The Peacock Cloak

emigrate and let them help themselves to everything.”
    Actually Thomas had been increasingly tempted to do just that. He could get a job abroad as a teacher, with better pay and a life free of checkpoints and curfews and daily humiliations. He was getting tired of the struggle to hold onto the idea of England. He couldn’t help thinking that perhaps England had had its day.
    “So what happened?” Harry pressed him.
    “If I tell you will you let it drop?”
    “Okay. For now.”
    So Thomas told him: about being forced to stay in the car, about Doreen soiling herself, about the insulting comment and his reaction.
    Harry exploded; “The callous bastards ! An old woman of eighty-two! In the country where she was born! How dare they?”
    “You said you’d let it drop.”
    “Yes, but…” Harry checked himself with difficulty. “Well all right. But just for the moment.”
    Jenny came down. She and Thomas picked at their pasta. William and Harry sat with them for a bit, William trying to make conversation, Harry dark and glowering in the background, saying nothing at all. Later on Harry went out to meet someone and William and Thomas watched TV. Then Jenny went off to the kitchen and had one of her solitary little cries.
    Thomas kept thinking about that lark twittering in the sun and wondering what it was that it seemed to remind him of.

    In the middle of the night there was a series of explosions out on the Fen. Thomas jumped out of bed and ran to the window. He couldn’t see anything at first but he heard gunfire, then silence.
    “What is it, Tom?” Jenny wanted to know.
    He shrugged and got back into bed. Neither slept.
    Half an hour later they heard the throbbing of helicopters low overhead, not just one of them but several going to and fro, their spotlights sweeping the village and from time to time flooding the bedroom with an ice-blue daylight that disappeared as quickly as it came. Some time later tanks and armoured troop carriers came clanking and rumbling into Sutton and there were more spotlights, more icy, comfortless false dawns.
    “…By order of the Eastern Logres Command,” crackled a megaphone on a BCL jeep on the road outside, “this district is under indefinite curfew….”
    “Remain in your homes,” replied another megaphone over in the direction of the church. “Any Saxon found in the street is liable to arrest and detention. We will shoot if necessary…”
    The first jeep came back: “Sutton village and Churchill camp are now subject to curfew under the Prevention of Terror regulations. Do not come out of your houses. Our orders are to shoot to kill if this is necessary to maintain order…”
    The phones were still working at first. Villagers called one another. The story went round that someone had managed to get some sort of homemade rocket launcher in through the outer wire of the Tre Morfa settlement. It had been set to fire four explosive rockets at 1 a.m. Two settlers had been injured. Some said that a small child in there had been killed.
    So of course there’ll be hell to pay , Thomas thought.
    The phones were cut off half way through the morning and then, at about 2 p.m., five Logrian soldiers with flak jackets and automatic rifles arrived at the Turners’ house. They made Thomas and Jenny pull out every drawer and empty the contents over the floor. They made them empty their food cupboards onto the table and their coal bunker over the back lawn. They even slashed open bags of sugar and flour with bayonets and pulled up the fitted carpet in the hallway…

    An hour later the soldiers returned again. Thomas, Jenny and William were still scooping up the sugar and the coal (which they could ill afford to lose) and trying to get the torn carpet back into place. The soldiers said they were looking for Harry Duckett. Some informer in the village had told them that William was his closest friend.
    “I don’t know where he is,” William said. “I really don’t.”
    They arrested him and took him away.
    Jenny and Thomas didn’t sleep at all that next night. Jenny sat clenching and unclenching her fists at the kitchen table, rocking to and fro, while Thomas patted her shoulder and told her stories about young men he’d heard about who’d been arrested and then returned to their parents unharmed.

    As it turned out they were lucky. William did come back the next day. A jeep pulled up and dumped him outside. He had a black eye but was otherwise outwardly