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Sean Gabb: The Churchill Memorandum

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Sean Gabb The Churchill Memorandum

The Churchill Memorandum: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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“Thursday the 16th March 1939. The Fuhrer had spent twenty two hours in Prague to inspect his latest conquest. During this time, the people of that city had barely been aware of his presence in the Castle. But as the Mercedes accelerated to carry him back to the railway station, one of the armoured cars forming his guard got stuck in the tramlines that lay just beyond the Wenzelsplatz. The Fuhrer’s car swerved to avoid this. On the frozen cobblestones….” About the Author

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It was as it ought to be. In America, I’d soon learned that listening to the news was compulsory. Breakfast every morning in my hotel had been suspended for a full quarter hour, as everyone had to stand and shake his fist when the names of the newest traitors were read out over the wireless. One evening, when I’d retired early, the management even sent a wireless into my room, with someone to stand over me as I listened to President Anslinger’s sermon of moral uplift. It was just one more sign of being back in a free country that football was more important than the news. No one in The Drivers’ Arms had paid much attention to the painted newsreader. Now she was gone, about half the pub was glued to the screen.

“You finished with that glass, love?” Old Elsie whispered. I smiled and pushed the glass across the table. If no one else had, she’d been glad to see me again. It was a pity I had nothing to say about America that corresponded to the crisp, black and white celluloid version that, after all these years, still played in her head. She sang a few bars from an old musical and asked about the dark magnificence of Chicago. I, of course, had been better informed about conditions there when I set out. Even so, I hadn’t been prepared for the smell of burst sewers, and for the burnt-out cars and no-go squatter camps that filled the wider streets. No point telling her about the endless turf wars between Italian and coloured and Jewish gangs that had kept me awake night after night until I was used to the sound of gunfire. Nor any point telling her about the black helicopters that hovered by day above the streets, and that only ever came down to snatch pedestrians, seemingly at random, off to probable torture and death in one of the Fellowship Camps. Elsie had the vision of America common to people of her generation, and it would have been cruelty to tell her exactly how it had all been broken in pieces. I smiled as she sang again and cleared the little table. As she came back with a damp cloth, it looked as if she’d forgotten again about the bill. I put a shilling on the table, and told her to keep the change. I pushed my chair back and got to my feet.

It was as I came out of the gents that I saw Stanhope. He was sitting across the public bar in what, even at twenty feet I could smell was a cloud of pure hashish smoke. With a deft use of his claw, he was reading the English edition of the Völkischer Beobachter. In honour of the coming Sad Anniversary, this had a huge picture of Hitler on the front and back pages. Whatever he was reading on the inside pages, his huge body was shaking with laughter.

What was he doing here? I thought I’d seen the last of him when I breezed through passport control at Croydon. A continental flight was in, and the alien entry queue was fifty yards long. He’d absolutely insisted I shouldn’t wait for him. And his final lecture had been forbidding and interminable—all about the new Russian calendar, with its ten months called variations on the name Stalin, and about the placing of its fifteen days of Socialist Rest. No one could have blamed me for taking my chance and bolting. I’d already given instructions for delivery of my boxes. So it had been straight onto the tram just before it pulled out. Now, here sat Stanhope—for all the world as if he’d come up on the following tram.

I might have wondered how he’d got so fast through alien entry. I could have marvelled how, of all the establishments in London, he too had chosen this one. What really mattered, though, was that he didn’t appear to have seen me. Nor would he see me. Voyage friendships are seldom worth prolonging. This was no exception. I dropped a sixpence into the China Mission collection box and dodged into the street.

Now it had stopped raining, I could see that London was reassuringly unchanged. It was the same noisy bustle on the streets, the same shiny cars of the higher classes trying to push their way through the swarms of smaller vehicles, the same smell of electricity from all but the grandest traffic. I thought of stopping a taxi. But I wanted the normality of London. Here, there’d be no machine gunning of pedestrians from unmarked black vans, no terror bombs in the restaurants, no endless stops and searches by men in and out of uniform—no swooping by those wicked black helicopters. It would surely come on to rain again in the next quarter hour. But I’d walk to the Richardson offices. Besides, where even English beer is concerned, two quarts still make half a gallon. I’d need a clear head for this meeting.

* * *

I was half way up Charing Cross Road when it did begin to rain. This time, it fell in sheets that overwhelmed the pavement heating. The danger now wasn’t so much stumbling into the road as being soaked by water thrown up by the trolley busses and other large traffic. Having no umbrella, I dodged into the main entrance of Foyles. I stood there, fumbling with a packet of fifty and looking in at the display of new books. My own first Churchill volume was now over a year old, and had been promoted to the general chaos of the shelves. There might be a few copies on the second floor, or they might be in the basement—always hard to say, of course, with Foyles where anything might be shelved from one day to the next. I scratched a wet fingernail over wet cellophane until I could make a breach in the seal. I gave an annoyed grunt as I pushed the packet open. While I was away, the larger packs of Capstan Super Strength had gone filter tipped. I broke off the cork tip and flicked it onto the pavement. I was trying to get my lighter going in the gusty, rain-soaked wind, when someone who’d taken shelter beside me reached forward with his own gas lighter. I lit my cigarette on its intense blue flame and nodded my thanks.

“Iss it true, my friend, zat ze Archpishop of Canterbury is not a priest?” he asked with slow deliberation in a very thick German accent. He waved at the central book on the display. It was the defence of the Thirty Nine Articles that had come out to such acclaim just before I left England. I watched as the stream of smoke I let out was dispersed in the wind and gathered my thoughts.

“It was a controversial appointment,” I replied in German. “But C.S. Lewis was, of course, ordained before the position was formally offered. And I don’t think anyone can doubt that he has been a success by any reasonable measure. It isn’t every day that a Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and a dozen other Romish priests are converted in the course of a public debate.” I’d lost him there, and I didn’t feel inclined to explain myself. The man smiled and went back to looking at the display. About my own age, he was dressed in English clothes. If he hadn’t opened his mouth, I’d not have guessed he was a foreigner. I could have kept the conversation alive by asking how long he’d been in England. But that isn’t something you ask of Germans. It was still raining, but the sky was beginning to lighten. I took another draw on my cigarette and got ready for a complex sentence all about the weather.

“You have just returned from Germany?” he asked with a downward look at the one suitcase I’d brought with me from Croydon.

“Sadly not,” I replied. “I’ve been in America. I’m having my main luggage delivered to where I live.” It sounds a redundant amplification. But you weren’t there to see how the man looked at me and at my luggage and back again.

“It iss as it should be,” he said, back now back in his slow and hesitant English. “But you should come to Germany soon. Dresden is an extremely beautiful city in ze spring—ja, ze most extremely beautiful city!”

I had no doubt it was. But it had now left off raining. I stamped my cigarette out and made my parting excuses. Normally, I’d have made some effort at politeness—you can strike up some interesting friendships in this way. On the other hand, conversations, in English or German, about the whereabouts of my luggage or the joys of yet another chocolate box German city were not on my agenda for that afternoon.

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