Winter of the World

Lloyd was not comfortable about this invitation, and hesitated over his reply; then his mother appeared, as pretty as a songbird in a red summer coat and a jaunty little hat. She hugged and kissed him. ‘You look very well, my lovely,’ she said. ‘But I must buy you a new suit for next term.’

‘This one is fine, Mam.’ He had a scholarship that paid his university fees and basic living expenses, but it did not run to suits. When he had started at Cambridge his mother had dipped into her savings and bought him a tweed suit for daytime and an evening suit for formal dinners. He had worn the tweed every day for two years, and it showed. He was particular about his appearance, and made sure that he always had a clean white shirt, a perfectly knotted tie, and a folded white handkerchief in his breast pocket: there had to be a dandy somewhere in his ancestry. The suit was carefully pressed, but it was beginning to look shabby, and in truth he longed for a new one, but he did not want his mother to spend her savings.

‘We’ll see,’ she said. She turned to Ruby, smiled warmly, and held out her hand. ‘I’m Eth Leckwith,’ she said with the easy grace of a visiting duchess.

‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Ruby Carter.’

‘Are you a student, too, Ruby?’

‘No, I’m a maid at Chimbleigh, a big country house.’ Ruby looked a bit ashamed as she made this confession. ‘It’s five miles out of town, but I can usually borrow a bike.’

‘Fancy that!’ said Ethel. ‘When I was your age, I was a maid at a country house in Wales.’

Ruby was amazed. ‘You, a housemaid? And now you’re a Member of Parliament!’

‘That’s what democracy means.’

Lloyd said: ‘Ruby and I organized today’s meeting together.’

His mother said: ‘And how is it going?’

‘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 not meet violence with violence.’ That had been the policy of the German Social Democratic Party. For the von Ulrich family, and for Germany, the policy had been a catastrophe.

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.’