Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (12 page)

Months of fire service; the sense of duty and belonging intoxicated her. Then, initially with a savage anti-climax, the Germans came to British shores. Calamity ensued; before long, violent conflict scarred the streets of Leeds and the feeling of anti-climax soon dissipated in the awful midst of war. Thankfully, guerilla action in the urban settlement was as quick as it was bloody. Calm descended. The smoke began to clear.

After a while, St. Mary’s reopened, now incorporating the 11-16 class along with the smaller children. And Naomi, ruefully, returned to her vocation. The new, older pupils stared with the transparency of youth, their instincts for tact not yet honed. Some mumbled embarrassed replies at their own feet, as she beamed in greeting.

Only when she’d turned a corner did she lean against the wall, burying her face in her hands. After what felt like hours but was likely a legitimate twelve seconds, she heard a familiar little cough, which was usually attached to the shadow of a smile and slightly raised eyebrows, an affected air of near-permanent amusement. It was a friend. Naomi looked up with dry, if tired eyes into the boyish face of Paul Heggerty.

“Paul!”

“Hey,” he replied, so quietly she sensed rather than heard him.

“Can we talk?”

“Not here,” he said quickly.

She followed him through the great doors to the stairwell, where they ascended one floor to the library, footsteps echoing on the polished, gleaming wood. When they got there, Paul opened the door but seemed to think better of it, in case old Betty the librarian was lurking in some quiet corner amidst the dusty tomes. They stayed in the corridor outside. Naomi leaned against the wall tiredly, worry lines bitten into her pale skin.

They didn’t exchange a word, and he embraced her. They clung tightly to each other, and he felt a shift in her body’s tension as she relaxed into him. The two friends had touched before – a nudge here, a playful poke in the ribs there, a cheeky pinch or, as at Christmas the year prior, a prim peck on his soft cheek, while flushed with wine – but never like this. Despite being her junior by two years, he held her as a father would; fingers running through her hair, surreptitiously stretching on his tiptoes as the tall Naomi laid her head heavily into his shoulder. He quietly breathed in her scent, nostrils grazing her curly, jet black locks. For all his jokes and jibes at her expense, which were repaid fully in kind, underneath the good-natured teasing Paul was slightly in awe of his friend’s staggering physical gravitas – a combination of beauty and a perceptible goodness of spirit – and even more so of her total ignorance of it. She seemed entirely unaware of her own physical splendour. This embrace, however, was one of concern.

Eventually he broke it, suppressing his self-congratulation in doing so. He often second-guessed his actions even as he performed them, and at the worldly age of 23 Paul Heggerty was trying to simultaneously eliminate as much of the self-regard and the introspective recrimination as possible.

Naomi’s head remained bowed after he released her.

“How are you?” He started tentatively.

One wide-eyed look in return was enough to tell him all he needed to know. But she too was surprised; gone was her jovial, sharp-witted, cocksure, mocking friend and in his place stood an uncertain and worried man.

“I know this must be hard for you,” he tried again. She forced herself to perk up. It was good just to hear that broad Leeds accent, which somehow didn’t suit his baby-faced appearance and cheeky, jesting nature.

“It’s hard for everyone, Paul. We’re all in the same boat.”

He contradicted her, partly out of habit.

“Perhaps, but your boat is a little less safe than the one I’m floating along in. For a start, there’s a big Star of David-sized hole in it, and a bloodthirsty shark with a moustache swimming underneath.”

She glared at him. Even now, he could still bring himself to wind her up. She did concede, though, that the familiarity of his jesting tone helped normalise the situation.

“I can swim.”

“I know that,” Paul replied, more evenly. “There are a lot of people in the same situation who can swim. Sometimes it’s best to be on dry land, with the ground under your feet.”

“Well, we’re all under the same thumb, anyway.”

“It’s a nasty thumb to be under.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I
do
worry,” he told her, voice noticeably softening, and he seemed so obviously sincere that she couldn’t help but smile, even snigger a little bit. But not a trace of amusement showed in his green, hazel-flecked eyes, or the slightly open pout of his thick-lipped mouth. He held her eyes, briefly, and then looked away without smiling. A small tilt of her head drew no reaction, and she whistled.

“Good heavens, you really do care don’t you?”

“Yes.”

The grin faded, and as he calmly turned she held his eyes, compelling him to elaborate. He sighed, without melodrama, with only the small involuntary movements of his hands accompanying the entreaty he made.

“I’m worried for you, Naomi. I
am
worried. I’ve seen Berlin under this lot. Visited for t’ Games in ’36, and it were’ bloody ugly I tell you. If the Nuremberg Laws were owt to go by, you’ll be out’ a job at the very least, perhaps an ’ome too, and if t’ rumours are true about German-Jewish relations in Poland as we speak then employment’s the
last
thing you should worry-”

“Paul! I get it! I understand!”

She’d tried to interject breezily, just to cut short such disturbing ruminations, but stress forced its delivery out in a sharper tone than she’d intended. She sounded scared, and knew it.
With reason
, she conceded.

Silence was compressed in the great hall, made more intense by the immensity of its surrounding space. When Paul answered, after twenty undemonstrative seconds, he spoke soothingly. “I know. I just want you to be very careful, me lass.
Very
careful. Head up, ears pricked. Even with the racist rags taken off the newspaper stands and the whole thing toned down, we still saw some very ugly scenes in Berlin. Over here they might not get to every man, woman and child for whatever mad scheme they’ve got going, but teachers, doctors and lawyers–”

“I know–”

“–which is why you should consider dropping out quietly, and perhaps even going underground,” he finished without missing a beat, his voice louder. “Cos eventually your lot over there ’ad to register. They’ll be watching certain professions ’ere. And teaching kids? The next generation, the future?” Paul shook his head bitterly, partly in sadness, but tinged by scorn and contempt. “You know what’s going on.”

And she did. While the south remained under an uncertain occupation, by all accounts, the bile and fury of Germany’s enmity of England raged
here
, and against the Scottish rebels to the north. Leeds, and Manchester and Liverpool to the west had been securely occupied by now, after bitterness and revolts. Then word had gotten out; SS-Gestapo were quietly operating behind the Wehrmacht’s back, acting in secrecy, their quiet suppressions obscured by the fogs of war.

Even as life continued as before, ugly reprisals had been taking root.

“We don’t know for sure that the Gestapo raids are happening,” she said quietly.

Paul shook his head sadly, but firmly. “SS raids. Whatever their label, they’re not even bothering with the plain clothes schtick, I’m afraid.”

Naomi smiled wanly. “I doubt they’ll care about a twenty-four year old Jewish girl up north who teaches kids English.”

Paul hesitated, briefly. “Education, medicine and law were the first professions to be hit in Germany after the Nuremberg Laws. Naomi, please don’t underestimate the news that SS raids are transpiring on British soil. These are
death raids
,” he hissed, instantly regretting his lack of tact as her bloodless face fell.

Those great enemies of the National Socialists, whose implacable enmity was eternal and assured, were attacked openly and with righteous indignation. It was in the style of a crusade; liberation by violence, the bacteria of society removed from the organism to save it – that being, the ideal human society as held dear by the Nazis. The freemasons’ lodges had been smashed, as had various other institutions deemed conspiratorial and working for the destruction of western civilisation. Synchronising the concentration of public demonstrations of a worldview that was
everywhere victorious,
the British Union of Fascist Blackshirts burst triumphantly back out into the open, and in greater numbers than ever. Preening with naked arrogance, those who did not renounce the foreign occupation as an affront to their British identity were happy to assist German and Italian efforts to enshrine fascist ideology on newly claimed soil. Outside the preexisting British fascist party, local chapters of the Anglo-German Friendship Bund were springing up, although here and there, it was commonly known, solitary arrests were being made in the dead of night. Some, it was said, were for reasons that seemed entirely preposterous and impossible to reconcile with the victimised people in question.

One rumour persisted, strongest of all; some kind of book existed that identified
Enemies Of National Socialism
. ‘The Black Book’, people whispered; peculiarly, Naomi thought, as though its colour mattered or made it more sinister. Death lists could be scribbled on newspaper scraps from
The Yorkshire Post
. It was the actions that were fearful.

Fear of books and lists. It seemed ludicrous. People with guns, without empathy and given immunity from illegality were the death plague.

Naomi smiled, her poise recovered. “Doubt my name’s in their book, Paul.”

“Well that’s one thing I’m not gonna joke about.”

“You don’t like book jokes?”

At that, he winced.

“Come on Paul,” she winked, tone breezy. “Books? Is
that
what we’re worried about?”

He stared resolutely at her, determination bleeding green in his eyes and Naomi looked away, discomfited by the vehemence of his concern.

No one was quite sure, but most of the arrests reported were being attributed to this ‘black book’. Men of fighting age were by and large either with the resistance, were working quietly in their ‘necessary’ jobs (‘collaborators’, it was said, with not inconsiderable guilt, that the resisting men and women were calling these mostly city-based workers who continued to maintain and produce under the Germans) or had been conscripted en masse with tens of thousands of others to the continent. Meanwhile, there was some tittle tattle regarding the book – it was now widely claimed that some of the names on it were dead, or had emigrated years prior. The running joke was that Sigmund Freud was to be arrested posthumously, and that California resident Aldous Huxley was sentenced to death in absentia -
A Brave New World
, indeed.

But for all the gallows humour, the SS Security Police and SD were no joke.
SiPo und SD
, as they were called, comprised of the Gestapo secret police, the German criminal police, and the SS-secret intelligence service – each branch under Reinhard Heydrich’s tender care, and apparently entrusted to some sinister Colonel named Six in England; another doctor, one of the intellectual gangsters Heydrich had staffed his SD with.

“You know full well they run the camps in Germany,” Paul pointed out.

“Yeah,” she replied nonchalantly, trying to deflect his blunt observation.

“And they’ve taken over army and RAF barracks here…” he pressed on, hesitant to drum the point home. She sighed.

“Yes. I have thought about it.”

The SS, so rumour had it, arrived soon after the Wehrmacht’s inexorable advance and apparently acquisitioned the main Yorkshire army barracks at Catterick Camp, which could hold 40,000 people. The visions of barbed wire camps filled with emaciated internees in typhus-filled long-huts were at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

“
Laying low
, let’s call it… is better than potentially ending up in there.
Potentially
.”

She contemplated it quietly. Paul did not move a muscle.

“Underground… like a rat?” she said flatly. “Like the vermin they say we are?”

Paul’s reply was firm. “No. Like a wonderful, flawed human being the same as me or anyone else, but one who’s in danger and needs to be safe.”

The words felt awkward and clumsy on his lips, but he neither blushed nor stammered. She changed the subject; not out of embarrassment, flustered though she was – and had been for weeks – but to explain herself.

“I can’t, Paul. Besides, losing my employment might not even come as a result of ethnicity.”

He looked at her blankly, and she sighed.

“Have you ever noticed I’m a woman?”

“Yes, but I don’t think your parents would approve of me,” he quipped.

She mused inwardly that in times of stress, he seemed to revert to little wisecracks as a safety mechanism. In all fairness, it was an admirable attitude.

“With good reason. Anyway, I am. A
woman
. And Nazis don’t like women, not outside in the world doing man things… like working. They don’t want us doing anything ending in ‘ing’ – I’m sure they’d ban us from eating and fornicating if it weren’t for childbirth.”

“You can…” he began, but the joke died on his lips. As radically liberated as her humour and tastes were for a modern woman, even post-Pankhurst, the implications of her ethnicity were too serious to act the fool, as ludicrous as the Nazi definition of a ‘Jew’ was. Paul realised how naïve he would appear should he continue to make flippant jests, and he stifled his instincts. Taking advantage of his uncertainty, Naomi pressed home her point.

“Paul, you should know my job’s at risk anyway. Forget race. The woman’s place is at home, producing good Aryan children. Not so Aryan in my case, obviously…”

“That doesn’t matter. Fu… bugger the job – you’ll always teach. You’re born for it. But –”

She interjected, resuming her point: “–Have you seen what they want us to teach?”

He looked discomfited, but nodded.

“They want the Protocols taught as
fact
to the children of this country. They’ve been debunked by more journalists as a fraud than the Dreadnought Hoax, let alone scholars. Have you read them?”