Winter of the World (Century Trilogy 2)

Lloyd sensed he had failed to reassure Daisy.

Canvassing finished early, for tonight the first of the radio election broadcasts would be aired on the BBC, and all party workers would be listening. Churchill had the privilege of making the first one.

On the bus home, Daisy said: ‘I’m worried. I’m an election liability to you.’

‘No candidate is perfect,’ Lloyd said. ‘It’s how you deal with your weaknesses that matters.’

‘I don’t want to be your weakness. Perhaps I should stay out of the way.’

‘On the contrary, I want everyone to know all about you from the start. If you are a liability, I will get out of politics.’

‘No, no! I’d hate to think I made you give up your ambitions.’

‘It won’t come to that,’ he said, but once again he could see that he had not succeeded in assuaging her anxiety.

Back in Nutley Street, the Leckwith family sat around the radio in the kitchen. Daisy held Lloyd’s hand. ‘I came here a lot while you were away,’ she said. ‘We used to listen to swing music and talk about you.’

The thought made Lloyd feel very lucky.

Churchill came on. The familiar rasp was stirring. For five grim years that voice had given people strength and hope and courage. Lloyd felt despairing: even he was tempted to vote for this man.

‘My friends,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘I must tell you that a socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom.’

Well, that was routine knockabout stuff. All new ideas were condemned as foreign imports. But what would Churchill offer people? Labour had a plan, but what did the Conservatives propose?

‘Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism,’ Churchill said.

Lloyd’s mother, Ethel, said: ‘Surely he’s not going to pretend we’re like the Nazis?’

‘I think he is, though,’ Bernie said. ‘He’ll say we’ve defeated the enemy abroad, now we must defeat the enemy in our midst. Standard conservative tactic.’

‘People won’t believe that,’ Ethel said.

Lloyd said: ‘Hush!’

Churchill said: ‘A socialist state, once thoroughly completed in all its details and its aspects, could not afford to suffer opposition.’

‘This is outrageous,’ said Ethel.

‘But I will go farther,’ said Churchill. ‘I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no socialist system can be established without a political police.’

‘Political police?’ Ethel said indignantly. ‘Where is he getting this stuff from?’

Bernie said: ‘This is good, in a way. He can’t find anything to criticize in our manifesto, therefore he’s attacking us for things we aren’t actually proposing to do. Bloody liar.’

Lloyd shouted: ‘Listen!’

Churchill said: ‘They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo.’

Suddenly they were all on their feet, shouting protests. The Prime Minister was drowned out. ‘Bastard!’ Bernie yelled, shaking his fist at the Marconi radio set. ‘Bastard, bastard!’

When they had quietened down, Ethel said: ‘Is that going to be their campaign? Just lies about us?’

‘It bloody well is,’ said Bernie.

Lloyd said: ‘But will people believe it?’

(iv)

In southern New Mexico, not far from El Paso, there is a desert called Jornada del Muerto, the Voyage of the Dead. All day long the cruel sun beats down on needlethorn mesquite and sword-leafed yucca plants. The inhabitants are scorpions and rattlesnakes, fire ants and tarantula spiders. Here the men of the Manhattan Project tested the most dreadful weapon the human race had ever devised.

Greg Peshkov was with the scientists watching from ten thousand yards away. He had two hopes: first, that the bomb would work; and second, that ten thousand yards was far enough.

The countdown started at nine minutes past five in the morning, Mountain War Time, on Monday 16 July. It was dawn, and there were streaks of gold in the sky to the east.

The test was codenamed Trinity. When Greg had asked why, the senior scientist, the pointy-eared Jewish New Yorker J. Robert Oppenheimer, had quoted a poem by John Donne: ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God.’

‘Oppie’ was the cleverest person Greg had ever met. The most brilliant physicist of his generation, he also spoke six languages. He had read Karl Marx’s Capital in the original German. The kind of thing he did for fun was learn Sanskrit. Greg liked and admired him. Most physicists were geeks but Oppie, like Greg himself, was an exception: tall, handsome, charming, and a real ladykiller.