The Peacock Cloak

all!”
    Thomas looked anxiously over the Colonel’s shoulder at the Duckett’s house

    On Saturday morning, Thomas went over to see his mother Doreen in her bungalow on the far side of the village. It was a depressing errand. There was so little that he could share with her and so little she could share with him. She was eighty-two and suffered not only with emphysema but with Alzheimer’s disease. In her mind she was back in the days of her adolescence when England was England, Logres did not exist and the Brythonic immigration had only just begun.
    “I really think the government ought to do more for us old people,” she grumbled at one point. “We built this country up, we paid taxes, and look at the thanks we get!”
    On the way back home, Thomas heard the angry shouting of young men ahead of him.
    There was a small crowd outside the church, consisting of a group of young English youths from the village and from Churchill Camp, and a group of young Logrians up from the fortified Brythonic settlement of Tre Morfa. The young settlers were armed with automatic rifles. They had unrolled banners protesting against the deal between their government and Chairman Tony Blair.
    GOD GAVE EASTERN LOGRES TO US !
    THERE IS NO SUCH PEOPLE AS ‘THE ENGLISH’
    SAXONS BELONG IN SAXONY
    About three hundred Logrians lived in the Tre Morfa settlement. Surrounded by a high razor wire fence and CCTV cameras, it was on the opposite side of the village to the five thousand Brummies in the Churchill Camp and it occupied about the same amount of land.
    “Fuck off Logrian scum!” the English crowd shouted. “This is England! We’ll bury you! We’ll fucking bomb you into the sea!”
    The Logrians, outnumbered but made confident by their guns, shouted back:
    “England? What’s ‘England’? This is Logres! You belong in Saxony! That’s why you’re called Saxons. Duh!”
    “We’re not called Saxons. We’re English. And we were born here.”
    Thomas sighed. Soon some English idiot would start throwing stones and then another idiot on the Logrian side would point a gun and then…
    Richard’s son Harry was at the front of the English crowd:
    “Convenient how your God tells you to steal land from other people,” he called out.
    “How can we steal what is already ours?” one of the settlers shouted back in strongly French-accented English (the Tre Morfa settlers came from Montreal and still spoke French among themselves.)
    “How can it be yours when we’ve lived here for a thousand years?” called out Thomas’ own son William from the back of the crowd. “And you lot were living in Canada until a few years ago.”
    “Because God gave it to us, scumbag, and you had no right to take it.”
    Thomas broke in before anyone else could reply.
    “Leave it, all of you,” he told the English group. “You’re giving them exactly what they want. Ignore them and walk away.”
    Being a schoolmaster gave him a certain authority. The English kids reluctantly began to disperse.
    “Scared are you, Saxons?” the settlers jeered after them.
    “Keep walking away!” Thomas told his compatriots.
    But he couldn’t resist one small jibe at the Logrians himself: “If you’re so brave,” he said in Brythonic, “why don’t you leave your guns behind next time?”
    “I thought you said to ignore them,” said Harry Duckett afterwards, but Thomas could see that he’d risen a little in his young neighbour’s estimation.

    A couple of days later Thomas had to take his mother Doreen for an appointment at Addenbrooke’s hospital down in Cambridge. She needed to have the fluid drained from her lungs. Jenny came too to help. The appointment was at one o’clock but, although it was only about fifteen miles down to Cambridge, they set out at seven with the aim of getting through the BCL checkpoint at Cottenham before the queues grew too long.
    At first Jenny and Thomas congratulated themselves on their plan. There were only ten vehicles ahead of them in the queue at the checkpoint and they thought they’d get through in an hour or so and maybe have time to look round a few shops and find a cup of coffee somewhere before it was time to get to the hospital.
    Jenny, by her standards, was almost cheerful.
    “Not that there’s much in the shops these days, mind you,” she said.
    But, even if the shops were bare, things seemed a little more normal in Cambridge than they did out in Sutton, sandwiched as Sutton was between the two sets