Margaret looked around, embarrassed, but obeyed the speaker. She stood up.
‘Imagine my gun targeted on Mrs ...’
‘Margaret,’ she said, resting her hand on my shoulder.
‘LadyMargaret,’ an elderly woman sitting behind us said.
‘LadyMargaret,’ Vaughn said, peering into the darkness. From his point on the stage it would have been difficult for him to see us. But he seemed thrown. Perhaps he’d seen me.
‘My apologies, Lady Margaret,’ he continued. ‘Now. Imagine my gun targeted on Lady Margaret. Set to kill her. But not only her, set to destroy every living thing, everything bigger than a grain of sand, for a radius of twenty feet.’
Margaret looked around, taking it in.
He scanned the crowd and pointed at another woman, at the far end of the row. A farmer’s wife I’d seen at the market.
‘Would you stand up too? Mrs ... or is it Lady ...?’
‘Spratt,’ she said, standing up, her face flushing a deep red. ‘Mrs.’
‘Mrs Spratt,’ he said. ‘The next gun is aimed at Mrs Spratt. Another twenty-foot crater, everything turned to ash and rubble. Now imagine that line of violence extended across Sussex, all seventy miles. A line of complete destruction. Imagine my next shot, twenty feet further north, at the back of the stage here. A walking barrage we called it, moving the destruction forwards so our boys could walk behind and mop up. Imagine what’s left behind. Nothing.’
He let that sink in, pausing for effect.
‘Nothing’s left behind,’ he continued. ‘Hell on earth.’
Margaret sat down. Mrs Spratt, taking her cue, did the same.
‘Raise your hand if you lost someone last time,’ he said. ‘Brother? Father? Uncle? Friend?’
I raised my hand and kept my eyes facing forwards. I didn’t need to look around. There wouldn’t be a single person without their hand raised. I felt Margaret raise her own hand. We’d never spoken about her family. The speaker raised his hand in solidarity with us all.
‘Did that feel like victory?’ he asked. Nobody answered.
‘When Churchill says we’ll fight to the last man, that’s what he means. When he talks of victory, he means being the last person left alive. But what’s victory if everything’s destroyed? Go and talk to the farmers in Flanders. Ask them what victory looks like.’
‘You’d have us lay down our arms and let the Germans invade?’ Margaret called out, the steel in her voice serving notice. Vaughn might have been treating this like a philosophical debate, but to most of us on the invasion route it was a matter of life or death.
Heads turned. Someone brave enough to challenge the man on the stage.
‘Why would they invade if we weren’t fighting them?’ a new man stepped forwards on the stage. Whereas Vaughn had tried to dress down to the occasion, this man hadn’t bothered. He had a flamboyance that would mark him as an outsider in any village hall or pub in the county.
‘We declared war on Hitler, remember? It wasn’t the other way round. The Germans don’t want to fight us. Hitler looks at the British Empire and he sees a natural brotherhood. All we need to do is give the word, and we’d be left in peace.’
Vaughn held up his hand as if to ward off his opponent.
‘Now this is where we need to be careful,’ he said. ‘My friend here will tell you the Germans and the English are all from the same stock, descended from the same mix of Saxons and Vikings. Our aristocracy are all part of the samefamily, particularly our royals. We even share a love of beer. And I’m not here to argue that with him, or with you.’
I admired his tactics. Admit that some of what your opponent says is sensible, show you’re a reasonable person. Get everyone in the room agreeing with each other. Then, once you’ve established your reasonableness, take the audience with you to the new ideas you want them to consider.
‘But I can’t accept that everything the Germans want is right for us. They want to build their own empire, bringing civilisation to the empty spaces of Eastern Europe. We want no part in that. They want to take control of the foreign agitators and international financiers that have been ruining their economy, just as ours was ruined in the last decade when we had all that mess with the gold standard. And even though we may share their sentiments, I don’t think we suffer from the problem to the same degree. But where we can’t agree, where we can never agree, is on the path forwards for England. I say it has to be rooted in a strong sense of what makes us strong and unique. Our sense of fair play, our love of tradition. In short, the things that have made our country great will be the foundation for our future greatness.’
There was a small ripple of applause. Perhaps the speaker had seeded the audience with sympathisers, or possibly he was getting through to some of them.
The flamboyant one waited for the applause to die down. He looked out at the packed village hall and nodded.
‘You’ve been listening to us for far too long.’ He paused for the ripple of polite laughter. ‘You’ve heard that we both agree on the need for peace. We both agree that the Germans aren’t our enemy.’ He paused again, walking the stage as if deep in thought.
‘So why are we fighting?’
