The time of troubles ii, p.84
The Great Storm: March 1962 (Timeline 10/27/62 - Countdown to War), page 84
James Philip
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The Great Storm – March 1962
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Timeline 10/27/62 – Countdown to War
Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2023. All rights reserved.
Cover concept by James Philip
Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design
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The author thanks John A. Wallen, and is indebted to him for his exhaustive proofing and sub editing of the final manuscript of this book.
The Timeline 10/27/62 Series
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Prequel: Countdown to War
1: The Autumn of Empire – October 1961
2: Enterprise – November 1961
3: Fallout Shelter – December 1961
4: The Lion Sleeps Tonight – January 1962
5: Doomsday Blues – February 1962
6: The Great Storm – March 1962
7: West Side Story – April 1962
8: The Wall – May 1962
9: Test Ban Treaty – June 1962
10: The Night of the Long Knives – July 1962
11: Marilyn – August 1962
12: A Hard Rain – September 1962
13: Gathered on the Beach – October 1962
Main Series
Book 1: Operation Anadyr
Book 2: Love is Strange
Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules
Book 4: Red Dawn
Book 5: The Burning Time
Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses
Book 7: A Line in the Sand
Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon
Book 9: All Along the Watchtower
Book 10: Crow on the Cradle
Book 11: 1966 & All That
Book 12: Only in America
Book 13: Warsaw Concerto
Book 14: Eight Miles High
Book 15: Won’t Get Fooled Again
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The War in the South Atlantic Quartet
Stumbling Towards the Edge
Book 16: Armadas
Book 17: Smoke on the Water
Book 18: Cassandra’s Song
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Book 19: Changing of the Guard
Book 20: Independence Day
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Coming in 2024
Book 21: The Missing
A Standalone Timeline 10/27/62 Novel
Football in the Ruins – The World Cup of 1966
USA Series
Book 1: Aftermath
Book 2: California Dreaming
Book 3: The Great Society
Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country
Book 5: The American Dream
Australia Series
Book 1: Cricket on the Beach
Book 2: Operation Manna
A Standalone Timeline 10/27/62 Novellas
A Kelper’s Tale
Cuba Libre
La Argentina
Puerto Argentina
The House on Haight Street
The Lost Fleet
For the latest news and author blogs about the
Timeline 10/27/62 Series check out
www.thetimelinesaga.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Author’s Note
Other Books by James Philip
Timeline 10/27/62 – Countdown to War
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Episode 6 – The Great Storm
(March 1962)
Chapter 1
Thursday 1st March 1962
The Athenaeum
Pall Mall
London, England
Letters patent…
One way or another the bloody things had a lot to answer for. Particularly in the reduced circumstances of a once great imperial power that in many respects, was still conducting itself as if it possessed an empire that was worthy of the name.
Tom Harding-Grayson had been ruminating over this, and the law of unintended consequences for much of the last month, feeling guilty that he had done so little – not that he had a surfeit of influence in these things nowadays – to obstruct, obfuscate or generally delay, even for a day or an hour or a minute, Her Majesty’s Government’s soon to be consolidated claim upon what would henceforth be designated the British Antarctic Territory, due to formally come into existence two days’ hence.
This state of affairs deeply troubled him, not least because he could not for the life of him understand how his colleagues at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office could be so…blind to the raft of frankly, insoluble problems the damnable declaration stored up for that could only result in a great deal of gnashing of teeth, wailing and the general spillage of a lot of other people’s blood.
Notwithstanding such provocation, under his new self-denying dawn until dusk ordnance, he was drinking tea – Darjeeling – because no matter how dull-witted his colleagues, and the ministers of the government they served, stubbornly remained upon matters of South Atlantic policy, and numerous other even more pressing international concerns; morosely imbibing copious quantities of the hard stuff – which he had done far too much of in recent years – unmitigated by good company was not going to help.
He always got maudlin when he drank alone. If he carried on like that he was going to drink himself to an early grave; Pat, his sadly estranged ex-wife, had been absolutely adamant about that, likewise that she was not going to hang around just to see it happen. Adamant, in fact, on any number of occasions but like the royal chump he could be sometimes, he had not taken heed of her warnings until it was too late…
He looked at his wristwatch; a present from Pat in 1950. He missed her desperately, and hoped above hope that she was not too lonely in her tax exile in the Lost Colonies.
Ironically, funnily enough, a few years ago, they had talked about the possibility of his resigning from the FCO, and of setting themselves up in New England; she would write ‘serious’ novels rather than the throwaway detective fiction for which she had made her name, while he might pen a couple of voluminous histories, or even the biography of Castlereagh that as a young man he had once dreamed of devoting his retirement to…
Nothing had come of that.
He had had his ‘career’, for what little it was worth; and all Pat’s friends were in England, London in the main. As two castaways in America they would both have been self-exiled from the British political milieu and their wide circle of friends, many of whom they had known from the days of the War. The moral that applied was: old trees never took kindly to being uprooted, and set down again in foreign soil.
He wondered what had happened to Henry Tomlinson.
His friend was late; which was unlike him. Henry was the most punctual man he had ever known in his whole life. On the other hand, one had to factor in that the poor fellow was surrounded by a gang of dolts at the Cabinet Office and if, as was perfectly possible, he had been dragged into another of those interminable Treasury penny-pinching imbroglios today then, from experience, Tom well knew that time could literally, seem to stand still…
Not that these days his old bailiwick at the FCO was any kind of island of sanity and common sense in what was becoming an ever more turbulent world. Even if the mythical ‘special’ relationship with the United States had not been going through one of those phases in which the Washington desk of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office might as easily have been a runaway rollercoaster was not bad enough; lately, Tom’s Secretary of State, Lord Home, remained resolutely relaxed to the point of somnolence on the great issues of the day. Granted, to his credit even in the midst of the most brutal of Cabinet skirmishes, or under the stinging flail of a co-ordinated Fleet Street attack, the man exhibited such an air of grace under pressure that sometimes it was almost impossible to know what was going on behind his long-suffering, patrician gaze.
Tom had asked to speak to the Secretary of State about the South Atlantic; but his diary had been filled with Parliamentary, constituency, ‘pressing’ departmental business and as the cricket season was scheduled to commence next month, ‘sporting commitments’ as befitted the only member of the current Cabinet to have played the summer game at a First Class level.
Tom had persisted, and got precisely nowhere.
Not that he honestly believed he could have won over Lord Home; he knew in his heart that the time for throwing metaphorical spanners into the works of the offending treaty had been two or three years ago.
And it was not as if he believed Lord Home’s views on the subject were, in any sense, materially at variance with that of the government, to which he had always been unswervingly loyal in a very old-fashioned preux chevalier sort of way.
The problem was that when the Secretary of State – like any public school and Oxbridge-educated Englishman of his generation and upbringing – thought about the South Atlantic he pictured images of scattered, windswept islands where the sheep outnumbered the humans by a thousand to one, of whale hunting, of endless grey, storm-tossed seas, and of the great ice continent to the south where immortals like Scott and Shackleton had etched heroic, frost-bitten remembrance into the very soul of the Empire. Theirs was a generation which had no inclination to come to terms with the fact that the epic age of exploration led by legendary heroes – like that of Hector, Achilles, Menelaus and Agamemnon of yore, of whom they had learned so much at Eton, or Harrow or Winchester College – was over, that the whaling industry had brainlessly exterminated most of the whales of the southern oceans and that what little legitimacy British suzerainty claimed on territories below 50 degrees South rested on to say the least, tenuous grounds.
Specifically, practically everything depended on its seizure of the Falkland Islands in 1833, a flag-waving exercise that was as much ‘ancient’ history as Poitiers, Cressy and Agincourt, events which any right-thinking person, and even among the cohort around Harold Macmillan’s Cabinet table, would never dare to cite as a basis of a contemporary claim of sovereignty over any part of a large slice of modern day France – for example, in respect of Gascony or the arrondissement of Calais – in the second half of the twentieth century!
“Oh dear, you’re looking preoccupied again, old man,” Henry Tomlinson observed, as he quietly and very wearily slumped down into an armchair opposite his old friend, unobserved until he shifted in his seat to make himself at home.
Tom Harding-Grayson blinked.
“Sorry,” he murmured, a little sheepishly. “It’s this farrago over the Antarctic Territories…”
The other man nodded imperceptibly, otherwise remaining impassive, mute while he organised his thoughts after what had been another more than middlingly trying day in Downing Street, mainly devoted – and failing – to persuade certain senior members of the Government to devote at least a little of their attention to their duties. It was a challenge; if they were not running around after flighty young women (or men) with their flies undone, or dealing with the baffling – none of them were very good with money – affairs of their country estates, or bickering about the French – well, Charles de Gaulle in particular –the Americans and the wholly foreseeable but in reality, unforeseen multifarious problems of the ongoing decolonisation in sub-Saharan Africa much in the fashion of a bankrupt business in the hands of insolvency practitioners forced to conduct a fire sale to keep its most litigious creditors at bay, there was the underlying, corrosive ineffectiveness of several key members of Supermac’s incestuous inner circle.
The chickens were, as one might say, coming home to roost for an increasingly lacklustre Conservative Government which, under three prime ministers had now been in power for a dozen years and had conclusively run out of ideas. While nobody had worried overmuch when it had just been the papers and a few backbench MPs whispering dissatisfaction and muttering snidely behind their hands, lately, what passed for a façade of Cabinet unity felt as if it might crumble to dust at any moment. Unfortunately, much though this was a moment when the Prime Minister badly needed to get a grip; he was too busy romancing the White House, disingenuously regaling all and sundry with assurances that they had ‘never had it so good’ and that the present difficulties were just flies in the ointment that would, all things being equal, go away in due course, to do anything about the gathering economic malaise and the declining influence of his government abroad and at home. Consequently, there was, and had been for some time, a sense of…drift in Whitehall which was threatening to hamstring the Civil Service, the competent, professional organisation that actually ruled what was left of the Pax Britannia.
It was all very worrying…
Henry Tomlinson looked to his old friend with a hint of schadenfreude playing in his rheumy eyes.
Tom had a lot more in common with any number of leading figures in Harold Macmillan’s administration than he would ever admit. Like himself, he had been to school with some of them, and in a couple of cases, their fathers; they were of the same class, shared similar Oxbridge prejudices, had served in the Second War, most of them with distinction and nobody could fault the government’s patriotism, even if it was a tad jingoistic and nostalgic for either man’s taste.
To Tom’s credit, Henry understood that his friend was not unaware that he shared the faults, and to an extent, the milder vices of the people whose tramline views of the world baffled him. That perhaps, was why he had given up, apart from a handful of spectacular spats – duelling with impeccable courtesy with papers and reports – with colleagues, and ministers who frankly did not want to get into an arm-wrestle with a man regarded only a decade ago as possessing one of the finest minds in the Civil Service. More recently, it was more a case of nobody wanting to be seen to be the one kicking a fellow when he was down; it was un-English, unbecoming. Had it been otherwise, Tom would have been, as the Navy used to call it, ‘on the beach’ by now, disgraced rather than at his ease this evening in what its members universally regarded as one of the ‘better’ London clubs in this contrary age of decline.
The British ruling classes had had their civil war back in the seventeenth century and concluded that they did not want to do that again. So, the Civil Service, politicians and by and large, academia determined to conduct their jockeying for position in private, doing their level best not to wash their dirty linen, let alone their disagreements in public.
It would never do to risk alarming the hoi polloi…
Which was why, unless a historian inadvertently stumbled across a long withheld document which had somehow failed to survive the winnowing of the guardians of the nation’s archives, it was unlikely the sorry tale of Tom’s two-year-long guerilla opposition, burrowing away like a canker in the underbelly of the FCO, would ever escape into the public domain. In England, dissenters usually kept their angst if not to themselves, but within their departmental spheres.
That was both the secret and the underlying strength of the system. Especially when the politicians respected the carefully considered advice of their ‘professional’ advisers; as the Macmillan government had over the Antarctic question and despite their ‘Tory’ reservations and attachment to the idea – if the not cost – of empire, most other important foreign policy decisions. Well, that horrendous catastrophe in 1956 apart; but everybody understood that if Anthony Eden had stopped to listen, just for a minute to sound the advice he was getting from practically all sides six years ago, the Suez debacle would never have happened and health permitting, he might still be Prime Minister. He had not, of course listened and well, everybody knew how well that turned out for him…
“The Antarctic Treaty is not a re-run of Suez and that despicable underhand business with the French and the Israelis at Sevres, old man,” Henry remarked, a little tongue-in-cheek. “Nobody is stabbing anybody in the back and our friends in Washington aren’t threatening to bankrupt us.”
To which Tom Harding-Grayson retorted, wryly: “We’re signing up to an open-ended commitment that does not address any of the real post-imperial territorial issues in the region.”
Henry sighed: his friend was talking about the Falkland Islands, standing Canute-like against the tide of prevailing wisdom, and the explicit policy of his own department and that he understood completely why he was such a lone voice in the wilderness of late.
Nonetheless, he let his friend expostulate his thesis more or less uninterrupted, even though he was familiar with the majority of its conjoined elements. The essence of it was that governments in the past had frequently batted aside, or simply done whatever seemed convenient at the time only for relatively minor, seemingly inconsequential matters far from home to come back later to plunge later administrations into crises. Although the Civil Service attempted to finesse affairs; it walked a tricky tightrope, because politicians liked to think that they were in control, one of the reasons few ministers of the Crown nominally responsible for the foreign, colonial and latterly, Commonwealth portfolios acknowledged that in reality the denizens of the FCO building in King Charles Street had pursued their own ‘foreign policy’ since Castlereagh’s time, regardless of the transient comings and goings of governments of the day.
It was part of the unspoken quid pro quo between Whitehall’s mandarins and Parliamentarians; there could never be a coup, or a revolution in Britain because it was in nobody’s interests. The system was one of checks and balances and all that, with the ring held by an independent judiciary embedded in the establishment.
