Second Violin by John Lawton Read Free Book Online Page B

resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to
remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.’
    Alex thought this to be bollocks. We had just sold yet another small country up the river. But, Chamberlain was not finished.
    ‘My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time . . . Go home and
get a nice quiet sleep.’
    Alex walked out into Whitehall. His chauffeur pulled the Rolls up at the kerb and asked simply, ‘Where to, Boss, office or home?’
    ‘Home. I have been told to get a good night’s sleep.’
    Sleep? Nice? Quiet? Alex would be up most of the night, and most of the next, writing his editorial for the following Sunday. ‘Peace for our Time’? How long did the man take our time
to be? Peace until our time chanced and changed into the next entity? It was a slogan for the next five minutes and no more.

 
§ 23
    The Sunday Post
2 October 1938
    Like most of my readers I am an Englishman. Unlike most of my readers, I chose to be an Englishman. I doubt what little remains to me before I shuffle off this mortal coil will
alter my accent one jot, but I have long since ceased to be incomprehensible to London cabbies, and when they ask ‘Where to Al?’, I do not flinch at the curt improbability of the
abbreviation, I wear the badge of Englishness with pride. No doubt there are some among you who feel that I have not yet earned the right to lecture you on the matter of Englishness. Tough –
I am about to do just that.
    Patriotism, as Dr Johnson so famously observed, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. It can be evoked as excuse without apology, but this should not blind us to the possibility of virtue inherent
in what a nation stands for. As simply as I can put it, Englishness has, since Magna Carta, meant the rule of law and the notion of constitutional law. In that document lie the foundations of
democracy. We tinker with it at our peril – indeed we should no more tinker with it than America would tinker with the Bill of Rights – for much the same reason – it is the chief
constraint on tyranny.
    All too easily Germany has become a tyranny. Herr Hitler shows no respect for the rule of law, either domestic or international. What Germanness (if such a concept can be said to exist at all)
stands for is the rule of the jackboot. Might is now right. Mr Churchill has been at pains to point this out to us for some time. I fear he has been a voice in the wilderness. But I say now, and I
say it unequivocally, that Mr Churchill has been right about Hitler all along. Mr Chamberlain’s aerodrome diplomacy, his abject shuttling back and forth this summer between England and
Germany, has given us the worst of compromises, it has given us – to steal from whichever German minister uttered the phrase at the start of the last war – another ‘scrap of
paper’ (contempt all but oozes from the words, you will agree) for Hitler to tear up at some not-so-distant date.
    The agreement at Munich is not peace with honour, it is not peace for our time – it is a post-dated cheque written in the blood of Europe’s young men. It cannot surely be long before
the word Munich has the same ominous ring to it that Sarajevo has had these twenty-five years. It is time to pray for peace, gear for war and ignore all ideas that the former is rendered
hypocritical by the latter. It is not. It is the key to our survival as a nation. Ask me what virtue of Englishness I admire most at the moment and
    I would answer ‘our guarded optimism’ – and, dear reader, I mean the adjective as much as I mean the possessive plural.
    Alexei Troy
    Later that evening a telegramme arrived at Church Row addressed to Alex Troy. It read:
    A