He looked back at the other Beetles. Doors were now opening, people were getting out. Marilyn and John the Hippy and Fat Les walked towards the house.
‘It’s got to be a trap hasn’t it?’ said John the Hippy.
Ishmael still didn’t know. They entered the house. It was still and silent and nicely furnished. In the sitting room Marilyn asked whether anyone would like a drink from her father’s cocktail cabinet. They declined.
They searched the house. It was empty. It was ghostly, like a show house, inhuman and unlived-in. They sat in the kitchen. They felt uncomfortable. Other road warriors entered — Davey and Harold the former bank manager and Tina and Eric the tie-wearer and Caroline with the nose-stud and Mary the artist. They made cups of coffee. They tried to make themselves at home. They were not sure whether they were experiencing victory or defeat.
Should they loot and destroy the house? Should they just go home? Where was home for Ishmael now?
‘We could set up a squat, I suppose,’ said Eric the tie-wearer.
‘It reminds me of one time I went to Margate,’ said Fat Les. ‘The fuzz had got the whole place carved up. We never even got a look at the rockers. I didn’t have a decent bit of bother all weekend.’
♦
Ivan Hirst also owns a unique model of a Beetle-based Reichspost truck, and a one-tenth scale saloon, just like one Adolf Hitler is photographed holding, but this one comes from Heinz Nordhoff. Nordhoff would gladly have given Hirst an actual Beetle cabriolet, but Hirst’s military position prevented him from accepting.
So Hirst has his models to dust, his spoils of war. They are a better way of remembering than most. They speak of creation and of rebuilding. History resides in them as much as in scars, in tattooed skins, in ruined lives and cities, in documentary photographs that need constant reinterpretation.
Today Ivan Hirst drives a BMW.
♦
The Norton twins were standing outside the back door, keeping the garden watched. Suddenly they moved very quickly and entered the house. Ishmael looked out of the kitchen window. There were ten or a dozen men in tweeds, advancing through the herbaceous borders with shotguns.
Suddenly there was a knock on the front door.
‘Do we answer it?’ Tina asked.
‘Of course we do,’ Ishmael said. ‘It’s quite usual for opposing war lords to hurl a few insults at each other prior to the fray.’
He went to the front door. Harold the former bank manager opened the door for him. He was ready for a confrontation with Marilyn’s father, with the devil himself if it came to that. But even so he was surprised to find a uniformed police constable on the doorstep.
‘Hello sir,’ the policeman said. ‘My name’s Constable Peterson and I just happened to be passing when I couldn’t help noticing those rather unusual motors parked outside. We’re having a little bit of a campaign in Crockenfield right now and unless I’m very much mistaken each of those cars is failing to display a valid tax disc. I trust you do have tax, sir, and I’d also be very much obliged to see your driver’s licence and a current MOT certificate, sir.’
Ishmael was unsure whether this was a real police constable or whether this was some elaborate ruse by Marilyn’s father. Either way Ishmael wanted to be rid of the pest.
‘Go away,’ Ishmael said gently.
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
‘Go away please or you may get hurt.’
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.’
‘Then hear this. We are on a mission. Forces of good and evil are here in confrontation. Darkness and light will here collide. I don’t think this is a police matter.’
‘With respect, sir, I think you’d better let me be the judge of that. I suppose you have proof that you actually own those cars?’
‘Listen, little man,’ Ishmael said. ‘You are out of your depth. Be warned.’
‘I think I’d better step inside and ask you a few questions, sir.’
At that moment a volley of shots was fired from the rear of the house. The windows in the kitchen shattered with a good deal of sound and fury.
‘Be gone,’ Ishmael commanded the policeman.
Constable Peterson ran away at some speed. As he did so he almost bumped into two Crockenfield Blazers who were advancing on the house from the direction of the front gate. All three were mutually shocked. One of the Blazers dropped his shotgun and the constable accelerated his exit.
His parting remark was, ‘I’ll be back and I won’t be on my own.’
Ishmael had to agree with Clausewitz about war being like a fog, certainly he remained vague about what happened in the next ten minutes. But he knew for certain at the end of that time that there was not a pane of glass left in any of the windows of ‘Sorrento’, all of them having been shot out by Marilyn’s father and his chums, and the whole crew of them were occupying the grounds looking frantic and drunk on blood lust. In the same time the whole of Hawk’s Lane that ran in front of ‘Sorrento’ became blocked by police cars, motorcycles, fire engines, ambulances and sightseers. Ishmael couldn’t help thinking that things weren’t quite going to plan — The Plan.
♦
There is a photograph of Ferdinand Porsche taken by his nephew and secretary Ghislane Kaes some time after his release by the French. It shows Porsche leaning on the door of a Beetle parked at a gravel roadside in the Grossglockner, Karnten, in Porsche’s native Austria.
There are mountains in the distance. There is a sharp drop from the edge of the road, down to what could be water, though in the photograph it appears jet black.
Porsche could be staring away to the distant mountains, he could be looking at something on the water beyond the edge of the photograph; but it appears to us now that his stare is unfocused, and that his posture shows weariness, not relaxation. Other eyes could interpret the photograph as that of a man on holiday standing beside a new car of which he is very proud, but our eyes interpret it as a defeated man staring at nothing.
This interpretation can, of course, also be interpreted.
♦
And so it was that Ishmael and his followers found themselves besieged in Marilyn’s father’s house, surrounded by a large number of Crockenfield Blazers who were in their turn surrounded by ever increasing numbers of police.
Harold the former bank manager suggested that they make a foolhardy charge at the Blazers and go out in a blooming of fey glory, but he didn’t get any support. Even Ishmael thought it was too symbolic by half.
A plain-clothes police officer stood at the gates to ‘Sorrento’ and made a more or less inaudible speech about this all being madness and they’d all regret it later, and everything could be smoothed out over beer and sandwiches with a little common sense.
The moment he finished there was a shot or two fired in his general direction and Fat Les lobbed an empty gin bottle at him through a smashed upper window.
Then Marilyn’s father spoke. He was glassy-eyed and unsteady on his feet, and he spoke from behind a rhododendron bush, though with, Ishmael would have been the first to admit, an undeniable authority. He denounced the police, the state, youth, Ishmael, the two-party system, the courts, the internal combustion engine, and finally women. His final remark was that unless the police kept their distance there would be a terrible blood-bath and he’d slaughter everyone.
Obviously, Ishmael couldn’t let such an opportunity slip by. He stood at an upstairs window and bawled out a few generalizations about natural law, life and death, the road, and transcendent love.
It was well received by his followers who naturally then turned to him for guidance in their hour of need.
‘I’m all for a bit of a confrontation,’ Fat Les said. ‘But I can’t see much percentage in slugging it out with these Blazers if we then have to take on the pigs.’