The Crocus List

2

After Sunday lunch at Maxim's parents the children went into the back garden and chattered maturely about pop groups and skateboarding while the adults went into the kitchen, where Maxim and his sister Brenda fought. Chris, now aged eleven, and his three cousins had come to accept that this was what happened when they met at Littlehampton, but didn't quite admit to themselves that they went outside to escape the clutching sick feeling of hearing their parents behave like tired brats. The grandparents did most of the actual washing up, since there were never enough tea-towels, so probably Maxim and Brenda were only in there because they were scared, like tired brats, that without referees they might go too far.

"Are you telling us," Brenda asked, "that all those soldiers we've got in Berlin couldn't defend the place anyway?"

"I don't know why you say _all_," Maxim said; "there's only about thirteen thousand Allied troops: roughly a division. And a hundred miles of perimeter, the Wall. One division can't hold that front."

"Then what on earth are they doing there? Just having a good time at the taxpayers' expense?"

"They are there to stop the Russians just walking in. If they go in, they have to go in shooting."

"And just kill off our soldiers and take over anyway."

Maxim shrugged. "And start off World War Three."

"Do we really want to set up things so that the… anybody, can start a World War just by accident?"

"They won't walk into West Berlin by accident. But that's what a Standing Army's always been about: to draw a line and say, If you cross that, you've started a real something. So nobody can nibble away with bloodless takeovers. As Hitler did: the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia."

"And meanwhile, you've got two armies practising to blow each other's countries to bits and getting more and more weapons to do it with. Do you see any end to it?"

"No," Maxim admitted, "but I'm no politician."

"Then why don't you leave it to the politicians?" Brenda asked triumphantly. "Why do you always say they're wrong when they want to talk to the Russians?"

Their mother said from the sink: "Just talking can't do any harm."

"It can if we're doing it unilaterally about Berlin."

"Unilaterally," Brenda said. "Of course, that has to be a dirty word in the Army. I bet you even have to go to the loo multilaterally."

"No, that's strictly a Naval tradition."

"Harry!" A disgusted bark from his father.

"Sorry. But it's sitting down without the Americans and French that does the damage. It splits NATO, it splits the agreement on Berlin. And that's what the Russians want, more than any changes in Berlin."

"Of course, if the Americans don't like it, that's all that matters."

"We have a four-power agreement on Berlin-"

"That was forty years ago. More."

Their father said mildly: "It was the Russians who put up the Berlin Wall. They could take it down without talking to anybody."

"Well, they could, " Brenda said defensively, then burst out: "So why don't we encourage them? Why can't you see how exciting this could be? For the first time in my life-and yours-we're actually taking a step towards peace. Give Berlin back to the Berliners, make it one city, get the tanks and guns out of the streets-can't you see that some people can be as excited about not having tanks and guns as you are abouthaving them? Do you want your Chris to live his whole life waiting for the four-minute warning?"

Their mother said: "I've never seen the point of a warning at all if it's only four minutes. Not that there are any shelters round here, as far as I know."

"Oh, don't worry," Brenda told her. "You'll be safe if you put a paper bag over your head or something daft like that."

"If you're hit by a nuke," Maxim said, "there's nothing you can do. There's nothing you can do if a hand grenade goes off in your pocket, either. But on the fringes of an explosion, any explosion, youcan do something. Anyway, the four-minute warning's the Worst Possible Case. Tactical warning might be that short. But strategic warning"-he was trying to annoy Brenda by using jargon; if he felt his own temper going, he'd try saying 'just a few megadeaths' in a bored tone-"the Red Army's got its mobilisation time down to forty-eight hours, so probably we'll get that much warning. It could be more."

"Just as long as there's time to appeal to the Dunkirk spirit, put paper bags over our heads and let the Army take over."

"Oh, for God's sake."

Brenda pressed what she saw as an advantage. "There _are_ secret plans for the Army-and the police-to take over. They're going to block all the main roads out of cities with machine-guns and-"

"Rubbish."

"Really? Perhaps you just haven't been told. We actually had, well _they_ tried to have, one of those farcical Civil Defence exercises up near us, and the Army officers who were supposed to be taking part, they refused, just refused, to do what the town clerk told them."

That hardly surprised Maxim: where the hell did the town clerk fit into the chain of command? But he thought it best not to say that. "Perhaps your town clerk thought it was all a bit of a farce as well. The Army really does know something about survival training, what with Noddy suits and respirators and-"

"What suits?" their mother asked.

"We call them Noddy suits. Protection against fallout and gas… I sent you a picture of me in one, on the Portón battle run."

"It made you look like a man from Mars."

"It's supposed to protect you against secondary radiation. So you can move around when everybody else is in shelters-"

"And take over." Brenda smiled with quiet triumph.

Their parents had stopped work and were looking at Maxim oddly. It was, he realised, the ingrained British conviction that once a man put on uniform, the next step was for him to Take Over. You might speculate about race memories of Cromwell's New Model Army and even the origins of Magna Carta, but the end result was the way the Army ordered youout of uniform the moment you came off-duty. In London, and in no other NATO capital, when an embassy threw a military cocktail party, the rule was that only the hosts wore uniforms; they wouldn't be seen on the streets anyway.

He sighed and put away a handful of teaspoons in the wrong place. It wasn't the fear of a military takeover that annoyed him, but people's blindness to the fact that the Army was recruited from men born and brought up in that same fear. That, and a horror of trying to give orders to people who most likely wouldn't obey them.

"Oh well," he said, "since we'll just about all be in Germany you'll be lucky to find an Army officer with the time to run the country for you."

Brenda's voice stiffened but she stayed calm. "It doesn't look as if _you'll_ be in Germany, so maybe you'll get the job. I know: why don't you give us all some saluting practice this afternoon, so we'll have a bit of a start on everybody else? A military dictatorship usually goes in for family favouritism, doesn't it?"

"Saluting won't be required. You can kiss my arse from time to time."

"Harry!" his father exploded. "You can leave that sort of language on the barrack square. I will not have it in this house."

Maxim mumbled an apology, avoiding Brenda's eye. Their mother, quite unmoved after thirty years of pretending her children hadn't said what she had clearly heard them say, asked: "But that suit wouldn't stop you being blown up by a bomb, would it? I mean, it isn't made of armour?"

"It's only paper, impregnated with charcoal-"

"Paper!" Brenda laughed delightedly. "You mean even the Army believes that?"

"If you're going to survive _any_ explosion," Maxim said grimly, "you need a shelter. Or a bit of crisis relocation."

"What's that?" their father asked.

"Being somewhere else at the time."

The chuckles lightened the atmosphere and-luckily-annoyed Brenda.

"There's secret tunnels under all the middle of London," she announced. "With air and water and rations for weeks. Of course, you have to be a Very Important Person to get in, but I expect Harry made some useful friends at Number 10. There was a book about it. The tunnels."

"It doesn't sound too secret if it was in a book," their father said.

"Oh, they didn't mean it to be in a book. They started the tunnels in the last war, against the German bombs, and kept on improving them afterwards. "

There was only the encrusted aluminium teapot left on the draining board and Maxim picked it up. "We don't dry that," his mother said; "it takes all the flavour out of it." It was a ritual joke, relying on Maxim always forgetting the teapot didn't get dried.

"The trouble with shelters," he said carefully, "is that you have to be something like a mile down if you're going to be safe right under a 20-megaton ground burst. And what happens to your escape tunnels going back up? Even three miles away you have to be two hundred feet down."

As a retired works manager, their father knew something about the strength of concrete structures. He carefully spread his tea-towel over the radiator to dry and said: "So you'd advise crisis relocation instead, would you?" But his joviality was forced.

"Only if you're a VIP, again," Brenda said quickly.

"Are you going to be crisisly relocated or whatever they call it?" their mother asked.

"I always carry a strong paper bag with me."

They knew he was dodging the question, but family rules wouldn't let even Brenda probe further. She had to content herself with having winkled out confirmation of one small belief. "So there is going to be 'crisis relocation' for VIPs?"

"If it hadn't been thought of, there wouldn't be a word for it."

"Two words."

"And what are the rest of us supposed to do afterwards?" their mother asked placidly.

"After a nuclear attack or the whole war?"

They looked at him again, and their father said: "Doesn't it come to much the same thing?"

"Not necessarily. The Soviets might opt to take out just London, destroy the government, as an example and to wreck our command structure."

"That," Brenda said, "sounds like quite enough for me. Wouldn't that be the end of it?"

Maxim shrugged.

"You mean to say that with London blown to bits and radiation everywhereyou'd go on fighting? I do believe you would! Just a little clockwork soldier that refuses to run down!"

" 'It is a typically Hohenzollern idea to believe that it is a crime for a country to defend itself after its army has been destroyed.'"

"Who said that?" Brenda demanded suspiciously.

"Karl Marx, actually."

Rummaging in the bureau drawer for a couple of after-lunch cigars, Maxim's father asked quietly: "Tell me-just as a matter of interest-if the government is destroyed, who decides the war is over? When we…" he almost choked on the word: "… surrender?"

"It won't be Brenda's town clerk, I can tell you that much. You might say it was up to the individual."