Not An English Word

By Tom Anderson

HE'S BACK IN TOWN

With the Liberal Democrats facing electoral annihilation, Nick Clegg resorts to desperate measures. He plots to use a forbidden Celtic ritual to resurrect one of the Victorian Prime Ministers who made the Liberal Party great. But he gets more than he bargained for when a mysterious MP named Harry Church appears on the scene to turn British politics – and the world – upside down…

Featuring creative live news subtitles, the importance of choosing a cheap colour dye for cult outfits, penguins in microwaves and the Second Crimean War.

This book can be enjoyed alone but also comes with a soundtrack: each chapter has a suggested, thematically related song in a footnote which may be played alongside it to enhance the reading experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sea Lion Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386198277

Book preview

Not An English Word

Dr Tom Anderson

Sea Lion Press

This is a work of fiction.

While ‘real-world’ characters may appear, the nature of the divergent story means any depictions herein are fictionalised and in no way an indication of real events. Above all, characterisations have been developed with the primary aim of telling a compelling story.

Any political positions espoused by the characters herein should not be taken as those of the author.

All rights reserved.

Acknowledgements

Once more I must thank Tom Black for setting up Sea Lion Press, and Jack Tindale for another excellent cover. Thanks to God, my family and the Norfolk countryside for being highly supportive while I wrote this one. Thanks also go to Jimmy Piggs Coffee House in Doncaster for the use of their wi-fi when my home internet decided to break in the course of writing this work, and to the University of Sheffield’s Western Bank library for reference books. And thanks to Dean and Charles for providing inspiration for the Bulgaria sequence.

Finally, a special thanks to Max Lindh for encouraging me to pursue this project when I was uncertain whether it would ever work. The enthusiasm of Max and many other beta readers on AlternateHistory.com was a huge encouragement to bring this one to life and keep it going.

Author’s Note

This book has a musical aspect. Each chapter of this book has an accompanying song (or in one case poem) which helped inspire it and is thematically related. These songs are listed in the footnotes. It is not necessary to listen to the song alongside reading the chapter – the story is complete from reading the chapters alone – but it may enhance your reading experience.

Now, without further ado…

Contents

Disclaimer              2

Acknowledgements              3

Author’s Note              4

Chapter One              14

Chapter Two              18

Chapter Three              23

Chapter Four              28

Chapter Five              31

Chapter Six              35

Chapter Seven              37

Chapter Eight              40

Chapter Nine              43

Chapter Ten              49

Chapter Eleven              53

Chapter Twelve              57

Chapter Thirteen              62

Chapter Fourteen              67

Chapter Fifteen              71

Chapter Sixteen              77

Chapter Seventeen              83

Chapter Eighteen              89

Chapter Nineteen              95

Epilogue              101

Afterword              108

Appendix              110

Bibliography                                                                                                                                                          116

Prologue

March 27th, 2016

The spring rain beat down pitilessly upon the pleasant hills and fields of Wiltshire. They cared not. The innocent-looking grass, criss-crossed with roads and fenced into neat pastures, lay atop not merely soil but vast deposits of chalk - chalk that would drain away the watery assault before it could settle. All those compacted skeletons of tiny little creatures from the ancient world… Wiltshire had known the endless deeps of time long before humans had walked the earth. It had owned many names. What the Romans and the Atrebates had named the land they had warred over was now not even remembered by anyone - except, perhaps, the land itself. Centuries later, King Cynric of Wessex had won the land for the Anglo-Saxons and named it Wiltunascir. Centuries more of conquests and counter-conquests had followed, as Vikings and their sophisticated Norman cousins followed in the footsteps of those who had come before. The language was buffeted back and forth by the tides of time and Wiltunascir became Wiltshire. It is debatable whether the land itself cared. It knew it would exist long after the folk currently laying claim to it had passed into history, then legend, then myth.

Though the days were growing lighter, the rain was now illuminated not by natural light but by the shining beams of two powerful headlamps. Individual drops danced in the glow for a moment before passing into memory, as ephemeral as human lives.

Now the big machine casting the light could be discerned. Cresting a hill, cautiously moving up a hilly B-road to prevent aquaplaning even in the fleeting puddles of water, was a four-by-four. A sensible vehicle for this weather. It was not one of the fashionable, expensive vehicles of the poseur, manufactured in Germany by designers who had sold their soul to the cult of vogue and designed, through gritted teeth, vehicles that merely looked as though they could safely handle off-roading. No, this was a tough, ageing Land Rover of the type now too embarrassingly practical to see on urban roads.

But then, this was about as far from urban as one could get in south-west England, regardless of how many Scots or Scandinavians would laugh at the description of this countryside as rural. It had walls and roads and pastures, after all! Regardless, it seemed remote to the driver as he carefully manoeuvred his vehicle around the next corner. He did not bother to consult his road atlas, never having gotten into the satnav habit. He knew these roads fairly well, even if most of his business had historically been one county over in Somerset.

Historically. He narrowed his eyes in emotion for a moment, without ever taking his eyes off the road. That was the word. All he had worked for, all his achievements...all history.

But he had never been the maudlin sort. To distract himself, he flicked on the reassuringly solid radio dial - none of these newfangled buttons on the steering wheel where you could accidentally turn off the life support on the International Space Station if you weren’t careful. He attempted to hit the memory button for Radio 2, but after a brief blast of static realised he had tapped the tuning search rocker by accident. The radio soon found a signal, however, and the driver winced for a moment lest he have his ears violated by something loud and unpleasant.

He needn’t have worried. "—FM said the announcer mid-sentence. And up next we have a request from, hmm, Nick C. in Sheffield..."

The driver, who had been listening idly, suddenly sat bolt upright. He slightly revved the engine as his foot slipped marginally, startling a damp pheasant which had been giving his Land Rover a bemused look.

"Yes, it’s a Chris de Burgh song, but hmm, not one of our more requested ones, really had to dig the CD out on this one, folks. Fake laughter. Sure you wouldn’t prefer ‘Lady in Red’ or something, Nick? No? Well, here we go then with ‘The Leader Trilogy’ by Chris de Burgh, from the 1986 album ‘Into the Light’."

[1]

Nineteen eighty-six. There was a year. Chernobyl. The Challenger disaster. Those were the things everyone remembered. Not everyone remembered speaking against Reagan’s F-111 bombing of Libya from British bases with the consent of the Thatcher Government, or long nights patiently working away in the printing workshop to ensure a miracle would not be a flash in the pan. But that was what the driver thought of. His reverie distracted him for a moment, and the words of the song slid through his subconscious like an assassin’s blade.

The driver narrowed his eyes once more. Almost reluctantly, he craned his neck slightly to the right—for what he knew was coming. He did not need to consult a map or compass to know what direction north-west lay in. Even without his orienteering training in his youth, his ultimate destination was visible by now. The hill loomed up before him.

Over his shoulder was the distant glow of Salisbury, its city lights battling against the gloomy rain. But there was another light, a light that should not be, a light that afforded no explanation. Atop the hill, now ever closer, the glow shone out into the night.

The driver ran out of road. He turned the keys in the ignition perhaps a little more rapidly than was necessary, cutting off the song. Perhaps he was afraid of what he might hear next.

Those Scots and Scandinavians really would be laughing. The hill was hardly as remote as it had once been. There was a tiny private airfield, even a Land Rover dealership—now there was an irony. But there were still hidden nooks and crannies. The driver pulled up the hood of his anorak, donned his good walking boots that resisted water as well as any wellies, locked the door behind him and set out.

His birth certificate would have informed a curious observer of two things: his name was Jeremy, and he was seventy-five years old. Many would have been surprised to learn the first, and everyone would have been surprised to learn the second, for he clambered up the rougher patches of the hill like a man half his age. He followed the glow, though he already knew the way, having learned it long ago. Now that glow was distinct enough to take on a perceptible colour. It was a rich shade of fluorescent orange, almost but not quite evocative of a sodium lamp-post. For a moment ‘Jeremy’ indulged himself in the fantasy of some dreadful ‘modern’ update of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which replaced the old Victorian lantern with a modern lamp-post in the middle of a remote forest. He smiled briefly before his expression of concern returned.

It was a closely-guarded secret that there were standing stones up here. They were easier to conceal than one might think. The hill was already covered in chronologically later ruins, some of them signposted by archaeologists. It was always easier to hide a painting in an art gallery, or a corpse in a morgue (‘Jeremy’ winced at the latter choice of metaphor). Besides, the circle did not sit out on the open hillside; the stones had been partly covered up by the Normans’ motte-and-bailey building activities, and were only visible from a small inlet in the hill. Thus they had escaped the fate of nearby Stonehenge or even Avebury, coated in graffiti, bigged up by disappointed American tourists and surrounded by neo-pagans whom the original druids would probably have quite happily sacrificed after spending five minutes in the same room.

No, this circle was secret, and it was secret for a very important reason. It did not appear on Ordnance Survey maps. This might seem like the act of some vast and all-seeing conspiracy to the Englishman who treated the Ordnance Survey’s products as being copied from tablets granted by divine providence, but in fact was very easily explained when one considered whom had served as Master-General of the Ordnance for many years.

Now ‘Jeremy’ moved stealthily. As before, his age was not apparent as he crept up to the sole entrance of the hidden haven of the stones. The rain continued to conceal his profile as he carefully examined his surroundings and risked one glance around the corner—

There you are, said a familiar voice. I was worried you weren’t going to come.

Paddy Ashdown looked around the inlet and sighed. It was even worse than he’d expected. He’d predicted there would be at least a dozen of them; in fact there were closer to twenty. He’d expected the occult paraphernalia so beloved by the youth who first learned of the secret, and indeed it looked like a rejected scene from some edgier ripoff of Harry Potter. He’d even predicted the loaves of bread carefully placed atop each of the stones half-embedded in the side of the hill, though the Kit-kat biscuits placed on top of the loaves was a bit of a surprise.

But he hadn’t predicted what they would be wearing.

Are you out of your tiny mind, Nick? Paddy said tiredly. He looked back and forth around the tiny, crowded clearing. "They don’t even match."

Nick Clegg pulled the triangular orange hood from his head, his usual slightly pained expression turning defensive. It’s not my fault if people can’t follow simple instructions!

For the record, the local shop was all out of Pantone 1235C, said a muffled voice behind a more buff-coloured hood, which sounded suspiciously like David Laws.

And besides, have you seen the prices of that stuff? asked Probably Danny Alexander from inside a cone of hi-vis jacket-coloured luminous yellow.

Quite apart from that, Paddy said patiently, what on earth made you think that dressing up like Klansmen would improve perceptions of the Liberal Democrats?

"Well, of course there are some negative connotations, Clegg conceded, wincing as he emphasised the words, but I mean it is an acceptable cultural garment in parts of Spain, and on the whole I felt it was a must, really, given the whole atmosphere this thing demands, and, and..."

And he really enjoyed the Sherlock Christmas special, piped up Possibly Julian Huppert from inside a reddish-orange outfit.

Clegg turned and glared at him for a moment, then shrugged. Yes. Yes I did. The notion that Benedict Cumberbatch can solve his problems by going back to the past, even if just in his head...that appealed to me.

Paddy’s eyes narrowed. Up till now, he had only suspected, but... You really want to do it, he said in wonderment. Have you taken leave of your senses? He glanced around the group of hooded Lib Dems. Forget I asked. If just one of you had run into a journalist on the way here...

At least the media would have to cover us then, Clegg said harshly. At least they would have to acknowledge that we exist, that Tim exists...

I can’t help noticing that Tim isn’t here, Paddy said nastily. Not up for your little act of blasphemy, I imagine. On Easter Sunday, too...

A time for new beginnings, Clegg said, as colourlessly secular as a stereotypical Anglican vicar. A time for...comebacks.

Several of the hoods moved slightly. It was subtle, especially considering how they repeatedly dented and smoothed out from the rain, but it was there. The others were nodding.

Now look, Paddy said, suddenly conscious of unsteady ground below him - not the good chalk he actually stood on, but figuratively. "Are you really talking about using the Rite of Caer Caradog just to reverse a bad election result?"

He knew the words were a mistake as soon as he spoke them. The others recoiled. "You call that a bad election result? said one voice. He didn’t have a seat to lose!" said another.

Have you forgotten the taste of marzipan so soon? Clegg said softly. He shook his head. "I wouldn’t contemplate this if I thought there was another way. Tim tries his best. He does! So do the activists. But nobody’s listening anymore. Now there’s no voice for liberalism in Parliament, not one