Flash fiction: Parallel Worlds

Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala

“It’s as if we inhabited completely parallel worlds,” said Jane.

“I didn’t really hear what happened,” said her brother John, who was reading the paper at the kitchen table.

“He wanted to bring some garden waste through the passage.”

“So?” John looked up. “You said the neighbours have access to the side-passage through your garden. I believe that’s quite common in these terraces.”

“Well, yes but these guys are busy working in our garden.”

John nodded; he was aware of that. They had been hammering and drilling all day and the back garden was a mass of pipes, unions and screws. In fact he had heard most of the encounter. The neighbour, Trevor, had opened the wooden door from his own garden and appeared dragging a large plastic bag of garden waste. He had looked put out to see his way blocked. “What’s going on here?” he asked. ”I’m having a heat pump installed,” said Jane. “Couldn’t you come through tomorrow instead?”

“A heat pump? Silly green nonsense,” said Trevor.

“You mean you don’t care about climate change?”

“It’s all a myth. You’re just wasting money.”

“You’re selfish and ignorant, Trevor.”

John had overheard this; he had groaned inwardly and poured more coffee. He had earlier spilled a quantity of ground arabica after trying to open the packet, which was impossible to open; it was a special brand from a Ugandan cooperative that Jane bought online at great expense. He now looked through the back window; Trevor and Jane were standing on the deck so he could only see their bottom halves, Trevor in long shorts and trainers, Jane in skinny jeans and large Doc Martens.

“And where’s my son’s ball?” Trevor was asking.

“It’s quite safe. He shouldn’t let it fly into my garden like that. He can have it when he comes and asks me politely,” said Jane.

John sank a little further down in his seat. He put some more sugar in his coffee, which was rather bitter.

Later, in the evening, Jane went out to her community self-help group, where they discussed promoting tolerance. “I’ll be back about nine and we can heat up those lentils for supper,” she called out.

“How lovely,” said John.

He sat on the deck, enjoying the warm evening air and sipping a glass of Marsala while reading the Book of Revelation, which always afforded him a certain amusement. Some time after Jane had left, the door to the next-door garden scraped open and Trevor appeared, dragging two large bin liners of bindweed. He did not notice John at first but struggled through the narrow gap between the deck and Jane’s back wall, then suddenly stopped. “Hallo, Father. I’m sorry to disturb you; I thought there was no-one here,” he said. He sounded a little abashed.

“My sister has gone out,” said John. “Don’t mind me. I’m staying with her while I’m on leave.” He stood up. “May I take one of those? They look rather awkward.”

Together they took the bags through the passageway and loaded them into the boot of an elderly Mercedes saloon with tinted windows, metallic black paintwork and stylised wheels.

“I’ll take them down the tip in the morning,” said Trevor. “Bless you for helping, Father.”

John chuckled. “John will do,” he said. “Come and have a glass of wine.” He sat Trevor at the small wrought-iron table on the decking, and poured him a glass of Marsala. “It’s a little sweet but very drinkable. Supplies from Father Godfrey at St John’s down the road. He buys his communion wine in bulk.” Trevor looked a little startled, so he went on: “Don’t worry, it’s not consecrated. If it was we’d go straight to hell, of course.”

“We’d meet some interesting people there, though,” said Trevor. He picked up the book John had been reading. “Any good?”

“Oh yes,” said John. “That’s our company instruction manual. It’s a free download if you’re interested.”

Trevor flipped the book open at the passage John had had open. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse,” he read, “and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” He put the book down. “What does that even mean?”

“It means we’re all stuffed,” said John. He chuckled and poured a little more Marsala into Trevor’s glass.

“It sounds like the sort of thing your sister says about climate change,” said Trevor.

“Ah well, she might not be wrong there,” said John. “Please take my sister as you find her, Trevor. She has a good heart.”

“I am sure. What on earth does she make of you being a priest?”

Wikimedia Commons/Tarquin

“She doesn’t know what to make of it, to be honest with you,” said John. “I think she feels I live in a strange parallel world.”

Trevor looked back at him with a thoughtful expression. “And do you?”

“No, I live in Haringey,” said John. “My sister is all right, Trevor. She is three years older than me. When we were children she dressed me and took me to school. She had to. Our father had gone and Mum was a drunk.”

“Oh,” said Trevor.

“Dinner’s ready, Trev,” called his wife from next door.

He stood up. “I’d better go. Have you eaten?”

“Don’t worry about me,” said John. “But thanks.”

When Trevor had gone he sat back in his chair, squinting to read in the gathering dusk.

“And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them,” he read. He sighed, and went into the kitchen for more Marsala. As he entered he saw Trevor’s son’s football in the corner. He hesitated for a moment; then he took it outside and rolled it through the gate to the garden next door.

More flash fiction from Mike:

A Man For All Seasons Net zero.The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

 

Flash fiction: A Man For All Seasons

Net Zero. The Stranger’s Bar. And a three-line whip

Ned wobbled a little as he crossed the Lobby. But he managed a bow to the Speaker’s chair as he entered the chamber and made his way safely to his usual seat. From this he looked down on the orderly scalp of the Shadow Environment Minister, whose hair had been coiffed with precision for tonight’s debate; it had, like her staff, learned to do as it was told.

“Old Ned Fiddler looking a bit unsteady,” a young MP had muttered back in the lobby. “Does he hit the sauce often?”

Sir Thomas More

(Hans Holbein the Younger)

“Never did much,” said the lobby correspondent with him. “Too busy shagging research assistants. But I think the new party leadership is getting to him.”

It was. One of the Whips had called into his office in Portcullis House that morning to discuss the Environment debate for later.

“We’re a little anxious about you, Ned,” he said. “We need to land some punches on the government tonight. Need to show all those Reform voters that we don’t like Net Zero either. Are you going to speak?”

“If I’m called,” said Ned.

“You see, when it comes to Net Zero, you’ve been a little…” The whip looked up at the ceiling and down again. “A little unsound, if I may say so. We were a little concerned after the select committee… at your comments on wind energy for example. A little too approving. Our voters do not want these ugly things in their back yards.”

“You would prefer me to tilt at windmills?” asked Ned.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Never mind. Fear not, I am sure I shan’t disappoint you.” He picked up a sheaf of notes and waved it at the whip, who had, he noted, cut himself shaving. “I have written a paean to fossil fuels that will warm the cockles of your heart.”

“Splendid.” The whip got up to go. In the doorway, he turned. “We realise of course that your seat is a little vulnerable to Reform. You may wish to be a little surer of your place in the Lords. Should anything untoward happen at the neck selection. After all, it’s a three-line whip.”

“Fear not,” said Ned, and added quietly:

“And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It was written in 1520, of Sir Thomas More.”

“Oh.” The whip looked confused. ”Well, I’m sure we can rely on you.”

He went. Ned regarded his retreating back with distaste. Over thirty years in the House, he thought, and I’m expected to endure threats from these smarmy little creeps. He looked again at his notes, in which he had collated all the threats to birdlife from wind turbines and bemoaned the loss of farmland to solar panels. He thought for a moment. Then he picked up the wad of papers and dropped it in the bin. Next he opened his desk draw and took out a very old brown envelope from which he drew several sheets of foolscap paper, yellow with age. He placed them in a clear plastic folder. 

Then he went to the Stranger’s Bar and had two gin and tonics and a Glenlivet.

 

*** *** ***

“Mister FIDDLER!”

He swayed slightly as he rose to his feet.

“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.” He looked round the chamber. “I need not long detain you …Bustards!”

Trevor Littlewood/Wikimedia Commons

A ripple ran through the chamber. The Environment Minister raised his eyebrows. Madam Deputy Speaker seemed about to intercede on a point of parliamentary language so he continued hastily: “Great bustards, to be precise. As the House will know, these birds have been reintroduced to these islands and it has been put to this House that wind turbines are a risk to them. Are we to let the planet fry because of the infinitesimal risk that some silly bustard might fly into the blades? I am reminded that, a few days after the destruction of the Möhne dam, The Times received a letter that purported to be from some learned academics concerned at the fate of some rare crested ring-tailed lesser-spotted Nubian warbler or the like thought to have been breeding on the reservoir. Still, this is not about bustards. Is it?”

He paused for a moment, then grasped the yellowed sheet of foolscap. “I should like, Madam Deputy Speaker, to read briefly from the diary of my great-uncle Christopher. He writes, on a day in June:

I have been thinking of the seasons and their immutability, which is a comfort in these times; one knows, doesn’t one, that in England, some morning in late February or the start of March, one will step out and feel the wind cold, harsh even, but not so raw as it was; and the sky will be a sort of washed blue with bright white clouds scudding across it, bisected by branches that are still bare but somehow not as barren as before. One knows then that it is early Spring. Then some weeks later that the buds arrive, the hawthorn breaks out and the trees are suddenly a very vivid green that you won’t see later in the summer, when they are duller, jaded.

We’re in that vivid time now; the sky’s a deep blue, not the livid grey-white of August, and the fields are coming alive – I can see them quite well beyond the perimeter fence, stretching across the Lincolnshire Wolds with their gentle folds and hedgerows. The blossoms are everywhere. I woke quite late today – we landed at four last night, and then there was debriefing and breakfast – when I got up I opened the window of my quarters and the world outside looked exactly like early June. Then just now the chaps were bombing up and some clot miss-set a circuit and let a 4,000-pound cookie drop from a bomb bay onto the tarmac. It didn’t go off, or we wouldn’t be here. I could hear the maniacal laughter of the crew and I thought, the world is in flames from Singapore to the Channel coast, and we have just been near-blown to eternity; yet the seasons feel exactly as they should, and there is something we cannot destroy, and that comforts me.

Ned lowered the page. “I read today that the Woodland Trust have detected changes in the seasons. Nothing has brought the reality of climate change home to me quite as that has done.” Two or three members began to rise, but he shook his head. “No, I shall not give way. Madam Deputy Speaker, I realise that my great-uncle could not now be comforted by the immutability of the seasons, as he wrote that he was in that dark time – a week or so before his death on active service. That is a reality almost beyond my grasp. Am I to deny that reality today because if I do not, a few thousand votes may go to fools?

“Madam Deputy Speaker, I have been a member of my Party for fifty years and a member of this House for thirty. But tonight I must defy the whip. I cannot vote against the Government motion and, for all its flaws, I commend it to the House.”

A wave of noise broke over him; cries of “Oh! Oh!” and “For shame!” and “Bravo!”. He did not hear them; he left the chamber and crossed the lobby, only dimly aware of the two or three lobby correspondents striding to keep up with him. They fell back, but one of them called out: “Is your career over?” And another called: “What season is it now, Ned!”

He stopped and thought for a moment. “I think,” he said, “that it’s early spring.”

More flash fiction from Mike:

A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: A History Lesson

Why do we study it? 

It was the last lesson of the day. Mr Balcombe donned his mortarboard and his gown. White chalk powder adorned the latter. This was from the Latin class after Assembly; he had flung the blackboard wiper at Brockley Minor, an especially dense member of the Remove who failed to conjugate the verb manere. The missile had missed, hitting the rear wall of the classroom with a dull thud and releasing a white cloud that caught the morning sunshine as it streamed in through the high sash window. “Since you cannot conjugate manere, you will, er, remain in detention after supper this evening,” said Mr Balcombe, delighted with his own wit.

Perhaps he’d been a little hard on Brockley; after all, the boy was a useful fly-half. He sighed, and entered the classroom where Mr Lawless was teaching the fifth form History. Mr Lawless had joined the school at the beginning of the term. He was a slim, rather quiet man in his 30s who said little in the staff room although he was always polite. But Mr Balcombe had noticed that when he supervised a table at suppertime, the conversation was a little louder, a little brighter, and sometimes the boys were laughing.

He also had the overpowering sensation that he had met him, at least briefly, years before.

“I understand, Balcombe, that his lessons are a little – er, unorthodox,” the Headmaster had said before lunch. “Sir Rodney Bush and one or two others have enquired. It seems their boys have mentioned them.”

“The lessons worried the boys in some way?” asked Mr Balcombe. He sipped his sherry.

“Well, no,” said the Headmaster. “They said they enjoyed them. So you might sit in on a lesson or two and check he is teaching properly.”

If Mr Lawless thought this unusual, he gave no sign of it. Mr Balcombe seated himself by the window and watched his colleague write on the blackboard, then turn to the class. On the board he had chalked:

EMERGENCE

And in a smaller hand:

Of what? When? Why? What happened? Then:

DID WE KNOW?

“Last week I asked you to consider these, with reference to a change, or incident, of your choice,” said Mr Lawless. “You have written essays. Bush. Tell us of an age and its emergence.”

“I thought of the Black Death, sir,” said Bush.

“Very good. The emergence of – what? A disease yes, but of what new phase or age?”

“Men asked more for their labour, sir,” said Bush. “So farming changed.”

“It did. The Acts of Enclosure, the arrival of sheep – what is emerging, Bush?” 

“A prosperous new world, sir.”

“Indeed. For some. But as the plague raged, none knew of that; only of the terror they felt. So. Thorpe. Your essay. Most original. Tell the class what emerged.”

“The age of steam, sir. Newcomen’s engine.”

“Yes. But did we know what was happening?”

“A few Cornish miners may have done, sir.”

“Exactly. The rest did not know,” said Lawless. He was walking back and forth before the class, stroking his chin. “That was in the 1690s. Two hundred years later, we cannot imagine life without the train. The cotton mill. And now the Dreadnought.” He looked around the class. “Now, someone – Bush, I think – asked me earlier this term why we study history.” He looked at a spotty youth at the back of the class. “Grimbly, tell me why we study history.”

“So that we can spot it happening, sir?”

“Precisely,” said Mr Lawless. “Tell me, everyone; is an age emerging today? Now? In this year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twelve? And how shall we know?”

No-one answered, for there was a hullabaloo from an adjoining classroom; and then a noise appeared from outside, a clawing, ripping sound, and doors banged as boys poured through the corridors and out onto the terrace that led to the playing fields. All turned their heads upwards, eyes shielded against the late afternoon sun; the noise grew louder and a shadow crossed the First Form cricket pitch and there it was, an assemblage of sticks and wires and stretched doped linen, a trail of black smoke behind it, drawn across the sky by two spinning discs that caught the sun. It drifted past them, perhaps a hundred feet above, the ripping, tearing sound assaulting one’s eardrums, the boys cheering and tossing their caps in the air.

“Well I’ll be damned!” Mr Lawless chuckled. “I do believe it’s the Daily Mail aeroplane!”

“It must be,” said Mr Balcombe. “I did hear it might come this way; how splendid! I suppose that’s that Grahame-White chappie conducting it.” The latter’s hunched figure was just visible as the aeroplane passed over the Headmaster’s house and proceeded in the direction of Great Billingham. In the quad a horse neighed and whinnied between the shafts of the Chaplain’s dogcart and Cook craned her neck at the sky saying “Well I never! Well I never!” over and over again, twisting her apron between her hands.

When the aeroplane was out of sight the two men rounded up their charges and chivvied them back to the classroom. As they followed the last stragglers across the terrace, Mr Balcombe said: “I did say I was sure I had met you before you joined us and now I fancy I know when. Were you ever in the Cape Colony?”

The other frowned. “Yes. That was some years ago.”

“Indeed. During the South African War. Were you serving there? I met you, I think, on a visit to the Second Hampshires.”

“Yes, I served with them. I remember now. We left for the Transvaal about then.”

“How was the Transvaal?”

“We were engaged in farm clearances,” said Mr Lawless. He was silent for a moment, then said: “I resigned my commission not long afterwards.”

“Oh.”

As they reached the door Mr Lawless paused for a moment, then turned and looked at the sky. “I wonder, Balcombe. What has just emerged… and what sort of new beastliness will we commit with the machine we have seen today?”

More flash fiction from Mike:

A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: The Creatives

Meeting a tech bro

Mandy had seen most of the building now. It was striking; a series of inverted V-shaped spars, roofed to halfway down, so the whole resembled an upturned half-built ark with the planking built out from the keel. There were windows in the roof, scattered at random and interspersed with solar panels.

“We say it’s the best newbuild in the Valley,” said Amrita as she led Mandy through another large open-plan office. “It’s sustainable too. The wood came from a stand in Washington State that’s sustainably managed. And we have enough solar panels and battery storage that we don’t hardly need the grid so the power supply is sustainable also.”

Serpent labret, Aztec
(MetropolitanMuseum of Art/Creative Commons)

Mandy wished her feet were sustainable; she should have worn better trainers today. She snatched a glance at her watch.

Amrita saw this. “Frey’s running a little late,” she said. The phone in her hand beeped. “Ah, he says about five minutes. Let’s go through the chill area.” They passed through an oblong room with a central drinks dispenser; there were low, deep cushion seats and soft bright couches. “Like, this is where we come to chill and it’s where we swap ideas. Frey says the idea is cross-fertilization.”

“Literally?” asked Mandy.

“I’m sorry?”

“Workplace romance?”

Amrita looked puzzled. “I don’t know. I guess I could check with HR and see if they have some figures.”

“Never mind.” There were several men and women sunk into the deep cushions but they seemed to be looking at their phones rather than each other. Mandy decided fertilization was improbable.

And then they were in Frey’s office. Its minimalism was aggressive. Its occupant sat behind his glass desk, coiled like a serpent.

“Sit down,” he said; it was not an invitation. “How is business? Your site is being read in the Valley, that’s for sure. And your tech blog’s the hottest part of it.”

“I hope so,” said Mandy. “And everyone’s curious about you. They want to know what you are doing here.”

*What have you been told we’re doing?”

“Everything, Frey. From germ warfare to Bitcoin mining.”

He chuckled darkly. “Those are kid’s stuff,” he said. He paused, frowned and seemed to think, in a way Many found mannered. “Have you heard of the Blue Brain project?” he said.

She had. “You mean those guys at Lausanne? They wanted to simulate a rat’s brain? And the Human Brain project followed?”

“That’s it. We’re beginning to understand the way the brain works – its neural networks, the way it processes emotion. But that’s just the hardware. If we can build that into a simulation, then add the software – “

Mandy frowned. “Is AI part of this?”

“Oh yes. That is why we are breaking new ground. Imagine an avatar that both functions like a human brain and is capable of learning. We can create a virtual ecosystem populated by virtual beings that can interact with humans. Imagine: You have a problem with your car or your tax return. Your virtual adviser can not only find the answer – that, in theory, is not new; they can also figure out how they can communicate that answer to you in a way that fits your personality. If for example it has understood that you are not neurotypical, it will speak accordingly. But better still, it will form relationships with other avatars within the virtual environment and you can interact with them too.”

“Hang on. Are you suggesting that I will soon have a virtual friendship group?”

“Yes. At first you will feel guilty, creeped out by it,” said Frey. “But then you will ask yourself, Why is this worse than the so-called real world? Why would it not be the real world?”

“The imitation of life,” she mused.

“No,” he replied. “Not its imitation. Its duplication.”

He paused a moment, then said: “Come with me.”

They went into a small room nearby; it was furnished with the same low couches and cushions she had seen earlier, but it was in semi-darkness. Several operators sat before banks of screens that lit their features from below, reminding her a little of paintings of witches or of hell. “Kelly here is team leader on this particular sim,” said Frey. “They’ve laid down the groundwork. It didn’t take long, did it, Kelly?”

The young woman turned from her screen. She was about 25 or 30, her slim face framed by Mont Blanc glasses with a bluish frame; she wore pale new jeans and a white cotton blouse, cowboy boots and discreet jewellery. “Sure didn’t,” she said. “I worked with Paul for the first day and we laid down the basic parameters. We’ve got light and dark, and a monoseasonal set up with equal daylengths; it simplifies things. Next was the physical environment – water and land etc., that was day two. That took us a bit of fiddling about with the graphics interface though. But we got round to plant life on D3. Jeff over there is setting up the taxonomy.”

“And now?”

“We’re in the testing phase. We got the animals done on D5 but we’re finding their interaction with the humanoids a bit glitchy. They were doing some unnatural things together.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Mandy.

“I don’t think Kelly meant that exactly,” said Amrita.

“That’d be radical,” said Frey. “But hey, why not. We can do anything with these sims. Anything.”

A human-like figure crossed Kelly’s screen. She was obviously female, with clear sexual organs. “We haven’t clothed them yet,” said Kelly. “What happened was one of the reptiles gathered fruits and gave them to Female 1, who ate them.  We’ll have to clothe the humans now so that we could code the animal-type sims not to see them as animals too.”

“Tell me,” said Mandy, “do you think the avatars are sentient beings?”

“Excuse me?” said Kelly.

“I mean, do they have consciousness? When something happens to them in the simulation, do they feel it?”

“Well, in the sense that a part of the code is activated.”

“Which is what happens to us, isn’t it?” said Mandy. “I mean, we function according to a genetic code that is not so different in principle from the binary code that activates your avatars and defines their behaviour. So who is to say that they feel nothing? Could there be an ethical question here?”

“Ethics”? The other three looked at each other.

“I don’t think there’s a problem there,” said Frey, after a pause. “Like every startup, we conform to State guidelines and our stock is traded according to SEC regulations.”

“I’m sure that’s so. That isn’t quite what I meant,” said Mandy. “But never mind.”

Later Amrita escorted Mandy to the car park. “There’s one thing I meant to ask him and didn’t.” Mandy paused as she opened her car door. “Lots of people are asking – What is Frey short for? It isn’t his given name?”

“No. His name is Godfrey. We call him Frey for short.”

“Oh. Well, thank you for today, it’s been great.”

“Sure, Mandy. Thank you for visiting Genesis LLC, it’s been great to see you.”

Lucas Cranach the Elder:
Adam and Eve Diptych, c1533-37 (detail)

More flash fiction from Mike:

A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: Cold

Everything is cold here 

“Dammit.”

“What?”

“This form. It wants her place of birth.”

He was a compact man of 30 with slicked-back hair and wore a white silk shirt bought, at some expense, in Jermyn Street; the stripes of his tie were a little bright.

A.Dombrowski/Creative Commons

“You could leave it for now,” said his wife, fingering her pearl necklace. 

She glanced at the window, admiring her reflection. There was a windy wet squall outside and a spray of rain hit the pane and glistened briefly in the light from the gas fire across the room. She turned towards it; Great-Aunt Lisa was hidden by her armchair, the back of which was towards her. But she could see the old lady’s hand on the armrest, the skin pale and mottled and papery with age.

“I can’t leave it. We must get the power of attorney and sort out the will,” he replied.

“Darling, that sounds awfully mercenary.” She mauled her pearls.

“It’s not mercenary,” he said. “Everything is ours really. We don’t want her leaving it all to that wretched Thai maid or something.”

She looked across at the maid, who was sitting on the footstool in front of Great-Aunt Lisa. She was reading aloud from the local paper; every now and then she looked at the old lady and smiled.

“I don’t think Maria’s Thai,” she said. “I think she’s a Filipina.”

“For God’s sake, it’s the same thing.” He leant back in his chair. “Where the hell was she born? Not Maria. Great-Aunt Lisa. I’m sure she told us once.”

“She said in the east somewhere, I think.”

“Oh God, somewhere turgid like Norwich or Ipswich or Harwich I suppose.”

“Harwich,” said Great-Aunt Lisa, quite suddenly.

“I am sorry?” asked Maria. She looked over the top of the paper.

“I’ll put Harwich then,” he said, after a moment.

Great-Aunt Lisa had been listening to Maria read an item on the toilets being refurbished in the Market Square. But now she looked from side to side and nodded slowly.

“Harwich,” she repeated. “It was Harwich.”

Maria put down the paper. “Would you like to go to bed now?” she asked.

“Yes. Yes, time for bed.” She smiled back, a little vaguely.

*

Later, Maria straightened the coverlet and made to turn out the bedside light. As she did so her phone chirruped.

“See who that is, dear,” said Great-Aunt Lisa. “Maybe it’s your mother.”

“I will call her later, in the night. The time difference…”

“Yes.” Great-Aunt Lisa looked back at her, suddenly focused. “Are you ever sad, dear? Are you angry?”

“Why, madam?”

“Leaving your family. On the other side of the world. Leaving your mother to care for someone else’s. Isn’t it sad?”

Maria felt her employer’s gaze. Every now and then she would be lucid like this and you could see what had been – sharp, kind, shrewd.

“Yes,” she said. “But it is what we do.”

Great-Aunt Lisa nodded.

“People are cold here, aren’t they,” she said. “Everything is cold.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Maria, surprised. She blinked once or twice and sat slowly down on the bed. Great-Aunt Lisa was looking past her, straight ahead.

“My parents. They were on the platform waving. I was nine. My little brother Willy, he was four. She held him up so he could wave. Bye, Liese, they were shouting out, good luck. It took hours and hours in the train and I was seasick and then I came to Harwich. Port of Arrival, it said on the card. Harwich. There were all these ladies on the quay and they gave us tea from a big beige urn and it tasted funny. And this horrid cardboard box. You had to carry that all the time. I never opened it though. It had my gas mask in it and it looked so evil. Like a horrible insect.”

She looked at Maria. “Do you see people again when you pass over? Are they waiting?”

“We think so in our church,” said Maria.

Great-Aunt Lisa closed her eyes. “I’ll sleep now,” she said.

Maria pulled the counterpane up so that it would cover the old lady’s shoulders. She picked up the empty glass and cup from the bedside stand and turned down the light. As she did so Great-Aunt Lisa murmured:

“I never saw them again, you see. Mutti and Vati and Willy. I thought they would follow. But it was the last train.”

“Oh,” said Maria. She waited a moment, but the old lady said nothing more; after a while she fell asleep, her breathing regular. Maria went down to the kitchen. From the living room came the sound of voices.

“We must make sure the will is correct,” he was saying. “After all, we are family.”

“Yes,” his wife replied. “Of course. How funny that she was born in Harwich.”

Maria looked through the kitchen window. Another brief gust scattered raindrops on the window. Yes, she thought, it is cold here.

Harwich Memorial: Safe Haven,

by Ian Wolter

More flash fiction from Mike:

A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Politics on the Edge

Rory Stewart’s memoir Politics on the Edge has been a huge hit. Should you read it? What does it tell us about British politics? And what should we make of Stewart himself?

Rory Stewart is now 51. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he was a soldier (briefly), diplomat, and adventurer, and lectured at both Harvard and Yale. Then in 2010 he was elected as Tory MP for a large, beautiful rural seat, Penrith and the Borders. He looked forward to progressing to a ministerial role and eventually a Cabinet seat. 

But this was where things started to go wrong.

It’s all described in Politics on the Edge (Jonathan Cape, 2023), published in the US as How Not to be a Politician. In it, Stewart describes the horrible life of a backbench MP, the authoritarian party whipping, the mad way ministers are appointed, and the steamy horrors of the Brexit period – from which he emerged with honour, but with his political career in tatters.

The reviews for Politics on the Edge have been excellent. Writing in The Guardian, former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson compared it to “Orwell down the coal mine, Swift on religious excess. We should be grateful it was written.” In the US, Andrew Moravcsik in Foreign Affairs called it “the poignant tale of a genuinely decent human being …and …the revelation that the political hypocrisy and ignorance surrounding him will thwart his efforts.” The book quickly hit the No. 1 spot in the Sunday Times bestseller list; it’s now out in paperback and is still at No. 3 in Amazon UK’s non-fiction charts after eight months. 

It's helped that Stewart’s had a high profile since he left Parliament; The Rest is Politics, the politics podcast he co-presents with Alastair Campbell, has been very popular (and has been said, by Nick Duerden in The i,  to net him £70,000 a month). And Stewart is a frequent interviewee on TV, radio and the net; the more so since the book; in fact he has spread across the media like Japanese knotweed.

But the fact that critics think it a good book does not make it one. Is it?

The short answer is yes, absolutely; anyone who cares about the way Britain is run should read it. It is also well-written and engaging. But at times it did irritate, even anger, me. And it raises too many questions it doesn’t answer.

The honourable gentleman
At the start of the book, Stewart says he wanted to enter politics as a Conservative because he wanted to make a difference. (Everyone who’s been in politics says they wanted to ‘make a difference’.) He decides the best way to find a seat is to go and see the Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron. Told that Cameron will give him a short appointment, he flies back to Britain. He does meet Cameron, who is not encouraging. He finds a seat anyway, in the Border country. A few months later, he wins it in the 2010 General Election. It’s a safe Tory seat. But his enthusiasm for the Borders and the people seems very real, and he explores the constituency on foot, in winter.

Stewart’s introduction to Parliament, however, is jarring. It starts with the new intake being summoned to a meeting with the Chief Whip, who tells them they are lobby fodder and their job is to shut up and vote the way they are told. They might be called legislators, says the Chief Whip, but they shouldn’t regard debates as occasions for open discussion, and “are not intended to overly scrutinise legislation”. Although Stewart doesn’t say so, this is surely a contempt of Parliament. As the term progresses, Stewart feels increasingly tainted by the tawdry hypocrisies of life at Westminster; the craven text messages one sends to the PM to congratulate him on a speech, or to support a colleague who has been caught with their pants down. “We attended award ceremonies hosted by MPs who had been suspended for corruption; some continued to drink with MPs accused, and later convicted, of assault and rape.” He does like some of his fellow-MPs, but friendship is rare – and not without reason: “Too many of our private conversations seemed to get back to Number 10 and the whips.”

He is under pressure to vote for things he thinks are wrong. In particular, Cameron wants MPs to vote for initial legislation on Lords reform, something he doesn’t want himself but has promised his LibDem coalition partners. Stewart, deeply conservative with a small C, is against it. I think he was wrong about that. But he’s horribly right about something else – Afghanistan; Stewart knows the country and sees that the West’s nation-building efforts are deeply unwise, that you cannot tell a people what to be. This cuts no ice with Cameron. But Stewart will eventually be vindicated. He has since argued (in the influential American journal Foreign Affairs) that the West might have achieved more had it tried to do less. From my own experience (not in Afghanistan but elsewhere), I agree.

Border country: Stewart's constituency,
Penrith and the Borders

Stewart quickly realises that as a backbench MP he has no agency. But for a long time he isn’t offered a ministerial post, even a PPS, because Cameron does not like him. After the 2015 election, however, Cameron does give him a junior ministerial position at the Department of the Environment, working under Liz Truss. It is a frustrating experience. He finds it hard to get anything done. He also finds Truss asking him for a 25-year plan for the environment, insisting it be ready in a few days. He then finds she has quietly given the task to several other people as well. So they combine their drafts –which doesn’t please her. He finds Truss is interested in no-one’s view but her own, and has a brain that transmits, albeit erratically, but does not receive. Reading this, one is appalled that she ever held ministerial office at all, let alone the Premiership.

Later, under Theresa May, Stewart becomes the Minister of State at the Department for International Development (DfID) – later rising to Secretary of State for International Development and a Cabinet seat. This is appropriate, as unlike other MPs he has hands-on experience in development, in Afghanistan; but he finds the job frustrating and the civil servants obstructive. In between these two development posts he serves as Prisons Minister. Here he begins improvements to security and discipline and also renationalises the Probation Service, the privatisation of which was clearly a blunder. These steps are taken with support from his boss, Justice Minister and Lord Chancellor David Gauke. Stewart has praise for very few senior politicians but he does for Gauke (and for May herself, who he served loyally to the end). Still, Stewart finds ministerial office frustrating, and thinks the way ministers are moved around is arbitrary, frequent and not conducive to good government. I’m sure he’s right.

Posh boy makes good?
But there were moments in this book when Stewart did piss me off. Early on he goes to see Cameron and notes that the Tory leader is surrounded by floppy-haired old Etonians – but what the hell does he think he is? I can’t condemn Stewart for being born posh (besides, I went to the same school as him till age 13). But he can lack self-awareness. I also questioned his judgments about international development. This was my own field for many years. He has genuine experience of it from Afghanistan, but it is deep rather than broad and while I agree with some of his views, others seem sweeping. If, as he says, he had problems with his civil servants at DFiD, this may be why. (He also recently angered me with a slighting reference on his podcast to VSO, the British equivalent of the Peace Corps; I was a volunteer for five years.)

Moreover there is austerity – which Stewart, as a Tory MP, supported. I was struck by a recent New Yorker piece by Sam Knight (What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?, March 25 2024). “Between 2010 and 2018, funding for police forces in England fell by up to a quarter,” he says, “Officers stopped investigating burglaries. …Last fall, hundreds of school buildings had to be closed for emergency repairs, because the country’s school-construction budget had been cut by 46% between 2009 and 2022.” There is much more of this in the piece. No doubt Stewart, and other Tories from the time, would argue that the huge debts incurred in the 2008 bailout had given them little option. But this is also about who was made to pay the price. “Poorer communities [that vote Labour] …suffered disproportionately,” says Knight. “In Liverpool …spending, per head, fell more than in any other city in the country. Public-health spending in Blackpool, one of the poorest local authorities in England, was cut almost five times more, per person, than in the affluent county of Surrey, just south of London, whose eleven M.P.s are all Tories.”  In short, the rich brought down the system and the poor then picked up the bill. Stewart, and every other Tory MP of the time, was complicit in this. 

In fact it would be easy to dismiss Politics on the Edge as a self-justificatory memoir by yet another posh boy who somehow thinks he has succeeded on merit. (Russell Barnes in Civil Service World described it as “400-odd pages of how right Rory Stewart was at the time, and how history will prove him to be a visionary.”)

But that would be a pity, because this memoir really does lift the lid on Parliament and government. Other books have done this before (Caroline Lucas’s Honourable Friends; Roy Hattersley’s witty Who Goes Home; Martin Bell’s An Accidental MP; and many more). But for a vision of sheer dysfunction, few accounts beat this one. No-one can read this book and continue to believe that Britain is a fully functional democracy.

Moreover Stewart has earned a hearing. Unlike other posh boys (like Cameron), he didn’t swan out of Oxford into a job as a research assistant then progress smoothly into Parliament, rising without trace. He did a lot with his life before politics. His army service was brief, but he then spent some years as a diplomat, serving in Indonesia and later as British Representative in Montenegro. He also founded, and for three years ran, an NGO in Afghanistan, where he met his American wife, Shoshana. He has written a number of books, including The Prince of the Marshes (now relaunched as Occupational Hazards), in which he describes his stretch as deputy governor of an Iraqi province in the wake of the 2003 invasion. In 2000 he took leave from the Foreign Office to make an epic 18-month walk across Asia; The Places In Between (which is excellent) describes the Afghan section, but he has written little of the journey otherwise, and is sometimes said to have been a spy. This is a bit idle; of course he will have passed any useful information to the intelligence services – he was a serving diplomat. But it’s true he may have had much closer links with them; after all, his father Brian Stewart was a very senior spook. And in general, he’s less David Cameron, more Fitzroy Maclean – a man whose life and background were very like his own.

Stewart as a Foreign Office minister, at a conference on
endangered species in 2018 (Foreign and Commonwealth Office)

Beware the slithy Gove, my son
It’s also clear that Stewart cared about his ministerial briefs. But the Brexit-related chaos in 2016-2019 meant Ministers were shuffled around even more often than usual. Stewart held his junior ministerial posts for little more than a year at most, and his Cabinet post for less than three months. For some Ministers, every reshuffle will have been a career opportunity. But Stewart feels, rightly, that this was no way to run a country. You also sense his disgust at the tawdriness of some of his ‘colleagues’ (I wish Tories would not use that word). In particular, the duplicity of Michael Gove was breathtaking.

In the end, however, it’s Boris Johnson who emerges as the villain of this book. And Stewart confronts him. First he stands against him in the 2019 leadership contest; he was the only One Nation Tory to dare do so – and only because none of the others would, by his account. He doesn’t win, although he is probably the candidate best liked by voters as a whole. Then in September he is one of 21 Tory MPs, many of them former Cabinet ministers, who have the whip removed for voting against Johnson’s government on a Brexit-related motion. Some of the MPs later had the whip restored, but Stewart decides to resign from the Conservative Party altogether. He could contest his seat as an independent in the December election, but doesn’t; he may have felt he would not win, but in Politics on the Edge he says he didn’t want to campaign against people who once campaigned for him. If that was his reason, it was a decent one. Politics on the Edge ends there.

It has sold very well and must have earned Stewart a pretty penny. I can’t begrudge him that. Other senior Tories rolled over and played along with Boris Johnson although they knew perfectly well what sort of man he was. Stewart, at some personal cost, did not. Moreover he is an interesting man who has packed a lot into his 51 years. And Politics on the Edge is a good book – well-written, forthright, revealing and important. 

But there is something missing from the book: analysis. Stewart is an old-style conservative with a love of tradition and an innate distrust of too much change. This traditional style of British conservatism has deep roots, going right back to the French Revolution and the events that followed. It is not unreasonable. After all, since then radical utopians have likely killed at least as many people as conservatives. Yet change is needed. Britain’s government and parliament, as seen in Politics on the Edge, are sclerotic and in a way corrupt. And we’ve just had an election in which a party won one of the largest majorities in history with just 33.7% of the vote share – and that’s only of the votes cast; 40% of voters didn’t bother voting at all. This has been followed by serious civil disorder. If this had happened in some hapless African republic the Foreign Secretary would be wagging their finger at them and muttering about suspension from the Commonwealth. But we cannot see what is happening to us. 

Britain’s system is rotten and has run its course, at least in its present form. That is clear from the book; but at no point does Stewart really confront the implications or say how we should address it. I think he should have done. Politics on the Edge is one of the best political memoirs I have read and I strongly recommend it. But in that sense, at least, there is a void at its heart.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.