PART ONE: EXILED TO NORFOLK
The rain fell as if the world was made from water.
Raven stood manacled to a seawall. The mounting waves would anyway soon drench him, though he'd probably escape drowning.
Across the pot-holed car-park lurked the pub where he drank twice weekly. A possibly cheery looking place but with violent undercurrents of dislike, boredom and gnawing frustration. Of course, class was the real issue. Never more so than now, with EDI emblazoned on every public building - even in this bleak coastal outpost.
Yes, most likely one of the better regulars would persuade Worzel to relinquish the key so that, at closing time, he'd be unshackled and led back into The Drenching Arms, where a rough towel would be thrown over him and a pint of mulled cooking lager poured down his throat.
Such kindness still existed!
The obvious question was why he tolerated this? But his options were limited socially, and he'd never needed more than a pub and a book. Unfortunately, conversation to him was pointless without any content, so he often overstepped the mark in intellectualism when talking with the grizzled regulars.
Worzel was a pontificating ex-hairdresser who brooked no interruption nor dissent during his diatribes on the slights and insights gained from various Cambridge academics whose hair he'd cut. As was typical of the English class system, this left the man resentful and endlessly provocative, on topics he knew nothing about.
Mostly Raven kept schtum, but tonight he'd felt the need to pipe up when the man's lecture on global warming had become intolerable. Needless to say, he'd then himself been accused of interruption and lecturing - tendencies he harboured - hence his freezing confinement on the seafront after being dragged from the pub. And since Raven himself hated ‘experts’ and middle-class ownership of ideas, he was hopelessly conflicted.
Last September, he'd been expelled from the Party for hate crime, after disagreeing with a Muslim colleague who’d claimed Father Christmas was trans and probably pro-Hamas. But Raven’s crimes were existential and had been tabulated over many years in teaching. At least he'd gone down with a bang, posting an image in the staffroom of Santa in a red and white kaftan, pouring burning petrol down a snow-covered English cottage’s chimney.
Retribution had been swift. He'd been stripped of his middle-class membership and exiled to this Norfolk seaside town, ostensibly to oversee diversification of fast-food outlets and net-zero compliancy in failing pubs and hotels. As always with such managerial tasks, this meant no actual work.
Obviously, he was now failing at that too.
Despite the gathering storm and vast stretch of North Sea facing him, an inflatable dinghy seemed to be nearing shore. What looked like Kurds and Arabic tribesmen were peering at him anxiously.
Raven laughed grimly but genuinely for the first time in many months.
PART TWO: NEW YEAR'S EVE
A museum of yesterday’s rainbows,
guarding the memories of car lights by night.
How the tide of the whole world is changing,
even in this corner, where a tired wind
rattles a battered pub door and only
I glance up to see if some ghosts arrive,
blown in past the broken-down wind turbines
now sheltering seagulls and my people.
So writes Raven, spending his New Year’s Eve
adrift in the emptying Drenching Arms.
The pub karaoke bursts into life
and a recent boat refugee belts out
I will survive by Gloria Gaynor,
cheered by a pensioner dressed as Hitler.
PART THREE: RAVEN IN THE PAST
It’s true that in England, our past isn’t even an earlier time. It’s oxygen, mother’s milk - and gold.
Progressives hate it and see only a crime scene. But the true crime was their murder of this country - slow, deliberate and shameless - and the evidence is piling up daily. Our towns are filled with abused girls, their rapists empowered by an establishment of diversity cretins enforcing an ideology of callous absurdity.
Raven sat staring into his battered laptop. Tonight, he was too depressed even for the Drenching Arms, which lurked nearly empty beyond net-curtains and a lonely milk bottle rolling down Fore Street in the January gales.
Onscreen was a heart-breaking YouTube video, of 1935 London. He remembered that solidity, the purpose and unassertive self-assurance, even from his 1970s childhood. Left-liberals - many with no memories of the place nor roots there - painted a stygian pit of prejudice, basted in Dickensian poverty and monochrome ennui. But the feelings of freedom and belief negated this cartoon portrayal. Our elite’s obsessions with such ‘evils’ had reduced London to an uneasy shell, showy yet silly - and painfully aware of it.
He reread the opening chapter of Our Mutual Friend, in a first-edition inherited from his father. Maybe the city would survive, the Thames slowly carrying away the bodies of its wreckers.
PART FOUR: RAVEN IN OXFORD
Raven was at Oxford station, hours early for his reprogramming session. As ever, he was constructing fictional scenarios for the shabbiest looking people - including himself - wandering around this dismal place.
Pity was what he wanted to feel but anger was his unavoidable reaction, at what his country had become rather than the individuals he saw. Still, neither seemed possible starting points for literature. That was his limitation, not the world's. Hadn't some philosopher said we always confuse the two - presumably only the true artist could reconcile them.
What would they make of the man sat opposite, checking his watch constantly then staring at it with open admiration, even love? Possibly nothing, although the inconceivable filth of his clothes and the stench from them were incredible. No doubt this was why Raven had found an empty seat at his table.
'Nice watch!' he ventured.
'Couldn't you at least have attempted to disguise your surprise?'
The stinking man's voice was educated, almost aristocratic. Raven peered closely at the timepiece shown to him. To his delight, it was a Dirty Dozen British Army watch, clearly original, with patina and fading radium lume.
'Worn at D Day?'
'Possibly - everything they fought for has been lost.'
Raven's 'kindness counselling' took place on the first Monday of every month in his old college - despite his exile in Norfolk, or because of it. His car had been seized and handed over to a 'boat person' (some Somalian drug dealer) so this re-education necessitated an excruciating cross-country rail trip. If he refused, his beloved daughter would immediately be moved from her current school into one notorious for bullying and drugs. His meagre pension would also be cancelled.
Monday was chosen so that he had to travel up on the Sunday, staying overnight in some shithole chosen by the authorities. Usually this was in London but last night he'd been forced into an Iffley Road guesthouse, notoriously the preferred venue for Oxford’s Pakistani rape gangs. Of course, he had to pay for this travel and accommodation.
At the last session, he'd been set the task of using three ‘key-concepts’ in a PowerPoint presentation, explaining the dangers from the ‘far-Right’. The specified words were diversity; equity; inclusion. He’d added two of his own: ‘desultory’ and ‘deracination’.
The first was one of his favourites; for some reason, it evoked his school days. As a child, he'd had few friends and none he actually liked. Sundays had stretched out endlessly, ending with the comfort of a Vosene hair wash.
He made his way to Turl Street through the commuters, beggars and homicidal cyclists.