The Romanian Question

I’M STILL LEAVING YOU

What Jessica Douglas-Home observed as she touted the polling booths with her interpreter and driver was that only members of the Salvation Front were represented at the polling stations. Opposition members had everywhere been prevented from turning up. Opposition workers reported posters torn down and offices ransacked, even by the police.

Opposition newspapers were mislaid or destroyed and despite a decree that campaign-ing must stop two days before the election, there was the last-minute distribution of a free newspaper publishing photographs of all the official candidates. “Every one from the Ceausescu era,” says Jessica sadly. “Simply a game of musical chairs.”

Sunday Telegraph, 27 May 1990

THE TIME MACHINE was a sphere of milky fluid attached to the front lamp-holder of a Raleigh ‘Royal Albert’ Police Bicycle of the old, sturdy type, before all the corruption had been made public. Jerry hated the look and feel of the thing, but he needed to take a quick refresher in 1956, to see if some of the associations made sense. At the moment, as he wiped the Bucharest dust from his handle-bars and checked his watches, he was down-right terrified.

Was it just the threat of liberty which alarmed him, or was the world actually on the brink of unimaginable horror as, in his bones, he feared? He shuddered. Whatever they might say, he had never relished the worst.

Especially when the best seemed so much more within his grasp.

Yet this was the dangerous time. It always was. “As power-holders lay down their arms, those who have known little power are quick to seek advantages.” Prinz Lobkowitz bent to pump up the front tyre, his wispy grey hair falling over eyes in which humour sought to disguise the concern he felt. “And there is nothing to say they won’t abuse that power as thorough-ly as their predecessors down the centuries. It’s the same in the Middle East.

Most of these people have never experienced anything like the familiar democracy of the West. They have no faith in it. They have been supplied with myths which prove how degenerate and immoral it was. These are deeply conservative people. They worship their ignorance since that was all of their religion that was left to them. They defend their ignor-ance as others might defend a principle.”

“Sometimes you don’t sound a lot different from the party hacks.”

Jerry gave the front wheel an experimental bounce. “That’s a lot better.

Thanks.”

Prinz Lobkowitz fitted the pump back on the frame. “They are all shades, I suppose.”

Jerry got the bike into the proper rhythm and was gone before he could say goodbye. The pearly grey mist opened before him. It was good to be on the move again. He only hoped no-one had changed the old megaflow routes.

This would not be the best moment to be Lost in Time, though God knew, it looked as if the whole of England was now in that situation. He had never imagined a future as miserable as this. He had thought the Sex Pistols had meant something more than a trend in T-shirts. They had all been bought over by lifestyle magazines.

He gazed wonderingly back at this unbearable future and found himself suddenly in a coffee-bar in Soho talking to some-one called Max, who waxed his moustache and wore a pointed beard, about Blind Jesse Fuller and Woody Guthrie. These were the years of private obsession, of small groups of enthusiasts never acknowledged by the common media, not even Melody Maker which was full of Duke Ellington and referred to Elvis only on the cartoon page. “This was before your enthusiasm became the common currency of the sixties,” said a Shade, “and you thought you had achieved a better world. Then you sold it back to them for shares in Biba, Mary Quant and Ann Summers, just as they merged with the City.”

“Humbug!” Jerry desperately attempted to disengage from a morality he thought he’d discarded years before. “I don’t want any of this. Where’s my mother?” She would understand. He had missed total immersion. When he was this aware of actuality, he tended to retreat in every complex way he knew. Time experienced at such relentlessly close quarters gave him the heeby-jeebies. He shivered. 1956 had been bad enough without this as well.

It was time to split again.