Winter of the World

20

1945 (II)

Adolf Hitler killed himself on Monday 30 April 1945, in his bunker in Berlin. Exactly a week later in London, at twenty to eight in the evening, the Ministry of Information announced that Germany had surrendered. A holiday was declared for the following day, Tuesday 8 May.

Daisy sat at the window of her apartment in Piccadilly, watching the celebrations. The street was thronged with people, making it almost impassable to cars and buses. The girls would kiss any man in uniform, and thousands of lucky servicemen were taking full advantage. By early afternoon many people were drunk. Through the open window Daisy could hear distant singing, and guessed that the crowd outside Buckingham Palace was singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. She shared their happiness, but Lloyd was somewhere in France or Germany, and he was the only soldier she wanted to kiss. She prayed he had not been killed in the last few hours of the war.

Lloyd’s sister, Millie, showed up with her two children. Millie’s husband, Abe Avery, was also with the army somewhere. She and the children had come to the West End to join in the celebrations, and they took a break from the crowds at Daisy’s place. The Leckwith home in Aldgate had long been a place of refuge for Daisy, and she was glad to have a chance to reciprocate. She made tea for Millie – her staff were out there celebrating – and poured orange juice for the children. Lennie was five now and Pammie three.

Since Abe had been conscripted, Millie had been running his leather wholesaling business. His sister, Naomi Avery, was the bookkeeper, but Millie did the selling. ‘It’s going to change, now,’ Millie said. ‘For the past five years the demand has been for tough hides for boots and shoes. Now we’re going to need softer leathers, calf and pigskin, for handbags and briefcases. When the luxury market comes back, there’ll be decent money to be made at last.’

Daisy recalled that her father had the same way of thinking as Millie. Lev, too, was always looking ahead, searching out the opportunities.

Eva Murray appeared next, with her four children in tow. Jamie, aged eight, organized a game of hide-and-seek, and the apartment became like a kindergarten. Eva’s husband, Jimmy, now a colonel, was also somewhere in France or Germany, and Eva was suffering the same agonies of anxiety as Daisy and Millie.

‘We’ll hear from them, any day now,’ Millie said. ‘And then it will really be all over.’

Eva was also desperate for news of her family in Berlin. However, she thought it might be weeks or months before anyone could learn the fates of individual Germans in the postwar chaos. ‘I wonder whether my children will ever know my parents,’ she said sadly.

At five o’clock Daisy made a pitcher of martinis. Millie went into the kitchen and, with characteristic speed and efficiency, produced a plate of sardines on toast to eat with the drinks. Eth and Bernie arrived just as Daisy was making a second round.

Bernie told Daisy that Lennie could read already, and Pammie could sing the National Anthem. Ethel said: ‘Typical grandfather, thinks there have never been bright children before,’ but Daisy could tell that in her heart she was just as proud of them.

Feeling relaxed and happy halfway down her second martini, she looked around at the disparate group gathered in her home. They had paid her the compliment of coming to her door without an invitation, knowing they would be welcomed. They belonged to her, and she to them. They were, she realized, her family.

She felt very blessed.

(ii)

Woody Dewar sat outside Leo Shapiro’s office, looking through a sheaf of photographs. They were the pictures he had taken at Pearl Harbor, in the hour before Joanne died. The film had stayed in his camera for months, but eventually he had developed it and printed the pictures. Looking at them had made him so sad that he had put them in a drawer in his bedroom at the Washington apartment and left them there.

But this was a time for change.

He would never forget Joanne, but he was in love again, at last. He adored Bella and she felt the same. When they parted, at the Oakland train station outside San Francisco, he had told her that he loved her, and she had said: ‘I love you, too.’ He was going to ask her to marry him. He would have done so already but it seemed too soon – less than three months – and he did not want to give her hostile parents a pretext for objecting.

Also, he needed to make a decision about his future.

He did not want to go into politics.

This was going to shock his parents, he knew. They had always assumed he would follow in his father’s footsteps and end up as the third Senator Dewar. He had gone along with this assumption unthinkingly. But in the war, and especially while in hospital, he had asked himself what he really wanted to do, if he survived; and the answer was not politics.

This was a good time to leave. His father had achieved his life’s ambition. The Senate had debated the United Nations. It was at a similar point in history that the old League of Nations had foundered, a painful memory for Gus Dewar. But Senator Vandenberg had spoken passionately in favour, speaking of ‘the dearest dream of mankind’, and the UN Charter had been ratified by eighty-nine votes to two. The job was done. Woody would not be letting his father down by quitting now.

He hoped Gus would see it that way too.

Shapiro opened his office door and beckoned. Woody stood up and went in.

Shapiro was younger than Woody had expected, somewhere in his thirties. He was Washington bureau chief for the National Press Agency. He sat behind his desk and said: ‘What can I do for Senator Dewar’s son?’

‘I’d like to show you some photographs, if I may.’

‘All right.’

Woody spread his pictures on Shapiro’s desk.

‘Is this Pearl Harbor?’ Shapiro said.

‘Yes. December seventh, 1941.’

‘My God.’

Woody was looking at them upside-down, but still they brought tears to his eyes. There was Joanne, looking so beautiful; and Chuck, grinning happily to be with his family and Eddie. Then the planes coming over, the bombs and torpedoes dropping from their bellies, the black-smoke explosions on the ships, and the sailors scrambling over the sides, dropping into the sea, swimming for their lives.

‘This is your father,’ Shapiro said. ‘And your mother. I recognize them.’

‘And my fiancée, who died a few minutes later. My brother, who was killed at Bougainville. And my brother’s best friend.’

‘These are fantastic photographs! How much do you want for them?’

‘I don’t want money,’ Woody said.

Shapiro looked up in surprise.

Woody said: ‘I want a job.’

(iii)

Fifteen days after VE Day, Winston Churchill called a General Election.

The Leckwith family were taken by surprise. Like most people, Ethel and Bernie had thought Churchill would wait until the Japanese surrendered. The Labour leader, Clement Attlee, had suggested an election in October. Churchill wrong-footed them all.

Major Lloyd Williams was released from the army to stand as Labour candidate for Hoxton, in the East End of London. He was full of eager enthusiasm for the future envisioned by his party. Fascism had been vanquished, and now British people could create a society that combined freedom with welfare. Labour had a well-thought-out plan for avoiding the catastrophes of the last twenty years: universal comprehensive unemployment insurance to help families through hard times, economic planning to prevent another Depression, and a United Nations Organization to keep the peace.

‘You don’t stand a chance,’ said his stepfather, Bernie, in the kitchen of the house in Aldgate on Monday 4 June. Bernie’s pessimism was the more convincing for being so uncharacteristic. ‘They’ll vote Tory because Churchill won the war,’ he went on gloomily. ‘It was the same with Lloyd George in 1918.’

Lloyd was about to reply, but Daisy got in first. ‘The war wasn’t won by the free market and capitalist enterprise,’ she said indignantly. ‘It was people working together and sharing the burdens, everybody doing his bit. That’s socialism!’

Lloyd loved her most when she was passionate, but he was more deliberate. ‘We already have measures that the old Tories would have condemned as Bolshevism: government control of railways, mines and shipping, for example, all brought in by Churchill. And Ernie Bevin has been in charge of economic planning all through the war.’

Bernie shook his head knowingly, an old-man gesture that irritated Lloyd. ‘People vote with their hearts, not brains,’ he said. ‘They’ll want to show their gratitude.’

‘Well, no point sitting here arguing with you,’ Lloyd said. ‘I’m going to argue with voters instead.’

He and Daisy took a bus a few stops north to the Black Lion pub in Shoreditch, where they met up with a canvassing team from the Hoxton Constituency Labour Party. In fact canvassing was not about arguing with voters, Lloyd knew. Its main purpose was to identify supporters, so that on election day the party machine could make sure they all went to the polling station. Firm Labour supporters were noted; firm supporters of other parties were crossed off. Only people who had not yet made up their minds were worth more than a few seconds: they were offered the chance to speak to the candidate.

Lloyd got some negative reactions. ‘Major, eh?’ one woman said. ‘My Alf is a corporal. He says the officers nearly lost us the war.’

There were also accusations of nepotism. ‘Aren’t you the son of the MP for Aldgate? What is this, a hereditary monarchy?’

He remembered his mother’s advice. ‘You never win a vote by proving the constituent a fool. Be charming, be modest, and don’t lose your temper. If a voter is hostile and rude, thank him for his time and go away. You’ll leave him thinking maybe he misjudged you.’

Working-class voters were strongly Labour. A lot of people told Lloyd that Attlee and Bevin had done a good job during the war. The waverers were mostly middle-class. When people said that Churchill had won the war, Lloyd quoted Attlee’s gentle put-down: ‘It wasn’t a one-man government, and it wasn’t a one-man war.’

Churchill had described Attlee as a modest man with much to be modest about. Attlee’s wit was less brutal, and for that reason more effective; at least, Lloyd thought so.

A couple of constituents mentioned the sitting MP for Hoxton, a Liberal, and said they would vote for him because he had helped them solve some problem. Members of Parliament were often called upon by constituents who felt they were being treated unjustly by the government, an employer or a neighbour. It was time-consuming work but it won votes.

Overall, Lloyd could not tell which way public opinion was leaning.

Only one constituent mentioned Daisy. The man came to the door with his mouth full of food. Lloyd said: ‘Good evening, Mr Perkinson, I understand you wanted to ask me something.’

‘Your fiancée was a Fascist,’ the man said, chewing.

Lloyd guessed he had been reading the Daily Mail, which had run a spiteful story about Lloyd and Daisy under the headline THE SOCIALIST AND THE VISCOUNTESS.

Lloyd nodded. ‘She was briefly fooled by Fascism, like many others.’

‘How can a socialist marry a Fascist?’

Lloyd looked around, spotted Daisy, and beckoned her. ‘Mr Perkinson here is asking me about my fiancée being an ex-Fascist.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Perkinson.’ Daisy shook the man’s hand. ‘I quite understand your concern. My first husband was a Fascist in the thirties, and I supported him.’

Perkinson nodded. He probably believed a wife should take her views from her husband.

‘How foolish we were,’ Daisy went on. ‘But, when the war came, my first husband joined the RAF and fought against the Nazis as bravely as anyone.’

‘Is that a fact?’

‘Last year he was flying a Typhoon over France, strafing a German troop train, when he was shot down and killed. So I’m a war widow.’

Perkinson swallowed his food. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, of course.’

But Daisy had not finished. ‘For myself, I lived in London throughout the war. I drove an ambulance all through the Blitz.’

‘Very brave of you, I’m sure.’

‘Well, I just hope you think that my late husband and I both paid our dues.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Perkinson said sulkily.

‘We won’t take up any more of your time,’ said Lloyd. ‘Thank you for explaining your views to me. Good evening.’

As they walked away, Daisy said: ‘I don’t think we won him round.’

‘You never do,’ Lloyd said. ‘But he’s seen both sides of the story now, which might make him a bit less vociferous about it, later this evening, when he talks about us in the pub.’

‘Hmm.’

Lloyd sensed he had failed to reassure Daisy.

Canvassing finished early, for tonight the first of the radio election broadcasts would be aired on the BBC, and all party workers would be listening. Churchill had the privilege of making the first one.

On the bus home, Daisy said: ‘I’m worried. I’m an election liability to you.’

‘No candidate is perfect,’ Lloyd said. ‘It’s how you deal with your weaknesses that matters.’

‘I don’t want to be your weakness. Perhaps I should stay out of the way.’

‘On the contrary, I want everyone to know all about you from the start. If you are a liability, I will get out of politics.’

‘No, no! I’d hate to think I made you give up your ambitions.’

‘It won’t come to that,’ he said, but once again he could see that he had not succeeded in assuaging her anxiety.

Back in Nutley Street, the Leckwith family sat around the radio in the kitchen. Daisy held Lloyd’s hand. ‘I came here a lot while you were away,’ she said. ‘We used to listen to swing music and talk about you.’

The thought made Lloyd feel very lucky.

Churchill came on. The familiar rasp was stirring. For five grim years that voice had given people strength and hope and courage. Lloyd felt despairing: even he was tempted to vote for this man.

‘My friends,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘I must tell you that a socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom.’

Well, that was routine knockabout stuff. All new ideas were condemned as foreign imports. But what would Churchill offer people? Labour had a plan, but what did the Conservatives propose?

‘Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism,’ Churchill said.

Lloyd’s mother, Ethel, said: ‘Surely he’s not going to pretend we’re like the Nazis?’

‘I think he is, though,’ Bernie said. ‘He’ll say we’ve defeated the enemy abroad, now we must defeat the enemy in our midst. Standard conservative tactic.’

‘People won’t believe that,’ Ethel said.

Lloyd said: ‘Hush!’

Churchill said: ‘A socialist state, once thoroughly completed in all its details and its aspects, could not afford to suffer opposition.’

‘This is outrageous,’ said Ethel.

‘But I will go farther,’ said Churchill. ‘I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no socialist system can be established without a political police.’

‘Political police?’ Ethel said indignantly. ‘Where is he getting this stuff from?’

Bernie said: ‘This is good, in a way. He can’t find anything to criticize in our manifesto, therefore he’s attacking us for things we aren’t actually proposing to do. Bloody liar.’

Lloyd shouted: ‘Listen!’

Churchill said: ‘They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo.’

Suddenly they were all on their feet, shouting protests. The Prime Minister was drowned out. ‘Bastard!’ Bernie yelled, shaking his fist at the Marconi radio set. ‘Bastard, bastard!’

When they had quietened down, Ethel said: ‘Is that going to be their campaign? Just lies about us?’

‘It bloody well is,’ said Bernie.

Lloyd said: ‘But will people believe it?’

(iv)

In southern New Mexico, not far from El Paso, there is a desert called Jornada del Muerto, the Voyage of the Dead. All day long the cruel sun beats down on needlethorn mesquite and sword-leafed yucca plants. The inhabitants are scorpions and rattlesnakes, fire ants and tarantula spiders. Here the men of the Manhattan Project tested the most dreadful weapon the human race had ever devised.

Greg Peshkov was with the scientists watching from ten thousand yards away. He had two hopes: first, that the bomb would work; and second, that ten thousand yards was far enough.

The countdown started at nine minutes past five in the morning, Mountain War Time, on Monday 16 July. It was dawn, and there were streaks of gold in the sky to the east.

The test was codenamed Trinity. When Greg had asked why, the senior scientist, the pointy-eared Jewish New Yorker J. Robert Oppenheimer, had quoted a poem by John Donne: ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God.’

‘Oppie’ was the cleverest person Greg had ever met. The most brilliant physicist of his generation, he also spoke six languages. He had read Karl Marx’s Capital in the original German. The kind of thing he did for fun was learn Sanskrit. Greg liked and admired him. Most physicists were geeks but Oppie, like Greg himself, was an exception: tall, handsome, charming, and a real ladykiller.

In the middle of the desert, Oppie had instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to build a one-hundred-foot tower of steel struts in concrete footings. On top was an oak platform. The bomb had been winched up to the platform on Saturday.

The scientists never used the word ‘bomb’. They called it ‘the gadget’. At its heart was a ball of plutonium, a metal that did not exist in nature but was created as a by-product in nuclear piles. The ball weighed ten pounds and contained all the plutonium in the world. Someone had calculated that it was worth a billion dollars.

Thirty-two detonators on the surface of the ball would go off simultaneously, creating such powerful inward pressure that the plutonium would become more dense and go critical.

No one really knew what would happen next.

The scientists were running a betting pool, dollar a ticket, on the force of the explosion measured in equivalent tons of TNT. Edward Teller bet 45,000 tons. Oppie bet 300 tons. The official forecast was 20,000 tons. The night before, Enrico Fermi had offered to take side bets on whether the blast would wipe out the entire state of New Mexico. General Groves had not found it funny.

The scientists had had a perfectly serious discussion about whether the explosion would ignite the atmosphere of the entire earth, and destroy the planet; but they had come to the conclusion that it would not. If they were wrong, Greg just hoped it would happen fast.

The trial had originally been scheduled for 4 July. However, every time they tested a component, it failed; so the big day had been postponed several times. Back at Los Alamos, on Saturday, a mock-up they called the Chinese Copy had refused to ignite. In the betting pool, Norman Ramsey had picked zero, gambling that the bomb would be a dud.

Today detonation had been scheduled for 2 a.m., but at that time there had been a thunderstorm – in the desert! Rain would bring the radioactive fallout down on the heads of the watching scientists, so the blast was postponed.

The storm had ended at dawn.

Greg was at a bunker called S-10000, which was the control room. Like most of the scientists, he was standing outside for a better view. Hope and fear struggled for mastery of his heart. If the bomb was a dud, the efforts of hundreds of people – plus about two billion dollars – would have gone for nothing. And if the bomb was not a dud, they might all be killed in the next few minutes.

Beside him was Wilhelm Frunze, the young German scientist he had first met in Chicago. ‘What would have happened, Will, if lightning had struck the bomb?’

Frunze shrugged. ‘No one knows.’

A green Verey rocket shot into the sky, startling Greg.

‘Five-minute warning,’ Frunze said.

Security had been haphazard. Santa Fe, the nearest town to Los Alamos, was crawling with well-dressed FBI agents. Leaning nonchalantly against walls in their tweed jackets and neckties, they were obvious to local residents, who wore blue jeans and cowboy boots.

The Bureau was also illegally tapping the phones of hundreds of people involved in the Manhattan Project. This bewildered Greg. How could the nation’s premier law enforcement agency systematically commit criminal acts?

Nevertheless, army security and the FBI had identified some spies and quietly removed them from the project, including Barney McHugh. But had they found them all? Greg did not know. Groves had been forced to take risks. If he had fired everyone the FBI asked him to, there would not have been enough scientists left to build the bomb.

Unfortunately, most scientists were radicals, socialists and liberals. There was hardly a conservative among them. And they believed that the truths discovered by science were for humankind to share, and should never be kept secret in the service of one regime or country. So, while the American government was keeping this huge project top secret, the scientists held discussion groups about sharing nuclear technology with all the nations of the world. Oppie himself was suspect: the only reason he was not in the Communist Party was that he never joined clubs.

Right now Oppie was lying on the ground next to his kid brother, Frank, also an outstanding physicist, also a Communist. They both held pieces of welding glass through which to observe the explosion. Greg and Frunze had similar pieces of glass. Some of the scientists were wearing sunglasses.

Another rocket went off. ‘One minute,’ said Frunze.

Greg heard Oppie say: ‘Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.’

He wondered if those would be Oppie’s last words.

Greg and Frunze lay on the sandy earth near Oppie and Frank. They all held their visors of welding glass in front of their eyes and gazed towards the test site.

Facing death, Greg thought about his mother, his father, and his sister Daisy in London. He wondered how much they would miss him. He thought, with mild regret, of Margaret Cowdry, who had dumped him for a guy who was willing to marry her. But most of all he thought of Jacky Jakes and his son, Georgy, now nine years old. He passionately wanted to watch Georgy grow up. He realized Georgy was the main reason he was hoping to stay alive. Stealthily, the child had crept into his soul and stolen his love. The strength of this feeling surprised Greg.

A gong chimed, a strangely inappropriate sound in the desert.

‘Ten seconds.’

Greg suffered an impulse to get up and run away. Silly though it was – how far could he get in ten seconds? – he had to force himself to lie still.

The bomb went off at five twenty-nine and forty-five seconds.

First there was an awesome flash, impossibly bright, the fiercest glare Greg had ever seen, stronger than the sun.

Then a weird dome of fire seemed to come out of the ground. With terrifying speed it grew monstrously high. It reached the level of the mountains and continued to rise, rapidly dwarfing the peaks.

Greg whispered: ‘Jesus . . .’

The dome morphed into a square. The light was still brighter than noonday, and the distant mountains were so vividly illuminated that Greg could see every fold and crevice and rock.

Then the shape changed again. A pillar appeared below, seeming to push miles into the sky, like the fist of God. The cloud of boiling fire above the pillar spread like an umbrella, until the whole thing looked like a mushroom seven miles tall. The colours in the cloud were hellish orange, green and purple.

Greg was hit by a wave of heat, as if the Almighty had opened a giant oven. At the same moment the bang of the explosion reached his ears like the crack of doom. But that was only the beginning. A noise like supernaturally loud thunder rolled over the desert, drowning all other sound.

The blazing cloud began to diminish but the thunder went on and on, impossibly sustained, until Greg wondered if this was the sound of the end of the world.

At last it faded away, and the mushroom cloud began to disperse.

Greg heard Frank Oppenheimer say: ‘It worked.’

Oppie said: ‘Yes, it worked.’

The two brothers shook hands.

And the world is still here, Greg thought.

But it has been forever changed.

(v)

Lloyd Williams and Daisy went to Hoxton Town Hall on the morning of 26 July to watch the votes being counted.

If Lloyd lost, Daisy was going to break off the engagement.

He fervently denied that she was a political liability, but she knew better. Lloyd’s political enemies made a point of calling her ‘Lady Aberowen’. Voters reacted to her American accent by looking indignant, as if she had no right to take part in British politics. Even Labour Party members treated her differently, asking if she would prefer coffee when they were all drinking tea.

As Lloyd had forecast, she was often able to overcome people’s initial hostility, by being natural and charming, and helping the other women wash up the tea cups. But was that enough? The election results would give the only definite answer.

She was not going to marry him if it meant his giving up his life’s work. He said he was willing to do it, but it was a hopeless foundation for marriage. Daisy shuddered with horror as she imagined him doing some other job, working at a bank or in the civil service, miserably unhappy and trying to pretend it was not her fault. It did not bear thinking about.

Unfortunately, everyone thought the Conservatives were going to win the election.

Some things had gone Labour’s way in the campaign. Churchill’s ‘Gestapo’ speech had backfired. Even Conservatives had been dismayed. Clement Attlee, broadcasting the following evening for Labour, had been coolly ironic. ‘When I listened to the Prime Minister’s speech last night, in which he gave such a travesty of the policy of the Labour Party, I realized at once what was his object. He wanted the voters to understand how great was the difference between Winston Churchill, the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr Churchill, the party leader of the Conservatives. He feared lest those who had accepted his leadership in war might be tempted out of gratitude to follow him further. I thank him for having disillusioned them so thoroughly.’ Attlee’s magisterial disdain had made Churchill seem a rabble-rouser. People had had too much of blood-red passion, Daisy thought; they would surely prefer temperate common sense in peacetime.

A Gallup poll taken the day before voting showed Labour winning, but no one believed it. The idea that you could forecast the result by asking a small number of electors seemed a bit unlikely. The News Chronicle, which had published the poll, was predicting a tie.

All the other papers said the Conservatives would win.

Daisy had never before taken any interest in the mechanics of democracy, but her fate was in the balance now, and she watched, mesmerized, as the voting papers were taken out of the boxes, sorted, counted, bundled, and counted again. The man in charge was called the Returning Officer, as if he had been away for a while. He was, in fact, the Town Clerk. Observers from each of the parties monitored the proceedings to make sure there was no carelessness or dishonesty. The process was long, and Daisy felt tortured by suspense.

At half past ten, they heard the first result from elsewhere. Harold Macmillan, a protégé of Churchill’s and a wartime Cabinet Minister, had lost Stockton-on-Tees to Labour. Fifteen minutes later there was news of a huge swing to Labour in Birmingham. No radios were allowed into the hall, so Daisy and Lloyd were relying on rumours filtering in from outside, and Daisy was not sure what to believe.

It was midday when the Returning Officer called the candidates and their agents into a corner of the room, to give them the result before making the announcement publicly. Daisy wanted to go with Lloyd but she was not permitted.

The man spoke quietly to all of them. As well as Lloyd and the sitting MP, there was a Conservative and a Communist. Daisy studied their faces, but could not guess who had won. They all went up on to the platform, and the room fell silent. Daisy felt nauseous.

‘I, Michael Charles Davies, being the duly appointed Returning Officer for the Parliamentary Constituency of Hoxton . . .’

Daisy stood with the Labour Party observers and stared at Lloyd. Was she about to lose him? The thought squeezed her heart and made her breathless with fear. In her life she had twice chosen a man who was disastrously wrong. Charlie Farquharson had been the opposite of her father, nice but weak. Boy Fitzherbert had been much like her father, wilful and selfish. Now, at last, she had found Lloyd, who was both strong and kind. She had not picked him for his social status or for what he could do for her, but simply because he was an extraordinarily good man. He was gentle, he was smart, he was trustworthy, and he adored her. It had taken her a long time to realize that he was what she was looking for. How foolish she had been.

The Returning Officer read out the number of votes cast for each candidate. They were listed alphabetically, so Williams came last. Daisy was so anxious that she could not keep the numbers in her head. ‘Reginald Sidney Blenkinsop, five thousand four hundred and twenty-seven . . .’

When Lloyd’s vote was read out, the Labour Party people all around Daisy burst out cheering. It took her a moment to realize that meant he had won. Then she saw his solemn expression turn into a broad grin. Daisy began to clap and cheer louder than anyone. He had won! And she did not have to leave him! She felt as if her life had been saved.

‘I therefore declare that Lloyd Williams is duly elected Member of Parliament for Hoxton.’

Lloyd was a Member of Parliament. Daisy watched proudly as he stepped forward and made an acceptance speech. There was a formula for such speeches, she realized, and he tediously thanked the Returning Officer and his staff, then thanked his losing opponents for a fair fight. She was impatient to hug him. He finished with a few sentences about the task that lay ahead, of rebuilding war-torn Britain and creating a fairer society. He stood down to more applause.

Coming off the stage, he walked straight to Daisy, put his arms around her, and kissed her.

She said: ‘Well done, my darling,’ then she found she could no longer speak.

After a while they went outside and caught a bus to Labour Party headquarters at Transport House. There they learned that Labour had already won 106 seats.

It was a landslide.

Every pundit had been wrong, and everyone’s expectations were confounded. When all the results were in, Labour had 393 seats, the Conservatives 210. The Liberals had twelve and the Communists one – Stepney. Labour had an overwhelming majority.

At seven o’clock in the evening Winston Churchill, Britain’s great war leader, went to Buckingham Palace and resigned as Prime Minister.

Daisy thought of one of Churchill’s jibes about Attlee: ‘An empty car drew up and Clem got out.’ The man he called a nonentity had thrashed him.

At half past seven Clement Attlee went to the palace in his own car, driven by his wife, Violet, and King George VI asked him to become Prime Minister.

In the house in Nutley Street, after they had all listened to the news on the radio, Lloyd turned to Daisy and said: ‘Well, that’s that. Can we get married now?’

‘Yes,’ said Daisy. ‘As quick as you like.’

(vi)

Volodya and Zoya’s wedding reception was held in one of the smaller banqueting halls in the Kremlin.

The war with Germany was over, but the Soviet Union was still battered and impoverished, and a lavish celebration would have been frowned upon. Zoya had a new dress, but Volodya wore his uniform. However, there was plenty to eat, and the vodka flowed freely.

Volodya’s nephew and niece were there, the twin children of his sister, Anya, and her unpleasant husband, Ilya Dvorkin. They were not yet six years old. Dimka, the dark-haired boy, sat quietly reading a book, while blue-eyed Tania was running around the room crashing into tables and annoying the guests, in a reversal of the expected behaviour of boys and girls.

Zoya looked so desirable in pink that Volodya would have liked to leave right away and take her to bed. That was out of the question, of course. His father’s circle of friends included some of the most senior generals and politicians in the country, and many of them had come to toast the happy couple. Grigori was hinting that one extremely distinguished guest might arrive later: Volodya hoped it was not the depraved NKVD boss Beria.

Volodya’s happiness did not quite let him forget the horrors he had seen and the profound misgivings he had developed about Soviet Communism. The unspeakable brutality of the secret police, the blunders of Stalin that had cost millions of lives, and the propaganda that had encouraged the Red Army to behave like crazed beasts in Germany, had all caused him to doubt the most fundamental things he had been brought up to believe. He wondered uneasily what kind of country Dimka and Tania would grow up in. But today was not the day to think about that.

The Soviet elite were in a good mood. They had won the war and defeated Germany. Their old enemy Japan was being crushed by the USA. The insane honour code of Japan’s leaders made it difficult for them to surrender, but it was only a matter of time now. Tragically, while they clung to their pride, more Japanese and American troops would die, and more Japanese women and children would be bombed out of their homes; but the end result would be the same. Sadly, it seemed there was nothing the Americans could do to hasten the process and prevent unnecessary deaths.

Volodya’s father, drunk and happy, made a speech. ‘The Red Army has occupied Poland,’ he said. ‘Never again will that country be used as a springboard for a German invasion of Russia.’

All the old comrades cheered and thumped the tables.

‘In Western Europe Communist parties are being endorsed by the masses as never before. In the Paris municipal elections last March, the Communist party won the largest share of the vote. I congratulate our French comrades.’

They cheered again.

‘As I look around the world today, I see that the Russian revolution, in which so many brave men fought and died . . .’ He tailed off as drunken tears came to his eyes. A hush descended on the room. He recovered himself. ‘I see that the revolution has never been as secure as it is today!’

They raised their glasses. ‘The revolution! The revolution!’ Everyone drank.

The doors flew open, and Comrade Stalin walked in.

Everyone stood up.

His hair was grey, and he looked tired. He was about sixty-five, and he had been ill: there were rumours that he had suffered a series of strokes or minor heart attacks. But his mood today was ebullient. ‘I have come to kiss the bride!’ he said.

He walked up to Zoya and put his hands on her shoulders. She was a good three inches taller than he, but she managed to stoop discreetly. He kissed her on both cheeks, allowing his grey-moustached mouth to linger just long enough to make Volodya feel resentful. Then he stepped back and said: ‘How about a drink for me?’

Several people hastened to get him a glass of vodka. Grigori insisted on giving Stalin his chair in the centre of the head table. The buzz of conversation resumed, but it was subdued: they were thrilled he was here, but now they had to be careful of every word and every move. This man could have a person killed with a snap of his fingers, and he frequently had.

More vodka was brought, the band began to play Russian folk dances, and slowly people relaxed. Volodya, Zoya, Grigori and Katerina did a four-person dance called a kadril, which was intended to be comic and always made people laugh. After that more couples danced, and the men started to do the barynya, in which they had to squat and kick up their legs, which caused many of them to fall over. Volodya kept checking on Stalin out of the corner of his eye – as did everyone else in the room – and he seemed to be enjoying himself, tapping his glass on the table in time with the balalaikas.

Zoya and Katerina were dancing a troika with Zoya’s boss, Vasili, a senior physicist working on the bomb project, and Volodya was sitting out, when the atmosphere changed.

An aide in a civilian suit came in, hurried around the edge of the room, and went right up to Stalin. Without ceremony, he leaned over the leader’s shoulder and spoke to him quietly but urgently.

Stalin at first looked puzzled, and asked a sharp question, then another. Then his face changed. He went pale, and seemed to stare at the dancers without seeing them.

Volodya said under his breath: ‘What the hell has happened?’

The dancers had not yet noticed, but those sitting at the head table looked frightened.

After a moment Stalin stood up. Those around him deferentially did the same. Volodya saw that his father was still dancing. People had been shot for less.

But Stalin had no eyes for the wedding guests. With the aide at his side he left the table. He walked towards the door, crossing the dance floor. Terrified revellers jumped out of his way. One couple fell over. Stalin did not seem to notice. The band ground to a halt. Saying nothing, looking at nobody, Stalin left the room.

Some of the generals followed him out, looking scared.

Another aide appeared, then two more. They all sought out their bosses and spoke to them. A young man in a tweed jacket went up to Vasili. Zoya seemed to know the man, and listened intently to him. She looked shocked.

Vasili and the aide left the room. Volodya went to Zoya and said: ‘For God’s sake, what’s going on?’

Her voice was shaky. ‘The Americans have dropped a nuclear bomb in Japan.’ Her beautifully pale face seemed even whiter than normal. ‘At first the Japanese government couldn’t figure out what had happened. It took them hours to realize what it was.’

‘Are we sure?’

‘It flattened five square miles of buildings. They estimate that seventy-five thousand people were killed instantly.’

‘How many bombs?’

‘One.’

‘One bomb?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good God. No wonder Stalin turned pale.’

They both stood silent. The news was spreading around the room visibly. Some people sat stunned; others got up and left, heading for their offices, their telephones, their desks and their staff.

‘This changes everything,’ Volodya said.

‘Including our honeymoon plans,’ said Zoya. ‘My leave is sure to be cancelled.’

‘We thought the Soviet Union was safe.’

‘Your father has just made a speech about how the revolution has never been so secure.’

‘Now nothing is secure.’

‘No,’ said Zoya. ‘Not until we have a bomb of our own.’

(vii)

Jacky Jakes and Georgy were in Buffalo, staying at Marga’s apartment for the first time. Greg and Lev were there too, and on Victory Japan Day – Wednesday 15 August – they all went to Humboldt Park. The paths were crowded with jubilant couples and there were hundreds of children splashing in the pond.

Greg was happy and proud. The bomb had worked. The two devices dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had wreaked sickening devastation, but they had brought the war to a quick end and saved thousands of American lives. Greg had played a role in that. Because of what they had all done, Georgy was going to grow up in a free world.

‘He’s nine,’ Greg said to Jacky. They were sitting on a bench, talking, while Lev and Marga took Georgy to buy ice cream.

‘I can hardly believe it.’

‘What will he be, I wonder?’

Jacky said fiercely: ‘He’s not going to do something stupid like acting or playing the goddamn trumpet. He’s got brains.’

‘Would you like him to be a college professor, like your father?’

‘Yes.’

‘In that case . . .’ Greg had been leading up to this, and was nervous about how Jacky might react – ‘he ought to go to a good school.’

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘How about boarding school? He could go where I went.’

‘He’d be the only black pupil.’

‘Not necessarily. When I was there we had a coloured guy, an Indian from Delhi called Kamal.’

‘Just one.’

‘Yes.’

‘Was he teased?’

‘Sure. We called him Camel. But the boys got used to him, and he made some friends.’

‘What happened to him, do you know?’

‘He became a pharmacist. I hear he already owns two drugstores in New York.’

Jacky nodded. Greg could tell that she was not opposed to this plan. She came from a cultured family. Although she herself had rebelled and dropped out, she believed in the value of education. ‘What about the school fees?’

‘I could ask my father.’

‘Would he pay?’

‘Look at them.’ Greg pointed along the path. Lev, Marga and Georgy were returning from the ice-cream vendor’s cart. Lev and Georgy were walking side by side, eating ice-cream cones, holding hands. ‘My conservative father, holding the hand of a coloured child in a public park. Trust me, he’ll pay the school fees.’

‘Georgy doesn’t really fit anywhere,’ Jacky said, looking troubled. ‘He’s a black boy with a white daddy.’

‘I know.’

‘People in your mother’s apartment building think I’m the maid – did you know that?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve been careful not to set them straight. If they thought Negroes were in the building as guests, there might be trouble.’

Greg sighed. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re right.’

‘Life is going to be tough for Georgy.’

‘I know,’ said Greg. ‘But he’s got us.’

Jacky gave him a rare smile. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s something.’