epic 18-month walk across Asia; The Places In Between (which is excellent) describes the Afghan section, but he has written little of the journey otherwise, and is sometimes said to have been a spy. This is a bit idle; of course he will have passed any useful information to the intelligence services – he was a serving diplomat. But it’s true he may have had much closer links with them; after all, his father Brian Stewart was a very senior spook. And in general, he’s less David Cameron, more Fitzroy Maclean – a man whose life and background were very like his own.

Stewart as a Foreign Office minister, at a conference on
endangered species in 2018 (Foreign and Commonwealth Office)

Beware the slithy Gove, my son
It’s also clear that Stewart cared about his ministerial briefs. But the Brexit-related chaos in 2016-2019 meant Ministers were shuffled around even more often than usual. Stewart held his junior ministerial posts for little more than a year at most, and his Cabinet post for less than three months. For some Ministers, every reshuffle will have been a career opportunity. But Stewart feels, rightly, that this was no way to run a country. You also sense his disgust at the tawdriness of some of his ‘colleagues’ (I wish Tories would not use that word). In particular, the duplicity of Michael Gove was breathtaking.

In the end, however, it’s Boris Johnson who emerges as the villain of this book. And Stewart confronts him. First he stands against him in the 2019 leadership contest; he was the only One Nation Tory to dare do so – and only because none of the others would, by his account. He doesn’t win, although he is probably the candidate best liked by voters as a whole. Then in September he is one of 21 Tory MPs, many of them former Cabinet ministers, who have the whip removed for voting against Johnson’s government on a Brexit-related motion. Some of the MPs later had the whip restored, but Stewart decides to resign from the Conservative Party altogether. He could contest his seat as an independent in the December election, but doesn’t; he may have felt he would not win, but in Politics on the Edge he says he didn’t want to campaign against people who once campaigned for him. If that was his reason, it was a decent one. Politics on the Edge ends there.

It has sold very well and must have earned Stewart a pretty penny. I can’t begrudge him that. Other senior Tories rolled over and played along with Boris Johnson although they knew perfectly well what sort of man he was. Stewart, at some personal cost, did not. Moreover he is an interesting man who has packed a lot into his 51 years. And Politics on the Edge is a good book – well-written, forthright, revealing and important. 

But there is something missing from the book: analysis. Stewart is an old-style conservative with a love of tradition and an innate distrust of too much change. This traditional style of British conservatism has deep roots, going right back to the French Revolution and the events that followed. It is not unreasonable. After all, since then radical utopians have likely killed at least as many people as conservatives. Yet change is needed. Britain’s government and parliament, as seen in Politics on the Edge, are sclerotic and in a way corrupt. And we’ve just had an election in which a party won one of the largest majorities in history with just 33.7% of the vote share – and that’s only of the votes cast; 40% of voters didn’t bother voting at all. This has been followed by serious civil disorder. If this had happened in some hapless African republic the Foreign Secretary would be wagging their finger at them and muttering about suspension from the Commonwealth. But we cannot see what is happening to us. 

Britain’s system is rotten and has run its course, at least in its present form. That is clear from the book; but at no point does Stewart really confront the implications or say how we should address it. I think he should have done. Politics on the Edge is one of the best political memoirs I have read and I strongly recommend it. But in that sense, at least, there is a void at its heart.

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Mike is now also on Substack at https://mikerobbinswrites.substack.com/

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.