Chapter 43

March, the same year.

St.David’s Day. 1st of March. All hell broke loose. For three weeks there had been the occasional riot or demonstration, the deliberate breaking of evening curfew, Patrol houses blockaded, even a few cars belonging to the Patrol burnt out. Four members of the Safety Patrol, and one of the Security Patrol had been killed; and another few dozen had been injured to varying degrees. The Patrollers had responded violently and viciously. Eight hundred people were beaten up and arrested, but in many cases, before those people could be taken to the local patrol house, they had been rescued by the locals. Even so, over one hundred people were taken into custody, many of them dying from injuries sustained during or shortly after their arrests. There was no effort made by the Patrol to even attempt to get injuries looked at.

People got more angry. Two patrol houses, one in East London, one in Bristol, were burnt to the ground. In other parts of the country, many were attacked and damaged. One in Sheffield was wrecked so badly it had to be abandoned due to the damage it had sustained. Yet all too often, local people would also turn up to defend the patrol houses, and then the fights got truly vicious.

There was another trigger as well. Since just before Christmas, all the British made television soap operas: East Enders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale etc., from all the channels, even BBC radio’s The Archers, all seemed to be airing a tiny back plot. Often only a few words or a couple of sentences here and there, but over time it had built up. And no one had noticed a thing. Thorn’s censors hadn’t noticed because, individually, they rarely saw more than two or three episodes, and almost never consecutive episodes, and that wasn’t enough.

Come the first of March though and all of them, all in the same evening, and very deliberately not at the same time, broadcast the denouement of their particular story. In many cases the final episodes only just scraped past the censors. Although each one, individually often looked bad, the particular censor reviewing this episode had seen few if any of the previous episodes, and the broadcaster showed a future plot outline that seemed to be taking the story elsewhere, so it got past. The broadcasters had been canny and had ensured that no one individual censor saw too many episodes together, particularly sequentially. Just in case. And since the different broadcasters, and often each of the different programmes, had their own censors attached to them from the political office, the censors looking at ITV’s ‘Emmerdale’, for example, didn’t see episodes of BBC TV’s ‘East Enders’, or hear episodes of BBC Radio’s ‘The Archers’.

But the fans did. And they had seen all the episodes. And all the funny little back plots in the previous ten weeks came together and made sense. And the population went wild. Those who watched, or listened, to more than one soap got it double or worse.

It was only on that final day that the censors realised what they had allowed. If they had watched the pre-release Coronation Street, they now saw the broadcast Emmerdale or Hollyoaks. Even the weekly hospital based soaps such as Holby City and Casualty, were in on the act. To the government’s horror, two imported soap operas, both from the USA, also had direct and specific references. BBC America was having a subtle influence from the other side of ‘The Pond’.

The effect was cataclysmic. Each soap revealed a different crime committed by Thorn or one of his cabinet, or by the government as a whole. And each did it in such a way that it was hard to counter. The broadcasters claimed it was all just fiction. After all, they pointed out, each soap has different writers; they are on different, competing, channels; it’s all just a coincidence. No one believed it for a moment. Not the government, not the public. Thorn was furious, but there was little he could do except deny it. And that just made him, and his party and the government, look more guilty.

The censors, in reality of course the government, pulled all the channels from the air. But that of course just made the government look even more guilty. Even long time supporters of Thorn began to question what the government was doing and had done.

Eric Hoffmann’s idea in the planning meeting at the end of November had borne its devastating fruit, but at the cost of all the broadcasters being shut down permanently, and a few actors, writers and directors being secretly arrested. Public arrests would have just confirmed the accusations, but secret arrests only slowed down the knowledge getting out, it didn’t prevent it. Thorn felt even less secure than he had before.

By ten o’clock that night, three hours after evening curfew, there were more people on the streets than at any time in the previous ten months at any time of the day. They were chanting and singing, calling for Thorn’s downfall.

Thorn’s supporters tried counter demonstrations, and in a few places there was serious violence. In Portsmouth, in Oxford, in Leicester, in Chorley and in a few other places, the counter, pro-Thorn, demonstrations got crushed so fast, almost before they had started, that few even realised there had been a pro-Thorn counter-rally in the first place. In other places the pro-Thorn rallies had been as big as the anti-Thorn rallies. In a small number of places: parts of London, in Glasgow and Nottingham, the pro-Thorn rallies fought, and defeated, the anti-Thorn protesters. Many people were very seriously injured, some died.

Still, few people were prepared to directly take on the Patrol. Each time Patrollers came on the scene, the demonstrators vanished to reappear elsewhere. The police wouldn’t have had that problem. They had had many years of controlling and corralling riots and demonstrations to come up with appropriate strategies to counter whatever a riot might try. The Patrollers however didn’t have that knowledge, so they floundered, looking more and more incompetent and clownish after each failed attempt.

By the end of the month, the riots were still happening every evening, and during the day everyone would try and clear up the mess after the previous evening. Many people blamed Thorn and his government, but not all. If there had been an opinion poll, Thorn would still have got twenty something percent of the vote, but that’s all. Of course the government wasn’t going to allow anything like an opinion poll.

Thorn was under siege and he knew it, yet he still believed that he would win. If he could just capture Queen Beatrice, he believed he would take out the heart of the opposition and it would simply crumble. He bitterly regretted not having her arrested years earlier when he’d had the chance.

No one knew where she was, yet once a day, usually around six pm, she would broadcast for up to thirty minutes. Although done in a fairly informal way, she broadcast news about what was happening and where. Beatrice herself felt she had to do this, both to prove to the nation that she was still free of Thorn’s grasp, but also to show that she was opposed to Thorn and everything he stood for. In her bulletins, Thorn was only ever referred to as ‘the great traitor’, while his cabinet were referred to as ‘the traitor’s minions’. It was effective, and though slow, it was starting to soften and change people’s beliefs. Even some newly recruited Safety Patrollers quietly went AWOL, and others, planning to join, quietly walked away again. Patrol recruitment began to drop, at first slowly, but soon quite dramatically.

The Maquis didn’t show itself, and it was never referred to directly, though many people now knew, or believed, it existed. It kept close watch. Anyone who stood up and claimed to be a member of the Maquis was ignored. The patrol soon took care of those fools. Those people who really wanted to do something, did it on the quiet, but they usually didn’t have the skills and training the Maquis had, and they very quickly came to the attention either of the Maquis, or of the Patrol.

If the Patrol got to them first, the local Maquis would quietly shake its collective head in sadness, and ignore them. If the Maquis got to them first, they were whisked away quickly and efficiently, and tested to see whether or not they were plants. In most cases they were then inducted into the Maquis, and told to shut up and do nothing except what they were told. “Appropriate training will be given when we can spare the time,” they were told. If they obeyed orders, and the Maquis would know, then about three weeks later they were once more whisked quickly away, to come back ten weeks later as a fully trained member.

If they were ex-police or military, no matter what age, they would be put through one of the few dozen medical tubes now available, and sent to one of four places in the country where they were reformed into their units. By the middle of April, the Maquis had increased in size by thirty percent from its size at the start of March. Many old and long defunct infantry regiments had been reformed, even if only the size of a reinforced company. Ex soldiers in their fifties, sixties and seventies all came out of ‘retirement’ and found they could help. Suddenly Britain had more trained troops than at any time since 1947. And Thorn’s government knew nothing about it.

Oddly, the nightly riots actually helped in the movement of food. Before hand, the patrol had all but blockaded the farms, taking the best food for themselves and senior government members. The riots had drawn away those Patrollers, so the farmers got far more of their winter and early spring crops to market, as well as those few crops they had been able to store from the previous autumn, like carrots, potatoes and other root vegetables. Milk prices went down slightly, the price of bread dropped, and even meat prices began to slowly decline. Some fruits became available. Unfortunately this also helped to bring in the black marketeers, who often made huge profits. Until the Maquis, and very occasionally even the Patrol itself, stepped in and ‘persuaded’ them to drop their prices. Many rural communities were now very definitely no-go areas for the Patrol.

There was also turmoil at the top of the Patrol. After the attack on Catterick Garrison, Gareth Boase had arrested four of the garrison’s senior surviving patrol officers. The senior officer who had been captured by the Maquis had been denounced by Boase as a traitor, and sentenced to death in his absence. His interrogators had shown him the recording of Boase’s announcement, and the man had at first collapsed, but had then turned on his superiors and given the Maquis a lot of very valuable information. Unfortunately he hadn’t known where either Adnan Hussan or Russell Sheard were, though he believed that Hussan was dead while Sheard was still alive and in captivity somewhere.

“Oy, you, make this work.”

“What?” Russell Sheard looked up painfully.

“Make this work.” One of his guards was holding a rifle out towards him.

“Why should I?”

“‘Cos I fucking asked nicely,” the Security Patrol prison guard snarled.

“Get me food and water. I haven’t had a drink for twenty-four hours, and nothing to eat in two or three days.”

“Ah diddums, the traitor’s crying because he’s hungry.”

“Traitor?” whispered Sheard hoarsely. “Coming from you that’s a compliment.”

“Huh?”

“He’s saying you’re, we’re, worse than a traitor,” said the other guard angrily.

“Fuckin’ fix it,” said the first guard.

Sheard just lay back on his thin mattress and closed his eyes. He cried out in agony when the rifle landed on top of him, striking him painfully on the face and chest. He opened his eyes automatically, grabbing at the rifle to push it off him.

“There’s no bullets in it, so even if you fix it, you can’t shoot us.”

Sheard automatically looked down at the rifle and then gave a mocking laugh when he caught sight of the small stickers on the butt. “Idiots,” he muttered, pushing it off him.

“Who are you calling idiots?” asked one angrily, just as the other asked why he was laughing.

“You’re the idiots.” muttered Sheard painfully, “and I’m laughing at you two for being so stupid.”

“It’s a real gun,” he was told.

“Oh, yeah. It’s a real gun all right, it a real DP gun you idiots.”

“DP?” asked one, puzzled.

“Drill Purpose,” snapped Sheard, pointing at the letters DP printed in large, bold, very black print on the stock.

There was a pause. “We were told that meant ‘dual purpose’?”

“Hah! No such thing. How long have you had it?”

“Weeks.”

“And how long have you been trying to make it work?”

“Same.”

“Weeks?”

“Yeah.”

“Hahaha, that’s so funny,” chuckled Sheard slightly hysterically.

“We’ve got twenty here and more ... er ... and ... and we need you to make them all work.”