NaNoWriMo Story 5/5 (November 2011): (working title: Why I Should Get the Conservatory)

NaNoWriMo Story 5/5: Why I Should Get the Conservatory

Written on a train between Sleaford and Skegness, 4.55-6pm, Wednesday 23^rd November 2011

TO COPY UP FROM NOTEBOOK

NaNoWriMo Story 4/5 (November 2011): The Demon Grief

The two girls enter the attic. They both seem at first glance to be about the same age; both straggly blonde and leggy, it’s impossible to make out much more than that in the gloom, and even less possible considering the one in front has just swung a massive torch around the room, shining it into all four corners of the spacious, cardboard-box-filled attic (there’s not much else in here apart from cardboard boxes, as it happens.) The girl behind her carries no torch; she seems, instead, in fact, to shine almost with some kind of inner light: something that’s not quite visible, as such, as light, but it’s as if your eyes are drawn to her as soon as you notice her, like some kind of magnet – a reversed perception filter from Doctor Who would be a fairly-close-to-perfect example. Wherever she is, you notice her. But it’s not she who is doing most of the noticeable stuff at the moment – she is just standing, slightly limply, in the attic doorway, obscuring the half-lit view of the yawning wooden spiral stairs, grey in the relative darkness, standing there and staring sort of dreamily into space. The one moving around the attic, opening boxes, now, that’s the other one, the one with the torch.

“Hey, Connie, look what I’ve found,” comes a voice, and you realise you’ve been captivated by the girl still standing in the doorway. Only now, at the sound of her – sister’s? Can they be sisters? They seem so – different, somehow – yet so similar – anyway, at the sound of her for-the-sake-of-argument-let’s-say-sister’s voice, she finally stirs out of her reverie and takes a slightly clumsy half-step forwards into the attic, looking at the left far corner, where the darker girl – illumination-wise, that is – is rooting around in the third of the cardboard boxes she has unpacked and whose contents she has roughly piled into categories on the attic floorboards, in what must have been at least three or four minutes since the girls came in, judging by how neat and numerous the piles are, and by the darker girl’s attitude. The darker girl straightens up, and you can see, if you crane your neck slightly to the right – but wait not too far you don’t want to be seen – a sad half-smile on her face as she turns round and beholds her [sister], who – somehow – how didn’t you see that? Weren’t you watching her as she crossed the room, entranced by whatever it is in her that entrances you? – has crossed most of the room and now is standing right before her – screw it, saying “sister” from now on till evidence suggests otherwise – and I don’t think it will – watching as the less remarkable sister (who is still pretty hot, when you can focus your mind on appraising her) rummages gently in the top layers of the box again and holds out something to the other one. Struggling not to watch her face, its every contour, detail, mole, tooth point, skin flake – as she receives it, you focus hard instead on the object being passed , and you see that it’s a small sheaf of A5 papers, around twenty in all, bound together by something you can’t see.

All of a sudden, the light sister chokes back something of a sob – and now it’s all you can do not to echo in howling sympathy; your whole body is convulsing in an ecstasy of wracking grief and you don’t know why but it’s terrible horrible oh god everyone is dead everyone you ever love is gone forever oh – and then, suddenly, it’s over, and instead you are flooded with a sentiment you don’t feel properly, can’t understand – it’s quite a bit more peaceful, easier to tolerate, and you almost relax until you realise that your previous convulsion has left the very end of your right plimsoll sticking out from behind the biggest pile of corner cardboard boxes, and you pull it back in – quick but not too quick, as quickly as you dare – and you squint again from behind the box at your eye-level, and the terrible girl’s face now bears her sister’s former half-smile, radiant and yet awe-inspiring in its controlled sadness: would that your own grief could progress that far. 

She speaks, then, and you are so engrossed in her emotion – in both of their emotions, though with the darker girl it’s just another case of commonorgarden empathy – so prized until five minutes ago, until you were faced with her sister’s mirror emotion, like a lifelong Platonic scholar coming face to face with the True Form of his beloved in heaven – the epitome of grief long-held, of regret, of that oh-so-elusive quality, acceptance. Where were you? So engrossed in her emotion – so engrossed in the lighter girl’s emotion, that it is a few moments – time enough for you to have gone through the whole confusing diatribe of thoughts through which you’ve gone in the half-second since she started speaking – before you realise that she is saying words – beautifully, rhythmically enunciated but eventually-undeniably plain old English words – and you can hear what they are.

“I’d forgotten about this. What is it – Mum’s party speech?”

Every syllable she speaks seems to last a beautiful eternity, hanging in the air like a thousand rainbows of a thousand and seven hitherto undiscovered colours – and then the darker girl, a hottie to be sure, but one who only reminds you, in her sister’s presence, that the phrase “take-your-breath-away” is usually only meant as a metaphor, replies:

“Yeah.” She too sounds wistful – human wistful. “From my thirteenth, you remember? With the Earth cake?”

The lighter girl is nodding. It makes you feel a little dizzy, watching the rhythm of her head, up and down, up and down, up – she is speaking again. “Just like Mum,” she says, and tosses her hair back – only a few inches, but enough for you to imagine being caressed by all the gentle waves and horse manes in the world – “always make the most epic deal possible out of everything.”

With a daughter like you, you think, I’m not really surprised.

You have just spoken to this girl. In your mind, but you imagined yourself speaking to her, this wonder of humanity and delicacy-in-every-sense. You feel the red flush crawling up your neck and cheeks, it makes the memory of asking Mary Sandhurst out behind the bikesheds and stammering and almost crying even before she gave her answer and then falling on the ground trying to pick up the books you didn’t even feel fall from your arms when she let you down gently, feel like a pissing contest at grammar with Jake and Ogilvy, crude and coarse and nearly meaningless – and then you realise she can’t see you – you think – and you relax a little again, the hairs on your neck and back bristling in the caramel of her breeze, listening as her little? sister says, “That was life for her, you know?” More nodding from the other. You try to concentrate – and manage it, for now. The one you can look at – be turned on by, if the circumstances were different – continues. “Everything’s a celebration, and celebrations are everything.” She smiles, you see it out of the corner of your eyes. The lighter one reciprocates, and then, coming from out of nowhere a sound which hammers piledriving into you as if you are being smashed, pounded against the breakwater in the screaming, keening wind of a storm which makes Hurricane Jill look like the steaming heat haze of ’13. A brief escaping choking sob, completely without control, for just a second, like peeling away the long-fixed mask of a person imprisoned long decades in the dark, only to be freed by some traumatic accident and realise, looking down on the blasted outside surface, that all they had is gone forever lost. All humans can do it. You wish you could. The prison has been cloying now, suffocating now, for too long. Even to think about J – to think about her the way this uber-girl is thinking of her mother – oh, it would be an inordinate blessing, a blessing among blessings, to be free, to face down the screaming pain with dignity and epic middle fucking finger, but it hasn’t happened, but this girl is experiencing her own equivalent, and it is a knife, a knife in the gut and the heart, but a knife made of butter, a salve for all the wounds and not forgottens of the ages.

 As you watch, the dark girl starts towards her sister, who puts a hand up to her mouth, shakes her head once, takes her hand away, and smiles. Tears are storming rivers across the smoothed-out barrens of her cheeks. The smile is an embrace, a strong embrace, of everything that is beyond you and everything you still have to cry with joy about, to throw your head back so far it cricks your neck, to toss your hair and shriek. It’s like when you’ve been fumbling around in the dark for so long you can’t remember when you weren’t, praying even, as times get more and more desperate and the fleeting memories of not-dark further and further away, to the unholiest and cruellest of probably-not-there gods, to set you free – and suddenly you find the light-switch, and you remember what living is, and why it’s worth it.

The darker girl is hugging her sister, whose light is mostly now obscured, but still: the strange not-light blazes nuclear out from the light girl, so much so that you see an image of a mere evolved ape falling inexorably towards the sun, so close now she’s barely a dot against a giant flaming screen of furious some-colour, and you think: why doesn’t she burn?       

The dark girl is whispering something in the light girl’s ear. The light girl nods again; you feel your stomach tremble. Then she smiles (you close your eyes in ever-precious pain), and the two of them turn around, their embrace breaks (why why why in the name of god why must all the people of the world bump against each other and truly touch so seldom): the sheaf of papers still clutched in the light girl’s silken glorious hand, and head away and to your left. They are sitting down on the floor, and your breath quickens: you try to hide it, slow it down, but it is hard to focus: at any rate, five seconds or so have passed and they haven’t seemed to notice you. They sit cross-legged, as ordinary girls at a sleepover, facing each other, and the light girl tosses her hair (your eyes moisten), clears her throat (the sound hits you like a lozenge grasped for and ingested in delirium) and begins to read.

Her voice is strident, wavering, proud, a rough ocean demanding fealty from those sailors daring to traverse her. Every swell is a breath of life’s freshest air, and every dip is a submergence in all the uterine glory of the creation of the world: alive, alive and brimming with completely harsh but beautiful reality:

“Hi! You can call me Lib, but my full name is technically Libertas Afrincula Jemileh Gasaver Homnelatuk. I suppose the end’s like those Mordor names in LOTR, isn’t it! Funny, that, what with my being a demon and all – I never really thought of that before. Hah. Anyway, obviously, don’t get scared, I’m a very nice person, and a very nice mum, too, as I’m sure Connie and Calista will tell you – I hope, heh – and, anyway, you know there’s a lot of different types of demons. Why do you think these drama writers keep coming up with so many different kinds? It depends which ones they’ve happened to run into. Demons have been around for 212,259 years, after all, ever since you lot started to notice stuff. Anyway, don’t let me get off on a tangent – my point is that I’m one of the ones who have powers – I can set fire to things with my eyes and hands, and shift dimensions, and be camouflaged – but I have my mind, my soul, and I can control it so  I only use it for good reasons. I intend to make good on a lot of those good reasons, btw – I’m only 732, and I could have the rest of eternity if I don’t fall into a volcano or piss some vicar off or something. I was an active demon for around 500 years, then I got kind of bored. We’re always born on Earth, no matter what kind we are, did you know that? Hell is so impersonal – and I’ll tell you another thing, you can never get the bloody temperature right. Connie there – Conores Etrigronde Libra, to give her her full name, she’s a slow-ager: she’ll turn 203 in a couple months’ time: it’s what you get when you cross demons with humans, you know – immortality and mortality have to find a balance, so I can still pass her off as a sixteen-year-old, though I have to keep reinventing her camouflage every couple years. Yes, honey, I know you can do it yourself, but I’m still your mum – you’ll have to wait for total independence till it looks like you’ve turned 18 – don’t pout, you know full well it’ll only be another 25 years or so – her father was a firebrand too, you know, he was the first human in like five tries or so who gave me an orgasm – we were together most of the 1790s and he used to say I gave him the energy to bash the British - and then, of course, there’s the girl you’re all here for, the girl who makes me sorry I’ll live forever  - well, you know what I mean – my human-ager daughter, the birthday girl, celebrating her real live not-pretend-at-all thirteenth birthday – Calista! That’s what you get for getting wasted and shagging an angel. I’ll never do it again – no offence hon, – at least not without protection.”

A ringing silence, broken suddenly by a wave of crystal pounding on a desert shore:

“God, Mum sure knew how to talk, didn’t she.”

“Hah, that’s nothing – remember how she breathed fire. Even you never wanted to piss her off, I’m telling you.”

By this time, you have turned your face away in contemplation, and are thoroughly engaged in it, staring silently into the phenomenally mundane dark recesses of the attic’s upper corners: the rosewood beams that backslash themselves upwards from the rosewood floor towards the rosewood ceiling; the cobwebs, one large and one small by comparison, which gently and silently adorn the left and right corners of the section in your view respectively; the small grey-brown spider apparently asleep in the centre of the smaller one; the vague sensation of light making a mostly forlorn assault on the scene from the triangular quarter-inch-wide crack in the wall at the bottom left corner. All this observation comes so easily, when the alternative is thinking: thinking about where you are, and what you’re dealing with. Not a new observation, of course (of course!), but one which has suddenly been given a new context so otherworldly as to be almost terrifying, and which would be, were it not for the girls’ relatable conversation topic. As such, it is easier, when you are not looking, to comprehend the earthliness of the sigh – like plunging into a heated swimming pool – of the otherly girl, and the (sisters’?) conversation as it turns to going back downstairs and (as they do actually start to go back downstairs) getting ready for work. Just before the last, a few seconds before the door closes downstairs – a vague and distant thud like a bored nuke exploding listlessly a thousand miles away – there is a normal-sounding sniffle, a nose being blown, and a voice – the normal sister’s voice, the weak smile evident in every syllable.

“Connie, your ephemera is still down. Get it up now – I’m not in the mood for the masses prostrating and crapping themselves in the street.”

The second voice comes again. “Oh God! Sorry! It’s just that” – now comes a very strange thing, clear in its strangeness even though distantly heard (though not as distantly as was the door slam; in the time that has passed since that, you have crept out from your hiding place behind the boxes and gone to stand silently beside (and slightly behind – don’t want to be discovered, especially by her) the attic door, listening carefully to the events two floors below). The strangeness of it is this: the otherly girl’s voice changes, changes as though suddenly bent by the force of some irresistible Doppler-style effect, only one that deals not in frequency but in supernaturalness. The first six words of this latter exclamation are suffused with the same sweet, dizzying otherness that your balance wavers for a second before righting itself; then she continues: “what with talking about Mum, and everything, I...”, and these last words are normal, normal as anything, normal as her sister, normal as you...normal as Mary. You stand in such wonder that it eclipses the normal (first normal) girl’s response, interrupting her sister: “It’s alright. Just be careful, OK?”

“Yeah.” Newly normal – for the otherly girl – but still a sigh of regret and sad content, like listening to the first leaves blow down from the trees in the first gustings of wind to tread the gap between autumn and winter.

That’s when the door shuts. You scuttle to one side of the door, near the corner directly opposite the larger of the two visible spiderwebs, and, within a few minutes, during which the only sounds are the vague and humdrum sounds of a young woman readying herself to go out for a day’s work (the click of a toaster, the thrum of a hairdryer, the scrape of a shoe, the brush of a jacket) – with the occasional exception, two or three times in a breathlessly monitored ten minutes, of another, half-concealed sniffle into a probable tissue, the door closes for a second time.

You wait five minutes more, strung wires and nervous hammerings be damned, and then, when you are sure, you cross – still quietly! – to the cardboard boxes again, and begin the work you came here to do.

Whatever is going on with those girls’ nature, Mary’s – what Mary’s was – is more important. And maybe – just maybe – she hid her “mysterious gift” in a cardboard box in her best friend’s attic (Callie, you know, Si, the note had said, and you’d thought “Oh right, the shy girl down the block with the recluse or something sister”) because of who it has apparently turned out her best friend is. What, rather. Not who – or at least maybe not entirely who – but, at least partly, what.

It’ll be a long journey to understanding this one. There are a lot of dusty boxes to be opened, revealing whatever awful or terribly beautiful treasures they may have to yield. And you don’t know when the search for – for whatever it is you’re searching for – is going to end. But you start anyway. Because something important about Mary – and a whole new and terrifying world into the bargain, it looks like – is waiting.       

NaNoWriMo Story 3/5 (November 2011): A Half in the Life

Richard Forrest (1864-1948) grew up on the streets of Southampton as an urchin following his father Jack Forrest’s (1838-1910) 1874-1910 imprisonment for murder and fraud in 1874, and the deaths of his mother Claire (1840-71) and sister Mary (1871-7). He worked (1877-9) as a pickpocket before being sent to prison in 1879 for six months for street brawling. After his release, he worked as an orphanage janitor for four years, 1879-83, before attending Southampton University, from 1883-7, and qualifying as a teacher for the orphanage, in 1887. Five years thereafter, in 1892, he was offered and took a PhD course at Oxford to study mathematics; he qualified with flying colours and became a teacher in 1895; he moved from the orphanage the following year, 1896, to work at a school elsewhere in Southampton, setting up a charitable drive in the city six months before his intended departure; after six years at this school he in 1902 accepted the headmaster position, and held it for five years before, in 1907, accepting an entry-level position at the Ministry of Defence. After rising through the ranks, four years later, in 1911, after having lived and worked in Oxford since the turn of 1910, he joined the Merchant Navy as a navigator, and changed to the Royal Navy after two years, in 1913. The year following that, 1914, the war broke out, and he served with distinction, losing the sight in one eye in 1916 and being posted back behind the lines, where he lost a foot in 1918. He suffered and recovered in early 1919 from the Spanish flu which claimed his third wife, and in 1925, by which time he was working as a mathematician for the government in London, he discovered that his youngest child of five, Sebastian (1905-92), who had the previous year, 1924, left university in Nottingham studying to become an architect, had met a German woman named Matilde Crael (1903-43) during a six-month spell in Berlin, had fallen in love with her and had accepted a job in Berlin, to begin in 1926.

 Richard was, by that time and as during the war, fiercely anti-German, a trait picked up in the 1900s during the arms race, although not shared by his then fourth wife, 49-year-old Coventry-born nurse Louise Middleton (1876-1939), his eldest and third sons – James (1888-1944), a Bristol-based doctor, and William (1895-1971), a shipyard worker in his father’s native Southampton, or his daughter Rosemary (1900-2001), a florist, gardener and landscape architect in Halifax. He was supported by his second son, Adam Forrest (1890-1950), a legal clerk in Hammersmith. He had met his first wife, London-born doctor Lily Everest (1858-1911) in 1881, while janitoring in Southampton; they had married in early 1884, while he was at Southampton University. However, he had an affair in the summer of 1885 with fellow student and prospective history and geography teacher Jane Brackett (1866-1920), natively of Bradford; his marriage to Lily broke up in the winter of early 1886 – she went back to London - and he married Jane on Christmas Day 1887; their son James was born on November 1^st 1888 in Cheltenham, at the home of Jane’s sister. Their second son, born in their Southampton home on October 20^th 1890, was Adam. However, their marriage began to show signs of strain in the spring of 1893 and they began divorce proceedings in February of 1894. In Portsmouth in June 1894, a month before their divorce was finalised, and shortly after the culmination of his second PhD year at Oxford, he met 22-year-old Evelyn Kennedy (1872-1919), who at the time was working as a third-level assistant in a Portsmouth butcher’s shop.

 By the time they got married on March 22^nd 1900, after having already had one child out of wedlock, William, on April 7^th, 1895, she was the immediate assistant, second-in-command and with a lot of say in the running of the shop, given her brother’s position as first-in-command. She was an astute businesswoman and, like Richard, had a profoundly strong grasp of mathematics. In 1898 she had begun taking steps to franchise the butcher’s, which had been established in 1717 by the ancestor of her former boss, but had never left those premises in Portsmouth until now. On June 1^st, 1900, they opened their third shop, in Oxford as well as in Southampton. On December 27^th, 1900, his one and only daughter, Rosemary, named in part after his late sister, was born, his second child with Evelyn and fourth overall. By the turn of 1901, Jane, from whom he had now been divorced for over six years, had met Cowes-born ferry musician Arnold Sterling (1868-1939) in October of 1897; they engaged to marry on New Year’s Eve 1900, thus giving his two eldest children, James and Adam, the imminent new prospect of a stepfather, which became fact the following July 17^th.

 By the new year of 1905, sixteen-year-old James and 14-year-old Adam were still living and going to school in Southampton, living with their 38-year-old mother, 36-year-old stepfather, and a new half-sister, Jennifer (1903-75), who had been born on September 1^st, 1903. Contrastingly, also in Southampton, not two miles away, lived 40-year-old Richard, 32-year-old Evelyn, 9-year-old William and newly 4-year-old Rosemary. Evelyn was now joint boss of her butcher’s operation with her brother (Wesley Kennedy 1868-1942) and they commanded eight shops: Portsmouth, Southampton, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Exeter, and two in London – Hammersmith and Wapping. The year of 1905, besides instilling in Richard the first real sense of danger from European revolutions, with the failed revolution in Russia and the armament of Germany, as well as the Russian-Japanese war, would eventually prove a race of nativity between the former marital partners: in the closing months of 1905, Richard and Jane each witnessed the birth of their final child: Jane gave birth to Arnold Sterling’s daughter Jessica (1905-81) on November 9^th; and Evelyn gave birth on December 11^th to his fifth child and fourth son, Sebastian. In August 1906, after leaving school in Southampton, James informed his parents and step-parents, as well as his siblings, that he and four friends intended to take a tour of the world for a year before he would enrol in medical school (he was already applying and intended to keep up correspondence with prospective universities). Richard was resistant, but Jane and Evelyn both persuaded him to look more favourably on his son’s plans (which included 15 countries over 300 days, and eventually constituted 11 over 287), and as a result James’ departure on September 10^th 1906 for Paris was not a contested one. During this period James acquired more liberal sensibilities than those of his father, visiting France, Germany, Russia, China and Japan as well as the Netherlands, Sweden, Persia, India, Australia and the USA. When James returned to Southampton on June 24^th 1907, one of the first things he did was to register as a paying member of the Liberal Party. He left the house on September 11^th 1907 to study medicine in Manchester, promoting Richard’s most devoted child Adam, now sixteen and approaching seventeen, to his eldest protégé, despite the fact that Adam had not been raised jointly by Richard since the age of three and had a grudging respect for Arnold Sterling, who had been his mother’s boyfriend since he was seven and his stepfather since he was approaching eleven. James, older and less reactionary, had done a much better job than his sole full sibling of dividing his loyalties between the two men. Adam was a relatively isolated child; James had focused more on friends than family; and both the next pairs of half-siblings, Jennifer and Jessica through his mother, and William and Rosemary through his father, tended more to stick to each other – this was helped by the nearly identical age of Jessica and Sebastian, who would later become classmates. Stepsisters Rosemary, 7 come 1908, and Jennifer, by then four, were also close, the former often acting as a mentor to and for the latter.

 The teenage Adam became ever more his father’s acolyte throughout 1908 and 1909, particularly as the European tensions began to mount. By the last week of August 1909, three weeks before Adam was due to leave his father’s side to study law in London, his father had spent nearly two years working as a mathematician for the Ministry of Defence, and was about to receive a second promotion, one which would move the family to Oxford as of January 5^th 1910. Richard’s MoD work had increased his sense of xenophobia, particularly towards the Germans who had invaded France in 1870, when he had been six years old: to an extent he had always seen the influx of French refugees as a reason for his father’s bartending slump which led to his involvement in the Southampton mafia and the ultimate disintegration of the family, but over many years, protective paternal instincts and working at an enjoyable job which was devoted to patriotic sentiment, the 45-year-old Richard had no compunction in telling his son, that afternoon as they burnt leaves in the early-autumn garden, that, “whatever you do in life, son, do it for England, because her beauty is greater than that of most women.”This was August 27^th, 1909: Adam left for London on September 17^th, determined to put patriotism into his daily and working lives: it was behind his relatively innocuous selection of poverty law as a specialty in 1912, the more sinister choice of immigration law in 1914, and the abrupt switch in November 1914 to military law. On September 11^th, 1909, six days before Adam departed from Southampton for London, Richard was offered a promotion by the Ministry of Defence; he discussed it with Evelyn, who agreed that the base of their now 13-shop business operations could be moved to their Oxford outlet, and, with almost no contact with Jane, whose children were now none of his concern, since the last that was his was now an adult, he and Evelyn on December 29^th, 1909 moved their belongings, their home, and their remaining protégés, fourteen-year-old William, nine-year-old Rosemary (whose ninth birthday had come only two days before) and four-year-old Sebastian, to Oxford, ignoring the initial dismay felt by William and Rosemary (Sebastian was barely old enough then to echo it) that they would be moved away from their stepsiblings, friends and, in Sebastian and Jessica’s case, classmates, Jennifer and Jessica Sterling, respectively now six and four in the Southampton care of their mother, Jane, 43, and father Arnold, 41. Thus for the designated Forrest family, of which Jane, Jennifer and Jessica were not a part (for Richard, who considered his opinions the family opinions), 1910 began in Oxford, the city where he had attended university from 1892 to 1895.

1910 saw James continue the third of his five years of medical studies in Manchester, attending several student Liberal Party meetings along the way; running and setting up charitable and political fundraising drives as well as contributing to research facilities. He was particularly happy with the government social reforms taking place in Britain at that time, in contrast to the opinions from London of his brother Adam, still in his first year of law school and embracing work above, though not at the expense of, entertainment. Frequently William and Rosemary sent letters and made telephone calls to Jennifer and Jessica, and helped Sebastian to write similar missives. They even increased friendliness with Jane, who prior to then had been a peripheral figure, and this increased friendliness occurred despite Richard’s would-be disapproval of it. In 1910, however, he did not discover it – the first thing of major personal note he discovered occurred on June 13^th, 1910, when he was contacted by a prison official at the Norwich institution where his father had spent the last eight years, to say that his father Jack had died at the age of 72, of old age. Richard expressed no interest in claiming responsibility for his father’s body, and told only James and Adam – James by letter, Adam by telephone – of the death and his own plans to attend the funeral at Norwich Prison on June 15^th. James did not discover the missive until lunchtime on June 15^th, by which time Richard had already left for the funeral at 11am, telling Evelyn only that he was going to “a funeral” and would be back the following day. It was not until the evening of the 16^th that he told her whose funeral it was. Adam, however, attended. Looking down on the casket as it was lowered into the ground by uniformly grey-clad prison officers, Richard murmured to his second son, “This is what happens to you if you stop loving your country.” Adam, like his siblings, was extremely familiar with the graves of his grandmother and infant aunt, side by side in Southampton, and his father’s stories of his life with them.

 On November 3^rd, 1910, at a Bonfire Night celebration at a friend’s house in Manchester, James was introduced to freshman music student Elizabeth Hockney, 19, who had been raised first in Penzance and then in Oswestry. They bonded over opera and Liberalism, and first dated that evening the eighth anniversary of which would be the first Armistice Day. On November 30^th, James persuaded her to travel down from her parents’ in Oswestry to Oxford for Boxing Day; he had also made arrangements to spend thirty hours or so with his mother, stepfather and stepsisters in Southampton, unbeknownst to his father. On December 20^th, Adam arrived in Oxford from London with positive first-term results from his second year and a slight nervous tic of the left eyebrow from overwork. Christmas Day 1910 in Oxford was attended by Richard, 46, Evelyn, 38, their still-charges William, 15, Rosemary, who was two days shy of turning ten, and Sebastian, who was two weeks into his sixth year. James had arrived in the evening of December 22^nd, and the following morning had announced that his girlfriend Lizzie would be joining them on Boxing Day late afternoon, before both of them would then head down to Southampton on the morning of the 29^th, to see his mother, Jennifer and Jessica, before returning to Manchester on the 31^st, in time for a student New Year’s Eve party. Richard was predictably irked by James’ planned association with Jennifer and Jessica, but did not try to forcibly stop it, unlike his reaction to William and Rosemary’s pleas to go and take Sebastian. Rosemary spent a significant portion of her tenth birthday sulking.

Militaristic affairs began to interest Richard more and more as the winter of early 1911 progressed towards spring, and he began ordering a large number of military-themed news and education magazines. He increasingly sought contact with military personnel at his MoD job in Oxford, and on March 23^rd, 1911, asked a colleague for information on how to join the local chapter of any military institution. On the evening of April 11^th, 1911, he returned to the house and put to Evelyn the proposal of his applying for a position as a navigator in the Merchant Navy, using his mathematical skills for stretches of up to two months at a time in British waters and around the country as a promoter of patriotism and English business. She persuaded him, this time, to ask the opinion of the children, and he did so at their family dinner on the evening of April 13^th, six days after William had turned 16. William, who was not particularly inclined to cherish his father’s presence, said very little, as did, understandably, five-year-old Sebastian, but Rosemary, 10, achieved a balance between regret and support: she said, not insincerely, that she would be sorry to be without him but that he should do it if it helped England: he was, after all, always talking about how much he loved England. At noon on April 14^th, 1911, Richard began the process of a job application for the Merchant Navy; he was granted an interview in Oxford on April 27^th, and was informed, with the arrival of the post on May 1^st, that the job was his if he telephoned them within 48 hours with the news that he still wanted it. He made the phone call less than two hours later, and was instructed to arrive at a training programme in Liverpool at 8am on May 23^rd. Two days later, at 4.45pm on May 3^rd, after a day’s work in Oxford, he handed in his formal two weeks’ notice to his MoD department, and was scheduled on May 5^th for a formal interview to determine his continued commitment to the relevant sections of the Official Secrets Act, which took place on May 6^th, passing him fit for resignation, which took effect at 5pm on May 17^th. On May 22^nd, after saying goodbye to his wife and three remaining charges, he set off for Liverpool, where, the following morning at 8am, he began his four-month training programme. This left the stoic William as the head child of the household indefinitely. William had for a long time had an on-again off-again relationship with his father, and the latter’s absence gave William what he saw as an interesting opportunity to explore his identity and new freedoms and powers. Not particularly an academic success, he took a paper round job on June 1^st, but his interest was quickly subsumed by a rival interest in the Oxford paper factory of the Whitestaff company. He took a job working as a messenger boy there on June 27^th, but lasted only two weeks before July 11^th saw him work in a clerking position. After leaving school on July 19^th, 1911, he kept up this work with increasing enthusiasm, especially considering his mother’s now 24-shop butcher’s empire made it unnecessary for him to work to support his family, and on September 1^st was successfully interviewed for a position as a long-distance lorry driver: he completed his first company drive on September 10^th, a thirty-mile distance, and his first long-distance trip came on September 16^th, from Oxford to Middlesbrough to deliver paper. Nor was he the only one to embark upon a significant career upgrade around this time: Rosemary’s school grades had been described as “stellar” by one teacher, and very, very favourably by many others. On July 25^th, 1911, the headmaster of Rosemary’s school called Evelyn in for a meeting, during which he proposed that Rosemary be skipped ahead a year, a process which would mean her starting secondary school just six weeks later – he had, he assured Evelyn, already achieved a place for her at a local high-achieving secondary school, should she so desire it. Evelyn consulted with Richard and Rosemary, and the latter, who was not particularly attached to her primary school or her classmates, agreed, once Evelyn had reassured her that it wasn’t worth worrying about the reactions of classmates who’d be jealous of her success, to start secondary school that September.

In the meantime, Richard had on July 1^st 1911 received news in Liverpool from London that his first wife, Lily Everest, had died in the latter city at the age of 52, after having contracted a disease from one of her patients. Richard cared little for this information, having not seen or spoken to Lily in almost twenty-one years (just as he had not now spoken to Jane in almost three), but he cared enough to mention it to Evelyn, in a telephone call on the evening of July 7^th. Evelyn suggested he might go, but he emphatically declined: remembering, however, that Jane’s relationship with Richard had been instigated as a cheat on Lily, back in 1885, Evelyn solicited the date of the funeral – July 11^th – out of Richard, and the following evening called Jane in Southampton – the first time Evelyn had spoken herself to Jane in a little over four months – to suggest that she go. Eventually, both of them journeyed to London together, leaving William in charge of Rosemary and Sebastian for fifty-eight hours, between 10am on July 10^th and 8pm on July 12^th. William, who always enjoyed his younger siblings’ company, enjoyed this responsibility almost as much, regretting that it would likely come little to him given the conflict between his demanding job and his siblings’ place of residence. As a result of their attendance of Lily’s funeral, Evelyn and Jane, who hitherto had been very little more than acquaintances, established something of their own long-distance friendship, which was easier to maintain given that Richard, who would have disapproved of it, was sequestered in Liverpool and embarked upon an even more long-distance career than William’s had become. For the first time ever, one of the two women attended the other’s birthday celebration on October 24^th, 1911, when Evelyn journeyed to Southampton to join in Jane and her family’s celebration of her 45^th. During the visit, Evelyn, 39, also bonded with her stepdaughters, eight-year-old Jennifer and nearly-six-year-old Jessica, and even with Jane’s husband, the now 43-year-old Arnold Sterling. Fearing Richard’s response to this fact, however, she neglected to mention to any of her children the fact of her attendance at this event, and Jane agreed not to mention it to her sons with Richard, James or Adam, in case they were to let it slip to him.

By this point, James and Adam were progressing well with their university degrees in Manchester and London respectively. When James turned 23 on November 1^st 1911 in Manchester, he was in his final year of medical school, extremely fit and athletic, and newly inaugurated for the year 1911-12 as President of MULS (the Manchester University Liberal Society – or, as it was known informally by many of the students, occasionally including James himself – “Men Under Lots of Stress”). The only cloud on James’ horizon was that, over the summer of 1911, his relationship with the then 19- and now 20-year-old Elizabeth Hockney was beginning to sour; it had been going downhill steadily and unevenly, with the occasional jump slightly back up, since they had had an argument in the summer break over their plans for their relationship after James graduated the following summer. Elizabeth, meanwhile, had only just finished the first of her four scheduled years studying music at the university, and their argument had petered out without a proper answer, but had kept resurfacing here and there as summer turned into autumn. Eventually, after a particularly large blowout on the evening of November 26^th, 1911, the couple did not speak to each other for three days: on the evening of November 30^th, they sat down together and thrashed out their difficulties: by the time the sun rose on December, they had agreed that they would no longer be dating. They parted friends, but parted nonetheless. Adam, meanwhile, had come out of his shell significantly as his second year had progressed into his third: he was now a prominent participant in beer and debating societies, as well as a keen pool-player and dabbling chef. He had embarked upon a string of one-night stands between late March and mid-June 1911, as his revision and exams began to take their toll in a way they had not the previous summer: this eventually translated into his longest relationship to date, from July 7^th to August 23^rd, with local barmaid Sophie Strachan. He was single as he sat in his shared and rented house in north-west London, sipping coffee, watching the sun rise and not knowing that, miles away in southern Manchester, his elder brother was doing the same thing from a couch on which a slightly younger girl also sat, both staring at the greying and pinking sky movelessly and with identical expressions of wearied melancholy, their hands no more than a few inches apart from each other on the settee’s cushions, but apart nonetheless.

 Richard had completed his Merchant Navy training on the last day of September 1911, and from the crack of October dawn had embarked upon professional calculations. The 47-year-old made a large number of new friends over his first six weeks in the position: on November 12^th 1911 he was selected as a crew member for a vessel leaving Liverpool and heading round the south coast to Southampton to dock and pick up supplies, before journeying to Amsterdam and back. This was an interesting opportunity for Richard, who had never been anywhere less Anglian than Ireland up until this point, to visit a foreign country, perhaps the first of many, and experience life in the wider world: to learn what it meant to be patriotic and have no allegiance to Blake’s green and pleasant country. The ship departed Liverpool on November 17^th and arrived in Southampton three days later: despite his connection with the city, he walked around only a small part of it in the thirty-six hours they were docked there: he had no wish to run into Jane, her husband, or their daughters. In the early afternoon of November 27^th, 1911, the ship – and thereby Richard – arrived in Amsterdam, and he was keen to explore the city, where he found microcosms of the social struggles he had one side’s back of in England; his worldview was broadened, and in the process so were his would-be/could-be friends and enemies.

On January 10^th, 1912, William, who like the rest of his family had not now seen Richard since a brief period of two days’ leave in late July during his training, was tasked with a job to drive a latest lorry-load of paper from Oxford to Edinburgh, leaving in the early hours of January 12^th. On the evening of January 12^th, he had his first sexual encounter, all-but sleeping with Edinburgh truck stop waitress Georgina McBride, 20, whose father owned the establishment and three others in Scotland. Whilst William enjoyed the intimacy, being a relatively stoic character whose predisposition before now had been primarily to support rather than being supported, he found the conversation with her, especially their comparisons of their parents’ franchise businesses, far more interesting than the subsequent sexual aspect of their brief relationship. Not wishing to appear weak-willed to his father through his mother, although he doubted she would take such an attitude to his experience, he confided his experience and reflections on it to Rosemary, on the evening of the following Saturday, January 17^th, 1912. Rosemary, who had just started her second term of her first year at secondary school, reassured the brother to whom she was closest that it was understandable to be weirded out and confused by new experiences; why, she herself, she said, was finding it strange to experience the hustle and bustle of life at secondary school, and that that was especially true when it came to something as “euch” as sex, which the girls at her school seemed to be always talking about and which she personally – she said with the same half-hidden ambivalence that had accompanied her earlier onomatopoeic deliverance – had no understanding whatsoever of. William thanked her for her wondrous and most magnificent insight, and a few hours later, after some games and taking care of six-year-old Sebastian, he left to drive the three miles across from the west to the northeast side of Oxford, where he had now lived in a small block-based apartment since the previous November.

The winter of early 1912 exposed the travelling Richard, after he had spent 10 days over Christmas with his family in Oxford, to a large portion of the countries of north-western Europe: between January 10^th and April 3^rd, 1912, he visited France, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Spain before returning to Liverpool with the stated opinion, to a friend and colleague on April 1^st, 1912, that “if these Europeans could understand the beauty of English cultural history, they might be valuable allies against these faulty imperial designs we seem so close to being beset with lately.” Whilst he did not come right out and say it – at least not then - he was talking about his increasing worst national enemy – Germany. Often he would tell his friends and colleagues, and anyone – in bars, for example, who happened to listen, that Germany was a dangerous entity which had for decades now been getting above her national station, and that it was “high time she was put back there, where she belongs.” His discourses received mixed reaction among his listeners; often, however, those who opposed him to his face reserved no vitriol for argument. Richard might simply have been the biggest patriot among a group of them, but ultimately all of them – including Richard – were more interested in serving England through the physical labour and effect of their current jobs than by politics. In the middle of April 1912, Richard’s anti-German diatribes were overshadowed for some time by a much more personal and immediate tragedy than any current one he blamed the Germans for: twenty of his colleagues, at least a dozen of whom could be counted as his friends, and three or four who were his regular drinking mates and confidantes in the bars and lonely places of Liverpool, had sailed aboard the Titanic, all workers, expecting to return to Liverpool no more than two months later. All of the people he knew aboard died when the ship sank that mid-April, including six who were never accounted for, but declared dead before the onset of 1914. Richard’s devastation was such that it provoked lengthy phone calls between not only him and his wife, but also him and Jane, to whom he had not spoken in close to four years. Evelyn arrived in Liverpool from Oxford to visit him on April 22^nd, shortly into the fortnight’s leave he had been granted in which to grieve, and, shortly after Jane also arrived, in part due to Evelyn’s encouragement, on April 25^th, Richard discovered from the mouths of his wife and ex that they had formed a friendship with each other, and his reaction, although cautious and vaguely admonishing, was a mere shadow of what it would likely have been when April had started three weeks or so before. The upshot of all this, following Richard’s return to work on May 3^rd, 1912, was that Jane and Evelyn conducted their long-distance friendship completely in the open now, which served to increase the frequency of their communications; also, Jennifer and Jessica, showing an increasing predilection for being referred to as Jenn (two Ns) and Jess, were able, for the first time since the turn of 1910, to physically visit with Rosemary and Sebastian, now that the latter two had no fear of paternal retribution for such fraternising. (William, given his status as an adult since the previous April, had visited the two on five or six occasions in the preceding fourteen months before June 5^th, the half-term day during which Rosemary and Sebastian were brought by Evelyn to Southampton.)

On July 22^nd, 1912, William, now 17, set out to drive from Oxford to Peterborough with a latest lorry-load of paper. He arrived on schedule in Peterborough at 6.23pm that day, and was allowed the night in the city before driving back at 5am the following morning. He went to a local racing-track and then to a bar, where he got into a discussion with an off-duty police constable, 23-year-old Jason Smith, about football, fishing, a little politics, and how to maintain order. Jason, telling William truthfully that his fiancée, Irish-American actress Meredith Vaughan, 24, was out at a poetry reading that night, invited William to come back to his house a mile and a half away and admire his success. Two hours later they were admiring some other things of each other’s in Jason’s spare bedroom as they had sex, which William found much more enjoyable than his experience in Edinburgh and which lasted until shortly before eleven pm. Afterwards, Jason told William that he had been aware of his attraction solely to men since the age of around twelve, and that he had lost his virginity to a man at sixteen, before agreeing at eighteen to expand his year-long publicly romantic relationship with Meredith, a friend of his since they were both sixteen, into a commitment; they moved in together, mutually supportive, that autumn and had engaged to marry – for Meredith, who was fully aware from very nearly the beginning of Jason’s sexual preference, the greatest incentive for this marriage would be to simultaneously get her parents off her back about taking romance over acting, and also to work towards starting a family with someone she loved, however platonic the word’s definition. Given Jason’s location and commitments in Peterborough and William’s in Oxford, they agreed that there was no opportunity to pursue anything, and parted ways, but William did not leave Peterborough with Jason’s confidence, friendship and phone number or without a new understanding of himself and where any romantic future he might have lay.

As the summer term drew to a close in 1912, Evelyn employed a coach for Rosemary, after discussing it with Richard via telephone: Rosemary’s test results had suffered as her first secondary school year had progressed. Rosemary had bi-weekly sessions on Mondays and Thursdays throughout the summer, including the period August 6 – September 4, when Richard returned to Oxford and Evelyn’s bed for the ninth and longest time since his departure the previous May for training in Liverpool. On September 10, 1912, four days after her father had gone back to Liverpool, Rosemary returned to the Oxford school for her second year with elevated confidence, though not without renewed trepidation at being a relatively isolated figure there. On the evening of August 31^st, Richard and Evelyn had had a conversation in bed, shortly after sex, about the future Richard expected to have for his career in the Merchant Navy. In response, Richard warmed to his theme on English patriotism, apologised for his long absences, and said he had got back to Oxford as often as he had felt comfortable with. At the end of the conversation, he agreed that from now on – at least, for the coming academic year – he would try to return to Oxford as often as possible. (They had already discussed the possibility of moving to Liverpool, another location of one of Evelyn’s now 38 butcher’s shops, but Evelyn had rejected it due to Rosemary and Sebastian’s schooling conflicts.)

On July 1, 1912, single James in Manchester had received the results of his medical licensing exams, taken between May 10^th and May 28^th. He was delighted to learn that he had passed with flying colours, and held a raucous celebration that night with several similarly rewarded friends, with a more formal equivalent on the evening of July 5^th. On July 7^th, he and his five other particular friends in medicine began corresponding with those hospitals to which they had applied for conditional internships. That same day, James established that he had been accepted as an intern at four different hospitals: Leicester, Glasgow, Sunderland and Bristol. On July 8^th he had made his decision, and accepted the offer made from Bristol, along with one of his five medical friends: the other four went two to Liverpool, one to Glasgow and one to London. Due to start his internship on July 23^rd, James began looking for housing and located a place to rent on July 9^th: by the 11^th he had agreed to move into it as of the afternoon of July 19^th, and in the early evening of July 12^th, he rang his mother Jane in Southampton with the news, followed by his father Richard, and then he made a third call to his stepmother Evelyn, during the course of the latter also celebrating with half-siblings Rosemary and Sebastian. He went out for a pub crawl with his friends on July 13^th, and called half-brother William on the morning of the 14^th to celebrate the news William had been told via Evelyn the previous morning. On July 23^rd he started his Bristol internship.

Meanwhile, in London, Adam was embarking that September on his final year of law school in London. Still a prominent member of several political conservative, consumptive and sporting societies, he had grown close over the summer to Lesley Waterman, a friend of a friend working as a legal secretary for a firm in the City: six months (and thus one academic year) his senior, she was an alumnus of the same university – they marvelled that they had never met before they were introduced as part of a private non-university careers seminar on the afternoon of July 2^nd. They grew closer throughout July and August, and first kissed during a night in together on September 10^th, then again, more vigorously, at a party on September 13^th. By the start of the second week of 1912’s October, the two were officially dating, and, despite a five-week breakup which occurred during the early summer (June-July) of the following year (over Adam’s job prospects: he eventually took a job with the same firm as hers on August 1^st 1913), they were still dating just under two years later, on June 28^th, 1914.

Richard kept his word: he got back to Oxford several more times over the following months than he had the previous year of his work, persisting(albeit less enthusiastically) even after he was dressed down by a superior for a lapse in his work quality likely caused, at least in part, by his increased time spent with his wife, on February 4^th, 1913, just after arriving back from his fifth visit to her, which incorporated his twenty-seventh day with her, since departing for Liverpool the previous early September. Rosemary’s school grades had picked up significantly, though they were not as high as her parents – and she too, though perhaps less extensively – had hoped for. Rosemary was becoming more confident, and her schoolwork was being, if not deprioritised, then shunted to roughly the side of her slightly burgeoning social life – she developed two good friends as 1913 began to spring into life, Rebecca Fulton and Jim Holt, both in her year, though inevitably an academic year younger than she. Although her parents, especially Richard, were deeply uneasy about her spending so much time with a boy at the mere age of 12, Rosemary, Rebecca and Jim, with particular help from Jim’s parents, a local physics teacher and childminder father and mother respectively, a highly liberal couple, especially for 1913 – Jim’s elder brother Stanley Holt was the Labour MP for Oxford Central between 1906 and 1914. However, her grades began to suffer again as Easter developed into early summer, and by the time the last week of June had arrived, they were worse than they had been under her previous slump. After a long debate held in person between Rosemary’s headmaster, Evelyn, and the temporarily returned Richard, they rejected the prospect of returning her to her original age group, but eventually selected another option, on the last day of June, that had been inspired by a burgeoning desire of Richard’s for yet another, though this time less significant a departure, career change.

 As Richard had become more and more familiar with the people, traders and politics of continental Western Europe over the past year since the Titanic disaster, he had become more and more convinced of the need for patriotic display of territorial English pride, to ward off the highly suspect aims of the counter-imperialists. Often, when he used the aforementioned phrase, many observers struggled or indeed failed entirely to hear its pluralisation: he insisted, however, that he had always indeed pluralised it; conceding later, after WWI had broken out in earnest, that perhaps he had subconsciously been envisioning one particular antagonist whenever he spoke of the dangers of foreign European powers’ uppittiness.  All the same, Richard, as 1913 had developed, found himself more and more attracted beyond the commercial tourism and camaraderie of the Merchant Navy, towards its far more obviously patriotic Royal equivalent. “Imagine that,” he told several friends and colleagues over February and March 1913, and finally breathed in fervent apology to Evelyn on the night of April 1^st, “instead of making money and flexing muscles to show your hidden enemy who and how mighty are the English, to demonstrate that same might by force against enemies who break cover and run at England with their guns and sharpened battleaxes! How much more a patriotic act can there be, than to defend our Green and Pleasant Land – he audibly capitalised the non-conjunctions of Blake’s phrase every time he spoke it – against those who would destroy it and all its glory, all its majesty – in the name of His Majesty, the King!” This passion of his grew more and more fervent as April turned into May; by the time May had reached its midpoint, he had begun again the frenetic and excited research he had conducted into the Merchant Navy, now focused on the Royal Navy. All throughout May and June he made contacts, and procured an interview in Liverpool on June 26^th, 1913, which went particularly well, and which was confirmed as having done so by a phone call he received on the evening of June 29^th, telling him to return the call by the end of the working day of July 1^st, if he still desired a position as a Royal Navy navigator. On the evening of June 30^th, after the meeting with Rosemary’s headmaster, Richard and Evelyn returned home to Oxford and put their mammoth proposal to Rosemary and Sebastian: Richard to join the Royal Navy based in Liverpool, Evelyn to run the butcher business from their Liverpool outlet; Rosemary to enrol at the same advanced level at the more education-intensive and private boarding school in North Liverpool, the 1386-established Bellgrove Academy for Girls? Rosemary asked to discuss it with her friends, and was begrudgingly given, at least nominally, the following day to do so: when Evelyn collected her from school at 3.21pm, she expressed her continuing ambivalence, the same feeling experienced by Becky and Jim when she informed them. Eventually, however, the family came at around 4pm to a slightly uneasy coalition, and at 4.32pm Richard called the Royal Navy in Liverpool and accepted the position. At 9.18am the following day, through Rosemary’s headmaster, her position at the boarding school was also accepted. After making all the necessary arrangements, the family upped sticks and moved en masse from western Oxford to south-western Liverpool, on August 16^th, 1913. Rosemary and Sebastian enrolled at new schools on September 12^th and 4^th respectively. Sebastian’s was located just 900 yards north-east of the Forrests’ new home, and Rosemary’s was three point eight miles due north, though compulsorily boarding, which meant that Rosemary slept there during the week and at home during most weekends, at least initially. More suited to the pace and environment, she made a decent circle of half a dozen or so friends fairly quickly, and spent only one weekend at home between Hallowe’en and the Christmas holidays of 1913, after having spent four of the first six of the term at home. By the time she arrived back for Christmas in Liverpool on December 20^th, 1913, the morning after term had ended, she was exuberant and high-achieving again, having found a particular interest in nature and an aptitude for biology, stimulated in no small part by the abundant plant and occasional wildlife of the boarding school complex. Her particular friends were Felicity “Fliss” Morgan, who she described to Sebastian and her parents and by telephone and letter to Jenn, Jess, William and Jane as her best friend, and Melanie Lipton, who she described most prominently as her “crazy friend”, though always with a big grin on her face. That Christmas, the last peaceful one for four years, as 1913 melted seamlessly into 1914, she talked about her half-dozen friends repeatedly, and the two emphasised above were emphasised more strongly and more often than all of the others, good friends though they were, put together.

Back in Oxford, William had felt a great increase in freedom now that his parents were not only back together, but also a long distance away and constantly occupied with work, life and family. He missed Sebastian and especially Rosemary (as they – especially Rosemary – missed him), but, in the autumn and late winter of 1913, both his work quality and his social life rapidly improved. During the period September – December 1913, he made several new friends both inside and outside work, and slept with a couple of men into the bargain – one known for less than two days, the other who remained a vague acquaintance thereafter. He was invited to the company Christmas party on December 19^th, 1913, which is where one of his (platonic) contacts, having taken particular note of the high quality of his organisational ideas over the past three months, offered to recommend him for one of the vacancies opening up as a lorry driver and schedule co-ordinator at an all-forms-of-stationery firm in Banbury. He agreed, and went for a double interview on January 8^th, 1914. On January 12^th, he was informed that he had been turned down, for the time being, for the co-ordinator’s job, but that he was accepted as a lorry-driver if he still wished, with a view to possible interdepartmental – or otherwise - promotion within the company. He accepted it, and, on January 18^th, found an apartment in Banbury, considerably bigger than the one he had had in Oxford, and with two flatmates as opposed to alone. He moved in there on January 22^nd, three days after signing the lease, and began his lorry-driving position on January 25^th. His organisational ideas impressed his employers so much, over the next three weeks, that come February 14^th he was offered and accepted the chance to go on less frequent and more local driving runs for slightly elevated pay, the employers’ motive being largely that he would be a good influence to have in the office, and to have there as often as possible. That night, he celebrated by buying three colleagues, two of whom were friends, and his two flatmates, 28-year-old postman David Jennings and 25-year-old hairdresser Catherine Simpson, several drinks, and them all buying them for him in return. After at one point during the evening snogging first Catherine and then David, he ended up in a lengthy conversation with 27-year-old paramedic Edward Libby, there celebrating his birthday: the evening culminated with the two going back to Libby’s house and having sex. After several similar encounters, by the end of April 1914 each was comfortably the other’s boyfriend. By a strange coincidence, the night of March 2^nd, 1914, one of the nights William and Edward had sex (they didn’t define it as “making love” until April the twenty-seventh), was also the night of the first time, in their dormitory and watched by two giggling onlookers, that Rosemary first kissed Melanie Lipton, cracking a joke about the latter’s surname shortly afterwards, and despite the giggling being done by Francine Shepherd and Sarah McCallister, and to an extent even by Rosemary and Melanie themselves (Fliss wasn’t in yet, and neither was the relative outsider of the dorm, Jenny Ellis), Rosemary sensed that the kiss was not the entirely silly affair the other two thought it was, and that thought brought forth another one the first thought had implied – Rosemary didn’t think Melanie thought it was wholly silly, either.

Which brings us to June 28^th, 1914.  

The short version is: shit happens.

The long version will be brought to you after the narrator has had a stiff drink and feels appropriately capable.

NaNoWriMo Story 2/5 (November 2011): Escape und Victory

“The road goes ever on and on”

-          J.R.R. Tolkien

“I don’t want any nasty, soggy chips. I want mine crisp unt light brown.”

-          U-boat captain, Dads’ Army, “The Deadly Attachment”

Marian Adelman, 82, born October 24^th, 1929, in northwestern Austria, lives with her husband, Benjamin Turner, 77, in Bowthorpe, Norwich. He is a retired nuclear scientist, chemist and chemistry teacher; she is a retired administrator who worked for UEA for 29 years from 1972 to 2001. Marian was one of four children born to Austrian health inspector Morgan Adelman (1892-1957) and Czech-born electrician (1919 – 1935), radio operator (1935-46), later sound technician (1946-58), lecturer (1958-61) and singer (1960-7) Elena Colder (1899 – 1974), who was the daughter and sole child of a diplomat and his wife heiress to a transportation firm fortune – the business had been begun as a shipping firm by his wife’s Italian maternal grandfather, Ricardo Henerici (1842-1908) in the summer of 1867, and continued by his daughter Evangelina Alciers (1868-1932) following her brother (Aldo Henerici, 1866-1896) the original heir’s death in 1896. Morgan Adelman, whose paternal great-great-grandfather, Edwin Adelman (1785-1860) had been a Jewish doctor in his native Copenhagen, had so-called Christian agnosticism in common with his wife, whom he met in September 1920 in western Czechoslovakia, while working as an internal inspector for the government building she was helping to wire together. They were both music-loving socialites who had many friends of many backgrounds, including Jewish people, who included Elena’s oldest childhood friend, Amanda Lehmann (1900 – 1980), who would go on to become a Holocaust survivor. Morgan and Elena married in Plzen, Czechoslovakia, the same city in which they met in March 1924, and their first child Philip was born there in October 1925. Marian was their second oldest child, born in that same Czechoslovakian city, Plzen, in October 1929. In January 1931, the family moved from Czechoslovakia to Linz, Austria; it was in Austria, after Elena inherited her family’s business in 1932, becoming a nominal CEO whose only difference from her old life was her vastly increased paycheque and hour-long meetings once every three months to discuss the business, that they had their final two children, Lindsey (born in May 1933) and Aaron (born in July 1935). After the Anschluss of 1938 converted Austria into a province of Nazi Germany, both Morgan and Elena joined the underground resistance movement, helping many people who were undesirable to the Nazis to escape into Switzerland, Liechtenstein and France. In August 1941, a fraud being perpetuated by Morgan as part of their Resistance activities was detected by the Nazis; he was arrested and imprisoned in Linz that November. The Nazis arrested their mother in January 1942; she was convicted of fraud and sent to prison; arrangements were made for the children to be moved to a foster home in Innsbruck; the parents in this case were hardcore Nazis who made their lives miserable, and Philip organised their attempted flight to Switzerland. However, he accidentally left details of their escape on a piece of discarded, binned notepaper, and shortly after the four departed on March 2, 1942, ostensibly for a day trip to Lustenau, in western Austria on the Swiss border, for a fictional Nazi-organised war careers day, their plan being to stay with Philip’s friend (a co-conspirator who called them from Switzerland) overnight , then claim to have missed the return train, their scheme was detected, and they narrowly escaped arrest at their train’s destination; on the early evening of March 3, they were separated as the pro-Nazi authorities closed in on them in the western Austrian Alps; Philip was arrested and Aaron, who was with him, transported back to Innsbruck. Marian, eleven, found herself in Switzerland, being received four miles west of the capture point by their arranged reception party (shortly thereafter she was transported to St. Gallen, Switzerland, where she lived for the next few years), and 8-year-old Lindsey disappeared entirely. Were it not for the fact that Philip had been protecting his younger brother, he would likely have been shot, but instead the 16-year-old was transferred to the same Linz prison as his father; his father had received a sentence of six years, his mother nine; he received a sentence of four years for abduction and dereliction of duty. His foster parents, guardians of three other children other than their own three, two of them sisters, were censured for their physical treatment, but nothing more. Marian desired to return to Austria to look for Lindsey, after the incident had been reported in the Linz newspapers with reference to her disappearance, but she was prevented from doing so. In point of fact, Lindsey had spent 14 hours hiding in underbrush before travelling northeast; she walked and disguised her face to hitch lifts; eventually passing through Czechoslovakia to the Ukraine, where she entered an orphanage in the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk as “Rose Wessel”; she was injured there in 1944 enough to lose her memory; deaf in one ear and believing herself to be Rose Wessel, a Ukrainian orphan, she took jobs as a cleaner and waitress before moving to Kiev in 1949; she attended college there from 1950-1952 and then moved to Moscow to be a servant; she joined the civil service in April 1958 and became a KGB spy from January 1961; she was arrested in Oxford by British authorities in February 1965 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment; after seven and a half, she was released in late January 1973; having turned against the Russians in 1968 after their invasion of and tactics in Czechoslovakia, she applied to study biology; was accepted to do so in Edinburgh from September 1975 after several rejections; graduated in 1979, still as Rose Wessel (Rose Wisla as of 1955; Rose Wesley as of 1969), and became a nature writer. In 1982 she met music journalist and part-time bass guitarist Robert Wilson, born in December 1944; they would go on to have a relationship from early 1983 which would survive a four-month hiatus in mid-1985 and become a marriage in October 1988. Marian’s efforts to track Lindsey down had proved fruitless; they met again quite by chance when “Rose” was doing a project for her alma mater in Edinburgh in September 1984, and chanced upon Marian when the latter was the previous appointment holder with the dean; they met in the dean’s office; they got to talking, and a few days later Rose’s memory reasserted itself, and she remembered her life as Lindsey and how it ended. In the meantime, Marian had left Switzerland for France in September 1946, after the release of her family from Nazi imprisonment the previous year, after British forces had reviewed the question of their sentences’ legitimacy and declared all three of them null and void. Aaron was returned that summer to his parents’ custody, and they appealed for the whereabouts of their daughters, causing Marian to come forward, partly after Philip’s information helped narrow the search for her to Switzerland. Marian attended university in Lille from 1948 to 1952, where she learned business studies and English. She moved to Le Havre in 1956, where she met her English husband, Andrew Kennedy (b.1931) while doing an admin job in October 1957; he was working for the catering firm she was administrating. They began a relationship, moved to Calais in the summer of 1960, and married there in March 1963. They moved to Southampton in August 1964, where she had her first child, Lauren, in January 1966; she was followed by Nicholas in August 1970. Marian and Andrew had moved to Ipswich in 1974 and to Edinburgh in 1981; the two sisters had lived in ignorance of each other in the same city for over three years before they met and recognised each other. Rose/Lindsey still lives in Edinburgh; Marian and Andrew moved from there to Norwich in 1991. The sad side of this is that Lindsey, who continued to be known as Rose to her friends and largely to herself, was never revealed as alive to her parents; her father Morgan had died in 1957 and her mother Elena in 1974. After his release from Nazi prison, Philip went to the University of Munich from 1947 to 1953 and eventually became a nurse; he moved from Berlin to Copenhagen in 1955, where in 1957 he met his future wife, Danish physician Sara Mendecke, born in April 1924; they married in northern Denmark in July 1965 and moved to Sweden in January 1968, where they still live. Aaron, the youngest son, attended the University of Paris from 1954 to 1958 to study literature and drama; he became an advertising executive in Paris from 1959, abandoned it in February 1964 to pursue a career as an actor, which was successful from then until November 1969, when he became a set and costume designer; he began dating 46-year-old 1955 Luxembourgian immigrant music writer and radio presenter Carla Jollice in November 1971; he helped raise her son, Dion, then 11, from a previous relationship; he had been born in February 1960; her relationship with his French father had lasted from the summer of 1958 to the spring of 1964. Aaron died in Paris on September 15^th 2007, aged 72.     

NaNoWriMo Story 1/5 (November 2011): The Leader is Dead

NaNoWriMo November 2011 Story 1/5: “The Leader Is Dead”

The following story draws, however – thus far – obliquely, on Nazism, Churchill’s idea of democracy, the film Valkyrie, and the “Would you kill Hitler?” idea, as well as free will vs. determinism, to tell in 10k-20k words the story of Thomas Farmer, a native of late 20C west Lincolnshire who attains a career as a bookseller following a failed authorial ambition. One part of the story, the first to be mentioned, details his fall from university, his failing days as a writer and his opening a successful bookseller business. The son of a gentle if naive Tory MP, he is quite a pleasant person to many, with several friends across all spectrums of society. The second aspect of the story details the despotic regime of the Shadow in 2030s Europe, radiating out from Britain and putting all of Europe in danger: his war with Iran and his persecution of European Muslims, illegal immigrants, intellectuals and political opponents. The despotism of the Shadow is set against the background of the scientific advancements of Anglia, the new country which has emphasised scientific achievement at the cost of human rights. The main characters are scientists and politicos who respectively, as the plot goes on, invent time-travel and organise resistance movements against the regime of the Shadow. Eventually, the third part of the story (or fifth or seventh part, depending on how this is all ultimately laid out, if the first two sections are told alternating against each other, as with the LOTR films, or simply one then the other, as with the LOTR books), will detail how seemingly mild-mannered bookseller  Thomas Farmer begins to be beset by one mysterious attempted assassin after another, shortly after his piquing interest in local politics lands him a position, about which he is sceptical of its worth, as a clerical assistant to the deputy mayor of Lincoln, a former associate of his father’s friend. Eventually, he learns the reason for these attempted assassinations, which number around sixteen over the course of the year 2012, unless it turns out that this rate and timespan is different. After discovering from one of the assassins that time travel back into the future is impossible, or at least for these characters who have no knowledge of the existence or workings of TARDISes, the latter not featuring or being hinted at in the story – I just don’t want to decanonise them, in the literary sense – he is persuaded to change his attitude, just as a nineteenth assassin appears from the future and badly wounds him. His friend, the sixteenth assassin, disappears shortly after he is injured and he blacks out. The next scene begins ambiguously, eventually revealing that Farmer has survived. Back in the future, the opportunity to time-travel is wiped out and explained as a stable time loop, thus closing the question of whether or not it would be right to travel back and kill Hitler: it’s not relevant, because to do so would be impossible, and we should all just go on with our lives. The title is derived verbatim from the English translation of the German phrase instructed to be typed by von Stauffenberg to Hitler’s secretaries during the July 20 plot of 1944; the relevant excerpt from Valkyrie will be featured in the story.

Eventually. If I must ask one thing of you as narrator and conveyor of truth to reader, it is – regrettably – that you be patient. This is a long and complex tale, and it is true, and yet also truly terrifying. For me, anyway. If it comes to you a cardboard box wrapped in glow-in-the-dark packaging and advertised as a wonder of wonders, I apologise. I hope that one day I will be able to tell it properly. Science is my thing, and when my understanding of my thing has been bent as badly as mine has been by the below events, it is a struggle for me, who am not by any means a born narrator, to relate it sensibly. For that, forgive me. For now, and hopefully not forever, here is my best effort.

Yours faithfully,

Dr. Peter Flauvert, PhD (Cantab.)

Main Characters:

1.       Thomas Farmer, bookseller, failed writer and tentative politico from western Lincolnshire

2.       Judith Francis, an orphaned Essex-dwelling nurse from the 2030s, who is the sixteenth person in 350 days (change?) to travel back and attempt his assassination

3.       Malik al-Fazhad, the leader of Iran with whom the Shadow is at war

4.       Hermann Detterich, the Hamburg-based leader of the Anglian resistance

5.       Tara Khaled, the Muslim 2^nd generation Iraqi immigrant and personal friend of Thomas Farmer, herself a librarian and occasional writer

6.       Dr. Peter Flauvert, the scientist responsible for the accidental discovery of time travel

7.       Hannah Porter, the leader of the UK in the new future after the neutralisation of the Shadow in his past (NB: use relevant LOTR quote – “The Shadow of the Past” - if possible). She will be featured primarily in the Shadow-reality, but will be shown as leader in the new one, which will appear only in the last chapter 

8.       Martin Lorchim, former German Health Secretary and key player in the Anglian resistance

9.        Robert Detterich, son of Hermann: revolutionary ideologue

10.    Theresa Kleinmann, girlfriend and later fiancée of Robert

11.   Shari al-Fazhad, Paris college friend of Theresa and the niece of the above-mentioned Iranian President: it is through these latter four that an alliance is forged between the “Muslim world”, the Anglian Resistance and the West Anglian Scientific Institute, the organisation behind Flauvert’s discovery of time-travel while attempting to track solar-based biological lifeforms recently discovered in distant star systems

 Scene 1: Thomas Farmer diary, 2011 (26). Includes a lot of political philosophy, his current job as a bookseller, his history as a university student, and his excitement about pitching his pride and joy to an editor at Lincoln’s Red Imp Publishing (possibly a confirmedly real alternate name). The book is a novel set just after the First World War and details a Lincoln cleaner who, while cleaning the cathedral, is inspired to research its architectural history: in the process of this, he stumbles across a portal to the day it was built, and must survive various antagonists in medieval Lincoln. The book is entitled Works of Heart.

Scene 2:  In Norwich, the scientific discovery of time-travel, 2034, from the perspective of its discoverer, Dr. Peter Flauvert, 51 (accidental and told as he discovers it). He discovers that the time-travel invariably ends when the traveller experiences a sufficiently high level of adrenaline, during a traumatic event. This invariability is revealed over the course of later events.  It is also difficult to return to anything like a time one has already travelled back to, and impossible to do it exactly.

Scene 3: On November 25, 2011, Thomas Farmer has a meeting with an editor, Hannah Porter: she tells him that his book is insufficiently interesting, lacking a wider foundation in nationwide politics and not sufficiently historically researched. He leaves in an extremely depressed mood to catch the train back to wherever he lives, possibly Metheringham. He sits back down in his living room, near a prominent personal library featuring myriad books on Lincolnshire and architectural history, picks one up, flicks through it, then slams it in disgust onto the coffee table – he is a literary man and refuses, even when in a bad mood, to risk unnecessary damage to works of intellectualism, even those he doesn’t agree with. He opens his fridge, takes out a sixpack of Carling and some Wotsits, and sits down to watch the News at Ten, which opens with a report on clashes between British Islamists and the English Defence League.

Scene 4: Dr Flauvert escapes from his time-travel experience and rushes with the knowledge to a scientific journal, which receive his discovery with scepticism, but also a promise to send an inspection team within the next few days to investigate his claimed discovery. Fairly unoptimistic, he travels to a local bar, where he meets Tara Khaled, someone he knows from the neighbourhood: she is a librarian and writer, and a 2^nd-gen immigrant Muslim. She, like him, feels that something is vaguely wrong with her life and the world in general: not just the Islamophobic government, but that something feels off about the whole business of living. She is watching the news: Iranian President Malik Al-Fazhad is speaking from Turkey, denouncing the war being pursued against his country and Anglian Muslims by the Shadow, the Anglian leader. There follows a rebuttal by the Anglian Home Secretary, who makes various vaguely Islamophobic comments, annoying the Iranian man. The Home Secretary also denies the existence of any co-ordinated Anglian resistance movement. This is the background to Tara and Peter Flauvert’s discussions; motivated by the TV report and him asking her about her day, she talks wearily of protesters at her Norwich library against the Anglian government, and how the police arrived, rounded them up and took them away; of how one of the protesters was hit in the head by police and got blood on the library outer wall; of how depressing it all is. She compares the Shadow’s treatment of Muslims to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, and she also talks about the increasing drudgery of administrative work she faces, especially in the face of dwindling library patrons. She asks Flauvert about his daughter and estranged wife; he eventually gets round to telling her about his time travel discovery and the troubles with the scientific inspectors. She asks to see it for herself, and he agrees to take her round early the following morning, so that as few people as possible see him bring her in: whites fraternising with Muslims is frowned upon.

Scene 5: Back in 2011, Thomas Farmer goes back to work as a bookseller; he leafs through his old university photos (make reference to The Obvious Child if suitable) and decides, once the day is over, to make a phone call to his former university flatmate, Rebekah Altam Ali, also 26 and now living as an English teacher in Norwich. Later she will turn out to be Tara’s mother. He has made the phone call in large part because he will be attending a book fair in Norwich the following week, a fact which will already have been mentioned in a previous scene. The two arrange to meet up the following Saturday morning, before the fair in the afternoon.

Scene 6: The president of Iran has a conversation with his niece regarding the deteriorating situation against Anglia; once she leaves his presence she gets on her mobile phone to her friend Theresa Kleinmann in Paris, telling her that the efforts of the Resistance need to be stepped up, as the war is worsening. 

 Scene 7:  Peter Flauvert and Tara arrive at 6am at the Scientific Institute; he shows her the discovery and they have another experience with time-travel. At some point, Tara asks if she can go back to see her mother, who died of lung cancer in 2026. We go back and it is implied that her mother is Rebekah; Tara talks about how it was nice to see her mother happy, after her father’s death in 2020, the decline of library patrons and the rise of governmental Islamophobia. It is remarked that the year they go back to, 2019, is a couple of years after the merger of the EU into a single government, and several years before its revolution into a singular state in 2027. They discuss the coming meeting with the inspector that afternoon, and Tara wishes Peter good luck as they part company a few blocks beyond the Institute.

Scene 8: Thomas Farmer meets up with Rebekah Altam Ali and they share a conversation which puts him in mind of his failures. Towards the end of it, he propositions her and she rejects him, telling him that she has a potential boyfriend. He later goes to the book fair and fails to discover anything truly spectacular: he stays in a Premier Inn that night in Norwich and lies awake into the night listening to the traffic outside, and some kind of loud music from a nightclub. Tears glisten on his cheeks as he stares into the darkness.

Scene 9: Peter meets with the scientific inspector later in the same day when he showed Tara his discovery. The inspector is more sympathetic than the people who appointed him, even though he, like his predecessors, is unable to confirm the existence of time travel: every person Peter has shown who is not a personal friend has seen merely an airborne slideshow of clips from the past (which happen, though it’s not revealed conclusively yet, to reflect whatever the people nearby are thinking emotionally about at the time), and an anomalously large amount of static electricity and electromagnetic activity, plus a “weird feeling” in the air. The inspector is not convinced, but he assures Peter he’ll write up a preliminary report by the end of the week, and in the meantime he advises Peter to pass the news of the discovery, whatever it is, on to the president of the ANAS (Anglian National Academy of Science). Peter frequents the same bar in which he previously met Tara, and this time he sees a report on the news which follows on from all the recent protesting: a law is being drafted through the House of Auditors (a single-chamber pan-European equivalent of the UK present-day House of Commons) depriving Muslims of Anglian citizenship unless they denounce their religion. The report also details several fatal shootings of protesters, including one who climbed St. Paul’s Cathedral and draped a star and crescent flag at the top of it. It’s summer, and riots are erupting across the country and across the continent. Switzerland is flooding with protesters bearing sculptures of minarets; in France, gangs of women roam the streets in full burkas, which are outsize enough that there may be weapons concealed beneath them. The Ministers for Germany and Norway are voicing dissent against the Shadow regime, calling for calm and tolerance. A protester with a Liverpudlian accent and short beard is interviewed: his profile is blacked out.

Scene 10: Thomas Farmer doesn’t claim the good-night guarantee against the Premier Inn, because he can’t be bothered and he can see it’s not their fault. He goes to the University of East Anglia and sits in on a history and politics lecture. When he arrives at the train station, he struggles to analyse the notes he has taken. There is an announcement saying that, because it’s Sunday, the train driver has failed to arrive and there will be an hour’s stop at Ely before he can catch the train on from there to Peterborough. Disgusted at his own perceived political ineptitude, he throws the lecture notes in a bin outside Ely station, falling and bloodying his face as he rushes up the underground slope to catch the train, which he misses by seconds (having become engrossed in his attempts to understand the notes in an Ely station cafe). Angrily, he wipes his face with a tissue and sits back down on the platform to await the next train to Peterborough, staring miserably into the howling wind and rain which accompanies this late November Sunday afternoon. 

Scene 11: Peter contacts the president of ANAS, who agrees to fly in from Munich the following day with a team of experts to look at the phenomenon. In the afternoon, after he has finished conducting his scheduled research, Peter walks across Norwich to Tara’s library, where he discovers her in the almost deserted building on the phone, having a hectoring argument with the person on the other end about withdrawal of funding. He talks to her after she hangs up, and she comments that it seems like the potential closure of the library, where she has worked for years, is motivated as much by covert Islamophobia as by overt budget constraints and lack of public demand for library services. The only other occupant of the library is a man wearing a trenchcoat and perusing the section on 20^th century history: he puts down John Toland’s biography of Hitler after Tara makes a remark that she’d like to show the government the Nazi concentration camps. The man turns out to be a government official sent to spy on intellectuals who might react badly to the government crackdown on Muslims and protesters, including intellectuals: he arrests her for this remark, and speaks into a communications device as he manhandles her out, saying “Got another one for you Chief – insurgent or something, judging by what she’s ranting about.” Tara admonishes him for talking in the library and shouts for Peter to lock up: he has protested against her treatment but the official has treated him with firm faux politeness, calling him “sir”, vaguely threatening him and otherwise ignoring him.  Peter locks up and hurries back to the Institute, calling his daughter on the way and speaking briefly to his estranged wife, touching on the subject of the government’s “reforms”, about which they are both outraged. Near the end of the talk, though, a subject which causes dissonance between them comes up: how much Peter used to quarrel with her brother, a naive C of E minister. He shuts the phone off wearily as the bus pulls up as close as it can to the Institute. He gets out and starts to walk.

Scene 12: Late at night in Lincoln, Thomas arrives off the train and walks back through the streets; taking a drunken shortcut across an estate, he sees a couple of fights, one involving racial abuse of a Pakistani Lincoln resident, is mugged by a hooded young man with a vaguely Arabic accent. Completely penniless and robbed of his train tickets, he is forced to return to Lincoln Central rail station and spend the night there, wide awake.

Scene 13: Peter arrives at the Institute to find the President of ANAS waiting for him with a team of individuals. They have an experience with the time-travel machine which involves Peter and the president travelling through time, but only one of his six-person team. The president advises Peter that his equipment is very, very dangerous, and swears Peter to secrecy about it. Tell no-one, he says. He makes his team swear as well, though only one of them would be likely to mention anything. This one man, introduced to Peter earlier and spoken to before and during the experience, is the Jewish Leon Hauser, great-grandson of a Holocaust survivor. The president of ANAS says that he will contact Martin Lorchim of Hamburg, a vague acquaintance of Hauser who was the German Health Secretary until he lost his job following the merger of the EU. The president of ANAS has like Peter realised that there is something somehow wrong about Peter’s machine: he will go away and test the results taken by his team overnight, and will report back to Peter asap about safe methods of destroying the machine. As he leaves, he takes out his phone and begins conversing in rapid and excited German. In the background news reports, clashes between Turkey and Iran have caused Anglian troops to cross the border between the Turkish Anglian Republic and Iran; there have been skirmishes; the president of Iran is very angry. He threatens force if necessary.

Scene 14: The private house of the Iranian president. Pan away from him and up to his niece’s room; she is in the middle of a phone call, to Theresa and, this time, Robert. They introduce a young man by the name of Leon Hauser, who says that he may have found a solution to the problem of a co-ordinated Resistance action. Between them, the four agree that, if this solution doesn’t work, they will go ahead with their captain contact in the English Anglian Republic army, and discuss whether or not they have the necessary plans of government offices. As well as discussing their counter-propaganda initiative with Hannah Porter, the BBC’s secretly pro-Resistance political correspondent, they also discuss how Leon’s boss, Robert’s father, the leader of the Resistance, is being made aware of the matter and will likely be acting to some degree on it.  

Scene 15: The phone call ends on Robert and Theresa’s side of the call, at a house in Hamburg, German Anglian Republic. They are standing in the hall near the door, with coats and suitcases. They discuss in grave voices the latest idea for action, reasoning that they will have to resort to Plan B if it doesn’t work; they will find that out within two days. Obviously very much in love, they embrace and kiss passionately before opening the door into the Hamburg rain as lights pull up outside; they get into the taxi, and give directions to the airport.

Scene 16: In the morning, Thomas Farmer reports the theft of his debit cards, getting them cancelled and new ones issued. He goes back to his work as a bookseller, and has a relatively good day: he sells a lot of things, goes to see a film and calls his sister in Cheltenham, resolving to leave the phone call to his parents in Gainsborough until the following day. Relaxing with a single can of Carlsberg, he watches TV in his pyjamas, unshaven (he’s not that happy yet). The TV is halfway through a documentary on dolphins when the power suddenly crackles and goes out; he switches it off at the mains and begins to count down, not too unhappily, from forty. He drains the can, goes into the kitchen and puts the kettle on. He stretches as he counts past seventeen, and when he hits five the kettle boils, shortly after he has implored it to “come on”. It boils and he goes back into the living room to drink it, not seeing the eyes, attached to blonde hair and a black hood, watching from outside the bottom of his kitchen window. 

Scene 17: Peter visits Tara in local police custody; he tells her in secret what he has been told about the discovery. As he leaves, he receives an urgent call: meet in the dark pub near Carrow Road instantly: a matter of grave importance concerning your discovery has arisen. The man doing most of the speaking has a distinct German accent, but one which wavers in and out, as if he is accustomed to trying to hide it. He hurries off towards the pub in question, pulling his overcoat around him.

Scene 18: Robert and Theresa arrive at Heathrow Airport, and prepare to board a flight to Norwich. Robert calls his father. Since Theresa speaks limited German (her name is a result of her German father who was raised primarily in England, and the fact that she lives in Germany means a lot less now that English is the official language of the Anglian regime), Robert holds this conversation with his father in English, but not particularly loud: in order to make the phone call, the two slip into a Heathrow Airport bathroom disguised as lovers, making sure it’s empty. The phone call is extremely short: Robert learns that his father is also on his way to Norwich, under the pretext that his private health corporation (actually a front for the Resistance) is flying him to the Gallic Academy of Sciences in order to discuss the development of advanced screening techniques against biological weapon concealment, an issue the Anglian government is very passionate about. They agree to meet up. After the phone call ends, Robert and Theresa decide to attempt to alleviate their mounting stress by becoming what they are disguised as: they have sex in the bathroom.

Scene 19: Sometime later, Robert and Theresa are met in the dead of night by a car containing three men: Robert’s father, Leon, and Dr. Flauvert.  They drive to Peter’s equipment at the WASI. Robert and Theresa discuss the Resistance and this discovery’s relevance to it in urgent whispers (they’ve become accustomed to whispering) with Leon: all are in the back seat. Peter is the front passenger; Robert’s father is driving. When they arrive, Robert and Theresa manipulate the device: they talk about going back to the Shadow before he took power. They do, and they find themselves outside a suburban window which has a suspiciously familiar description to the audience. They duck out of the experience, and order Peter to crank the controls up to experimental levels. He initially refuses, but eventually they compromise with him telling them how dangerous it could be to attempt to bring such a temporal disruption into fully clear focus, and as they watch, a man in pyjamas walks into the room and boils a kettle. Theresa tells the others to go back; she has an idea, and will see them in a minute. They go back; she goes into the high-powered time machine, the first person ever to enter it at such experimental energy levels. It later transpires that because of the heightening of this energy, a) it cannot be lowered again, because to touch the machine is to receive electric shock, and b) Theresa cannot return to the future from such a solid past, and neither can any future user of the machine.

Scene 20: In his diary, Thomas thinks more favourably about the history and politics lecture notes he made at UEA. He has a relatively good couple of days at bookselling, and settles down on Thursday night to watch Question Time, after making one phone call before leaving the shop: can the electricity guy come round on Friday to look at the TV? He can? Great. He thinks to himself: typical that the electrical device on the fritz should be the one of his few electrical devices (TV, CD player, kettle, toaster, fridge, freezer, blanket) he most cares about. Unlike two nights ago, he has resolved to drink just a mug of tea, with no sugar: he doesn’t want to be up until 2 like he was last night even with the relative relaxation that brought, compared to the preceding days (he couldn’t shake the vague feeling of being watched). He goes into the kitchen and boils the kettle, conducting the TV off-and-on-again routine for the third night in a row. He drinks the tea, and suddenly he is convulsing on the floor: the mysterious face outside the window casts off her hood, revealing herself to be Theresa. She watches as he becomes still, then leaves. Seconds later, he jerks and reaches for the phone, calling 999.

Scene 20: Peter arrives back at his Norwich house in the middle of the night, and ponders on the ANAS president’s advice that, asap, the equipment should be destroyed. Certainly, what it seemed the young girl was proposing to do was a fairly traumatic and ethically questionable event: he pitied her that she felt driven to do it. He calls his wife and daughter again, and then attempts to put through a call to the police station to speak to Tara, but he is told she is not available: imprisoned potential political terrorists are newly banned from visitation rights, in accordance with the government edict of earlier that evening. He sleeps uneasily, and ponders on the wrongness of his life.

Scene 21: Hannah Porter is in her Lincoln office. It’s late at night and she receives a phone call from her associate, telling her that the copy will shortly be available for her to review of the book on relationships between key figures on both sides of the Crusades period. She expresses distaste for the author over the phone, saying that his take on the Crusades as a phenomenon is disturbingly flippant about the violence. She discourses on politics and how a man can think in such a way in this day and age. Still, a job’s a job’s a job. She doesn’t expect to sleep through the night anyway: she’s nervous about her mayoral deputisation ceremony the next morning. Her colleague, who she is also dating, reassures her. He suggests a takeaway the following night, and she admonishes him about the adverse effects of the Indian they had the previous evening, which made her throw up this morning.

Scene 22: Theresa fails to return to Robert and Leon, which tells them that obviously the attempt on the young Shadow’s life didn’t work, and that it felt disturbing anyway to attempt his murder. However, the measures being taken against Muslims and protesters are quickly reaching epidemic proportions, and Robert, frantic with worry about Theresa’s fate and increasingly desperate due to the regime, decides to go back himself and make one more attempt. He instructs the others to shore up the plans for the other resistance strategies, in the event that he too is unsuccessful. 

Scene 23: Thomas wakes up in the hospital to discover that he has been poisoned. The police say they will be looking into it, and he will be shortly discharged.

Scene 24: Tara languishes in the Norwich police cell, unable to contact anyone. She thinks about her mother, who she recently saw through Peter’s time-travel device: she recalls one Christmas when she was eight years old, celebrating and receiving and giving gifts with and to both parents. She thinks about how right the world seemed then, and marvels sadly at how wrong it has gone since.

Scene 25: Over the Christmas period, Thomas’ bookselling becomes increasingly unsuccessful – despite the drab and out of the way location of his store, he puts this down to decreasing public demand for literature, which depresses him. He spends Christmas in Gainsborough with his parents and his sister; depressed at their relative success, he listens to his father the following morning when the man, a Tory MP, offers him a job as an administrative assistant in the Lincoln mayor’s office: he decides to go for the interview, scheduled to be on January 4^th, 2012.  On the morning in question, he wakes up and takes a taxi to the station, only to experience someone (Robert) ramming a car into his taxi  - he sees him briefly through the window as he loses consciousness, but then the guy disappears. He reschedules the interview for January 5^th and gets the job.  

Scene 26: Robert fails to return to the future, convincing Leon and other resistance members that he, too, was obviously unsuccessful. The Resistance cell agree to shore up their two contingency plans to be set off as planned. All of them leave feeling deeply uneasy, but Leon decides something different. He picks up the phone and calls a contact in the Resistance, leaving him the address of Peter’s lab, instructions on how to operate the machine, and an imperative for as many members as possible to converge on it as soon as possible, but to be as clandestine as possible in doing so. At the end the contact is revealed: a black-jacketed, bearded man riding a deserted London tube carriage. He looks at the address on his notepad before striding to the exit as the train pulls into the nearest station. He leaves the train and examines the Underground map on the ascending wall.

 Scene 27: It’s 2034, and Hannah Porter receives a late-at-night phone call from Leon, asking her if she’s ready with the propaganda distribution initiative. She calls her daughter at university in Liverpool and checks if she’s okay. She hints again at wanting her to pull out of her own personal role in the propaganda delivery system, but Valerie insists.

Scene 28: An army barracks. After a brief, hushed and discomfited parting word to a subordinate, a dishevelled-looking man in uniform, Captain John Reynolds, fully enters (prior to doing so he was in the doorway), picks up the ringing phone and talks to Leon, who asks him if his men are ready with the devices. He replies in the affirmative and stares into space for a few moments after putting the phone down. Sighing, he picks up the phone again and calls his wife. 

Scene 29: Three months later, it is the end of March and the beginning of April 2012. Thomas is ensconced in his administrative work, and has gained commendations from his superiors for his efficiency. He has also made friends among his equal colleagues: one of them invites him to a party the following evening, April 1^st, to have a drink and a talk about cool and important things. He accepts, albeit somewhat reluctantly. That evening, March 31^st, as he is leaving work via the complex’s underground car park, he is confronted by the man from the underground tube train, who stabs him in the side. He goes once more to hospital.

Scene 30: Stranded in the past, Robert and Theresa set out to find each other.

Scene 31: Peter goes to visit his wife and daughter, and ends up having an argument with his wife. Drunk to an extent, he drives back to his lab instead of his house and sits reproaching himself silently for his drink-driving. He almost smashes the time-travel machine, but thinks differently of it. He falls asleep at his desk in the next room, and is awoken by a break-in. He arrives in the time-travel machine room to discover two people using it: he has arrived too late to stop them, but not before he hears one of them say “Let’s vaporise this sucker”. He cringes at the thought of organism bombs being set off in the vicinity of the time machine, but there is nothing he can do. He leaves the laboratory and sits on the kerb across the road, drinking from a paper bag. Nothing yet happens.

Scene 32: Late spring. Robert and Theresa locate each other and lay low, trying to work out what to do. They conclude that life is deterministic and wallow in misery, eventually visiting the deaths of their respective mothers. They resolve to approach the Shadow on a rational basis, try to change his destiny from within.

Scene 33: Mid-June 2012. Thomas, now a much more prominent socialite, being big in the Anglo-Saxon Religious Freedom Party, which was part of the nature of the gathering his workmates had invited him to, is interviewed for a position as aide to the Mayor of Lincoln, and is offered the job, which he takes. He goes to visit his sister and her kids for a weekend in Cheltenham shortly thereafter; the following afternoon, he visits a local pub to see coverage of England’s 2^nd group Euro 2012 match, against Denmark (they already narrowly won 2-1 against hosts Poland), and have Bosnia to come. At half-time, with England 2-1 up, he goes upstairs to the distant pub toilets, and is followed in by two men, who set off bombs: he survives, despite being knocked into the wall, but is shaken. Both of the men are vaporised, but the walls of the toilet are barely touched.  He leaves and, in shock, watches the rest of the match (England go 2-3 down before equalising at the last minute. He walks back to his sister’s house two hundred yards away, jumping at shadows. He reflects that he himself is basically just a shadow of his former self tonight: the shadow, too, of the man he used to be back when he was a bookseller. He gets on with his life, says goodbye to his sister, and takes the train from Cheltenham to Oxford, where he will tomorrow be speaking at a meeting of the ASRFP, before returning to Metheringham. Robert and Theresa are in the pub, and following him up the stairs when he comes back down: they are close enough to hear the blast, and rush past him to behold the scene of an exploded organism bomb with revulsion.

Scene 34: Peter calls his wife again, only for her to tell him it’s late and to get some sleep. He goes home and tries to do just that, but on the way he is contacted by the president of ANAS, who tells him that the results are back and that the machine must be destroyed: Peter tells him it has been cranked up and the man, appalled, tells him it must be destroyed within three days. He tells Peter that he and two others will amass the equipment and return forthwith to Norwich, and to expect them in no later than two days’ time. Peter goes home and sleeps fitfully, dreaming about explosions, thugs and dictators. In the morning, he watches Valkyrie on DVD, having woken up early, before going back into work, where he spends the whole day trying to ignore the machine, which has begun a constant low and ominous fizzing.

Scene 35:  Robert and Theresa confront Thomas in Metheringham, where Theresa snaps and tries to kill him again. He apprehends her and they get to talking: she tells him the truth about why she is trying to kill him, and after comparing himself to Miles Bennett Dyson, he offers to bring them as guests to a few party meetings and to quit if they don’t like what they see. He still owns the shop where he was bookselling; he just hasn’t actively tried very hard recently to flog stuff: the business is failing, after all.

Scene 36: The night after the call from the president of ANAS, Peter, following a day of massive government building bombings across Anglia and a massive propaganda campaign organising armed civil disobedience the following month, gets into a massive argument with his wife, who threatens to attempt to cut him off from custody of his daughter. He also discovers that Tara is still cut off in prison. He gets very drunk and angry and, after spending a day wandering the streets witnessing government atrocities, he decides to travel to the institute and smash the machine himself, without waiting for the ANAS delegation. He enters the room where the machine is and attempts to smash it; he is partially successful but is then electrocuted and plummets back in time unconscious. He lands on something soft and rolls over to discover a young man in an apartment: has he killed him?

Scene 37: The answer, after a bit of deliberate ambiguity, turns out to be no. Robert and Theresa agree to help Thomas with the running of his bookstore; Peter becomes depressed at being stuck in the past.

Scene 38: The following night in 2034. Chaos reigns across the whole of the Anglian continent: the Shadow finally reveals himself at the head of a governmental repression column. In Norwich, the men arrive to destroy the time machine and find Peter’s wife and daughter inside, searching for him. They discover it is already partially destroyed and prepare to finish the job: Peter’s wife realises she loves him and she and her daughter freak out about his whereabouts and smashed and dangerous-feeling office. The men destroy the time-machine and the Shadow disappears: everything disappears except for  the room with the time machine, and Peter’s wife and daughter wait inside with the men as the world outside reforms.

Scene 39: November 2025. Robert and Theresa are partners in Thomas’ successful bookstore chain; he leaves a physical therapy session and reflects on his emotional ones of a decade ago. He reflects on his increasingly middle-age body, and meets Robert and Theresa, neither of whom have aged at all since 2011. They discuss with Peter the facts of how time appears to be moving towards something peacefully reminiscent of the future time they came from (Peter hasn’t aged either) and espouse again the theory that they can’t age as they are not in the right time period. Peter, who is a married scientist, is overcoming marital troubles again, but has no kids with his wife. Thomas is dating Rebekah Ali from Norwich, where he lives and operates one of his chain of bookstores, and helping to raise her daughter Tara. 

Scene 40: 2034, revised. The government is a perfectly peaceful, tolerant, awesome one led by Hannah Porter. Robert and Theresa meet up again with their families. Tara is free; the world of the previous 2034 is revealed to have been a construct of the time machine’s creation and destruction, remembered only by those who have close emotional contact with the machine, thus including Tara.