'How do you know German, Farjeon?'
'Learned it when I joined the RAF. Useful if I ever got shot down, I thought. Wait… "Here are the men we have selected from among the Prominente prisoners for the Fountain of Life programme."'
"'Fountain of Life?"'
'The word is Lebensborn. Fine Nordic types all, says Trojan! That's us, I guess. Bloody hell. Good Aryan stock!'
'I don't want to be "good Aryan stock,"' Gary murmured.
'Don't think you have a choice right now, old boy,' said Willis. 'And as we're standing ten feet from the Reichsfuhrer I'd advise you to hold your peace… We're to be a symbol of the unity of Nordic races globally, and a demonstration of the theory that Nordic qualities rise to the top, even among prisoners and other riffraff… Now he's saying something else. Can't quite get it. Something about a loom? A tapestry? That Standartenfuhrer – Trojan? – says he's finally tracked down the one missing component, and the weapon that will cement Aryan supremacy for all future and all past is at hand… Even for the Nazis this sounds a lot of guff. But look at old Himmler's piggy eyes gleaming behind those glasses. Whatever this rubbish is, he loves it.'
'What component?'
'Him, I think,' said Willis.
Two beefy SS guards dragged forward Ben Kamen. He stood trembling before a laughing Himmler.
X
14 October
Mary woke up to music from the Promi. The Nazi propaganda station was proving a furtive hit, even in free England. The announcer said that today was Hastings Day, yet another of the Nazis' endless memorials – and another day off for the lucky denizens of the protectorate. Lying in bed, Mary wondered if Gary was allowed to listen to the Promi.
Reluctantly she got up, to start another day without her son. But she had a faint hope that today might bring her that little bit closer to him.
Her journey to Birdoswald on this October Tuesday, organised by Tom Mackie, was hopefully going to be relatively civilised. A WAAF driver picked her up from her lodgings in Colchester to drive her all the way to Cambridge, where she would take the main east coast train line up to Newcastle. And from there she would be driven further, along the line of Hadrian's Wall to Birdoswald, where Mackie had his office.
The car journey itself was a novelty. You hardly drove anywhere these days, such was the shortage of fuel. They passed lorries and a few packed buses in Colchester itself, but in the open country they saw few vehicles. There were plenty of road blocks though, barriers and barbed wire and pillboxes, manned by nervous-looking Home Guard types. After ten miles or so the WAAF had to stop to show her identification. She took it cheerfully. 'More Home Guard on the road than traffic these days!' she said brightly to Mary. She was rather jolly-hockey-sticks, very English.
And as they set off again a squadron of planes, perhaps Hurricanes, came screaming overhead, flying low, heading south.
Mary was oddly reluctant to leave Colchester, even for a couple of days. It was hardly a comfortable place; nowhere in England was, she imagined. But she was able to carry on her researches here, and she had her duties in the WVS, though they were less demanding now the bombing was reduced. And, only fifty miles or so from Gravesend, she was close to the Winston Line, the dreadful barrier that had cut the country in two, and so about as close as she could get to Gary.
But for the best part of a year she had been badgering Captain Mackie of MI-14 for an interview on the subject of Ben Kamen and his historical conundrums. She had come across Mackie when he sent her a letter after the invasion, offering his sympathy about Gary, whom he had met in those final hours before the cease-fire. It had occurred to her to write back, for Mackie's MI-14 seemed precisely the sort of organisation that might take seriously the mysteries she was uncovering, and figure out what to do about them. She could hardly be reluctant about taking up Mackie's invitation now, even if it did mean she would have to travel to the other end of the country.
She was nervous, though, about the hints of urgency in Mackie's note. Something had changed, and she doubted it was for the better.
The station at Cambridge was crowded. This was now the terminus of the east coast rail lines, King's Cross in London having been abandoned-indeed blown up, it was said, like the capital's other main-line stations. There were a few service personnel on the move from one posting to another, but mostly the crowds were a seepage of refugees from London, a flow still continuing after a year, women and children, old people and invalids, supervised by police and ARP wardens, all waiting for a train to the north.
The WAAF saw Mary to her compartment, making sure her reserved seat had not been taken. Mary would have to share with a mother and her three children, and a couple of older men. The children seemed happy enough, plump little creatures dressed in layers of clothing, each with a colourful gas-mask satchel in the rack above. To them this was an adventure, a day off school. They squealed as the locomotive chuffed into life, and clouds of steam billowed back the length of the train. They made Mary smile.
But the journey seemed long and slow, the overcrowded train hot. Mary peered out, trying to distract herself with a view of a country in the middle of its long war.
Close to London the autumn fields were littered with burned-out vehicles and wire loops, protection against paratrooper or glider landings. The Home Guard manned pillboxes and trenches at every junction and bridge and level crossing, waiting to destroy the rail line in case the Germans should start advancing again. There was a logic to the defence, with stop lines running parallel to the coasts in case the Germans attempted any secondary landings, and other lines cutting across the country to impede any advance out of the protectorate. But Mary felt nervous at the thought of the heaps of mines and explosives the train must be passing through.
In the stations where they stopped there were lots of uniforms, of the conventional services of Britain, the Commonwealth and the US, and of Britain's vast volunteer armies, like Mary's own WVS. Mary didn't like the transformation of Britain into a country of uniforms. It was as if the German way of thinking had infected everybody, as if the Germans had already won.
And the towns were scarred by the war. Though repair work was underway, you could see gaps in the terraced streets, holes colonised by weeds rather than people. There were defensive emplacements everywhere, anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons. And factories were hastily being erected, relocated from London and the south. There was plenty of labour to do all this work; all of England's major towns had taken refugees from London, homeless and unemployed.
Outside the counties of the protectorate itself, it was the capital that had suffered most severely from the invasion. London was in English hands, but, bombed and oppressively threatened, it was slowly bleeding to death. Its people and factories were being shipped out, its docks barricaded or blown up, and its many state functions transplanted elsewhere: York was now the seat of government, Manchester was Britain's financial centre, the royal family had migrated to Holyrood in Edinburgh, and the seat of the Church of England had been moved to Liverpool. London's museums and galleries had been stripped, their precious contents scattered and hidden. The city itself was turning into an abandoned museum, with only its immovable architectural treasures remaining.
There were some commentators who said that London might never recover from this cruel shutting-down – George Orwell, for instance. 'Oh yes it will,' Mary had heard the old crusties say in the Colchester pubs. 'We'll ship the Cockney buggers back ourselves.'