Under an English Heaven by Donald E Westlake aka Richard Stark

Author:Donald E Westlake aka Richard Stark [Stark, Donald E Westlake aka Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction - General
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1972-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

The Walrus and the Carpenter

Were walking close at hand;

They wept like anything to see

Such quantities of sand;

"If this were only cleared away,"

They said, "it would be grand!"

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

14

Here come Fisher and Chapman, all things to all people.

In the beginning of December it was announced in London that two Members of Parliament, Nigel Fisher and Donald Chapman, would be leaving very soon for the Caribbean to solve the Anguilla problem. The two M.P.'s had all the necessary qualifications; one was a Conservative, the other was Labour, and both were old friends of Colonel Bradshaw's.

As Nigel Fisher said before leaving, "Our job is to try to find ways of reuniting Anguilla with St. Kitts." Of course, immediately after that remark he also said, "We have no intention of being seen to be taking sides."

The Delegation was preceded by a small administrative team, containing a radio and a radio operator and a cipher clerk, and led by a man named Anthony Lee. Lee didn't know it but he was on his way to the worst mess of his life.

But to begin with, Lee was merely running the administrative team for the Parliamentary Delegation. He was forty-four when he first landed on Anguilla. The son of an Anglican clergyman, he'd served in the Royal Navy in the Second World War, went to Cambridge, and afterward joined the Colonial Service, but always on a contract basis, never as permanent staff. After serving ten years in Africa, mostly in Tanganyika, he spent two years in private industry but apparently preferred working for the Government; he applied for a post with the Commonwealth Relations Office, got a new contract, and went off to Aden until the British had finished setting up their ghastly Southern Yemen federation. After his Aden tour he was offered the job as secretary to Fisher and Chapman's Parliamentary Delegation. It was suggested that an English administrator might be assigned to Anguilla for a period of time and that he might turn out to be the man.

Anthony Lee is a gentle, soft-spoken man who prefers a simple life in which he can follow simple orders. He is six feet four inches tall, so that he towers over just about everybody else in the Anguilla story, but despite his height—or perhaps because of it—he is not at all a forceful personality. He moves with the tide, he follows orders competently and diligently, and in a normal circumstance he is probably the ideal representative of a far-off Authority: the unabrasive vessel through which Authority's desires are made manifest.

Unfortunately, Anguilla never has been a normal circumstance.

When Fisher and Chapman arrived, the Beacon ran a Delegation Special supplement that pretty well covered the events of their stay.

The advance guard [said the paper] consisted of Mr. Tony Lee with radio operators and equipment to be in constant touch with London, and a team of secretaries, which shewed that they intended to do an efficient and comprehensive job. Prior to the arrival of the M.P.'s, Mr. Greatorex, the British Representative, and Mr.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.