Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks. Alan Coren
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and John O’Groats and threatening to swallow us all; then comes the Greenwich Time Signal, followed by a BBC voice intoning in old, noble accents the latest catalogue of horrors, the crash of stocks, the leaps of Bank Rate as it fights its way upstream, the rifts between and within political parties, the news that Britain has been bounced out of one more of the rooms in the fickle seraglio that is Europe today, stories of industrial dispute and international embarrassment, of crop failure and metal fatigue – the list seems endless. And, after it all, at ten minutes past eight, we drag ourselves pitifully from our beds with all-too-evident third rate power, and crawl away to work with the aforementioned look in our one hundred million eyes.
All right. I realise that many citizens of the United States, the Soviet Union, of France and Italy and Australia and Japan and all the rest of that gang of unprincipled upstarts currently touting their carpetbags around the market-places of the world and making the Made in Britain label an object of derision among men, I realise that these people, while sympathetic to our decline, tend to feel that we had a good run for everyone else’s money, and that we’re bitching unreasonably now that other flags want to get in on the act. Which is rather like tapping Billy Batson on the shoulder and saying ‘Tough luck, Billy, but Shazam isn’t the code word any more and we’re not telling you what the new one is because we figure it’s about time somebody else had a crack at the Captain Marvel title. Under the circumstances, our advice to you is to open a hardware store in Wichita Falls and leave Doctor Savannah to some of the younger fellahs.’ Fair enough, unless you just happen to be Billy Batson, in which case you’re stuck with a not inconsiderable problem of adjustment.
To return to specifics. I sloshed the coffee into a brace of Coronation Mugs, and, my upper lip a ridge of steel, padded into the bedroom to shore up my wife’s wilting spirits with a few well-chosen words about the unconquerable will and study of revenge and similar snippets culled from our immortal heritage. She lay palely between the sheets, like one whose life has been frittered away on over-attention to camellias, listening to the newscaster reeling off reports of motions of censure on the Government, the wasting sickness of our gold reserves, the current protest march of aircraft workers, the latest lurch in the cost-of-living index, and other gobbets calculated to stick in the most optimistic craw. As the minutes flashed by, loaded to the gunwales with disaster, our commingled gloom deepened to a rich ebony, and I was on the point of hurling the radio through the window in the hope, perhaps, of felling a passing Volkswagen (a distinct statistical possibility), when the announcer paused suddenly, caught his breath, and said
‘Mr. Denis Healey, the Minister of Defence, promised today that Britain would not lose her world lead in the development of vertical take-off aircraft.’
There might have been more news after that, but we didn’t hear it. My wife sat bolt upright in bed, the colour hurtling through her cheeks, her eyes uncannily bright, and clutched at my arm with that reserve of energy normally associated with drowning men in the presence of a sudden boathook.
‘Can it be true?’ she whispered.
I bit my lip.
‘It has to be true,’ I said.
‘A world lead? Of our very own?’
‘And we have it already!’
‘Pray God we can hold on to it!’ she muttered. We looked at one another with new hope. Horizons began to open before us, albeit vertically.
‘I think –’ I said, very slowly, ‘– I think it’s all going to be all right, after all. I think we’re going to come through.’
We drank our coffee in one draught, flung the cups over our shoulders, and offered a brief prayer for those in peril on the drawing-board. We had seen, at last, the thin end of the wedge, and it was a good wedge. Without a weapon of one’s own, you see, without an original working weapon, it’s impossible to hope for greatness. All very well to moan about defence expenditure and the lack of funds for schools, hospitals, pensions, roads, universities and all the rest of that pointless paraphernalia. All very well to brag about your Shakespeares and your Dantes and your Racines and your Ella Wheeler Wilcoxes. But when the chips are down, the chap from Smith and Wesson is the one we turn to. Weapons are the only true curators of our culture, and what in recent months has sapped the vitality of the Island Race has been the increasing doubt as to whether our independent deterrent was worth the sack it came in. While other nations proliferated their Polarises, or lobbed their ICBM’s willy-nilly between Novaya Zemlya and the Pole, we in Britain have gradually come to feel that the idea of having our own personal overkill was but an idle dream. We know that, called upon to swop punches with an Unnamed Foreign Power, we’d be hard put to to raise one megadeath among the lot of us. In all probability, the first day’s hostilities would turn us into mere froth and flotsam; we should go down in history as no more than a patch of choppy water off the Irish coast. But not now. Now that we possessed a weapon in the development of which we led the world, to what glorious heights might we not rise?
‘They ought to ring the churchbells,’ said my wife, mopping her tears with a sheetcorner.
‘By heavens!’ I cried, smiting the mattress till the springs sang, ‘The old lion lives to roar again! Let Russia tremble! Let China quail!’
My wife looked at the ceiling with passionate calm.
‘And gentlemen in Osh Kosh, now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap …’
She lit a cigarette with a trembling flame. ‘I say, my love, do you suppose it’s too late to get the Empire back? Or, at least, some of the nicer bits?’
‘Never!’ I shouted. ‘We are just entering the period familiarly known as the nick of time, and from here on in the going cannot be anything but good. Before the year is out, vertical take-off aircraft will be dropping like archangels all over the uncivilized world. Natives will run from the bush, crying ‘What is that great shining bird that drops from the skies like Ukkra, God of Sleet?’ and we shall answer ‘It is a British vertical take-off aircraft, you heathen bastards, sent from the Great White Queen across the oceans, and you have ten seconds flat in which to start the grovelling routine.’
She clasped her hands ecstatically.
‘Oh, think of it! There is trouble in the Straits … the natives are running riot through the rubber … mud has been thrown at the Flag …’
‘… ten thousand miles away, a tall figure in mutton-chop whiskers hails a cab in Downing Street and clops rapidly …’
‘Clops?’
‘All right, roars. Roars rapidly through the night to Buckingham Palace … the Imperial Presence … the curt nods … the rasp of pen on parchment …’
‘We have decided to send a vertical take-off aircraft!’
‘Ah!’
‘Ah!’
I strode to the window, hands clasped behind me, and looked into the coruscating future.
‘What about this? De Gaulle criticises the movements of British hussars in the Sudan … our Ambassador hurries to Colombey-les-deux-Églises … the slap of glove on cheek … next morning, when the population of Marseilles awakes, there, bobbing on the tide, is a fleet of British vertical takeoff aircraft …’
‘Bobbing on the what?’
‘I don’t know why you have to quibble. Bobbing in the air, then. Shooting vertically up to five hundred feet, and shooting vertically down again, like great silver yo-yos, like … what’s the matter?’
My wife was looking at me with every sign of fear.
‘These vertical thingummies,’ she said, quietly. ‘What do they do except … except bob up and down?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, do they carry Ultimate