Crow On The Cradle by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RO:SF
Published: 2017-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 34

Saturday 20th February 1965

Westminster, London

Forty-one year old Colonel Edwin Noel Westby Bramall had never had any illusions about what a filthy business taking back the ruined city was going to be. That morning, as he had at dawn each day since he had set up his battalion field Headquarters in the old, structurally more or less intact Foreign Office building in nearby Whitehall, he had walked across Parliament Square and climbed the battered, defiantly still standing Clock Tower of the shattered mother of Parliaments, and looked out through the shattered clock-faces, surveying the great, ravaged once and future capital.

Down on Parliament Green and in the Square beyond Miriam Prior’s ‘huddled masses’ – as one of his subalterns had called the hundreds of civilians who insisted on remaining in the middle of what was likely to become a battlefield – lived in a tented, ramshackle camp. Grey smoke from their cooking fires rose almost vertically in the still frosty, wintery air. To the north it was too misty, the overcast too low over Hampstead to make out many ground details. To the west new palls of smoke hung over the last redoubts of the rebels.

The constant patrolling of the gunboats had driven the diehards far from the river bank; now they were concentrated around the piles of rubble that marked the outline of where Stamford Bridge, the former ground of Chelsea Football Club had stood, in Eel Brook Common, and in the trench lines abutting the perimeter of the gas works along Imperial Road. Several aircraft had made high-level – carpet-bombing – raids on the area overnight. As the fighting had intensified in the last fortnight two fresh infantry battalions – 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers and the 5th Wessex Yeomanry – had relieved the original assault force, now the fresh troops were slowly, surely closing the circle.

Farther down the river the Royal Engineers were working to fully re-open Tower Bridge to permit the Navy to moor a couple of destroyers in the mid-stream between it and London Bridge. Ships so positioned would be able to direct fire onto practically any target in Greater London. Other ‘fire support’ vessels were already in position in the Thames Estuary ready to back up the forthcoming north-south ‘London Corridor Campaign’ to open the route to the docks from the north via the least damaged districts of the capital. Engineers had already re-activated several of the locks in the Royal and West India Docks, and set up a forward logistics depot in North Woolwich. South of the Thames a company of the Scots Guards had gone ashore at Greenwich, taken possession of the heights around the old Royal Observatory and extended their lines as far west as Deptford Creek without encountering significant resistance.

Bramall studied the South Bank across a deserted Westminster Bridge. The Ton class minesweeper HMS Kellington had contrived to anchor on the Embankment to his left, opposite the burned out shell of County Hall. The Navy had done wonders, he conceded grudgingly. They

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