Flash fiction: A Time of Darkness

It doesn’t repeat. But it rhymes

I hadn’t thought about that day for a while. But I’d never forgotten it, or what he’d said. I knew so little of him, then in a few sentences he told me everything – and just for a moment he showed affection, something he never did.

I told Mom about it and what he’d said, not then but a month or so later, when he’d left us, as we all knew he would.

“That’s quite something for your father,” she said. She emptied an ashtray and a little ash landed on her black mourning dress; she flicked it away. “Put those paper plates in the trash, please, honey. How did folks make such a mess in here, you’d think they’d be tidy after a funeral.” She picked up an empty Schlitz can. “Jesus, how many of these did your damn cousins drink?”

“Mom, we’re German,” I said. “Sausage and beer. It’s how you get through a Lutheran funeral.”

She chuckled. Then she frowned. “He never showed emotion.”

“Never?”

“Never.” She looked out the window at the tall trees and the darkening sky. “They had no tears left, you see. They shed them all early.” She turned towards me. “What did he tell you?”

“About Vinnitsa,” I said.

“Oh,” she replied.

*

So anyway.

It’s 43 years later and I ain’t 17 anymore; I’m 60 with grey hair, love handles and sagging tits, and I’m sitting in the same spot on the back deck of our house amid the wreckage of my life.

I’m a medical billing specialist. Well, that’s what I was this morning, anyway. I drove down to the office at Main and 14th like I always do – well, did – and parked on the empty lot next door, and went up to my desk on the third floor. It’s by the window. It’s the envy of the others, who work in cubicles and get no natural daylight, just the fierce glare of the striplights. “You got a great view here,” someone said once and I guess I did, right out over the carwash, Luigi’s Pizza on one side of it and the sleazy fried chicken joint on the other. Luigi’s is OK. I get takeout from it now and then. I’ve got to know the guy who owns it. “You Luigi?” I asked him once. “Nah, the name’s Vladimir,” he said. “Vlad’s Pizza ain’t got the same ring though.” I’ll give him that. The pizza was good though and they had loads of guys working in back. The chicken joint was busy too but I never went in there. “What do you get with your chicken wings in there?” I asked someone. “Salmonella,” he said. I passed. But now and then I used the carwash. Not the automatic rollers. I’d leave the car with them and three or four small, nuggety men with dark skins and high-pressure jets would fall upon it and clean it within an inch of its life and vacuum the inside and get rid of the dust and candy wrappers and empty Cheetos packets that I’m too big a slob to remove.

U.S. Customs and
Immigration Enforcement

Well, this morning I sat down at my workstation and switched on my PC and checked my phone and my email for messages. Nothing from my Ashley. I was hoping she’d come by soon, haven’t seen her for a month or two, but she’s kind of busy, she’s a single mom like I was and the father’s a useless P.O.S. just like her own was before him. I texted her. And I texted Maria. She hasn’t shown up now for two weeks and the house is a mess. I don’t know where she is.

Then I started processing a claim. Appendectomy. We have a list of cost codes and it’s just been updated. I open up on screen and start adding everything up. A day and a night in hospital, and it comes to $7,776. I gulp and go back through the figures and then I pick up the phone to my boss.

“Bob, I got an appendectomy and the wound dressings come to seven hundred bucks,” I say. “Are we kidding them?”

“Gimme the CPT code.”

I do.

“Nope,” he says. “We’re not kidding. Charge it up.”

“Is that OK? Who’s gonna pay?”

“Relax. His health plan will pay,” he says.

“Someone pays in the end,” I say.

“Yeah, I know that, you know that, all God’s chillun know that. How long you worked here, Greta?”

Too damn long, I think. I hang up. I look out the window and the sun is quite high already. I work on through the billings, checking the CPT codes, changing some here and there to lower the bills a little. Now and then I check my phone. No Maria. No Ashley. The buildings I can see through the window are a series of concrete cubes and neon signs, baking under a pale blue sky. I long for my back deck and my garden and an ice-cold beer.

I’m still looking out the window and daydreaming when a bunch of black cars pull up. Big ones, Ford F150s and Ford Explorers and a Suburban, all with tinted windows. They screech to a stop outside the car wash and Luigi’s Pizza and the Salmonella House and these guys in flak jackets and combat pants leap out and they’re armed and they’ve all got ski masks covering their faces. Jeez, they must be hot in this heat is my first thought, and then I see the letters ICE on their jackets and realise what they’re doing.

“F**k,” I yell out. Everyone looks round. Bob and several others are standing by my desk looking down at the street. “Go get ‘em, guys! Go! Go!” Bob yells. “Send ‘em to f**kin’ Salvador.”

They’re through the doors of all three places now and folks are streaming out and running, it’s like someone kicked an anthill. I see two ICE guys jump on a middle-aged woman and bring her down on the road and one’s got his knee on her back. There’s a short, thickset young man in a T-shirt and a reversed baseball cap and I see he’s the one who serves me pizza sometimes and now and then he gives me a wink and sticks on some extra topping. They’ve got him against the wall of Luigi’s. An older guy is marched to one of the SUVs, hands pinned behind his back, and kind of thrown in through the rear doors. Bob’s whooping like a lunatic. His secretary’s got her fists clenched and is punching the air and yelling Yeah! Yeah! like she was having a f**king orgasm. “You sick f**ks,” I yell but they don’t hear me. Then one of the guys from the carwash runs this way and I see him darting through the street door and the ICE men see him too late but they give chase, and two minutes later the door of the office bursts open and he’s standing there panting, looking around with his face set in a sort of rictus of horror and I remember father’s phrase from long ago, hunted – hunted and haunted, eyes blind with terror. Bob pushes past him to the door and yells down the stairwell He’s in here, come’n git him and he’s grinning and two of us shut the door and turn the catch, but the ICE agents are hammering on the other side and yelling Open up! United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement! We are a federal law enforcement agency! and the door bursts open and they grab him and drag him away. And I sink down into my seat.

“Bob,” I say, “you are a f**king creepazoid.”

*

It wasn’t going to end well, was it.

The HR lady sits me down in her office. “I gotta ask you, Ms Hauer. You called your supervisor, Mr Burdon, a – “ she mouths the profanity – “creepazoid?”

“I guess it was a bit mean to creeps, eh?” I say. She blanches a little. She’s very young, I reckon mid-20s, perfect makeup, a well-cut suit and just the right amount of jewellery, and I’m 60 with saggy boobs and sitting there in a tee shirt with my purse on my lap and I’ve just realised my stash tin’s poking out of it.

“Mr Burdon says there’s been long-standing performance issues,” she goes on.

“That’s because I won’t cover up for his crappy record keeping,” I say. “Or the way he tries to touch female staff. He has a thing for Latina girls, you know that? Trust me, he’s a major-league creep. You should get a life. How much did you pay for that suit?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“When I was your age, I’d flunked out of college, got knocked up at a party and had two DUIs already,” I say.

She frowns. “DUIs. I can’t see any traffic violations those on your file.”

“Oh God,” I say, and then I lose it. I tell he to go f**k herself, then do it again but sideways, then do it on the kitchen table. She blanches a bit more and tells me my health insurance will end at midnight. She takes my ID and has security see me out the building.

*

So it’s the end of the afternoon. I’m sitting on the back deck, about where I was that warm afternoon 43 years ago. I’m looking at the garden, it’s grown over with long grasses, not as he’d have had it – my God, every flower, every twig knew its place; I swear he made them parade in the morning. But I like it more like this. I saw a possum last night and there’s a family of raccoons too, and I hear their skirring in the mornings.

Nothing from Maria. But we can guess why now, can’t we.

Nothing from Ashley.

I roll a joint. It’s a big one. It’s a very big one. I’m gonna get as baked as a damn brownie.

I’m just about to light it when the deck creaks and I look around and there she is, in her denim shorts and a bikini top with her tattoos and her piercings and her bare feet and her dirty-blonde hair tousled like she just got out of bed and I wouldn’t be surprised if she just was in bed, though who knows who with. Ashley doesn’t tell me everything.

“Seriously, Mom?”

“What?”

“That’s not a freakin’ spliff, it’s a California redwood.”

“I’m celebrating. I just got terminated.”

“Oh, Mom. What did you do this time?”

“ICE raided the pizza joint and the carwash and Burdon was dancing around with glee and I called him a f**king creepazoid and he is because he’s a nasty little MAGA piece of s**t and…” I become aware that I’m crying, and I take out my handkerchief and wipe my face and blow my nose and it’s full of tears and snot. “What are you doing here anyway?” I say. “I’ve been texting you for days. Where’s Carla?”

“Guess I sensed trouble,” she says. “I got this little switch in my brain that tells me. Momma’s f**ked up again, it says. So I thought I’d come by. I got Carla a sleepover with her friend Ellie. She’s fine.”

“Well now you’re here, you can go to the fridge and get me a f**kin’ beer,” I say.

She nods, but hesitates, just for a moment, and looks at me, and her hand seems to be reaching out towards me. Then she turns and goes into the kitchen and comes back with two ice-cold bottles of beer and we crack them open and we sit there and for a few minutes we say nothing, passing the spliff back and forward.

“I did a great job with you,” I say after a while. “I raised a slutty stoner, just like myself.”

She grins. “Nah, it’s in the genes.”

“It isn’t. You never met your Prussian grandfather.”

“Grandma said he was kind of cold. Not unkind. But not much small talk.”

“He never showed much affection,” I say. “Except – there was this one time. When I was 17. A month before he died.” I get up and walk two yards or so into the garden and turn back and look at her. “I came in about this time, six maybe? – before dinner. And he’s sitting in a folding chair, right about here.”

*

This is what I told Ashley then.  About Dad. And what he told me that afternoon, in the garden, when I was 17 and had acne.

I’d been hanging out with the gang at the mall and when I came in, Mom was busy in the kitchen and I asked to help but she said, “It’s OK, honey. Go sit with your father in the garden. He likes it when you do that.”

“Does he?”

“Yes,” she said.

It was a warm day but he was wrapped in a blanket; he was near the end and very thin, and his cheekbones stuck out and his nose was like a beak and of course he’d lost most of his hair because you do, though there were a few wisps left below the crown. I sat on the edge of the deck, waving my legs to and fro.

“Where you been?” he asked. He had this gravelly voice and his accent was still strong, after 30 years in America.

“At the mall,” I said.

“What do you do at the mall? Never do I understand,” he said.

“Hang out. With friends.”

He grunted. I figured Dad wasn’t really that interested in what I did at the mall. Then I coughed, several times, loudly. “Sorry, Dad,” I said. “It’s one of those summer colds. I guess I mustn’t give it to you.”

He smiled slightly. “I do not think it makes much difference now.”

I winced. He seemed to see that he had hurt me in some way and cast around for something to say. “I nearly coughed myself to death once,” he said. “And my lungs filled up with fluid. I had pneumonia. I survived.”

“When was that?”

He frowned and I thought for a moment that he wouldn’t answer, then he said:

“The first winter after the war.  The English kept us in open-air cages. In Belgium.”

He’d never talked about the past. Somehow I’d known not to ask.

He didn’t seem like he’d say any more, so I asked him: “Were you a prisoner of war, Dad? How long did they keep you?”

“They kept me a while,” he said. “They didn’t believe my story, you see. I was a Gefreiter, a corporal, when they captured me. I was near Lübeck when the English took it. I got very sick in the cage and they moved me to a hospital. An English officer saw me there and said, he’s no corporal. He had recognised me. ‘I saw him in Heidelberg before the war,’ he said. ‘He was a student there. I am sure he is an officer. He has put on a corporal’s uniform to disguise what he has done.’ So they classified me as a C, a Nazi. And put me in a camp in the far north of Scotland. With all the Nazis.”

“Sounds like you had a blast,” I said.

I saw the ghost of a smile again.

“I got them to check my story. They transferred me to a better camp and I was even allowed out to work. Then they released me in 1947. I went back to Germany. But our home was in the East. And even in the West there was only rubble.”

“Why were you a corporal, Dad? Our family was kinda upscale, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, we had a small estate in Pomerania. Everything was lost when Germany collapsed.” He looked at me directly then, and I flinched a little, as I always did when he did that, right to the end. “I was not always a corporal. I was a lieutenant. An Oberleutnant. But I was – zum einfachen Soldaten degradiert… How do American soldiers put it?” He frowned. “Busted. Down to corporal.”

He stopped again, but I knew there was something that I needed to understand. I looked at him; he was trying to draw the blanket closer around him but his hand was thin and weak, and I did what I never did and touched him, pulling the blanket around his shoulders. I sat back on the deck.

“What happened, Dad?”

“I refused an order.” He looked at me again, and there was that faint smile. “A German does not refuse an order.”

“What was the order?”

“I should tell you, shouldn’t I.” For a moment he seemed almost to be talking to himself. “I should tell you. You must know of these things.” He seemed to be fighting for breath, then he said:

“It was near Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. We caught a family of Gypsies in the woods. My comrades decided they would have some sport, and got some horses from a village they’d burned. Then they released the family in the woods and told them to run and if they escaped they could go free. And they hunted them on horseback.”

I must have looked appalled. He looked at my face and continued.

“They got the children and shot them in the woods. The mother they captured and made to dance without her clothes, then they killed her. I wouldn’t join the hunt. So when they caught the father and brought him back to our quarters, the Major told me to kill him. I refused.”

I guess I was sort of stunned. I said nothing. After a minute he said:

“I saw his eyes. Hunted – hunted and haunted, eyes blind with terror.”

We sat in silence for several minutes. The sunlight retreated behind the tall trees and I could see him shiver slightly. Then I said:

“And they busted you, Dad?”

“Yes, they busted me. They didn’t say ‘demoted for not murdering’, of course. It was said I had shown weakness in the face of the enemy.”

He seemed exhausted and I sensed he didn’t want to say anything more. Then he said:

“Go and help your mother with the dinner.”

I stood up, and started toward the kitchen, then I heard him say: “Come here.” I did, and he pulled me gently towards him and he kissed me on the cheek. He never had before. He never did again. I drew back and saw his eyes were glistening a little.

“How could they do these things, Dad?” I asked him.

“You can’t understand,” he said. “Not now. It was a time of darkness.”

*

We’re sitting on the deck still. It’s getting dark. We’ve finished the joint and Ashley has her arm around my shoulders.

The Gypsy Girl Mosaic of Zeugma

Gazientep Museum of Archaeology

More flash fiction from Mike:

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?

Parallel Worlds Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala

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

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: A History Lesson

Why do we study it? 

It was the last lesson of the day. Mr Balcombe donned his mortarboard and his gown. White chalk powder adorned the latter. This was from the Latin class after Assembly; he had flung the blackboard wiper at Brockley Minor, an especially dense member of the Remove who failed to conjugate the verb manere. The missile had missed, hitting the rear wall of the classroom with a dull thud and releasing a white cloud that caught the morning sunshine that streamed in through the high sash window. “Since you cannot conjugate manere, you will, er, remain in detention after supper this evening,” said Mr Balcombe, delighted with his own wit.

Perhaps he’d been a little hard on Brockley; after all, the boy was a useful fly-half. He sighed, and entered the classroom where Mr Lawless was teaching the fifth form History. Mr Lawless had joined the school at the beginning of the term. He was a slim, rather quiet man in his 30s who said little in the staff room although he was always polite. But Mr Balcombe had noticed that when he supervised a table at suppertime, the conversation was a little louder, a little brighter, and sometimes the boys were laughing.

He also had the overpowering sensation that he had met him, at least briefly, years before.

“I understand, Balcombe, that his lessons are a little – er, unorthodox,” the Headmaster had said before lunch. “Sir Rodney Bush and one or two others have enquired. It seems their boys have mentioned them.”

“The lessons worried the boys in some way?” asked Mr Balcombe. He sipped his sherry.

“Well, no,” said the Headmaster. “They said they enjoyed them. So you might sit in on a lesson or two and check he is teaching properly.”

If Mr Lawless thought this unusual, he gave no sign of it. Mr Balcombe seated himself by the window and watched his colleague write on the blackboard, then turn to the class. On the board he had chalked:

EMERGENCE

And in a smaller hand:

Of what? When? Why? What happened? Then:

DID WE KNOW?

“Last week I asked you to consider these, with reference to a change, or incident, of your choice,” said Mr Lawless. “You have written essays. Bush. Tell us of an age and its emergence.”

“I thought of the Black Death, sir,” said Bush.

“Very good. The emergence of – what? A disease yes, but of what new phase or age?”

“Men asked more for their labour, sir,” said Bush. “So farming changed.”

“It did. The Acts of Enclosure, the arrival of sheep – what is emerging, Bush?” 

“A prosperous new world, sir.”

“Indeed. For some. But as the plague raged, none knew of that; only of the terror they felt. So. Thorpe. Your essay. Most original. Tell the class what emerged.”

“The age of steam, sir. Newcomen’s engine.”

“Yes. But did we know what was happening?”

“A few Cornish miners may have done, sir.”

“Exactly. The rest did not know,” said Lawless. He was walking back and forth before the class, stroking his chin. “That was in the 1690s. Two hundred years later, we cannot imagine life without the train. The cotton mill. And now the Dreadnought.” He looked around the class. “Now, someone – Bush, I think – asked me earlier this term why we study history.” He looked at a spotty youth at the back of the class. “Grimbly, tell me why we study history.”

“So that we can spot it happening, sir?”

“Precisely,” said Mr Lawless. “Tell me, everyone; is an age emerging today? Now? In this year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twelve? And how shall we know?”

No-one answered, for there was a hullabaloo from an adjoining classroom; and then a noise appeared from outside, a clawing, ripping sound, and doors banged as boys poured through the corridors and out onto the terrace that led to the playing fields. All turned their heads upwards, eyes shielded against the late afternoon sun; the noise grew louder and a shadow crossed the First Form cricket pitch and there it was, an assemblage of sticks and wires and stretched doped linen, a trail of black smoke behind it, drawn across the sky by two spinning discs that caught the sun. It drifted past them, perhaps a hundred feet above, the ripping, tearing sound assaulting one’s eardrums, the boys cheering and tossing their caps in the air.

“Well I’ll be damned!” Mr Lawless chuckled. “I do believe it’s the Daily Mail aeroplane!”

“It must be,” said Mr Balcombe. “I did hear it might come this way; how splendid! I suppose that’s that Grahame-White chappie conducting it.” The latter’s hunched figure was just visible as the aeroplane passed over the Headmaster’s house and proceeded in the direction of Great Billingham. In the quad a horse neighed and whinnied between the shafts of the Chaplain’s dogcart and Cook craned her neck at the sky saying “Well I never! Well I never!” over and over again, twisting her apron between her hands.

When the aeroplane was out of sight the two men rounded up their charges and chivvied them back to the classroom. As they followed the last stragglers across the terrace, Mr Balcombe said: “I did say I was sure I had met you before you joined us and now I fancy I know when. Were you ever in the Cape Colony?”

The other frowned. “Yes. That was some years ago.”

“Indeed. During the South African War. Were you serving there? I met you, I think, on a visit to the Second Hampshires.”

“Yes, I served with them. I remember you now you mention it. We left for the Transvaal about then.”

“How was the Transvaal?”

“We were engaged in farm clearances,” said Mr Lawless. He was silent for a moment, then said: “I resigned my commission not long afterwards.”

“Oh.”

As they reached the door Mr Lawless paused for a moment, then turned and looked at the sky. “I wonder, Balcombe. What has just emerged… and what new beastliness will we commit with the machine we have seen today?”

More flash fiction from Mike:

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

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

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: Rhodri’s Maps

They hanged the man and flogged the woman

who stole the goose from off the common
But let the bigger thief go loose
who stole the common from the goose.
(Anonymous, 17th century)

“Who is presenting today?”

“Rhodri Hactonby. He’s in his final year.”

“Ah, you mean Lord Hactonby.” Dr Coster chuckled. “I wonder what the connection is with Hactonby. It’s in Lincolnshire, isn’t it? Perhaps his father owns it.”

“Perhaps he does,” said Dean. “It’s a courtesy title. Rhodri is the second son of the Duke of Guntersford. As a matter of fact he was at Eton with me, though two years behind. He did rather well there. A useful batsman. And he made it into Pop – that was after my time, but I hear he had a rather splendid waistcoat made.”

“I’m afraid I know little of such matters,” said Dr Coster. “I’m just a humble Wykehamist.”

“Actually I can’t say I liked Hactonby much even then.”

“Oh,” said Coster. “By the way, I take it you circulated his presentation to the group?”

“I did.” Dean was a postgraduate and assisted Dr Coster with the Historiography course. He was likeable, if quiet; lately he had been quieter. Dr Coster noticed that he was staring into the middle distance, where a slim figure in jeans and a T-shirt was walking ahead of them towards the School of History.

“Ah. Miss Jade Smith,” he said. “Our token pleb.”

“I like her,” said Dean.

Coster looked at him. “She’s a little hard to like sometimes,” he said. Dean made no reply.

They seated themselves in the lecture room, Coster on the dais from which he would chair the seminar. Dean sat with the 15 or 16 students, next to Jade; the chair beside her had remained vacant until they came in. She was a slight figure, five foot nothing with a gaunt face and a full mouth. her eyes were dark and her skin scarred by acne.

Hactonby was presenting. He was tall with a floppy mane of blond hair; his face was pale and rather fleshy. He moved himself across the room with restless energy, waving his hands about and pointing now and then at the screen. His first slide read:  

UNCOVERING PROGRESS

THE MAPS OF GUNTERSFORD PARVA 

His next slide showed a patchwork quilt of a village, with long fingers of land divided into narrow ribbons.

“This is the parish around 1350, at the time of the Black Death,” he said. “This map is obviously not contemporaneous. It was put together by the late Professor Blanchflower from parish records and from the archaeological project that he conducted in this and a number of Midland parishes in the 1970s. It is splendid work and I commend it to you. We may observe” – he waved his hand at the image – “the land was farmed on the strip system; a peasant subsistence economy. But two hundred years later” – he clicked the remote control – “things are very different. This is the parish after an Act of Enclosure. The strip system is gone and we see larger, more efficient units, given to sheep production…. In the wake of the Black Death, a labour shortage had caused the peasants to pressure landowners for improved conditions. Their response was to enclose the land and institute less labour-intensive, more productive agriculture.”

Dean thought he heard Jade whisper something. It sounded like “Stole the common from the goose”. He glanced at her. As he did so she raised her hand.

“Yes, Jade?” said Hactonby. He looked a little put out.

“Where did the people go?” she asked.

“The people?”

“The ones who wanted better conditions.”

“Well, I imagine they went to the growing towns of Elizabethan England,” said Hactonby. He frowned. “Rural-urban migration must have eased the pressure on the countryside.”

“I wonder if it did,” said Jade. Her accent was from the West Midlands, and jarred a little in the room. “You may have read A.L. Rowse. In his The England of Elizabeth he notes that in rural parishes in the 16th century, there was a surplus of births over deaths. In urban ones there was a surplus of deaths over births. So migrating doesn’t seem to have worked out very well for them, does it?”

“Well,” said Hactonby. “One must look at the bigger picture. A country must progress.” He clicked to the next slide. “Here we see the parish in 1800, as sketched out by the Rector of Guntersford Parva, Elias Winterbottom.” He turned to the room. “A most estimable gentleman who did much for the poor of the parish. His journals are in my family’s archives.” He indicated the map. “As you will see, there is now a mill and some housing.” He clicked again. “The year 1920. The same approximate area though it is now part of the urban Borough of Guntersford. The mill buildings have been replaced by the factory complex of Grimly and Straight, boilermakers and later transmission manufacturers…” He turned to Jade. “I understand my family leased the land to the firm, and invested in its plant. One fancies that the descendants of those peasants then found productive work forging the pistons and spars for Spitfires and Hurricanes.”

“Jolly good for them,” said Jade.

Hactonby displayed the next slide. “And here is the parish in the year of our Lord 2024. I have cheated; this is from Google Maps.” The room tittered. “The manufacturing plant complex is long gone. The buildings you see now are, as far as I can establish, a call centre and an Amazon fulfilment centre.” He steepled his hands in a gesture that Dean thought theatrical, and continued:

“In maps we see the progress of a country. A subsistence economy that produces little surplus value. When it ceases to be economic, it is replaced by a form of agriculture that does. Its labour requirements are less but people will continue to breed, so a labour surplus allows us to proceed to a manufacturing economy and, when that too ceases to pay, to a services one. The evolution is, for now, complete. And the maps show it all.”

“No they don’t,” said Jade. “They show f**k all. What happened to the peasants when they left the land? What happened to the workers when the mill closed? Did the factory take them? Or were they made to bugger off?”

“Jade,” said Dr Coster, “these are fair questions but please be civil.”

“About what? About what this little shit’s family did to the likes of mine for 700 years?”

There was a mixed reaction in the room. Some groaned. Some laughed. Dr Coster sat with his mouth slightly open. Dean’s face showed a sort of pain.

“I say,” said Hactonby, ”would you like to discuss this over dinner?” He grinned.

There were snorts of laughter. Coster smiled. Jade stood and blundered to the door. It slammed behind her and she caught ironic cheers as she walked away.

“That is enough,” said Dr Coster. “Please, that is quite enough.”

Dean went to the door too. As he opened it he turned back towards Hactonby. “Rhodri,” he said, “you are a f**king peasant. You always were.”

There had been a hint of rain as they had entered, and now it had begun in earnest. Jade did not seem to notice but hurried towards the street, bent a little from the waist. Dean ran to catch up with her, calling out. He saw the rain spots joining on her T-shirt; her hair was wet.

“Jade.”

“What.”

He trotted up to her. “I don’t suppose he meant any harm,” he panted.

“Oh, he f**king did.” She glared at him. “You don’t get it, do you? We’re so different, me and him, you and me. It’s a different country for you, isn’t it? Even maps don’t say the same things for you.” She closed and opened her eyes and he realised she was crying. ”I hate it here,” she said. “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I hate you all. I wish I’d never come.”

She turned and moved away, head bowed.

“Jade!” he called.

“F**k off,” she choked.

“Jade! Stop!” She turned around.

“I love you!” he yelled.

“You what?”

 A Deliveroo driver turned and looked at them, then hurried on.

“I love you,” he repeated. They stood and looked at each other, their clothes soaked, her hair matted against her face by the rain. 

No Old Etonians or Oxbridge students were harmed during the writing of this piece.

More flash fiction from Mike

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

Parallel Worlds Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala

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
Cold Everything is cold here

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

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Attlee, Bevin and the New Jerusalem

The next UK government will inherit a mess, but not as bad as Clement Attlee did in 1945. Yet the Attlee government not only coped. It made Britain better. Meanwhile his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, played a key role in forging the Western security framework that has endured to this day. Who were these men, and what were they really like?

Attlee takes power in 1945 (Leslie Priest/AP)

When Labour came to power in July 1945, Britain was broke. Much of its gold reserves had been spent on the war, and the US had insisted, as part of its postwar loan agreement, that sterling be convertible within a few years. This was a huge financial bomb waiting to go off. Meanwhile the occupation of the British Zone of Germany was also costly; it was in a terrible state, not least because of Britain’s own bombing. 

At home, labour shortages in the mines restricted coal supplies and would immiserate everyone in the awful winter of 1947. There was a huge housing crisis; about 2 million houses had been destroyed or badly damaged across Britain, and an estimated 750,000 new houses were needed – quickly; according to the Royal British Legion, a staggering 4.2 million service personnel were to be demobilised by December 1946. Meanwhile there were about 400,000 German prisoners in Britain, and large numbers of Polish and other servicemen whose countries were about to come under Stalinist occupation. It was becoming clear that they would not be able to go home.

Abroad, India was ready to explode but the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, could not get Indian politicians to agree a path to independence. Britain was also still fighting in Greece, where left-wing forces could have taken the country into the Eastern bloc along with its neighbours. There was armed conflict in Palestine, which was still under the British mandate. In 1948 the emergency in Malaya would start.

Not all these problems would be solved. Some, especially Palestine, would leave a toxic legacy. The houses wouldn’t all be built. But in six years, Attlee would build a social democracy in which people’s basic needs mostly would be met. Abroad, despite some failures, his remarkable Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, would play a leading role in the postwar global order and in forging the Atlantic alliance. At home, he would guard Attlee’s back against rivals in Cabinet and keep it stable.

Who were these men?

***

Francis Beckett’s biography Clem Attlee was originally published in 1997 but reissued in an updated edition in 2015. It’s not alone; there are a number of well-regarded Attlee biographies, notably John Bew’s Citizen Clem and Michael Jago’s Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister. But I think for most people Beckett’s will be all the Attlee they need.

Attlee has been seen as an accidental Prime Minister who was in the right place at the right time. In the schism and electoral rout of 1931 many of Labour’s ablest people either crossed over to the National Government or lost their seats or both. Attlee was one of the few survivors. Otherwise, it’s said, he would never have been deputy Labour leader and would not have become leader when Lansbury stepped down in 1935.  Biographer Michael Jago thought this was nonsense. Beckett agrees. Attlee, he argues, rose to the top on his considerable political skills and the strength of his beliefs. He was anything but an accident. Reading Beckett’s biography, I partly, but only partly, agree with this. Throughout his leadership, rivals such as Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton would deride him as a grey man and insist Labour needed a more charismatic leader (e.g. them). Without the events of 1931, he might have been a capable Minister but never Prime Minister; the post would have been filled by one of his “charismatic” rivals. It is our good fortune that it wasn’t, for the grey man did rather well.

Clement Attlee was born into a large middle-class family in Putney in 1883. His father was a Liberal barrister and Attlee himself went into the law after Oxford. But it bored him. One night in 1906 his younger brother took him to visit a club for disadvantaged boys in Stepney, then a very poor part of London where he would not normally have gone. The visit transformed his life and he ended up living in the East End as a social worker and campaigner, becoming involved in left-wing politics. In 1914 he joined the army and served with some distinction in the Gallipoli campaign and in the Middle East. In the former, he caught dysentery and was almost the last Allied soldier to be evacuated. In the Middle East he was badly wounded. Beckett says he felt strongly that the army and navy had mismanaged the Gallipoli campaign but that Churchill’s strategy had been sound. This would matter in 1940, when Attlee would bring Labour into Churchill’s wartime coalition.

Beckett obviously covers Attlee’s part in the wartime coalition and his subsequent premiership. He takes a broad-brush approach. I don’t think that’s a bad thing; the minutiae of long-ago governments do not always tell us much. Beckett does show that Attlee played a crucial role from the beginning, backing Churchill against Chamberlain and Halifax, who wanted to negotiate with Hitler. He also demonstrates that Attlee could restrain or influence Churchill, and did – but tactfully; he would have ‘a word with the PM’, rather than row with him in Cabinet. Beckett quotes several examples, not least Attlee’s defence of de Gaulle, who Churchill and Roosevelt loathed – not always without reason. But Attlee realised they had no right to remove him. At the same time Attlee quietly chaired the main committees concerned with postwar reconstruction, which helped him set the agenda for the government he would soon lead.

He was not to regret his part in the coalition. He later acquired the original of Low’s famous 1940 cartoon (“All behind you, Winston!”) and according to Beckett it was on the wall of his living room when he died in 1967.

***

Beckett takes the same broad brush to the postwar government. Here a little more detail might have been welcome, and there are some omissions, or matters covered briefly. The latter include the fuel problems that beset Britain in the very bad winter of 1947, and the constant plotting of Attlee’s rivals for the leadership – they are there but not in depth. Beckett may be right not to get into the weeds. Still, he could have said more about the pension and social security reforms, which were to have a huge positive impact, and their prime mover the Minister of National Insurance, Jim Griffiths. A Welshman who had left school at 13, he is largely forgotten now. But his work in that Attlee government had a positive and lasting impact on millions. He seems also to have been a likeable and capable figure.

Ellen Wilkinson
(Bassano Ltd./National Portrait Gallery)

What Beckett does bring out is Attlee’s magnanimity in government. Besides leadership rivals like Morrison and Dalton, he also brought in Aneurin Bevan, who had been a fierce critic throughout the war years, and Ellen Wilkinson, who was apparently Morrison’s mistress and had been involved in multiple plots against her new boss. (Beckett says she had a Damascene conversion about Attlee as soon as she was in government.) These decisions have sometimes been seen as wily plots to neutralise opposition. The reality, according to Beckett, was that Attlee felt all the best people were needed in government whether he liked them or not. 

And for the most part they did well. This was especially true of Bevan, although he could be difficult; and of Wilkinson, who implemented the important 1944 Education Act. Beckett covers her role fairly well. But he says little about her death in office in 1947, possibly by her own hand but more likely of an accidental overdose. This was a poignant episode; a charismatic woman with a gift for friendship, she was mourned on both sides of the House. Morrison did not attend her funeral.

There is one episode of Attlee’s premiership that was very grave, and about which Beckett is perhaps a little generous to him. This was India.

By 1945 it was clear that Britain could not keep control in India much longer. There was a Secretary of State for India and Burma; this was a Cabinet-level position in its own right, occupied by Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, a long-time Labour figure. However, he was by then 76 and besides, Attlee seems largely to have directed India policy himself – a legacy perhaps of his service on the Simon Commission in India in the 1920s. Early in 1947 he sacked the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, who had tried hard but failed to get Indian politicians to agree with each other on the shape of the transition to independence. Attlee replaced him with Lord Mountbatten, telling him to get the British out quickly and leave India as a single nation if possible but if not possible, to partition it. Mountbatten was given plenipotentiary powers to this effect. He chose Partition, and brought the date forward to just six months hence.  Attlee let him do it. Should he have done? It led to a huge, unplanned exchange of populations – something that might have been predicted. This left a million dead and is a difficult part of Attlee’s legacy.

Beckett is with the defence. By 1947, it is argued, Britain could not keep order and any delay would make things worse. This might be true. But perhaps Attlee should have given the same authority to Wavell when he came to power two years earlier. Wavell’s diaries were published in the 1970s and they do suggest that, given the same freedom of action as Mountbatten, he might have negotiated an agreed path to a united India.

But history is full of what-ifs; in the end they take you nowhere, and maybe Attlee was right. His support of partition may have sprung from his realisation, decades before others, that the Western model of democracy could not always be exported. In May 1943 he had circulated a remarkable paper to Cabinet in which he argued that in certain situations – Palestine, Ireland, South Africa – two groups might so distrust each other that one would oppose governance by the other under any circumstances, at least without an outside referee. Perhaps Attlee believed that in such a scenario the two parties must go their separate ways altogether. If so, Partition was the logical step. But the price was high, and it was not the British who paid it.

***

Attlee shaped Britain as no other single person has in modern times. But what was he like?

He lived quietly – and modestly; when he went to the Palace to kiss hands in 1945 it was in an eight-year-old Hillman 14 driven by his wife Violet, and the couple used the same car in the 1950 election campaign. For 1951 they had upgraded to a Humber Hawk, but Beckett says this was still prewar (other sources do say it was new). His wife Violet usually drove him on his election campaigns. He was moderate in his personal habits. The family home was a semi in Stanmore, north-west London, and he returned there whenever he could during the war years. He had married at nearly 40; the marriage seems to have been a devoted one, and lasted until Violet’s death in 1964. They had four children.

Outside the home, Attlee was a quiet, undemonstrative man. He was also almost weirdly calm and self-controlled. His years in government, as deputy and later Prime Minister, were the most crisis-ridden in modern British history, but he seems to have been completely unflappable (even when chauffeured by Violet, which is said to have been terrifying). He was also quite able to detach himself when the day’s work was done however crisis-ridden it had been, and read a book or write letters. He was concise to the point of abruptness; he never used two words where one would do and never used one word when he could grunt instead. He had little small talk. Ministers who did not perform were dismissed perhaps not rudely, but certainly without ceremony. One imagines that Ministers and civil servants might have respected rather than loved him.

There was however a more jocular face to Attlee’s government. This was his closest ally: his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. He, too, is now the subject of an accessible and absorbing biography – by a more recent Labour minister, Lord Adonis.

***

Ernest Bevin was born in Somerset in 1881. His mother was a widow; his father’s identity has never been known (though Adonis has evidence he was a local farmer). His home was very poor but not unhappy; however, his mother died when he was eight and at 11 he left school and worked as a labourer. By the age of 13 he had had enough of this, and went to Bristol, where he became a drayman and, in time, a Baptist lay preacher and union organiser.

Bevin: a 1945 portrait by
Thomas Cantrell Dugdale

In the latter role he did well and his influence grew. He started to travel, building links with trade unionists in Europe and elsewhere. During the First World War he visited the USA, where he had a cordial meeting with the powerful labour leader Samuel Gompers, who had helped found the American Federation of Labor.  Eventually Bevin founded Britain’s own first ‘super-union’, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). By 1940 he had for some time been the country’s most important union figure. Distrustful of Labour intellectuals after 1931, he decided that Labour’s taciturn and business-like new Deputy Leader, Attlee, was the horse to back. The two men were a contrast; Attlee a silent ascetic to whom many found it hard to relate – and Bevin, big, bluff and sometimes a bully, forged in the furnace of labour negotiations and union politics. He was genial and ruthless.

In 1940 Attlee and Churchill found Bevin a seat and brought into the wartime coalition as Minister of Labour, believing this to be the best way of mobilising the workforce behind the war (wisely, they seem to have realised this was not a given). As wartime Minister of Labour, he played a key role in uniting the labour movement behind the war effort – something Churchill, no friend of the unions, could not have done without him. Finally, as Foreign Secretary from 1945, he was at least partly responsible for forging the US-European alliance against the USSR. Bevin was thus the father of the modern British union movement, a pillar of Attlee’s reforming government, and a key architect of the postwar global security settlement.

Given that these three legacies are now under threat, a new look at Bevin is timely. It arrived in 2021: Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill, by Andrew (Lord) Adonis, a strong New Labour figure and himself a Minister in the 200s. I have some reservations about this book (not least the title). But it is well worth reading. It isn’t the first Bevin biography; there are several, including Alan Bullock’s mighty three-volume account. For the casual reader, there’s Mark Stephens’s short book Ernest Bevin, written to mark Bevin’s centenary. However, Bullock’s would probably be too much for most readers. Stephens’s book is concise, but it was published by the T&G itself and is not especially critical (though it’s not a hagiography – and it is very well-written). Adonis’s book is short and lively enough to be readable. And it’s even-handed; Adonis clearly admires Bevin, but he is sometimes very critical, especially of Bevin’s period as Foreign Secretary.

The book is mostly not based on primary sources. Adonis draws heavily on the previous biographies (including Bullock’s) and other books germane to the period. I think that’s fine. He’s clearly trying to project a readable image of Bevin, not find out what he had for breakfast on a given day. Now and then he does rely rather heavily on one source. One chapter is partly an extract from the memoirs of Nicholas Henderson, who worked for Bevin at the Foreign Office and was later Ambassador to Washington. Adonis will certainly have sought permission for this, and it does add important background. But although he is scrupulous about quoting sources, they are sometimes hard to check as there is no reference list – an odd oversight.

Adonis credits Bevin with a great deal. The early parts of this book depict a determined man who was not expected, by background, to amount to much, but whose determination, occasional ruthlessness, showmanship and humour helped build a truly national trade union movement where none had existed. Then he became wartime Minister of Labour, and later the first postwar Foreign Secretary – both crucial roles at a time when things could have gone very wrong. In Bevin’s hands they mostly didn’t. Adonis also shows us someone who, although ruthless, could be very loyal. He always was to Attlee, and did much to buffer the rampant egotists in Cabinet who would have liked Attlee’s job – one which Bevin himself never sought. He must thus be credited at least in part with the stability and success of Attlee’s government, the more so as Attlee’s own personality sometimes did not help him.

Adonis also states that Bevin stiffened Western resistance to Stalin more or less alone, getting – he says – little help from a rather supine Truman administration. There is probably much truth in this. Truman’s Secretary of State was James F. Byrne, a Southern Democrat who had had a long and ambivalent career. He had been a segregationist in his native South Carolina but had also crossed swords with the Klu Klux Klan, and would do so again as the State’s Governor in the 1950s. He had also been a New Dealer and had opposed isolationism in the 1930s. But he was indeed ‘soft’ on Stalin; other sources also confirm this. In fact, Truman himself was worried about this, and sacked him in January 1947. Still, Adonis is very persuasive in arguing that Bevin helped forge a united Western front against Stalinism. He argues that Bevin’s background in union activism greatly influenced the way he saw Hitler in the 1930s and later saw Stalin, as his international union contacts meant he could see what fascist governments did to unionists in the 1930s. But was also keenly aware of communist tactics in the union movement, and loathed those as well.

I wonder if Bevin’s instant distrust of Stalin was also just native shrewdness. Bevin was no fool and knew a stinker when he met one. Also, Adonis doesn’t really discuss the poor relationship between the UK and the US immediately after the war and the US dislike and distrust of British imperialism. But they were important context for what happened in 1945-48. Even so, I think Adonis is on the money. Not all Labour MPs were happy with what they saw as Bevin’s warmongering, but his contribution to Western peace and security was immeasurable.

But Adonis is hard on Bevin in some respects, noting again that he did not like opposition. He is also very critical of some aspects of Bevin’s tenure at the Foreign Office. He takes a rather black-and-white view sometimes. Thus he is merciless in judging Bevin’s handling of Palestine. It is true that, on Bevin’s watch, Britain’s mandate over Palestine ended very badly. People in the region are still paying the price. But it is not always clear what Adonis thinks Bevin should have done. After all, the problem preceded Bevin and has not been solved since.

Adonis is also highly critical of Bevin’s imperialism. It’s true that Bevin regarded the colonies as an ongoing resource and neither he nor Attlee was interested in decolonisation. In Africa it would take a remarkable Conservative Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod, to force the pace some years later. Again, I think Adonis has a point here. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Arthur Creech-Jones, was a Cabinet minister in his own right and had a long-standing interest in colonial affairs. It may be that he would have liked to move faster and that Attlee and Bevin frustrated this.  (Bevin did not have responsibility for India.)

The Potsdam Conference, 1945; Attlee and Bevin had taken over
from Churchill and Eden during the conference itself.
Front row, Attlee, Truman and Stalin; at rear,
Truman's Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy; Bevin; Secretary of
State Byrne; and Stalin's Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov
(US National Archives/NationalMuseumof the US Navy) 

Last but not least, Adonis deprecates Bevin’s lack of interest in the nascent European Union, in the shape of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) formed in 1950. It is true that Bevin was negative towards British participation, partly because he wanted to protect Britain’s own coal and steel. 

But as he left the Foreign Office early in 1951 and died a few weeks later, he may be excused for not understanding just how consequential the ECSC would be. One could in fact argue that Britain’s absence from Europe was not culpable until its failure to attend the Messina Conference in 1955, a decision made by Anthony Eden’s Tory government, not by Bevin. And as Adonis himself records, Bevin had close contacts with European as well as American labour movements and travelled widely in Europe in the 1930s. But Adonis is right; Bevin failed to understand how Europe would develop and how important it was to be at its heart.

So did Attlee. He did not want Britain involved, then or later. Shortly before he died in 1967, he gave a brief speech in support of anti-Marketeer Douglas Jay. “The Common Market,” he said. “…Very recently this country spent a great deal of blood and treasure rescuing four of ’em from …the other two.” These attitudes were common in Britain then and have not disappeared. There is a contrast here with the graceful pragmatism and foresight shown by France and the Benelux countries, who understood the need to bury the hatchet forever. To be sure, Adonis – angry perhaps, like a lot of us, about Brexit – is judging Bevin from our own time; things looked different then. But his criticism is at least partly fair.

***

I would have liked Adonis to convey more of the private man. The chapter drawn from Henderson is quite vivid, and now and then Adonis does give us a glimpse into Bevin’s family life. We do learn that he lived for many years in suburban contentment in Golders Green – but didn’t mind a little luxury and some good booze. And Adonis quotes a splendid comment by a contemporary that Bevin, a very large man, both looked and dressed like an overstuffed sofa (pictures suggest this was accurate.) But something about the man is elusive here. His wife Flo appears in the book very little, although they had a long marriage. Neither do we really learn much about Bevin’s siblings, who like him were born working people and unlike him remained so. Still, Bevin came from a time when one’s private life was not on display, and maybe his remains hidden.

Adonis does tell us what Bevin was like to work with. His ally Attlee was decent to others but as we have seen he never dissembled, and used very few words, even in public; one imagines he could be a strain. Bevin, by contrast, was bluff, friendly and fun, fond of a good glass of wine and capable of great warmth and kindness. To be sure, he was ruthless with those who crossed him. But those who didn’t do so liked him, and his civil servants thought him a fine minister.

***

These books are both worth reading. They do contain some odd omissions, and Adonis is too swift to judge in some areas. But Beckett’s is a readable and thoughtful portrait of Attlee. He shows us clearly why Attlee succeeded where others might have failed. As for Adonis on Bevin, he provides an accessible picture of a remarkable man, and his book should be essential reading for anyone interested in Labour history.

And both books are a window into one of the most effective governments that Britain has ever had – one we should all try to understand. For all its flaws, it steered the country through one of the hardest periods in its modern history, played a key role in building postwar global institutions, and left the British with universal healthcare, social security and proper pensions for all. They had had none of these before. One of the most moving passages in Beckett’s comes in his discussion of Attlee’s Minister of Education, Ellen Wilkinson, who introduced free milk and school meals.

Before the war, private school children were noticeably taller, better built, healthier and stronger than state school children, because they were properly fed. …In the Fifties this was no longer the case, due to the provision of free school meals and school milk.

These were not perfect men, but they had the courage to make things better. It seems now we are too scared to try.

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

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.