The Churchill Commando, page 3
‘Up!’ the man said. ‘On your feet! Up!’
The youth made an effort to rise, but his knees buckled under him and he fell forward, his head lowered, as though in prayer. The man motioned to Rick and his friend Ginger.
‘You – and you! Take him over to the wall! Come on, move yourselves!’ The voice, though slightly muffled by the mask was unmistakably cockney in tone, and the command was delivered with a sharp, military ring.
Rick and Ginger lifted the whimpering boy to his feet and half carried, half lifted him to the wall where the others, shocked and silent, made space for him. Blood was beginning to bubble up from the heavy graze made by his fall on the gravel, and as he leaned against the wall he pulled out a grubby handkerchief and held it to the wound. He was trembling as though with fever, his teeth chattering noisily.
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3
‘Attention! Attention!’ The man with the loud-hailer materialised out of the darkness, a tall, athletic figure, dressed like the others in dark overalls and a mask. He handed the hailer to one of the armed men, moved slowly forward between the searchlights to within a few paces of the crowd at the wall, and stood, hands on hips, looking deliberately along the rows of bewildered faces, as though he was challenging them to stare him down. The other men fell back respectfully, leaving no doubt that this was their commander.
He stood thus for a long time, dominating them, his dark eyes almost luminous in the semi-darkness; the night, the station yard, seemed to be filled with the force of his personality, as though the air was charged with an electric current. When he spoke at last, the breaking of the silence came to them almost as a physical shock. He said only a few words, in a scornful, half-jesting tone, but behind them there was the unmistakable ring of steel.
‘Well, lads,’ he said, ‘you’ve had a good day, have you? Put the boot in here and there, frightened a few old ladies, looted a few shops, smashed up a bit of railway property, eh? And I daresay you were looking forward to a little more of the same when you got home. Nothing like shoving an old woman off the pavement, is there? And there’s always a few around. They just won’t lie down and die, will they? They won’t get out of your way – so if you kick ’em in the guts it’s their own fault, isn’t that so? Mind you, the odds must be right. Like this afternoon, for instance. You see, I know what you’ve been up to. I know a great deal about you. What were the odds in that shop you smashed up and looted? There were two of them and what? – twenty or thirty of you. Odds of ten or fifteen to one in your favour. Oh, you’re a lot of brave lads, we have to grant you that. Bonnie fighters one and all.’
He moved a step or two nearer, and he seemed to hurl his words at them like daggers.
‘Louts! Every one of you! Gutless, spineless, chicken-livered louts!’ He shook his head as though lost for words, and muttered, half to himself. ‘God help us! God in heaven help us!’ He moved his right hand in what seemed to be a signal, and the masked man with the cockney voice took over.
He was squat and heavy, and he stood before them like a bull, lifting his massive head towards them in an aggressive manner.
‘Right, my lucky lads,’ he bawled. ‘Hear me! I shan’t say it twice. Start stripping off. The lot – right down to your underpants. We’ll let you keep them on – don’t want you to catch a cold in your vitals, do we? If you haven’t got underpants, that’s your bad luck. Right – get cracking. Throw the stuff in front here. I’ll give you two minutes. Anyone who takes longer than that will get the sharp edge of a rifle in his guts!’
There was a pause and then a murmur of protest rose from the crowd, ascending in volume, and some of the boys at the rear, well-screened from view, began to shout abuse, but the revolt was crushed before its infection could take hold. Four masked men with sub-machine guns, closed in, menacing the group, and the protest fell away into silence. One by one the youths began to pull off their clothes, prompted by the armed men who moved along the flanks of the group prodding viciously at those who were slow or seemed reluctant to start.
The pile of clothing grew rapidly, forming a long, low mound in front of the Cockney, who stood with one eye on his watch and one on the crowd of youths. From time to time the masked men poked among the clothing and removed the odd weapon, which they tossed to one side. There were a dozen lengths of bicycle chain, several knives, even a piece of brick in a sock and a couple of knuckle-dusters.
‘Time! Stand still there! Stand still!’
The Cockney moved forward and ran his eye along the rows of white, shivering bodies. Most of them were wearing underpants of one sort or another, but there were several who were completely naked and most of these were making pathetic efforts to shelter behind their friends, as though they felt ashamed or vulnerable.
‘Right, my lads,’ said the Cockney. ‘When I give the signal – and not before – you can start heading for home.’ He pointed to a gate in another part of the wall. ‘You go thataway. Turn left outside and keep going. If I was you I’d run, to keep warm. Now, wait for it.’
He turned towards the man who seemed to be the commander. The man nodded and moved forward.
‘Remember this day,’ he said. ‘Remember it well. The party’s over. From now on neither you nor anyone else will be allowed to get away unscathed with what you did today. If the law won’t punish you properly, we shall. Pass the word. And remember we shall be watching. We shall know. And one way or another we shall make you pay.’ He stepped back. ‘Right. Clean them up!’
There was a momentary pause and then, from out of the darkness two great jets of water began to play on the crowd by the wall. There was a kind of collective yell of shock, and they pressed together more tightly as if this would give them shelter.
‘Right!’ shouted the Cockney, ‘run for it!’
Shouting and cursing the youths began to break, holding their heads down as they ran for the gate, pursued all the way by the relentless icy, arching columns of water.
A short path led from the gate to form a T-junction with a narrow lane, but the right-hand turn into the lane was blocked by a truck, and four more armed men. Gasping, breathless, the youths turned to the left and fled into the darkness.
Rick was one of the last to go and as he turned away from the truck to follow the others, he was sure he heard the sound of men laughing. The laughter seemed to pursue him for quite a long way.
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4
Later that evening a taxi-driver handed an envelope to the commissionaire on duty at the Daily Express building in Fleet Street, after which he returned to his cab and drove away. The envelope was addressed to the editor of the Sunday Express and marked very urgent. In due course it was delivered to the editor who put it to one side; at that moment he, with senior members of his staff, was preoccupied with a series of reports which had been trickling in for the past half-hour and which looked to have the makings of an extraordinary, not to say, sensational story.
The first of these reports was in the editor’s hand at this moment. It came from a journalist named Hemmings who worked for a local newspaper in Bedford and occasionally earned a few pounds on the side by acting as a stringer for the Express group. Hemmings was a good and experienced newspaperman with a plain, impersonal, muscled style in which scarcely a word was wasted, but on this occasion he had been unable entirely to suppress his own feelings; there was, the editor noted, a hint of mocking satisfaction in his report, as though he approved of the events with which he was dealing.
He lived in the village of Little Warling, a few miles south of Bedford and earlier that evening, on his way to a dinner engagement he had chanced upon the youths from the train. Tired, cold and dispirited, they were strung out in melancholy procession along a half-mile stretch of narrow country lane. Most of them were now sheltering in the local church hall, in the care of the police, but Hemmings had taken three of them to his own home, where after being fed and roughly kitted out with some of his old clothes, they revived sufficiently to tell him their strange story. Hemmings had set all this down and added, in conclusion, that he was on his way to the disused railway station at Warling, where the attack on the youths had taken place, and that he would ring back within the hour with further news.
The other reports were centred on the same area. A signal box on the main line had been invaded by two armed men, both wearing masks, and the signalman had been forced at gun point to stop the 6.45 football special from King’s Cross. The train was halted for about two minutes, after which the signals were re-set and it continued its journey. The armed men warned the signalman to make no attempt to raise the alarm, and instructed him to continue with his normal duties. They stayed in the box for thirty minutes and only when they left was he able to warn his superiors.
The final report, less detailed and more nebulous, referred to rumours that a train had been hi-jacked in the same area. It seemed to fit with the other stories and the editor ordered that this should be checked out immediately. Only after he had made other dispositions did he turn his attention to the envelope lying on his desk. It took him thirty seconds to read the typed message it contained and when he had done so he sat back in the chair, fingering his thin hair in amazement and disbelief. Then he read it through once again, more slowly this time, weighing each sentence as though to test its truth.
In the right-hand corner at the top of the single sheet of white paper there was a sign, made by a rubber stamp. It consisted of a red triangle, similar to that used in road signs to represent danger, and within this there was the letter C. The message was set out in neat, numbered paragraphs:
1.At 18.35 hrs. on Saturday, April 30, at Warling Station, one of our units took punitive action against a large group of hooligans and vandals. The operation was successful, and should be taken as a demonstration of our purpose.
2.That purpose is to alert the British people to the dangers which threaten our way of life. The signs of corruption and degeneracy are all round us and need no emphasis. In the name of freedom the law is mocked and defied, violence, terror and perversion have become the common currency of our cities, the simple decencies of courtesy, good manners, consideration and respect for others have been replaced by vulgarity, boorishness and ignorance.
3.A journey of a thousand miles begins with a short step. Today, at Warling, we took that first step. There will be others. We shall continue to harass and punish the guilty until this nation finds its way back to sanity.
4.We pose no threat to any decent citizen, whatever his age, race, colour or religion. We are neither racialist nor fascist, we do not seek to destroy democratic institutions. But we believe that there can be no democracy without discipline, no peace without strong laws and the will to enforce them, no liberty without order and virtue.
5.We make only one specific demand. In accordance with the wish of the vast majority, as indicated by the public opinion polls, we call upon Parliament to restore the death penalty immediately and to extend it to cover acts of terrorism, kidnapping, and other serious crimes of violence.
6.We have adopted, as a symbol of our purpose, the name of one of our greatest leaders. We call upon the people of Britain, in his name and inspired by his indomitable spirit, to make a supreme effort. Let us make a new beginning – let us make the coming months a season of national revival and regeneration! Restore order, courtesy and discipline in the home, in the schools, in the factories and offices, on the streets! Let each be responsible for his own.
(signed) the churchill commando.
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5
Inevitably, the remarkable events at Warling were featured prominently in all the Sunday newspapers and became the main lead story in the radio news-bulletins. The Sunday Express took pride of place with its exclusive publication of the communique from the so-called Churchill Commando, and this became the subject of much comment from the professional pundits from all corners of the political arena.
The radio stations seized the opportunity to conduct an exercise in vox pop sending their reporters out on to the streets to sample the reaction of the public. Almost ninety per cent of those interviewed expressed approval of the action of the self-styled Churchill Commando, their comments ranging from the cautious to the outright enthusiastic. The general feeling was summed up by one housewife, a Mrs. Plumrose from Chelsea, who was questioned on her way home from church.
‘Well, you have to fight fire with fire, don’t you? These hooligans have had things their own way for far too long. Half the time, it isn’t safe to walk the streets. Now they’ve been given a taste of their own medicine, that’s the way I look at it. It’s a bit of a laugh really, isn’t it? I mean, you have to laugh – the idea of those hooligans getting washed down. I’d have given my right arm to have seen it. I say good luck to these men, these commandos, whoever they are. If this country had more like them, if we had another Churchill running things, we shouldn’t be in such a mess.’
No senior ministers had been persuaded to comment, but on the BBC lunchtime programme The World This Weekend, both an Under-Secretary at the Home Office and a high-ranking police officer at Scotland Yard sternly condemned the instigators of the incident at Warling, and warned of the dangers inherent in such vigilante-style activity. An M.P. for a West Country constituency, appearing on the same programme, agreed with them in principle, but tempered his condemnation with a sort of postscript.
‘I’m bound to say,’ he said, ‘that there is very real concern among the ordinary citizens of this country about the inability of the responsible authorities to deal with these hooligans and vandals and with the rising level of violent crime generally. I’m not blaming the police – they’re undermanned and over-worked and they do a fine job – and I don’t think they get sufficient support from Parliament. There are far too many do-gooders in this country – woolly-minded permissive liberals who seems to have more sympathy for the criminals than for the victims. We need to strengthen the police and bring in tougher punishments for law-breakers – unless we do that, and do it quickly, there will be more outbreaks such as the one last night. As I say, I don’t approve of this Churchill Commando, but on the other hand, I must add that, in my view, we have allowed violence and permissiveness to go too far. Sooner or later a backlash of this sort was bound to come. We ought to heed the warning.’
Another M.P. from Yorkshire issued a statement in which he announced that he would be putting down a motion asking Parliament to restore the death penalty and extend its operation to other serious crimes.
Later that evening the television news programmes reported at some length on an extraordinary new development. All over Britain, people were bringing out photographs of Winston Churchill. Most of them were old wartime pictures showing Churchill in his most pugnacious mood and they were going up in their thousands in the front windows of houses, in the rear windows of motorcars, in public houses and clubs.
It was as though the incident at Warling had touched off some spring in the British people, releasing a long pent-up frustration. The general mood was one of amused satisfaction; strangers talked to each other in trains and pubs just as they had done in war-time, commenting with smiles on the humiliation of the hooligans as they or their parents had once spoken of the victory of the 8th Army at El Alamein as a turning-point in the war.
Neither the Prime Minister nor the Home Secretary shared this mood. After watching the television news they spent ten minutes on the telephone discussing the situation, following which the Home Secretary summoned the Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police and other senior officials to an emergency meeting to be held at the Home Office at 9 a.m. the following morning. The Home Secretary told his Private Secretary to inform the Press that he would be making a full statement to the House of Commons on Monday afternoon and that until then he had no comment to make.
An hour later, as the Minister was relaxing at his home with a few special guests, a man named Tom Barr went into the Queen’s Head, a public house in Camden Town and ordered a large whisky.
Chapter Three
1
Few people noticed Tom Barr sitting quietly at the far corner of the public bar of the Queen’s Head. There was always a nucleus of strangers in the pub, especially at weekends and so long as they did not usurp the tables and interfere with the unwritten rights of the regulars, they were tolerated. At intervals Barr caught the barman’s eye and ordered another Scotch which he tempered with water and ice, and occasionally he turned his head to glance round the room, but for the most part he sat there quite happily, his chin resting up on clenched fists, as though content with his own company.
He had been there for just over an hour, and was on his fourth whisky when the Brothers came in. There were four of them, ranging in age from about 30 to 45 and the conversation fell away to a whisper as they jostled their way to the bar. They brought with them the smell of sweat and stale beer, and in face of their swaggering arrogance the warmth of the crowded room seemed suddenly to fade, the atmosphere to become chill and uneasy. The change was so marked that even Barr looked up from his thoughts. He glanced at the four men for a moment and then returned to his drink, as though they held no interest for him.
The eldest of the four, a heavy, ox-shouldered man with a Zapata-type moustache, whom the others addressed as Frankie, banged loudly on the counter and ordered four pints of special. The barman acknowledged the order with an ingratiating smile and out of the side of his mouth muttered to the young Irish girl who was helping him.
