The Battersea Barricades Read online

  The

  Battersea

  Barricades

  A short story from

  The Chronicles of St Mary’s

  Jodi Taylor

  The 10th short story from The Chronicles of St Mary’s tells the story of the Battersea Barricades and the people who fought there.

  It’s not easy being a rebel.

  So many new skills to assimilate.

  Never mind strategic planning, weapons expertise and the like - there’s bicycle-stealing, oil-stain removal and boat steering to be mastered first.

  And quickly.

  It’s the time of the Civil Uprisings and two young women set out to make a difference.

  Their only problem?

  They don’t know where they are.

  Or where they’re going.

  Or what to do when they get there.

  Other than that …

  This story is dedicated to heroes everywhere. For many of us, the simple act of getting up in the morning can take nearly all the courage we possess, and actually going on to face the day takes care of the rest. Many people lead what has been described as ‘lives of quiet desperation’. They’re not called upon to defeat an army or climb a mountain or defy a god, but simply to put one foot in front of the other, to keep going, often with no hope even of respite, let alone a happy ending. Their struggles are personal and private. No one ever makes a movie of their lives. They’re not called to Buckingham Palace to receive a medal and they certainly never make the headlines. But they’re heroes nevertheless, and this little story, such as it is, is dedicated to every single one of them.

  Dramatis Thingummy

  Mrs Theresa Mack

  Rebel leader. Future Kitchen Supremo at St Mary’s.

  Mrs Elizabeth Shaw

  Communications clerk. Bicycle thief. Motorbike thief. Trainee rebel. Future grandmother and assistant to Dr Peterson.

  Mrs Mavis Enderby

  Oil-covered logistics officer. As per Mrs Shaw, above, excluding the grandmother bit. Future Head of Wardrobe at St Mary’s.

  An old bargewoman

  Delivering ‘textiles’ from Bolivia, together with two potential but confused rebels. Could be a grandmother – who knows?

  River police officer

  No time for tea. Surprisingly unobservant in the matter of ‘textiles’ from Bolivia. Very sound on WD40. Probably not a grandmother

  Dr Bairstow

  Director of St Mary’s.organiser of commemorative surprises. Not a grandmother.

  Dr Maxwell

  Head of the History Department. Still struggling with Motherhood 101 and very unlikely to live long enough to achieve grandmother status.

  Mr Markham

  Head of the Security Section. Not a grandmother. Marital and paternal status uncertain and not addressed in this tale.

  Mr Strong and Miss Lingoss

  Flight path executives.

  Together with members of St Mary’s, rebels, soldiers, politicians and other ne’er do wells you wouldn’t want hanging around your grandmother. Although, on second thoughts, your grandmother would probably have been there, on the front line, enthusiastically chucking bricks at the authorities. Never underestimate what your grannie got up to when she was younger.

  St George killed a fire-breathing dragon. He’s the patron saint of England. I don’t know why – he was born in Cappadocia, executed in Lydda, and slew the dragon in Silene, which I think is in Libya – but, patron saint of England he is.

  Here’s another useful nugget of info concerning St George’s Day – 23rd April. According to Professor Rapson, if you gather your dandelions on St George’s Day then your dandelion wine will be perfect for drinking on Midsummer’s Day.

  Whether or not that’s true, I have no idea. I remember Professor Rapson, standing his fermenting demijohns on the windowsills in R&D and saying, ‘Sunlight, Max. You can’t get enough of it. For the purposes of wine, that is,’ shortly before managing to blow out all the windows five days before ‘D-Day’. That’s ‘Drinking Day’, as Miss Lingoss helpfully explained to me while we inspected the wreckage. How five demijohns managed to take out eight windows, two whiteboards and a desk was a bit of a mystery and Miss Lingoss’ suggestion that we weaponise the wine and offer it to the Ministry of War was firmly rejected by Dr Bairstow, himself in no good mood after yet another punitive visit from the provisional wing of the Society for the Protection of Historical Buildings – pronounced SPOBE. In vain did I try to raise his spirits by pointing out that, in the future, they would change their name to the Society for the Protection of English Regalia and Monuments, pronounced … I was instructed to vacate his office forthwith and to take Dr Peterson with me.

  That was pretty much the end of the professor’s wine-making career. Those of us who had listened in anticipation to the really quite energetic gloop, gloop, gloop of enthusiastic fermentation suffered some disappointment, although, as Peterson pointed out, if it could devastate the entire eastern end of R&D what would it have done to our delicate stomach linings? I should probably mention that this disappointment would have been tempered by enormous relief from the more thoughtful and sensible members of St Mary’s if, as Leon said, we had been able to find these thoughtful and sensible members of St Mary’s in the first place.

  I don’t know why I’m maundering on about wine. It has absolutely nothing to do with the story, so, trudging back to St George’s Day …

  It was St George’s Day at St Mary’s. That’s the St Mary’s Institute of Historical Research. We’re located just outside Rushford, although, as Leon often points out, if I don’t keep a firm grip on Professor Rapson, Miss Lingoss, Mr Swanson and all the other nutters in R&D, we won’t be located here for very much longer. We investigate major historical events in contemporary time. With the professor’s wine dripping off the ceiling and not an unbroken window in sight, now would not be a good moment to call it time travel.

  Anyway, returning with dogged determination to St George’s Day … It was St George’s Day at St Mary’s and most of us were wearing a rose. No, not the same rose, obviously. It’s at this point Markham always gives thanks for not being Welsh – as, I suspect, do the Welsh – because he says he would never know where to put his leek. Mr Evans frequently offers to demonstrate. Markham points out that Evans is from Halifax so what does he know, and there’s often a bit of a scuffle, resulting in a light blizzard of Deductions From Wages to Pay for Damages Incurred forms dropping from on high.

  So – where was I? St George’s Day at St Mary’s. Done that. Roses. Yes, we’ve done that, too. Have I mentioned the fire-breathing dragon? As Miss Lingoss had pointed out in the scorched aftermath of that particular trauma – it had been a perfectly legitimate experiment designed to ascertain whether it was possible for a dragon to manufacture and breathe fire without blowing its own head off and yes, all right, shame about the apple tree, but it would probably grow back. Better than ever. Like eucalyptus trees. I’d felt a headache coming on and requested she go and annoy someone else.

  Returning yet again to the present – St George’s Day – Rosie Lee, my assistant – and trust me, you’re far more likely to catch sight of a fire-breathing dragon than of her actually doing any work – had pushed off early. ‘It’s St George’s Day, Max,’ as if that was any sort of excuse, and I was alone which, trust me, at St Mary’s, is not necessarily a Bad Thing.

  I tidied up a bit, dictated two reports and pulled out a copy of next month’s assignments to take down to Mrs Enderby in Wardrobe so she could make a start on assembling the costumes.

  I knew something was going on outside because, at his request, I’d loaned the entire History Department to Professor Rapson. I could hear voices. Lots of voices. B
ut no screaming. Not yet, anyway. I would investigate later when it was too late for me to be implicated in whatever was about to happen. I grabbed the schedule and trotted around the gallery, down the stairs, through the deserted Great Hall, and into the Wardrobe Department.

  The three of them were sitting together at the far end of the room. They were all wearing black with a red rose pinned to their dresses. Mrs Mack had kicked off her shoes and sat with her legs curled underneath her. Mrs Enderby sat primly in her seat, unusually free from the French chalk that was a hazard of her profession, and Mrs Shaw was staring blankly out of the window. They were in a world of their own.

  I had forgotten today was their anniversary. I don’t know how I managed that. It’s not as if the dates and events hadn’t been drummed into us in school. But I had.

  I’m going to digress again. Brace yourselves.

  Constitutional monarchy. People think because the monarch reigns rather than rules, he or she has no teeth. That’s not actually true – something people who think our hereditary monarchy should be replaced by easily bought, corrupt, publicity-seeking criminals with egos the size of a planet, or politicians as they’re sometimes known, don’t seem to be able to comprehend.

  The monarch advises and warns and, because he or she can say no, a wise politician – sorry, just struggling with the unfamiliar use of the words ‘wise’ and ‘politician’ in the same sentence – a wise politician ensures they never have to. It’s a system that worked well, give or take a few tweaks, until comparatively recently. Until something went wrong. No one knows what. The details are restricted under the Hundred Years Rule and possibly won’t be made public even then, because no politician wants the electorate to realise that power actually resides with the people, so no one knows exactly what happened, but something did.

  ‘Constitutional Crisis’, shrieked the headlines. Except in the Daily Mail, of course – this was before it was banned – which led with a double page full-colour spread on women in the public eye, highlighting their losing battle with cellulite.

  Anyway, it seemed the government either had done or planned to do something even more amazingly stupid than usual. It would probably all have died down eventually, but the old king, an amiable duffer by all accounts and idealistically the polar opposite of then very right-wing government, made a statement. It was comparatively mild – as he was himself – but it flicked the government on the raw. And then, having chucked the royal cat amongst the political pigeons, he went on to make an extremely ill-advised broadcast to the nation, attempting to explain his position and justify his actions. He would have done better to have kept quiet. You could almost hear Edward I, a man who never explained or justified anything in his entire life, turning in his grave.

  The government, alarmed by the magnitude of support for the royal point of view, panicked, and assumed what it called Emergency Powers, and what everyone else called Losing the Plot.

  Sadly, despite his best efforts, the old king had only succeeded in making things very much worse. He was bundled from the political scene before he could do any more harm and despatched to Scotland – which was being even more than normally fractious – on the grounds that each deserved the other.

  There was a great deal of muttering across the country, which probably wouldn’t have come to much because we’re British and we mutter all the time, albeit quite politely, but having got the hang of overreacting, the government, aware of what had happened in the US, suspended a few more civil liberties and announced their latest, greatest idea – the possible future introduction of what they liked to call, ‘The People’s President’.

  Once everyone stopped laughing, however, this was discovered to be a very real threat and suddenly people woke up. The thing is – in this country, everything belongs to the Crown and not the government. The police and armed forces swear their oath of allegiance to the monarch and his/her elected government. The courts belong to the monarch. People are detained at His Majesty’s pleasure. The laws might be passed by Parliament, but they’re upheld by the Royal Courts. The real power of the throne is that it holds no powers itself, but prevents those powers being held by others, which means that, theoretically, the government can’t arrest a bunch of dissidents and bundle them into court with instructions to the judge to find them guilty and send them down for twenty years.

  Well, obviously, all that was being kicked into touch and people didn’t like it. That’s not the way we do things. We’ve chopped people’s heads off for less. Politely, of course.

  The mutterings increased and in Cardiff, of all places, people channelled Owain Glyn Dŵr and Llewellyn the Great and, for all I know, Ifor the Engine, and took to the streets to voice their opinion of things in general and the government in particular.

  And not just in Cardiff. All over Wales they came down from the mountains, climbed out of the valleys and sang at people. Well, no, obviously they didn’t, but you get the drift.

  The Northern Irish, writhing under the yoke of British oppression – they said – joined in as well, and the Scots, never ones to be late to a party, lined up behind Hadrian’s Wall and prepared for the traditional summer pursuits of cattle rustling, maiden-snatching and independence declaring.

  I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. And, obviously, it wasn’t a spontaneous uprising. None of this happened overnight. It took about a decade for the slow erosion of freedoms and civil liberties to come to a head. It wasn’t a case of a single section of society feeling disconnected. Everyone felt disconnected. The government had finally achieved a perfect score because, now, no one was happy. Anyway, inevitably, matters came to a head.

  It was a long, hot summer. Tempers frayed, hosepipe bans were imposed, England were kicked out of the first round of the World Cup, beaten 3 - 0 by the People’s Republic of Somewhere Or Other, population twenty-five thousand if you included the livestock. Suddenly a further series of draconian laws hit the statute books, rushed through the Commons on the nod and not allowed anywhere near the House of Lords at any price because some twenty or thirty of the few remaining peers had publicly announced their intention of kicking the Bill up the arse – together with the government it came in on. The House of Lords was quietly ignored and everyone geared themselves up for the Summer of Discontent.

  I don’t think anyone expected things to escalate quite so quickly or quite so dramatically. Troops were despatched to Cardiff – to ensure public safety, they said, and for the good maintenance of order. Anti-government protesters became out-and-out rebels and took to the streets.

  Terrified of losing what control remained, the government tried to tighten its grip and succeeded only in losing it completely. It must have been like clutching at smoke. The tiny town of Thirsk – at no small cost to themselves – publicly declared their support for Cardiff. Additional troops were deployed northwards and we were off.

  Violence began to spread across the country like a fringe of fire on lighted newspaper. Pitched battles were fought in the streets. Property was destroyed. Schools and universities closed. Local authorities were disbanded and their powers claimed by the government. Only temporarily, of course. They said. Public gatherings of more than five people were forbidden. Hundreds of people were hurt. Some died. The government issued warning after warning. Additional powers were granted to the police and the military. Habeas corpus was suspended. There were running battles in the streets.

  Of course, when law and order breaks down, everything breaks down. The streets weren’t safe, even during daylight. There were food riots and power cuts which led to widespread looting. Private scores were settled, and it seemed there was no way of preventing the country from sliding into anarchy and chaos.

  The government hit back. Those deemed to be … less British … were informed they were no longer welcome. Political dissidents – and there were a lot of them by this time – were rounded up. Snatch squads at dawn became a common event and the rest of the world looked on, appalled, as Britain seemed set to disa
ppear, like Narnia, in fire and water.

  There was no one to help. Europe was imploding. No one had a clue what was happening in the US, but according to the few who had made it out, it wasn’t good. Russia and China had stopped talking to one another which was generally reckoned to be about the only good news around. Storms, droughts, and floods played havoc across the world. People started to believe that it was the beginning of the end of the world.

  What turned the tide was the return of Princess Mary from Canada. Strictly speaking, she wasn’t a princess at all. She’d renounced all that and emigrated to Canada to become a doctor. Refused permission to train or practice in this country, presumably in case some litigious republican tried to sue her for saving his life, she’d told the establishment to go forth and multiply, signed an enormous number of official documents and pushed off to live, as princesses do, happily ever after somewhere else.

  They’d welcomed her with open arms in Canada, where she’d made a new life for herself, marrying a palaeontologist with a beard and raising a family – all of whom turned out to be trouble right from the word go. I always think it’s good to see the old traditions being carried on by the younger generation.

  Anyway, Princess Mary, as the world insisted on calling her, obviously hadn’t renounced quite as much as the establishment might have wished. Returning to Wales as an ordinary member of one of the many international medical teams despatched to care for those tragically wounded in recent unfortunate events, she found herself regarded as the natural focus of those wishing to raise the flag and make a stand. It was Henry Bolingbroke at Ravenspur all over again. Except she landed at Cardiff Airport, but you know what I mean.

  People flocked to her from all over the country. She was hailed as the nation’s saviour. The government went ballistic and attempted to deport her. Cardiff rose up and the streets, almost literally, ran with blood. They fought for the best part of two days. Half of Cardiff was levelled. Street to street fighting became house to house fighting and then room to room fighting.