Vikings Dawn

THE SONS OF DEATH:

VIKINGS DAWN

By Ernest Marlin

A Wegworld Ltd Publication

Copyright © Ernest Marlin 2014

The Sons of Death: Vikings Dawn

By Ernest Marlin

A Wegworld Ltd Publication

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Ernest Marlin 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publishers.

Events in this work are based loosely on real events, but have been changed and compiled to create a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents have been changed and are used in a purely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 1

Tommy Atkins. Let’s call him that. That’s not his real name. His real name might be Geoff, but it doesn’t matter. He was born not long after the end of the Second World War in the upstairs, back-bedroom of a 1920s-built north London council house, whilst a few feet away downstairs his grandfather, Ernie, paced anxiously up and down the garden with tears in his eyes.

His arrival, although an important event at least to him and his immediate family, passed unnoticed among the wider public as indeed one would expect with the simple numerical addition of one to the existing hoi polloi. That’s Greek, by the way. It means the common people, the herd, useful for taxing, tilling fields, lining factory assembly lines, buying goods that they don’t need, or filling the ranks when the nation calls for sacrifices to be made on its behalf.

His childhood, such as it was, was brief, blighted by poverty, ignorance and an absent father. Later in life when there were enough years between him and that childhood, when he came to think about it he realised that the most enduring impression and the overriding memory was one of fear, fear of the other boys all of whom seemed more confident and tougher than him, but far worse than that was a deep, underlying insecurity rooted in, he knew not what, but which was to be the engine that drove him for much of his life and which increased rather than decreased as the years went by.

By the time he reached his teens, he was a restless rebel without a cause. He had no idea what to do with himself and no idea what he wanted. At another time and in another place, he would have been an ideal recruit for some cause or other regardless of what it might have been, or perhaps he could have been a convert to some new faith, anything to immerse himself in and to give him some sense of direction, some reason for living.

Alas, for our Tommy, no bugle called, no voice spoke to him and no great cause offered itself to him as a means of escape, escape from his life and background and escape from himself. He longed to be released, to be swept along by events more powerful than he, but nothing came to save him. As he grew older, it slowly began to dawn on him that he was going to have to make some sort of decision himself. He considered the options.

This was easier said than done. To make an informed decision, it helps if you are aware of what the options might be. He was not well informed. He lived in an English, working-class ghetto and the extent of his awareness about anything was determined by the limits of understanding the customs, habits and taboos of the world he inhabited. As a result, his choices or options were inevitably limited.

The other source of deep disquiet and intense longing in his life was the female sex. When he had been very young, girls were just a sort of irritating auxiliary boy who could be relied upon to ruin a decent game.

‘Go into the garden and play,’ might be the parental direction on visiting a neighbour. Girls were just about acceptable playmates, but from an early age demonstrated an ominous tendency to want their own way. Their own way consisted of busily organising all the boys to play ‘Mums and Dads’.

‘Right, let’s play Mums and Dad,’ they would announce briskly. ‘We’ll stay at home and look after the house and you must go to work.’

Had Tommy been intelligent enough to grasp it, there was an ominous portent in those words. Alas, he was an inexperienced, little boy and therefore blind to the signs.

As he grew older and as girls became more and more objects of desire, he had a lurking suspicion that it was a desire which, if satisfied, carried a consequence which might broadly be described as playing ‘Mums and Dads’, but this time for real. Without knowing why, he knew that this was not for him.

What was for him? He had no idea. It was the question that dominated his thoughts whilst he washed bottles at the farm dairy where he earned a few shillings working an indeterminate number of hours on a Sunday afternoon. Basically, you worked until all the milk was bottled and ready for Monday and the dairy had been scrubbed and hosed down. Then the farmer, a morose individual with a shock of sandy hair and hands with fingers like Cumberland sausages, paid you with whatever loose change he had in his pocket. One week you might get seven shillings, the next perhaps fourteen shillings. Giddy wealth!

His other job, Mondays to Saturdays inclusive, was a four mile walk or bike ride away at a flower nursery where he started at 8:00 am and finished at 5:00 pm with half an hour for lunch for seventeen shillings and sixpence a day. There were no deductions from the pay because the man who owned and ran the nursery didn’t pay National Insurance for his employees, all of whom were teenagers gathered from the local Employment Exchange, and underpaid, but off the books like much of the rest of his business.

It was there, one day, that Tommy met Ron, a grinning youth with a lopsided smile, long sideburns and with the tops of his wellington boots turned down like reverse turn-ups.

Tommy had vaguely known him at school and after exchanging the obligatory, tribal greetings almost wholly unintelligible to the uninitiated, they resumed friendly relations. Ron related as they mixed soil together by the simple but strenuous expedient of barrowing it back and forth between heaps, that he had joined the Merchant Navy since leaving school. Ron was a fireman, that is to say he shovelled the coal into the furnaces that drove the old steamship of which there were still a good many in the merchant marine. Tommy had been impressed. Ron, it appeared, had seen the world.

‘Na, not much mate,’ had been the emphatic reply to this suggestion. ‘When you are down below you don’t see nuffing, and when you are on deck all you see is the bleedin’ sea!’

‘But what about in harbour?’ Tommy had asked.

‘Yes, well, if you get some shore leave you get as far as the nearest boozer and end up with some tart.’

‘Really?’ Tommy had said, his interest aroused.

‘Don’t get too excited,’ Ron said calmly. ‘Most of ‘em are bloody ugly. It’s just that when you have been at sea for months and are pissed, you ‘ave a go at anything.’

Tommy was deeply impressed by the worldliness and the self-assurance of Ron and looked at him admiringly as he stood there leaning on his shovel whilst rolling himself a cigarette, an operation which, when carried out with soil-covered hands, produced a spindly, chocolate-coloured fag which required enormous efforts on Ron’s part to draw life into it when lit.

‘So, what you doing here then?’ Tommy asked suddenly thinking it strange that Ron should be working at the nursery rather than at sea.

‘Just fancied a change,’ said Ron simply. ‘Come home to see the old lady, brought her a few bob, dug her garden for her. Thought I’d take a break from the sea for a bit.’

By his ‘old lady’, Tommy knew that Ron meant his mother, a widow who had worked as a cook at the local school.

The sudden appearance of Dick, the nursery manager, put an end to the conversation as they resumed the mixing of soil which made talking difficult, particularly in Ron’s case with a fag held firmly in his lips. Nevertheless, he did manage to grunt, ‘That bastard must have been a slave driver in a past life.’

That, Tommy thought, was fair comment. Dick was always creeping up on them trying to catch them not working which, in his and Ron’s case, was not necessary, since they were both grafters. The irony was that one lad who also worked there called Tel, a lean, greasy-looking youth with slicked back, black hair was a real lead swinger, but Dick could never catch him out.

Tel, pronounced like ‘bell’, had raised idleness to an art form. The secret, he once confided in Tommy, was to always be moving, however slowly, so that whoever was spying on you never actually caught you doing nothing. Working with him Tommy found exhausting. He found it harder trying to work at Tel’s geriatric speed than to actually get on and do the work which, by nature, he preferred to do.

He had had a similar experience once when, to fill in between jobs, he had worked as a road sweeper at Barnet. At first he had thought the job would be a doddle, just pushing a broom along the gutter of whichever street you happened to be sweeping. The reality, however, was very different. Try as he might, he could not go as slowly as his companion pushing a broom on the other side of the road who, red-faced, overweight and puffing, managed to give the impression that he was exerting every fibre and reserve of his being, but without that having any obvious effect on the progress of the broom along the gutter he was supposed to be sweeping. Tel reminded him a lot of this old boy and momentarily wondered if they were perhaps related. He dismissed the thought as unlikely, but plainly they were two of a type and absolute masters of their craft.

Tommy thought no more of the conversation with Ron, but then a couple of weeks later he happened to find himself walking along a back alleyway which passed the rear of Ron’s mum’s house. He had no thought of calling in, but a sudden attack by a couple of street dogs encouraged him to leap the garden fence, which he managed successfully without the dogs managing to sink their teeth into him. Once in the garden, sitting amongst the vegetables, he found himself face-to-face with Ron’s mum, a stout lady with her hair in curlers and the whole covered by a headscarf tried under her chin.

‘Get off my cabbages,’ she said calmly as Tommy picked himself up and brushed himself down.

‘Sorry,’ said Tommy. ‘Those dogs nearly had me.’

Ron’s mum either was not impressed by his narrow escape or preoccupied with other more important things on her mind. Indeed so it proved for whilst Tommy was making his way towards the alleyway that led to the front of the house and what he hoped would be a dog-free street, she suddenly said, ‘Ron’s been nicked for robbery.’

He was shocked. He didn’t know what to say. It was a bit embarrassing really. He wanted to get on home and what Ron had or hadn’t done didn’t really concern him. Having started, though, Ron’s mum was determined to continue and before he knew it, he was seated at her kitchen table drinking tea with a dash of rum in it. Apparently, this was the way Ron liked it.

He sat there sipping the tea and to cover his sense of embarrassment carefully inspected the top of the circular table with the Formica top decorated with pictures of bowls overflowing with exotic fruit of the kind that he had little doubt would in reality never have graced the table top.

She told him all about it, the little she knew, that is. She related what she had been told had happened. Ron, wearing a stocking over his head, had gone into the Co-operative shop in the High Street on Saturday evening just before closing time and pointed a sawn-off shotgun at the manager and demanded the day’s takings. So far, so good, but it didn’t seem to have occurred to Ron just how conspicuous he would appear, clearly visible through the shop window with a stocking over his head. Hardly had he stepped out of the shop clutching a bag containing the day’s takings and an assortment of Green Shield stamps, when plod appeared and he was caught red-handed. Fortunately, perhaps for him and certainly fortunately for the local constabulary, his gun was unloaded. Still, it was armed robbery nonetheless and he was looking at a long stretch inside.

Tommy was secretly impressed, but judged it better not to say so. He made sympathetic noises.

‘Poor old Ron,’ he mumbled.

‘Poor old Ron!’ his mother exploded. ‘That silly sod has got himself banged up for nothing, nothing at all,’ she shouted suddenly sounding hysterical. ‘He’ll get five years,’ she sobbed, anger and hysteria metamorphosing into grief. She sat at the table with her head in her hands quietly sobbing. A photo of Ron grinning looked at her from the window ledge with a jam jar full of dead wasps on one side and an old Bovril tin on the other with some flowers from the garden stuffed into it.

Tommy wanted to go. He didn’t know what to say to the grieving woman in front of him. He rose to his feet hesitantly and made must-go noises. She clutched his hand and pressed a piece of paper into it.

‘You’re his mate,’ she said urgently. ‘Go and see him inside, will you? I’ve got this pass, but I can’t bring myself to go. I couldn’t bear to see him in prison.’

Tommy looked at the paper in his hand. It was a visitor’s pass for Brixton Prison.

‘Alright,’ he replied, not knowing how to say no. Satisfied apparently, she let him leave.

Released from her sadness, he had half a mind not to go, but then on impulse he decided to go and see Ron, although what good it would do Ron or Ron’s mum, he didn’t know.

CHAPTER 2

Brixton Prison is only one of a number of prisons in London, all stuffed full of errant humanity, most of it protesting its innocence. Ron probably would have been no exception to this general rule as unvarying as a rule of nature, had the circumstances of his arrest not have been so clear-cut. He was, as they say, ‘bang to rights’ and there was little he could do, save put a brave face on it.

Tommy went to see him on a grey, drizzly day which somehow seemed appropriate and to fit both his mood and the grim surroundings. As he walked along the path towards the prison gate, he stretched his neck backwards to look up at the impossibly high walls towering above him. It looked grim indeed. An endless mountain of bricks. Once at the gate, an enormous, studded door, he knocked on the postern gate, a smaller gate set into the large one. The grill slid back to enable the person inside to inspect the person requiring admittance. If satisfied, the postern gate would be opened and the visitor admitted, who might be a solicitor’s clerk, a