Doctor Who_ Nightshade - Mark Gatiss [39]
years according to an ordered pattern: passing from a But London had changed. As the weeks went by, straightforward childhood to a straightforward school and a Hawthorne found himself experiencing something like straightforward double First in Mathematics and Physics.
culture shock. Men who looked like girls paraded up and Above all, he loved the order of numbers, that indefinable, down the streets, wearing embroidered Indian frocks and near-poetic quality which abstract higher maths could their hair down to their shoulders. Young people were in achieve. Sometimes he would sit alone in his sparsely open rebellion against authority, organising ‘sit-ins’ at the furnished flat and simply let his mind wander, drift and LSE or even dropping out of society altogether to live in twist along the mental pathways he had created out of miserable hippy communes. Next best thing to anarchy in beautiful numbers. Those who knew only the cynical his opinion.
misanthrope would never believe the smile of sheer One aspect of British life, however, needled him like no pleasure which inevitably crept across his face.
other, just as its threatened arrival had back in the thirties.
He had risen quickly in his chosen field, joining Frederick There were blacks everywhere.
Storey and his team of radio astronomers, first in Manning the building sites, crowding the labour Cambridge and later in the famous New South Wales exchanges and positively overrunning London Transport. It experiments of the late fifties. Those embryonic days had was unbelievable.
been exciting and fulfilling, Hawthorne and Storey making He thought of the friends who had died in the War, died a strong team. After his mentor’s retirement, Hawthorne to preserve a country and a way of life which they revered.
had been confident of promotion, believing himself to be 110
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DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
Now it was polluted by the dregs of Empire. By God, it was Tar Baby, they were dirty, unnatural, somehow less than a sad time to be an Englishman.
human. And Hawthorne was still checking under his bed.
As a young man, he had walked a hundred miles to hear The phone call from Cooper inviting him to join her in Oswald Mosley speaking. He could taste the atmosphere Yorkshire had been all the excuse he needed. Leaving even now: thousands of like-minded men, splendid in their London was like recovering from a long illness and the black shirts, listening to that incredible orator denouncing further north he travelled, the more certain and traditional the coons and the yids and all the other scum that were things seemed to become. But then he had arrived in sapping Britain’s strength.
Bradford, realising with sick certainty that he had swapped But Hawthorne was no longer a young man. He had one wave of immigrants for another. There to meet him at watched his dream of a racially pure country vanish in a the station was his new colleague: young, handsome, wash of feeble liberalism.
intelligent and brown as a berry.
Somewhere, deep in the shadows of his complex mind, Hawthorne found himself flinching whenever Vijay came Hawthorne kept his own private bogeyman. An image near him, the boy’s cultured, almost too English accent from his childhood half-wrapped in fear and half in annoying him intensely. It seemed unnatural and forced, nostalgia, bringing with it memories of his mother as she sat like a chimp at the zoo dressed in human clothes - an by the bed reading stories. Even as a child, Hawthorne had analogy which pleased Hawthorne immensely.
possessed a rational mind, his imagination balking