Jerry shook his head. He glanced carefully up the alley. “Any port in a storm, eh, Sam? When in doubt consult your stars. What can you lose?”
“What can you lose, old son?” Sammy nodded with melan-choly introspection, perhaps revealing all the many things he had already lost.
Above their heads was the blindness of the East End night in those precious years between the Blitz and the Thames Develop-ments.
“There must be easier ways than this of making a living.” Sammy drained off another wave of sweat with his heavy arm and dashed the liquid to the concrete of the step. “So long, Jerry. So long, squire. So long.” He went back to his chops and his pies. He had only recently introduced the pies to compete with a modern formica cafe across the street, and was not sure if they were worth it. They were bloody hard to fry.
Jerry, munching his free pasty, pushed his bike with one hand round the corner into the blazing white light of Whitechapel High Street, a salutary vision, where the wide roads were already gone through Leman Street and half the ruins of his youth. Leman Street had become little more than a slip-road and Wapping Old Stairs was blocked with corrugated iron on which posters for Tommy Steele and Bill Haley were already fading. The grey iron was bent and torn in places and through the gaps Jerry could watch the rain approaching across the moody waters of his Thames, where pieces of timber and old Tizer bottles jogged and drifted above depths which promised every horror. Even the agitated lapping of the water had a sinister, neurotic quality, and Jerry, never a keen East Ender, was glad when he got to the Tower and the waiting motorboat.
“We thought we’d lost you,” said Mitzi Beesley, decisively securing her Mae West.
“How was your mum?” Shakey Mo asked over his shoulder as he started the engine.
“She wasn’t working tonight.” Jerry studied the water, swir-ling like a Mr Softee, and wondered just how many of these memories were actually his.
FROZEN ALIVE
The lawyers and doctors, almost without exception, remained in Cernauti when the Russians took it over; a number of Bukovina Jews, who had been living in Bucharest, left for Cernauti when the Russians came, stating that they preferred to live under Russian domination and subsist on dry bread than to live under Roumanian rule and be considered below contempt.
King Carol, Hitler and Lupescu
“LOATHSOME, UNCOUTH, LOUTISH.” Bishop Beesley waved an eloquent Yorkie.” Or am I being unjust, do you think, to that scum of the earth. I like you, my dear sir, I really do. You’re a wag, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
Nobody paid him any attention. The going was proving unexpectedly hard and it was all Shakey Mo could do to keep the armoured car on course. “I still say it’s no part of the Lake District.”
Major Nye wanted to offer them his definition of a gentle-man.
Eventually, to take their minds off their discomfort, they gave in, though Mo Collier’s snorts and mutterings remained in the background.
“A gentleman,” Major Nye announced, “should be courteous to all and considerate of all, respectful of all, no matter what their station or their sex.
He should be thoroughly read in the literature of the day as well as that of the past, and should be conversant on matters of Science, Nature and the Arts, have some practical reading in moral philosophy and some practical understanding of all these things; he should also have a good knowledge of cookery, fencing, fancy sewing, water colouring, medicine and, of course, riding. He should always be able, with coolness and self-knowledge, to defend his actions, both moral-ly and socially. He should have some accountancy and com-parative religion, some household management, some training in the care of the sick and injured as well as the elderly. He must know the arts of self-defence, perhaps both Karate and Tai Chi, and certain aspects of infant responsibility. His education should emphasise courses in algebra, geography, history and politics, but should otherwise share the common curriculum.”
“You’re a determinist then, Major Nye?” Professor Hira was the only one who had been listening.
“Not in the strictest of senses, old boy, no. In fact I think politics, like religion, are a man’s own damned affair, pardon my French. But live and let live, eh?”
“Have you ever run across such a paragon as you describe, Major?”
Professor Hira adjusted his ear-piece. The radio had, for days, been delivering Radio One, set to some antiseptic cycle of current singles repeated one after the other every hour for forty-eight hours until two sides were replaced, until another forty-eight hours had passed, and so on.
Professor Hira thought it a miraculous little system and was irritated by any suggestion that it was already hopelessly out of date. Modern technology could randomise anything these days.
“Not in this century, no, old boy.”
“Sometimes,” said Mo, “you don’t even need to do any kind of programme. It’s the very latest in pseudo-technology. Wow!” His fingers played over endless invisible keys. He was pro-gramming air-computer. His days were truly filled. “Cerebral, man. Punch that code!” He could still function on simple levels and was useful for his old, instinctive skills. “Bam!
Psychedelic! Post-modern! Wow! Chaos!”
YEARS SINCE YESTERDAY
Iliescu said Romania had emerged in a state of moral decay from the era of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was toppled and executed last December.
Reuter/Majorca Daily Bulletin, 21 June 1990
“GAS,” SAID CAPTAIN Maxwell, the English engineer, replac-ing his stein of Pilsner Urquhart carefully upon the laminated oak, “is the Future.” He glared with a kind of proprietorial benevolence around the bierkeller. “That’s where the fortunes will be made.”
From outside, in Wencleslas Square, the Australian Morris Dancers gave their precise rendition of the Flory Dance. They were said by some to be the hit of the Festival. He looked at Jerry before uttering a hearty laugh.
It was as if someone had farted through their face.
Jerry gagged.
PLAYING FOR KEEPS
One evening in the early weeks of the ‘New Order’ in Roumania, a group of armed men, in the green uniform of the Iron Guard, burst into the country house at Sinaia, as the old man of seventy sat at his desk in the study. They fell upon the ‘Patriarch of the Roumanian People’ and dragged him out of the house to the dark road outside. As he lay on the ground, they cut off his famous flowing white beard, riddled him with bullets, cut his throat, stabbed the already lifeless body and threw it into a sodden ditch by the wayside. When the torn, beardless corpse of Nicolai Jorga was discovered the next morning, there was found, stuffed in his mouth, a copy of Neamul Romanesc, dated September 9,1940, containing the signed ‘leader’ entitled: ‘On the departure of King Carol’.
Thus did Roumania, under Hitler’s ‘New Order’ directed by the Nazi Gauleiter ‘Red Dog’ Antonescu, achieve the ‘moral restora-tion’ which this Roumanian general swore to his King, Mihail, to be the holy cause of the overthrow of Carol the Second.
King Carol, Hitler and Lupescu
“EITHER THE HUMAN race is going to have to improve its memory, lose it altogether, or get a new one.” Catherine Cornelius gave her brother a dismissive kiss. “You can’t fight that kind of amnesia. You might as well give up.”
“Never say die, love.” Mrs Cornelius went by with a pie. “I carn’t bloody believe it’s Christmas again!” This was her great day of power and she was celebrating.