Gavin Lyall: The Crocus List

She paused, wondering briefly whether to elaborate on that. But they could either imagine it or they couldn't. She no longer expected them to see, within the stocky well-dressed matron with groomed grey hair and fashionable glasses, the tired, tense girl who had hunched over the illegal radio ina Lyonnaisfarmhouse. The morning when she learned that the organiser of the Tabernacle circuit had been taken ina Milicetrap and she was now the leader. Forty-eight hours was the time they were told to hold out under torture; after that, you assumed the Gestapo would know everything, so in that time you had to change everything. Warn others to go into hiding, find new places to cache weapons and explosives, new bases for action… Now, forty years later, she was doing much the same thing, not out of any nostalgia for the Great Days, but from a simple conviction that such days had not passed. If anybody questioned this, she suggested they count how many references to guerillas, terrorists and liberation armies they could find in that day's copy of The Times.

She coughed again, this time just to explain the pause, and went on. "You should see yourselves as essentially anurban Resistance movement. It follows that we are assuming there will still be cities, that the fabric of British society will still remain. If we are a nuclear wasteland, then the Russians aren't likely to be interested in taking us over. It also follows that the occupying force will work through the existing structures of that society, not try to change everything overnight. They just couldn't do it. They'll do what the Germans did in Europe: exercise control through some form of national parliament, the existing civil service, local government, the police, postal and broadcasting systems, the distributive trades and so on. And it's there, in those same channels, that you willsabotage their efforts and try and exert your own control. It's no good setting up Resistance armies in Wales-or here." She made an elegant gesture at the glimpse of moorland in one corner of the window behind her. "You'll simply be ignored. You must go to them, not wait for them to come to you. And you'll find them in the cities, in the key positions that exist today.

"There also already exists the framework you'll need for recruitment and training. I want you to take out your pens and write down all the unofficial non-statutory organisations that you have some personal connection with, or even just knowledge of. In three minutes, please, starting now."

There was a bit of old-fashioned school-marm in Miss Dorothy Tuckey. She stood beaming with confidence as they glanced at each other, puzzled, then began to write slowly, but faster and faster.

… the Regimental Sailing Club, Maxim wrote; the Littlehampton and District Model Railway Society; the Royal United Services Institute (was that statutory, though?); my mother's Thursday lunchtime club; my old school association; Camden Ratepayers' Association; the Darts Club at the Hare and Hounds; the Church of England (well, why not?); Military Book Society…

Everybody was still writing, or pausing for furious thought, when Miss Tuckey called time. She made no move to collect the papers.

"All those," she said, "are potentially subversive organisations." She rode on over their instinctive amusement. "They are all groups of people with some shared interest or commitment, and therefore a basis of mutual trust. They all have a centralised structure and some sort of a base, even if it's only a temporary or part-time one, and existing lines of communication. And don't forget the amount of further education that goes on in the civilian. world. Think of all the local authority night schools, all the summer schools run by industry and the unions, all of those are ready-made training schemes. You can't abolish them without weakening the whole structure of an industrial society, and it would be an enormous job to take them over or infiltrate them all with informers. By the way, didanybody write down the readership of Sappho or Gay News'?"

She joined in their laughter; nobody put up his hand.

"I'm glad to hear it. But quite seriously, don't dismiss homosexuals as unreliable or distasteful. Most of them have just the experience of leading secret, double lives that you lack. Moscow knows all about that. When they were recruiting among the Apostles at Cambridge before the war, they weren't blackmailing those people. They were just picking up young men who had been self-taught secret agents ever since puberty. Who already had a grudge against the existing society because it wouldn't accept them for what they were."

"What about the Church?" someone asked. "I mean any church?" Maxim was glad somebody had pre-empted that question; he was trying, because that was part of the course's teaching, to be as anonymous as possible.

"Yees," Miss Tuckey began hesitantly. "The problem is that Moscow has always taken religion very seriously -1 mean as a rival. The clergy would certainly be on the lists. But you're right in one way: any religion-Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu-has a background of subversion. They were all underground at one time. And religious belief can be a great solace in loneliness; I dare say some of you know that already."

Glancing covertly around, Maxim saw a few quickly restrained nods. A Resistance war might be lonely in the long run, but on a raw battlefield loneliness could strike in the brief snap of a bullet's flight-even if you were clutching the hand of the next man along. He had done that, too.

"Did anyone write down the Family?" Miss Tuckey asked. "Don't think Moscow doesn't know about that, either. It can be the most dangerous, subversive organisation of all."

Chris? Maxim wondered. Brenda?-yes, she'd join up within months, and Chris immediately… Dear God, don't let it happen. Let the tanks and guns be enough, even the nukes, letme be enough, just don't let it come to this. He was beginning to see that a secret war would be the most total of all.

After lunch they paced the clipped grass of the ramparts overlooking the grey waters of the firth. The barracks had been built for the garrison of the fortress surrounding them, set on a low spit of land where the channel narrowed and French ships would be exposed to cannon fire as they picked their way in to supply a second Jacobite rising. Over two hundred years later the sandstone walls stood untouched by anything but Scottish winds and the incised graffiti of recruits who had gone on to die at Corunna and Waterloo, Balaclava and Lucknow, the Sommeand Alamein. This of course gave exactly the sort of romantic continuity the Army loves, so it seemed likely to keep the Fort swept, mown and whitewashed for another two hundred years, although no longer for a full garrison. It had now become a useful back room for training courses that needed more secrecy than space.

None of the nineteen was supposed to know who each other were, which obviously couldn't always work but helped establish an atmosphere. The group itself was named-Garibaldi-rather than numbered, which would have suggested how many courses had gone through before them. They all wore plain barrack dress, the only badge being a self-chosen codename, and Maxim already felt uneasy about being 'Jabberwock'. It sounded frivolous, and gave away that he'd read Alice. Three of the others had chosen Shakespearean names and he wished he'd blended with them, however much he doubted that 'Coriolanus' had actually read himself. He also wished he wasn't already sure what rank most of the others were, and to what corps or regiment they belonged. What had they learnt about him, putting his life in their hands for the KGB thumbscrew to squeeze out?

Secrecy is the condition for action; trust is the means for it, an earnest Int Corps instructor had told them on their first-night briefing. Maxim had duly pondered that, and come to the conclusion that, in the Army, it meant nothing new.