With a hum, the NatSec van pulled away and I collapsed on a wooden bench to catch my breath. I had never been so close to one of these men before; I had never been able to smell their sweat. I wish I could say that it had demystified them, that up close they were just flesh and blood, no more terrifying than the local drunken bully in a pub. But he had been just as inhuman as the pamphlets or the broadcasts on Radio Free Europe portrayed them. I wondered what had made him like that. We had seen it with the staring-eyed Nazis who had marched through our streets in ’44, but that had taken years of brutalizing propaganda. I couldn’t understand how it had come down on us. The Marxism that I had read, and of which Blunt spoke, was about peace and cooperation. It said nothing of such savageness.
From where I sat, I could make out the northern side of the former cathedral, which now seeped stone blocks twenty metres into the square. The blocks formed a platform where the high and mighty would stand to give all the Liberation Day speeches tomorrow, marking the seventh anniversary of the day that the Soviets arrived to drive out the Nazis. If the Red Army had pressed on right up to the North and Scotland when they arrived, of course, the whole island would be celebrating their arrival. Instead, the Soviets had been as surprised as the rest of us when American paratroopers dropped into the Midlands a month later, closely followed by their ships docking in Liverpool. And a year later, as Churchill said, ‘The iron curtain fell across our land.’ So tomorrow we would all cheer the streams of tanks, troops, Pioneers, bands, boilermen and fishermen as they paraded past us after marching defiantly along that curtain.
It was a day when we all felt we could do anything as a nation, and when I had first moved to London, I had been excited that I would be able to watch the parade and go to all the celebrations afterwards. But the prospect had soured for me somewhat when I had passed by the square one afternoon in mid-July and stopped to watch a platoon of Pioneers drilling in preparation.
‘Platoon will advance left turn,’ their CO had barked, although their fifteen-year-old faces showed they weren’t entirely concentrating on their task. ‘Platoon right turn.’ Behind scaffolding, I had seen red marble panels with the unmistakable outlines of Marx, Engels and Blunt lining a platform that was still being constructed, while, tucked away in a corner of the square, a gang of cleaners was attempting to scrub away something that had been crudely painted on a plinth: a sort of vampire with blood-dripping fangs, wearing a military uniform and cap. STALIN, its artist had scrawled below. Nearby, soldiers manned little machine-gun turrets on strange beetle-like armoured cars. There were a few people milling about, but it was a dreary day so the square was largely empty.
I had watched, curious, when the armoured cars suddenly started up, pouring thick black exhaust fumes into the air, and the soldiers began shouting to each other. In a rush of sound, they sped off into the square and I followed their path, trying to work out what was happening. Then I saw: an aged-looking couple – in their sixties or thereabouts – were hurrying towards the platform. The man was carrying something in his arms.
The few sightseers stopped. Workmen who had been bolting together the scaffolding let their tools fall idle and watched as the couple scrambled to the front of the stage, jointly took a hold of whatever it was the man was carrying and stepped apart to unfurl a home-made banner: a sheet, with the words DEMOCRACY NOW in red letters roughly made from sticky tape or such like. I had only heard of this sort of thing – the weak political protests that happened occasionally. What did they really expect to come of it? A public uprising? After thirteen years of conflict and upheaval, all we wanted was peace. No one was going to join them to see their last remaining friends and family destroyed by more war, whether it was against a foreign enemy or against our own countrymen. And out of the corner of my eye I noticed a young man discreetly taking photographs of them. His presence was no coincidence.
The old couple stood there for a second before two of the workmen gingerly took hold of them and tried to push them away – probably more for the pair’s own protection than out of loyalty to the state – but they were too late: the soldiers were already jumping from the back of the screeching armoured cars. At that, the workers slunk into the background – they could predict what was coming next. Seeing the soldiers’ arrival, the young man also realized it was time to leave, placing his camera in his coat pocket before quietly but rapidly walking away. He didn’t see one of the soldiers smack the butt of his pistol across the old man’s cheek and kick his legs away; or how, when the woman screamed, they hit her too. I, however, winced with each blow.
Between them, the two soldiers – boys no more than twenty – shoved the man from the platform down to the concourse of the square, and I felt another shiver of pain as his head connected with the ground. For a moment, no one moved: we all just watched him lie there, complicit in our inaction; and then, haltingly, he tried to push himself to his knees. But there was something impossible about his attempt – the lower half of his left leg had broken clean away and I realized that it wasn’t made of flesh, but of wood and metal, articulated at the knee: a product of the Blitz or a battlefield mortar.
One of the soldiers made a beckoning gesture across the square, and I looked around to see a tarpaulin-covered army truck burst into view. Four more soldiers scrambled out – their insignia showed them to be a sappers’ regiment – and surrounded the injured man as he tried to crawl off, with his broken false limb still dragging uselessly behind. He was thrown into their truck before the troops jumped in after him and I heard him cry out an indistinct word or two. I could do nothing except watch.
The woman was also pushed into the van, albeit less harshly, and, as soon as the vehicle’s wheels could turn, they careered on to the main road, leaving only a strange silence. It had all taken barely more than a minute.
The air was broken then by a new sound: a mocking, whining human voice. It was jeering, coming from the ranks of the Pioneers – just one boy at first, and then a few more joining in, until they were all doing it. One pretended to break his leg and hop in mockery of the man until their grinning CO quietened them down with a ‘That’s enough, now’ and had them return to their drilling. I walked away, my feelings about Liberation Day a little more subdued.
That had all happened in the summer, and now I sat on a bench in the November evening smog, recovering my breath and thoughts after my ordeal with Grest. It felt so raw. After a while, my hand fell on something poking up between the bench’s wooden slats: a little piece of paper that had been folded up and stuffed there to be found. I would have ignored it but it had been placed so as to expose large bold type at the top, with words that couldn’t be missed. POLITICAL PRISONERS HELD AGAINST INTERNATIONAL LAW IN MENTAL HOSPITALS. I pulled the page out, to find it was a small sheet of closely printed black type: the sort of cheap samizdat that one saw gummed to walls here and there before it was ripped down.
‘They are prisoners for what they believe! We do not know where they are. Please do not forget them,’ it added below the top line. There was a long list of names, most of them male.
I had heard – we had all heard – of the new usage that the mental hospitals were being put to. Those poor people. They didn’t deserve what had happened to them, but there were so many names on the sheet that I would never recall them. I looked along the road. With the paper in my hand, the memory of the couple, and the NatSec van receding into the distance, I began to wonder where on earth the Republic was going.