Warsaw Concerto, page 16
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Now the headlines piqued his curiosity.
He began to read the text of the speech reproduced in The Times, mainly because The Standard’s ink was literally falling off onto his hands.
The problem is that when we start from a misconception our subsequent understanding, and therefore decisions, are founded on shifting sands and this is what has happened because it was seductively convenient to governments of the day and since to foster the myths of ‘little England’ and ‘standing alone’ in the allegedly ‘dark days’ of the Second World War.
Frank Waters felt the heat rise in his face.
Nevertheless, he read on.
Before the Second World War there was only one global superpower and it was not the United States of America, it was Great Britain and its Empire. A quarter of the map of the planet was painted Imperial pink in 1939 and only a sick and deluded man – like Adolf Hitler – would have imagined for a single second that he could successfully take us on. Yes, it is true that in some areas of military preparedness the Nazis were in advance of Neville Chamberlain’s Britain, and – although one can argue the point – for example, that at one stage early in the war Germany produced marginally more steel than we did, but in practically every other respect the Thousand Year Reich lagged behind us. Another example, in 1939 approximately one in three Germans still worked on the land, in the British Isles the comparative statistic was less than one in ten; yes, in some respects the German education system was more rigorous than ours, particularly in technical areas but scientifically, we were the ones who invented radar, split the atom and notwithstanding many years of neglect, still had the largest Navy in the World. The only reason we ended up standing alone in 1940 was because our Allies, NOT US, were overwhelmed by the initial waves of Nazi aggression in that era before we ‘got our act together’!
The Prime Minister’s husband realised he was frowning rather than actually grinding his teeth. Dammit! The blasted man might actually be making a salutary point!
The former SAS-man had been in England in that summer of 1940; granted, a lot of people were in a funk about the prospect of a German invasion – mostly former appeasers – but the general mood had not been one of despair, more one of ‘let the bastards come and we’ll jolly well settle their hash for them!’
Give Churchill credit, he knew that these Isles had been ‘here before’. Napoleon had conquered Europe but been overcome in the end by blockade and the wealth of the then much smaller, weaker proto-British Empire; which, let us not forget was still recovering from the loss of the American Colonies in the 1780s. The Royal Navy had kept the homeland safe; Wellington had nibbled at the margins of the French Empire but what had really beaten Bonaparte was that time after time our treasure bought and stitched together yet new alliances. By the time we got to Waterloo the poor chap – Bonaparte - was up against the sixth or seventh ‘Grand Alliance’. For Napoleon read Hitler. That was Churchill’s analysis of the strategic situation in 1940; just as it remains Mrs Thatcher’s, in this modern age.
Frank Waters had never been much of a history buff. Strategy had always gone over his head; tactics was the thing.
In the 1940s the United States became – in a few short years – the World’s premier power. From being a sleeping giant in 1940, its manpower and resources under-employed or unemployed, by 1945 it had doubled its workforce, while in the United Kingdom, even by drafting women into the work place our domestic work force only increased by around ten percent because so many men had had to go into the armed forces. But and it is a big but, that is to consider Britain as an island, disconnected and separate from the Empire. In effect, while the mobilisation of the American military-industrial machine after Pearl Harbour rapidly overtook war and other production in Great Britain, by the end of the war in 1945, it had barely equalled the economic productivity of the ‘whole’ Imperial system controlled from London. It is a complete myth, a fabrication to suggest that in 1945 we were the impoverished clients of Uncle Sam. At that zenith of Empire, we were impoverished because of the war, that I concede, but also because we chose to be impoverished. Or rather, because our ruling classes chose to inflict impoverishment on the people of these islands!
Now Frank Waters was blinking with confusion, and no little rising outrage. These bloody Bolsheviks would stop at no lie to make their case!
Much has been made of the cost of the Second World War. Indubitably, great damage was inflicted upon the country and our overseas possessions, our cities were bombed and thousands of our ships sunk. Immediately after the war it was stated that the ‘capital cost’, that is, what had been lost in terms of ‘things’, bricks and mortar, industrial assets and infrastructure and so on, amounted to as much as 25 percent of the entire British economy. If that had been so we might well have been on our knees. It was not so, nowadays we accept a capital loss figure of around 18 percent. But this also is a misnomer, since most of the notional ‘loss’ is actually a confabulation of what ought, rationally, to be put to one side and called what it is: war debt and losses incurred selling off British concerns overseas, mainly at bargain basement prices in the United States. My research, in those days when I was a professional political economist indicates that the nett cost of the Second War to the United Kingdom was probably in the region of around 7 percent, calculated as a measurement taken against the larger, more modern industrial society that we had actually become by the conclusion of the war in Europe. In short, if indeed we were impoverished, it was because our leaders had chosen to impoverish us to fight and to win the war that we had just won. OUR PEOPLE paid the cost of the war, while industry, imperial commerce and the bankers of Wall Street profited allowing post-war US Presidents to treat US like poor relations! Paupers, in fact!
The Prime Minister’s husband put down the paper for a second or two to partake of a calming sip of Brandy before reading further.
Let us not forget that not so long ago a Conservative Prime Minister told us that we ‘had never had it so good’. How could that be, barely fifteen years after the second war to end all wars? How could that be in less than a generation? Easily, comrades. Easily, comrades, once we see beyond and around the great lie of the age. When Harold Macmillan uttered that monumental hostage to fortune, the great captains of industry and their Tory lapdogs were still shamelessly reaping the benefits of our victory. True, we had been battered somewhat in the war but afterwards our pre-war competitors – the United States apart - were on their knees. And when we talk about the ‘cost of the war’ well, a large proportion of that was paid for ‘gratis’ under Lend Lease – only fair, I hear you say because after all, we were fighting the US’s war for them – leaving us just to pay pre-1940 debts and to take out monumental international loans to balance the books. It was the United States who forced us to pay for its victory. It was this, not the war which made us seem so impoverished in the late 1940s. The ruling elite had presumed, as that class always has throughout history, that those debts would be waived in the afterglow of victory, instead it fell to Clem Atlee’s government to ‘pick up the tab’ for ‘Victory in Europe’. And now I must ask you the question: is history repeating itself?
Fortunately, Frank Waters had just put down his glass; because in that moment it might well have been inadvertently crushed in his clenched fist.
I spoke earlier of a nett capital loss to the United Kingdom of around seven percent representing the cost of the Second War in non-human terms. In some respects, the legacy of wholesale industrial re-tooling and re-structuring, and the massive planned investment in war and shadow war industries has stood us in remarkably good stead in the current crisis. Across the Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the North wartime aircraft, chemical and all manner of major industrial plants became the engine of our post-Second War boom, and remain essential to our future prosperity as a nation.
The old soldier sighed in exasperation.
Everybody knew that the whole bloody country north of the Watford Gap was booming – the factories, anyway – because of ever-spiralling demand from the New Commonwealth. The old country exported all manner of manufactures and what the Lady called ‘intellectual property’, back came mineral resources and components and the wheels of commerce jangled like giant cash registers. Even with the demands of the ‘French situation’ all staple foods were now – as near as dammit - ‘off the ration’ and economically things were so chipper that the industrial mandarins complained endlessly about ‘labour shortages’.
The country would have been in a fine old pass but for all the refugees, immigrants from the near continent in the last couple of years! Now that tens of thousands of them had returned to France the shortage of skilled men – and women, bless them – was beginning to drive up wages.
The Lady was already worried about the ‘inflationary effect’ of that; so much so that she had re-opened the door to workers from the Irish Republic again, and allegedly, government, and business agents were actively recruiting in the less badly damaged areas of the Low Countries, Scandinavia and even from such faraway places as Portugal, Malta and the West Indies…
Have we learned nothing from our mistakes? Are we destined to repeat, time and again, the folly of our recent history? Why in this country is it a crime to demand the building of a new Jerusalem at the same time our leaders are so Hellbent on creating a new Sparta?
The latest government assessment of the nett capital cost to the nation of the October War is 23.6 percent of national wealth and 27.3 percent of ‘English’ wealth. I do not claim that the catastrophe of the October War is remotely comparable to that of the Second War. In the Second War the bombed cities survived, the majority of their populations lived to rebuild from the ruins; in October 1962 whole cities suffered London’s tragic fate. There are no ‘Londoners’ to rebuild from the ashes, Liverpool, where I grew up, is a sea of rubble and the last resting place of three-quarters of its former population. Moreover, we must accept that there are some places which will never be rebuilt and perhaps, it is time we reconciled ourselves to that truth. What troubles me most is that much as Churchill’s wartime regime neglected the home front, so, for I suspect, entirely ideological grounds, the current administration criminally neglecting the people of this country!
It was enough to make Frank waters reach for his gun.
Dammit, the bloody thing was upstairs in his and the Lady’s rooms!
To report that one-quarter of the wealth of the nation was lost on a single night, and to remember that one in three people in England died on the night of the cataclysm, or from factors directly linked to it thereafter, is a tragedy beyond the comprehension of any of us. We are of that generation for whom the well of pity may be bottomless but shall never be allowed to run dry. What I say to you is that there is an inescapable logic to these dreadful numbers that governments ignore at their peril. A significantly greater proportion of the wealth, the industrial and commercial collateral of our country survived the war than its people. Thus far, it is this capital overhang, this now fully functioning industrial over-capacity which is what has allowed us to both fight overseas wars and to feed our survivors. What I say to you all here tonight is that we ought not to be thankful for morsels off our rulers’ tables; it is high time we started to share in the wealth created by all those booming factories in Coventry, Wolverhampton and Birmingham, in the runaway commercial success of those giant publicly-financed chemical and aerospace complexes in Lancashire and elsewhere in the north and as it progresses, the mining of the vaults of the City of London…
The correspondent reported deafening applause!
Instead, what we have and what we are likely to have for many years to come is a regime eerily reminiscent of that experienced by the working classes in the years of the Second War. Welfare and dole are dirty words to this government; the Tories seem to have no shame when it comes to the treatment of the old and vulnerable, or those who are in most need of their government’s assistance. The way the Prime Minister talks you would think that it is her administration’s policy that if somebody has to pay the price for balancing the books by going short, or dying on waiting lists for urgent medical treatment then that is ‘a price worth paying’. It is an attitude that pre-supposes that ‘the poor will always be with us so, there is nothing we can do about it’ and it sickens me, Comrades!
I KNOW IT SICKENS YOU!
It ought by rights to sicken Mrs Thatcher but obviously, it does not. But that is the trouble with the Tories. Under them there are the ‘deserving poor’ and there are ‘useless mouths’; yet they still defend their policy of reducing or suspending ‘the ration’ of people unwilling or unable to do work arbitrarily deemed ‘essential’ during the thirty-three month-long period of the Emergency following the October War. How many people, how many families died because of that ruthlessly applied regulation? They still call Mrs ‘T’ the ‘Angry Widow’; well, we’ve all got a right to be angry, bloody angry about a lot of the things ‘that woman’ has done in our names, Comrades!
Comrades, bloody Bolsheviks!
Do you know that there are five or six times as many doctors per member of the Army, the Navy, the Royal Air Force, or for a policeman or a civil servant or a local government administrator than there are for ordinary tax payers? Do you know that four years after the October War there remains a rigidly defined arbitrary hierarchy of who matters, and who does not, of who is important and who is of no consequence in our country? It is a national scandal that there is a hierarchy of ‘useful’ members of society. Basically, those persons and their families essential to the sustenance of and the maintenance of the standard of living of the ruling elite: those are the people at the top of the list! The aged, the chronically ill and the unemployable are at the bottom. Rock bottom!
We are the Party that created the National Health Service in pursuit of the high ideal of guaranteeing universal health care to all. That proud ideal has been callously trampled underfoot. Today, we have a Government that applies the same cruel yardstick to all aspects of the ‘social state’, to education to housing, to transportation...
The way the man was talking one would think that what was left of the Home Counties was a land overflowing with milk and honey!
“Ah, from the expression on your face you haven’t got to the racing pages yet, Frank,” Major Sir Steuart Pringle chortled as he breezed into the room.
“I was just reading what the Bolshie little so and so Peter Shore said in Manchester last night,” Frank Waters admitted a little sheepishly.
The immaculately turned out Royal Marine grinned.
“Oh, all that guff. The way the man talks you’d think the late 1940s, the last time his gang was in charge, was a halcyon era of hospital building and rebuilding all the bomb sites. People forget that none of that stuff even started until the 1950s when Mr Churchill got back into power.”
Frank Waters had not known that.
“Is that so?”
“Oh, yes. After the Second War, Atlee’s lot were so busy nationalising everything they didn’t have any money left over for anything else.” The Head of the Prime Minister’s protection detail belatedly remembered why he had come to find his friend. “Oh, your presence has been requested. The conference feels you may have insights into the conduct of special operations in occupied France. They want to pick your brain.”
“Oh, dear,” Frank Waters groaned, “that doesn’t sound good.”
He put down the paper.
He drained his Brandy and girded his courage.
“Lead on, old man,” he murmured with the odd distraction of a man who is uncertain whether he has been invited to a banquet, or to be fed to the lions.
Chapter 15
Saturday 10th December 1966
St Leonard’s, Sydney, New South Wales
Elspeth Joan Etherington née Christopher had been five months pregnant with her third child, Elizabeth Rose, at the time of the October War. She had become estranged from her father after her mother’s final illness in the 1950s, and – occasional letters apart - lost contact with her brother, who was the best part of five years her junior, when she had emigrated to Australia in July 1958.
Elspeth and her husband, Patrick, an amiably driven Ulsterman from Coleraine, County Londonderry who had lived and worked in England ever since he came down from Oxford, had met Elspeth at a party in Knightsbridge in 1957. She and Pat had married a year later at the conclusion of his university-deferred National Service – as a subaltern in the Royal Engineers, among other places, in Aden, Singapore and Australasia – just three weeks before they boarded the Orient Steam Navigation Company liner SS Orchades at Southampton, bound for Australia.
They had led a peripatetic life for the first three or four years after they moved ‘down under’ but when their first daughter, Joan had emerged, squalling lustily with perfect good health into the world, they had finally established their family home in sleepy St Leonard’s, an increasingly well-to-do commuter suburb of the capital of New South Wales about three miles up the Pacific Highway from the Harbour Bridge.
Elspeth had not spoken to her father after her mother’s funeral until fate had decreed that in the aftermath of the October War, the ‘Fighting Admiral’ brought the flagship of the British Pacific Fleet, HMS Ark Royal, to Australia.
The Ark Royal and her escorts, the destroyers Barrosa, Cavendish and HMAS Vampire, and the frigate Llandaff had steamed slowly into Sydney Harbour to an ecstatic welcome, like white knights coming to the rescue of a land still in shock after the terrible events of late October 1962. It was as if now ‘the Navy’ was in town everything would be all right after all. The whole city had been given over to civic and naval ceremonial, and several ‘open days’ declared so that the citizens of Sydney might be welcomed on board the visiting ships.
