‘Sold out. In fact, we had to move to a bigger hall.’
‘I told you it would work.’
The meeting had been Ethel’s idea. Ruby Carter and many others in the Labour Party had wanted to mount a protest demonstration, marching through the town. Lloyd had agreed at first. ‘Fascism must be publicly opposed at every opportunity,’ he had said.
Ethel had counselled otherwise. ‘If we march and shout slogans, we look just like them,’ she had said. ‘Show that we’re different. Hold a quiet, intelligent meeting to discuss the reality of Fascism.’ Lloyd had been dubious. ‘I’ll come and speak, if you like,’ she had said.
Lloyd had put that to the Cambridge party. There had been a lively discussion, with Ruby leading the opposition to Ethel’s plan; but in the end the prospect of having an MP and famous feminist to speak had clinched it.
Lloyd was still not sure that it had been the right decision. He recalled Maud von Ulrich in Berlin saying: ‘We must
They walked out through the yellow-brick Romanesque arches of the station and hurried along leafy Station Road, a street of smug middle-class houses made of the same yellow brick. Ethel put her arm through Lloyd’s. ‘How’s my little undergraduate, then?’ she said.
He smiled at the word ‘little’. He was four inches taller than her, and muscular because of his training with the university boxing team: he could have picked her up with one hand. She was bursting with pride, he knew. Few things in life had pleased her as much as his coming to this place. That was probably why she wanted to buy him suits.
‘I love it here, you know that,’ he said. ‘I’ll love it more when it’s full of working-class boys.’
‘And girls,’ Ruby put in.
They turned into Hills Road, the main thoroughfare leading to the town centre. Since the coming of the railway, the town had expanded south towards the station, and churches had been built along Hills Road to serve the new suburb. Their destination was a Baptist chapel whose left-wing pastor had agreed to loan it free of charge.
‘I made a bargain with the Fascists,’ Lloyd said. ‘I said we’d refrain from marching if they would promise to do the same.’
‘I’m surprised they agreed,’ said Ethel. ‘Fascists love marching.’
‘They were reluctant. But I told the university authorities and the police what I was proposing, and the Fascists pretty much had to go along with it.’
‘That was clever.’
‘But Mam, guess who is their local leader? Viscount Aberowen, otherwise known as Boy Fitzherbert, the son of your former employer Earl Fitzherbert!’ Boy was twenty-one, the same age as Lloyd. He was at Trinity, the aristocratic college.
‘What? My God!’
She seemed more shaken than he had expected, and he glanced at her. She had gone pale. ‘Are you shocked?’
‘Yes!’ She seemed to recover her composure. ‘His father is a junior minister in the Foreign Office.’ The government was a Conservative-dominated coalition. ‘Fitz must be embarrassed.’
‘Most Conservatives are soft on Fascism, I imagine. They see little wrong with killing Communists and persecuting Jews.’
‘Some of them, perhaps, but you exaggerate.’ She gave Lloyd a sideways look. ‘So you went to see Boy?’
‘Yes.’ Lloyd thought this seemed to have special significance for Ethel, but he could not imagine why. ‘I thought him perfectly frightful. In his room at Trinity he had a whole case of Scotch – twelve bottles!’
‘You met him once before – do you remember?’
‘No, when was that?’
‘You were nine years old. I took you to the Palace of Westminster, shortly after I was elected. We met Fitz and Boy on the stairs.’
Lloyd did vaguely remember. Then, as now, the incident seemed to be mysteriously important to his mother. ‘That was him? How funny.’
Ruby put in: ‘I know him. He’s a pig. He paws maids.’
Lloyd was shocked, but his mother seemed unsurprised. ‘Very unpleasant, but it happens all the time.’ Her grim acceptance made it more horrifying to him.
They reached the chapel and went in through the back door. There, in a kind of vestry, was Robert von Ulrich, looking startlingly British in a bold green-and-brown check suit and a striped tie. He stood up and Ethel hugged him. In faultless English, Robert said: ‘My dear Ethel, what a perfectly charming hat.’
Lloyd introduced his mother to the local Labour Party women, who were preparing urns of tea and plates of biscuits to be served after the meeting. Having heard Ethel complain, many times, that people who organized political events seemed to think that an MP never needed to go to the toilet, he said: ‘Ruby, before we start, would you show my mother where the ladies’ facilities are?’ The two women went off.
Lloyd sat down next to Robert and said conversationally: ‘How’s business?’
