Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (11 page)

Fearful, darting eyes could be seen blinking behind curtained windows; despite the weather, there was a repressed tension in the air that was brutally palpable, almost electric. Everyone knew – soldiers and civilians alike – that someone, anyone, could strike sparks anywhere. In Leeds, Wehrmacht soldiers who were billeted in the centre and at Armley Palace to the west patrolled cautiously through the central districts that still bore the marks of what had first been defence, and then frenzied, desperate rebellion. It had collapsed in impotent fury and defiance, much like the rival ideologies and social paradigms that had proven weak in the face of the insurmountable jackbooted beast that was international fascism; Mussolini’s lovechild had grown to an irrepressible, unruly and violent shyster; far outstripping the limits of power, murder and empire than even he could have foreseen in his halcyon days of the
March on Rome
.

Could Mussolini have possibly
dreamed
that his movement would snowball into a continental revolution; aided and abetted by the world’s oldest, largest and most powerful religious institution? Ten years later; Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s Spain rising up at his heels, the re-emergent German titan; teeth bared at the world that opposed them.

Everywhere Victorious
. Gods on Earth.

Bloodstains remained as grim scars on the pavestones of wide Leeds streets; the city centre tram shuttled its silent passengers east down the dual-carriage York Road throughway, all eyes averted from the quiet scenes of recent hellish, thunderous shouts, booming explosions and screams. The meeker members of the northern populace began to feel – even hope, to themselves – that their husbands, sons, brothers, neighbours of whomever the men in the movement may be would perhaps, in retreating, have ensured that present and future violence be kept away from the city. Some were glad, though none dared voice that selfish, survivalist hope. A
Trojan
hope, ultimately; the forlorn pipedream of a spectator that a victorious Hector’s duel on some distant plain would keep the bloodshed away from Ilium’s sacred walls, and the families sheltered within.

Public sacrifice had been made; a notable scapegoat horribly executed in warning.

The Lord Mayor had voiced public support for the continued armed struggle and defiance of London’s armistice that had been widespread across the north, following the capital’s June designation as an ‘open city’. After encountering fierce resistance along the Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds-Hull northern belt line, the Wehrmacht chose to exemplify the futility of opposing German arms. Leeds’ Lord Mayor Wythie’s fate was sealed. Under the express orders of Commander von Brauchitsch himself, the Wehrmacht had publicly hung the Lord Mayor with piano wire from the Leeds Town Hall, watched by silent, saddened crowds.

Almost comically inadequate, the most perfunctory of public announcements had informed the city’s inhabitants of the impending death of Willie Wythie, and the next day, hundreds of mostly soundless observers saw the spectacle of the old man jerking pitifully as he choked to death. Most claimed that a sense of decency and decorum prevented them from witnessing such a horrid event, while those few that did pointed out dryly that Hitler aside, the death penalty was still occasionally applied in Britain by the British themselves. Most, though, suffering losses of their own and in the immediate aftermath of recent conflict, declined to comment. Distress was widespread; at least one third of all families had lost one or more relatives, and many more still had sons, brothers, husbands and fathers with serious injuries, or who had been captured in battle, or conscripted to forced labour. Others fled for the hills, a disorganised rabble of resisters; well-armed, as each surprised rumour-monger had it, but
up against it
in every conceivable sense.

Lord Mayor Wythie, now thankfully still, was left hanging from the Town Hall turrets for the first month of occupation in its entirety, serving as a macabre reminder of the days of fighting, and a nasty warning against future dissent.

After initial hostility and a widespread attitude of what Wehrmacht chiefs deemed to be disrespectful, the watchful Germans were presented with another opportunity to instil fear through a single act of calculated callousness. Wythie’s target of the support that proved fatal was a known left-wing activist, who had been instrumental in drumming up support for the ‘people’s defence of Great Britain’ against its invaders, organising some structure to those in Yorkshire with arms, who were willing and capable. His name was Andrew Knaggs.

Quite by chance, the firebrand was snared during a clandestine meeting with members of a major trade union, whom he’d been passionately petitioning to rally round to the cause; an attempt to attract more men to the growing resistance. German troops were highly trained; the ambush had been performed clinically, with all potential belligerents eliminated with ease, save the target. The small, wiry figure, bearded and youthful, had tried to commit suicide upon capture, realising that escape was impossible, but was failed by the cyanide capsule he had bitten to no avail, its expired poison utterly useless. He was made an example of.

Spouting nothing but obscene curses and profane condemnations of the Germans, Knaggs refused to be cowed in the face of his tormentors as the Wehrmacht staged the most cursory of trials, quickly sentencing Knaggs to join Wythie on the gallows. It was with some regret that the soldiers assigned to the task sent the brave man to an excruciating, choking end, impressed as they were by his courage and the mesmerising vitality of his snarling defiance. However, every German who witnessed his fury was glad that such an enemy, one of revolutionary charisma and élan, had been eliminated from the fight.

“Andrew Knaggs, for crimes against the German Reich and serious contraventions of the Geneva Convention’s stipulated legal code of waging war; you are sentenced to death. Do you have anything to say?”

“Yes,” he sneered quietly, before raising his voice to the massing crowds at City Square. “Germany is a nation of fools! Fight, England,
fight
, and
fight
, and never quit, so that one day our children can live in peace–”

The executioner abruptly interrupted his exhortations, and the partisan leader slowly choked to death on the wire, blood bursting from his eyes and orifi.

To diminish the rebel’s continued legacy, Andrew Knaggs’ body was immediately taken down, and transported out of Leeds for discreet disposal. It was strongly rumoured the Gestapo tradition was to incinerate bodies and scatter the ashes in sewage. If this fate befell the rebel Knaggs, it is not known. The body of Leeds’ unfortunate Lord Mayor, by contrast, continued to dangle from the city’s symbolic administrative building, dangling eerily on the wire that killed him. Even in the weeks following his eventual removal, no children were to be seen for at least one mile in all directions from the great Hall.

To the north of that city centre past the park, St Mary’s school stood as a grand red-brick testament to Victorian England, its ornate architecture rising past high window arches to gothic spires and ridges in a formidable mound, like some kind of grim municipal building of a bygone medieval power-centre or 19
^th
century French lunatic asylum. To the more imaginative eye, one could envision some kind of sinister ritualistic neo-pagan festival taking place in its cavernous depths, or row after row of padded cells in a labyrinthine hell; the insane screaming and babbling their disjointed outpourings in a giant, man-made testament to the darker realities of human life, shut away to spare the sane from the discomfort of acknowledging them. In contrast, the parish church nestled into a space three times smaller on the other side of the leafy lane looked a poorer representation of God’s omnipresence. Older members of the parish maintained a haughty silence on the matter, while the younger, less religiously inclined joked that only in ‘God’s Own Country’, as Yorkshire was known, could such a thing be allowed.

In reality, the great building was host to a school of great warmth, and the invariably tentative, fearful first steps taken by five year old boys and girls into its high-ceilinged interior were for nought. Teachers here were young; so many of a lost generation had bled out their fledgling lives on the fields of Flanders, Ypres and Passchendaele that the following batch of teens nationwide were thrust into the adult world at a tender, school-leaving age. For St. Mary’s, youth had brought vigour, enthusiasm and fun. The corridors along the south side of the building were unfettered by additional storeys above them, and as such both they and the Cathedral-like Great Hall curved high overhead, supported by cast-iron arches and great beams.

“Back at the old castle,” the receptionist smiled from behind the glass of her partition. “Good to see you, Miss Rosenberg.”

“Good to be back,” Naomi replied fervently.

It really
was
. But already, there was a change, something almost imperceptible. Oversensitised by the implications of German victory, the young teacher was sure she detected something in the way Agnes had said her surname.
Rosenberg
. Perhaps she had merely imagined it.

“So…” Naomi continued, slightly nonplussed by her own suspicion. “Same as before, from the little I’ve heard? We continue as though nothing ever happened…”

“So no more tackling fires?” Agnes asked brightly, neither confirming nor denying the implied request, as though unaware that it was a probe for information.

“No,” Naomi answered with regret, abandoning her planned enquiries. “Back to usual.”

Usual
. As though there could ever be such a thing again. Perhaps there never was, she mused, just a series of drastic changes that generations grow accustomed to and which get taken for granted by their young.
Perhaps in fifty years England will be full of dedicated Nazis
, she thought, and shuddered. It was hard to picture it, but she knew that after years of occupation, what seemed so quaintly ‘normal’ to her now would appear to be impossible fantasy. Perhaps even
misguided
.

“Well,” Agnes chirped, “I suppose it’s best.”

“Best?” Naomi replied, a little loudly. “Agnes, who really knows what’s
best
anymore? All we can hope for is peace, for which we have to sacrifice our pride, or otherwise it will be repression, and then more of us sacrifice our lives.”

Peering through squinted eyes, Agnes gazed at Naomi curiously, her amused poise briefly broken, and the young teacher instantly regretted losing her own composure.

Just stay normal, and neutral
.

“Anyway,” she resumed, more cheerily, “I guess you’re right. All we can do is carry on. It’s great to be back at the school.”

She smiled as sweetly as she could, baring her teeth for maximal effect, and then extricated herself from the unnerving chat, strolling out and into the great corridor. Agnes’ eyes followed her until she disappeared from sight, before turning and sharing a
well-what-have-you-now
look with her fellow receptionist, whose nose was so high in the air that her mouth resembled the
Arc du Triomphe
entryway in miniature. The shared look was full of an unspoken meaning.

Naomi Rosenberg had once been a pupil at the school herself. The tall, slender long-legged young teacher turned the heads of older pupils as she strolled confidently through the corridors; emitting bonhomie, smiles and warm greetings were her currency, which she spent freely. That same long-legged lady had once been a slightly gangly, early-developed little girl with neither physical beauty nor mental focus, blundering through academic and social life alike with a graceless charm, showing little sign of the adult she would ultimately blossom into.

The school had closed upon the start of the war, remaining as such throughout ‘sitzkrieg’, and despite not being particularly patriotic in the standard sense – to King, Empire and flag – Naomi possessed a great love for the democratic ideals instilled in, and espoused by, the people of Great Britain; not to mention a profound dislike of the dictatorial fascist craze which had swept through the continent like a particularly unpleasant domino effect, with its totalitarianism and anti-Semitic persecution.

Furthermore, she loved Leeds. The city was perfect to Naomi; its place at the heart of the industrial revolution of the prior centuries in northern England was a transformation of grand development that nevertheless left room for large inner city parks, tree-lined roads and leafy suburbs aplenty. She loved the Leodensians, or ‘loiners’, the people of Leeds who, while being part of a modern city, often shared the particular Yorkshire idiosyncrasies of laconic humour, as fearlessly honest as they were broad in tone and dialect, and a prevailing dry understatement that she found endearing.

Spending time in nearby Roundhay Park by the lake, the public squares near her home, the city centre and its smaller park to the north, or even her own mostly terraced inner-city urban estate with a book, or in the company of friends, were the simple pleasures that city life in Leeds allowed Naomi to enjoy. She’d long since inwardly acknowledged her thankfulness that of all the places in the world her grandparents could have settled in the diaspora, they chose Leeds, Yorkshire, in the north of England.

Furthermore, Naomi possessed a fiercely independent streak, and on telling her father that she intended to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force – and being firmly rebuffed, on the grounds that
his
daughter ‘would
not
put
herself
in danger for another stupid war’ – Naomi rebelled. With the quiet pretence of acquiescence, the energised lass signed up for the Auxiliary Fire Service the very next day, slightly nervous, and then thrilled when acceptance came. Her response to the predictable outburst of anger from her father was to move out, and she found a nearby flat of her own. In the context of the time, it had seemed like nothing of import given the dramatic magnitude of the island’s predicament as a whole.

Sat on the roof, trying to seek out a blaze; underlying the collective fear and misery, Naomi was unashamedly thrilled with her role.