The Battle of Cable Street by Tanya Landman

Author:Tanya Landman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barrington Stoke Ltd
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

A few weeks later, Mikey came back from the toilet with some pieces of newspaper in his hand and a wicked grin on his face. He nodded at me, winked and jerked his head towards the door. I knew that meant Mikey didn’t want Grandma hearing what he had to say, so as soon as I got the chance I went out and joined him on the landing.

“Look, Elsie!” Mikey said, and he was pointing to the newspaper. It was announcing a competition. There was going to be a big rally of the BUF, and it was the kind of thing you could only get into if you were a party member. But the newspaper had got hold of 500 tickets and was offering them as prizes in its competition. All you had to do was write a letter explaining “Why I Love the Blackshirts”.

“You going to help me, Elsie?” Mikey said. “Your handwriting is nicer than mine.”

“You’re kidding, ain’t you?” I said.

“No, I ain’t,” he replied. And his eyes were glinting like he was really excited.

For a moment, the ground seemed unsteady under my feet. Not Mikey, I thought. He can’t have been sucked in by Mosley, can he? In that split second, anything seemed possible.

Mikey must have seen how scared I looked because he said, “What do you take me for? I just thought we could have a laugh entering the competition. They all take themselves so serious. They need the mickey taking out of them.”

It was such a relief that Mikey was kidding, and it had been so long since me and him had a good giggle, I went along with it. I suppose I wasn’t thinking straight.

We wrote the most ridiculous, overblown letter, full of praise and enthusiasm for Mr Mosley. Me and Mikey egged each other on, getting more and more outrageous with every sentence until I was laughing so much I could hardly hold the pen.

We said how we worshipped the very ground Mosley walked on. That we were ready and willing to lay down our lives for the future of Britain and our Empire under Mosley’s great and glorious leadership. His order, his discipline, his vision had made us strong and given us hope and courage. We couldn’t wait to do our bit to serve.

The letter was daft. It was so clearly making fun of the whole stupid lot of them I didn’t think any more of it.

But blow me down, flattery really can get you everywhere. Two weeks later, the day after my twelfth birthday, Mikey called me out to the landing again for another quiet word. He’d met the postman coming up the stairs and taken a letter addressed to the pair of us before Grandma and Father could see it.

“Present,” Mikey said, handing the letter to me.

We’d won tickets to the rally.

I was all for throwing them straight down the toilet, but Mikey had a better idea.

“We’ll go along,” Mikey said. “How about we heckle, eh? We’ll tell Mr Mosley exactly what we think of him.

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