Against all the odds the worst deprivations and ravages of mass starvation and disease might, conceivably, be kept at bay this winter, albeit only until the spring. His detractors would never forgive him but then if the last year had taught Edward Heath anything, it was that everything he’d thought he’d understand, loved and respected about Parliamentary democracy was in this harsh new age a meaningless bagatelle. The man who headed Her Majesty’s United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration was slowly coming to terms with the new realities. He’d never been anything other than a man of deeply held political and religious beliefs; and like any man whose beliefs have been torn apart and remade by tragedies beyond normal human comprehension, he’d emerged from his test of fire tempered in ways few who’d known him before the cataclysm could begin to understand.
The Prime Minister viewed Sir Henry Tomlinson with hard, inscrutable eyes for some moments.
“It is not enough just to survive,” he sighed, betraying for a moment the bone deep weariness in his soul, “not enough.”
The other man nodded but said nothing.
“You and I will hang together if I fail,” Edward Heath remarked, a hint of mischief quirking his lips for the most fleeting of moments.
When at around eleven o’clock Henry Tomlinson strolled distractedly — his mind still preoccupied with his conversation with Edward Heath — into his office two doors down the first floor landing from the Prime Minister’s room the Angry Widow was waiting for him.
Until the dreadful, chaotic weeks in the immediate aftermath of the cataclysm the Cabinet Secretary had never met or exchanged words with the attractive, meticulously turned out thirty-eight year old mother of twins who had, by sheer force of personality — and no little intellectual acuity — contrived to turn the Ministry of Supply into a going concern in recent months. Much as he enjoyed their encounters he, like others, was sometimes left a little drained and rather breathless by their conclusion.
“Airey tells me you boys are up to something?” The Minister of Supply half-asked, half-demanded before Henry Tomlinson had time to get both feet inside his office.
‘Airey’, was Airey Neave, the fifty-three year old war hero who’d escaped from Colditz and had assumed the duties of the Angry Widow’s chief of staff, protective uncle and smiling assassin. He’d won a Military Cross for getting out of Colditz, added a Distinguished Service Order in 1945. Airey Neave was the man who’d read the indictments to the leading Nazis on trial at Nuremburg. Neave was a rare thing, a surviving national treasure.
“Does he indeed? I haven’t seen the old rascal for the last few days?” Henry Tomlinson countered amiably. He stepped around the low coffee table on which a tray with a silver tea service had mysteriously appeared during his interview with the Prime Minister.
“Bottlenecks at the West Country depots,” his visitor explained. “I was tempted to knock heads together but Airey convinced me that things hadn’t reached that stage yet. Do you know we had to cut the petrol ration last month because those fools at Transport don’t understand that they actually have to distribute fuel not just burn it!”
Henry Tomlinson was fully aware of the inadequacies — incompetence and negligence, if one was being honest — of several of her ministerial colleagues. However, it would have been crass to detail them now. At least until he discovered to what he owed the pleasure of the lady’s visit.
“I thought you’d be in longer with the PM,” Margaret Hilda Thatcher observed, settling in one of the two chairs next to the coffee table. “Shall I be mother?”
The Cabinet Secretary had meetings scheduled, a thousand and one things which required his imprimatur but knew when he’d met his match. He might be able to urbanely fob off most ministers and their underlings; the Angry Widow was different.
He sat opposite the woman, watched as she poured tea into two cups.
“No milk today, I’m afraid,” she apologised, sparkling a smile at the man.
People got carried away with Margaret Thatcher’s head girl bossiness, her simmering impatience with process and her persistent questions. The dazzling smile complicated the picture, if only because it tended to mask the steel behind her blue grey eyes. It was the furnace-tempered steel in the woman that had seized Henry Tomlinson’s attention the first time he met her.
“Dairy production is a matter for the Ministry of Agriculture,” he chuckled emolliently.
“Quite.”
“Darjeeling?” The Cabinet Secretary sighed, sipping his lukewarm brew.
“Airey brought back a couple of small tins from one of his forays last month,” his visitor explained with a short flashing smile.
Henry Tomlinson sipped anew.
“It is the small things that one misses, don’t you think, Margaret?” He prompted, filling the space she’d left him with a moment of self-reflection he’d have shared with very few of her ministerial colleagues. Perhaps, that was because he was not on first names — or remotely familiar — terms with any of her senior colleagues. He still didn’t know how they’d arrived at being on ‘Margaret’ and ‘Henry’ terms.
Margaret Thatcher gazed into her tea.
“Yes. But we must always look to the future, Henry.”
“Always,” he agreed. “Forgive me. I lost my wife many years before the war. Your loss is much more,” he hesitated, “immediate. Forgive my thoughtlessness.”
The woman waved this aside.
“One in three of our people gone and the bloody Americans want to stand on the Moon!”
“Funny old world,” the Cabinet Secretary grimaced.
“So what are you boys up to?”
“I’m not with you, Margaret?”
“My people have been warned to expect ships from the first convoys from the Southern Hemisphere to dock in the next ten days. Southampton, Weymouth, Plymouth, Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea have all been warned. Is it true that Dublin has been warned to receive ships, too?”
Henry Tomlinson nodded. The Government of the Republic of Ireland, Eire, was not and had probably never been a friend of the old country but the Prime Minister had been wise to make the gesture of sending a couple of ships to Dublin. If only to remind the Irish that Great Britain — for all that it was bloodied and mauled — remained a going concern.
“We’ve been living off scraps for the last year,” Margaret Thatcher went on. “We’ve virtually exhausted our strategic stockpiles, we’re living from hand to mouth. I hardly dared to hope Operation Manna would come to fruition. Now we’re on the verge of getting through the winter without widespread starvation. My goodness, if we’d relied on the promises of our so-called former Allies our people would have starved this winter.” Her voice was quietly, melodically persuasive. “So, I ask again, what are you boys ups to? And I don’t mean trying to bribe the Irish Government to stop its proxies fomenting civil disorder in Ulster!”
“What does Airey think we’re up to, Margaret?”
“Airey says next year is election year in the United States.” The woman paused to quirk a brief frown at the older man, whom in many ways reminded her of her late husband, and continued: “Until this time next year Kennedy, or whoever wins next November doesn’t give a fig about us.”
“Airey may be right.”