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OK, folks, here is chapter one of Twentyland…

1. School

The other children would not believe that my father was also the Father of Our Country. His face, stern but gentle, square and manly with gently greying temples, smiled down from our classroom wall – from every classroom wall – and from the big framed picture in the hall, and from posters on every street. To my fellow-pupils our beloved leader President Marki Larvartin was a legendary figure, like someone from a story, and I’m not sure they believed in his real existence in quite the way they believed in their own fathers. The idea that I might be his daughter was to them an obvious lie, and not even an amusing one, but a silly, tedious one, an attempt on my part to add some status to my own mousy indeterminate dullness.

I had not meant to say anything about it. My mother had always warned me sternly against mentioning my father’s name: I wasn’t quite sure why. It hardly seemed something to be ashamed of. But she succeeded in impressing on me that it was effectively a secret, and that she would be angry if ever I betrayed it.

But then little Stephia started goading me, saying I was a bastard. I had rather liked Stephi before this, but this accusation was particularly galling because it was technically true, and therefore could not be rebutted. My mother, I knew, considered marriage an oppressive, bourgeois institution, more a defacement of an honest relationship than its natural fulfilment. She would no more have agreed to marry my father than to walk around in a set of chains. I always understood that my father tacitly agreed, at least in a more lukewarm manner. though he would never condemn marriage publicly and always lent his strong moral support to the institution of the family.

But then Stephi began to say I had no father, did not know who my father was.

“I have a father!” I shouted indignantly, “I have a father I see every day at home! And he’s more important than your father!”

“What’s his name, then?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“Why not? Because you don’t know it?”

“No, because it’s none of your business.”

“Ooh! Lucia’s father is secret! He’s better than mine, he’s better than yours, only he daren’t tell anyone his name.”

“My father,” I said furiously, unleashing what I took to be the equivalent of a nuclear strike, “is Marki Larvartin.”

The effect was far worse than I could have imagined. It was roughly as if I had said my father was Napoleon Bonaparte, or Charlie Chaplin. There was a stunned moment of silence, briefly gratifying, and they all broke out in sincere, uncontrollable laughter. Even those who had looked ready to defend me now instantly switched sides. I had gone too far, I had been too stupid, I had let them down and no longer deserved any sympathy. No, now I deserved all I got, they made it clear.

Over the next few weeks, some of them took to mocking me and even, in a desultory way, bullying me. I found myself penned into a corner of the playground by the leaking drainpipe which was covered in moss, the only place which was securely out of view of the teachers, where I was subjected to a lazy inquisition. If I hit you will the army come and get me then? Why doesn’t your father come and rescue you? One serious little girl got a more dangerous glint in her eye and told me that she feared this disrespectful appropriation of our Leader’s name showed false consciousness. I might be in need of re-education to prevent my becoming, in objective terms, a reactionary element. I might need to be sent to an ‘Explanation Camp’. She attempted to start the process by giving me a Chinese burn. I despised all my antagonists, but I viewed her and her supposed Camps (there were in real life Reading Camps and Number Camps where children who had failed to make good progress might go in the summer if their parents wished) with particular contempt. My father was not Chairman Mao, and the threat of compulsory re-education did not exist in our happy Republic; if anyone needed their perceptions amended, it was her. All the same I felt wounded to be placed in the role of the traitor, the heretic, when I knew I was the daughter of the absolute wellspring of orthodoxy.

In fairness, there was absolutely no reason for them to believe me. I went to an ordinary school, and because my parents were not married, I did not use my father’s surname: I was Lucia Fabrin, not Lucia Larvartin. We lived in an ordinary apartment in an ordinary part of the city, and my father would come home from the Agraci Palace in an ordinary green Robodin car, his only concessions to his elevated status being the uniformed soldier who drove it (it was one of my father’s quirks that he never learned to drive) and the pale secretary Stilin in the passenger seat, a black cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Lucas Stilin, who had been with my father since the early days, since my father first joined the Party, accompanied him everywhere, even up the door of our block before turning and getting back into the car. I never felt quite comfortable in Stilin’s presence. It wasn’t that his gaunt appearance was so terrifying – he really only looked like an elderly teacher or clerk of some kind, it was my imagination that made him seem so cadaverous – but somehow I felt there was a danger about him, like some poisonous creature which, without any malice on its part, would one day do me or my father some terrible harm. However, my father seemed to find him indispensable, and he certainly appeared to be dedicated.

My mother told me my father wanted me to have an ordinary working-class Twentyland education, not to have me treated as the privileged offspring of a politician. He would have been untrue to his principles if he had allowed me to use my unearned status to win the respect of my little peers. Once again it was made clear that she would be furious if she ever found out that I had even mentioned who my father was. But one day I could not help bursting out:

“If you are the President, Daddy, why don’t we live at the Palace?”

He looked up from his newspaper and raised his greying eyebrows at me. He threw my mother, standing at the sink, a sly look.

“What’s this? Our little girl wants to be a princess, it seems, Marica.”

“But you work at the Palace. You go there every day, even Sundays. Wouldn’t it be easier if we lived there?”

He sighed. My mother was giving me black looks which threatened a bad time later on. But my father was not angry. In fact I never remember him being angry with me. He put aside his paper and held out his arms; I skipped across to the battered old armchair he always settled into (like some old bear easing itself wearily into a pile of leaves for its winter sleep); worn thin in places, leaking stuffing at one side, and with one broken spring, but still his favourite; he wouldn’t hear of replacing it. I sat on his knee. Resting my head on his chest (I wasn’t too old to do that yet) I caught a faint but definite whiff of pipe tobacco. He was supposed to have given up a year ago; if my mother caught him there’d be a bad time for him too.

He began by reminding me of the bedtime stories he had always told me; stories about the French Revolution, the Russian revolution. He had always told me, he said gently, that our Revolution was to be better than those, fine as they were. When the leaders of past revolutions had got into the King’s palace, they found it suited them very well. They began to live in the King’s house and wear kingly clothes. in the end they became kings, as Napoleon had done. There was an English writer, he told me, a terrible reactionary, but one who had written a good, clever story about this, a story about the revolution of the farm animals; I should read it when I was older…

My mother rolled her eyes up disrespectfully. My father often tried her patience; she had a far sharper sense of propriety than he did. She did not think there was anything a good Marxist-Larvartist could learn from English literature, not even from Charles Dickens’ harrowing documentary works on the cruelty and contradictions of capitalism, about the only English books she was prepared to countenance at all.

My father reminded me how the French had cut off the heads of their King and Queen. But you cannot dispel the institution of monarchy merely by executing the individual who happens to occupy the position of monarch, he said: like bad magic it lingers in the air until it can inhabit a new human form. Louis was not a bad man in himself, perhaps; it was not his wickedness that made him a king, but the impartial processes of historical dialectic. Perhaps he did not even like being king; instead he wished he had been a clock-maker. How would it have been, now, if the revolutionaries had not killed him and his silly wife, but given him a little shop, and her a flock of real sheep? How would it have been, if instead of spilling the blood of all those aristocrats, many of them decent individuals at heart, people who could have worked for France, they had simply been told that they should all be ordinary people now, or at least, that they should be ordinary until they did something remarkable, something good for their fellow citizens that made everyone open their eyes. Wouldn’t that have been better? Mightn’t some of those guillotined people have turned out to be worth having? Wouldn’t the French Republic have lived and grown? Mightn’t it have become the example which other countries strove to emulate, a land that lived out the true meaning of its own creed as a place of loving fraternity just as much as one of freedom and equality, a nation of comfort, sympathy and kindliness instead of the birthplace of a ravaging Imperial army?

When the Chinese captured the last of their Emperors, my father said, they didn’t cut off his head; no, even though he had most atrociously betrayed them by collaborating with the Japanese occupation, even though he was responsible for the cruel deaths of many innocent Chinese citizens. Instead they made him a gardener, and allowed him to live a decent useful life, free from the institutions which had oppressed him as well as the workers. He turned out to be a simple fellow, no more than a tool in the hands of ruthless politicians in his earlier life, but a decent and honest gardener at the end. Now that was the way a Communist regime should behave: that was exemplary; that was Marxist-Larvartism, though of course the poor Chinese didn’t have the advantage of understanding the illustrious theory they were exemplifying.

“And so, Lucia,” he concluded, “that is why we must be ordinary people if we are to keep faith with our special Twentyland Revolution. You know, it suits me anyway: ordinary life is congenial to me. I’m sure you prefer it too, don’t you? Think of having to wear stiff clothes all day and never get them dirty; think of always having to eat properly with a knife and fork while lots of horrid servants in wigs stared at you. You would not like to sleep in that Palace, in a huge bed with horrid musty curtains around you, wide dark spaces full of ghosts, the sound of strange people creeping down the corridors all night; no, no.”

“But then why do you work there every day?”

“I wish I didn’t, to tell you the truth. You know I have to entertain foreign leaders, Lucia, and my advisors tell me that such people are impressed and rendered more amenable if they come to a palace to see me. And when I present awards to our workers and scientists, they feel honoured all the more if the presentation is in a palace. Perhaps they should not feel like that, perhaps one day they won’t, but at the moment, I’m afraid they do. Anyway, I should not like to demolish the place; it is a fine building in its way, a valuable reminder of our history, too, and it is better that we put it to ordinary use. Do you know that we only use a small part of it for my offices? We made the rest of it into a lunatic asylum.”

My mother frowned.

“It is not a lunatic asylum; it is a mental hospital.” she reproved him.

“I’m sorry. But you know, Marica, there is some excuse for me. They call themselves the lunatics. You know that they belong to St Matthew’s Refuge for Lunatics – that is the official name. But there is also St Matthew’s Hospital of Genito-Urinary Medicine, and when people asked which one they were from the patients always used to say very quickly that they were the lunatics. They got used to it. In any case, it is a good use for a palace, don’t you think? You know that when they first moved in, they were very pleased with their new accommodation. When I came out of my office one evening, there was a lunatic – excuse me, a female mental patient I should say – standing by. She saluted me and thanked me for moving them all into the Agraci Palace, and then, as I was getting into the car she shouted at the top of her voice; ‘Don’t worry, Marki Larvartin, the people may think you’re a scoundrel, but the lunatics will always support you!’”

He paused, and then raised one finger thoughtfully.

“But you know what? I think your criticism is a good one in a way, after all, Lucia. She is right, isn’t she, Marica? You think, Lucia, that I should not be ashamed to bring these foreigners, and these deserving workers, to an ordinary home, and you are right; your approach is impeccable. Tomorrow you shall live in a palace, because this flat will become the Palace – will you be ready, Marica? I look forward to seeing the reactions. I think the face of the British ambassador, Sir John Beauchamp-Tollemache, will be particularly worth seeing. I shall offer him this chair as a mark of my special regard for the English aristocracy.”

My mother was not amused. She told me my father must not show me any special favour, since that would betray his principles, and that I should not ask it.

“I’m afraid your mother is right, Lucia, said my father, if we begin to bend the rules for ourselves, we shall be setting off on a bad road.”

I moaned in frustration, and he looked at me in surprise.

“Is there something else behind all this? Tell me your problems.”

I hesitated – this was going to make my mother even angrier – and then I told him about the other children and how they wouldn’t believe me. He listened carefully – it was one of the things he was good at: no-one else paid attention to my views, but he seemed to think they were as important as my mother’s, or the Controller of Police’s, or anyone’s. People trusted him for the simple reason that he listened to them properly, and he seemed for his part to find people unendingly interesting, not always a quality a politician can afford, I should have thought.

When I had finished my mother intervened.

“This is your own fault, Lucia,” she declared icily, “If you had done as you were told, there would be no problem. I will speak to your teacher about this, but you must say no more about your father. Understood? In time this will blow over.”

Over the next week at school I found this hard to believe, but I was a dutiful girl and I did my best. When I was teased, I clamped my lips shut and would not say who my father was – or anything at all.

Then, after ten days or so, in the middle of a lesson, when we were settling down to a spelling test, the classroom door flew open and my father, entirely unannounced, strode in, looking older, greyer and fatter than in the picture on the wall, but far nicer and instantly recognisable. I felt as if I were soaring out of the top of my own head on a surge of joy and excitement. He looked around the classroom, came over to my desk, and seized me in a great bear-hug, all in an astonished silence; put me down again, strode over to the teacher’s desk and whispered inaudibly in her ear. I don’t know what he said to her – I supposed he was trying to put her at her ease; she certainly looked as if she needed it, poor woman. Then he went back to the door where his driver was standing grinning beside the ghost-like figure of Stilin the secretary, waved at the children and disappeared.

The teacher was completely flummoxed by this. She sat in silence for a while, staring straight ahead with her eyes wide open. Then suddenly, as if she had woken up, she began to applaud frantically. The children joined in gradually; for about a minute we all clapped vigorously, and then faltered and stopped again, feeling slightly ridiculous.

My life at school was different after that; not better in every respect, since some of my former friends now shunned me while a few of the worse kind of people began to toady and follow me around; but no-one doubted my word any more.

My mother was furious when she found out what had happened.

“After all those lectures about being an ordinary man, you do this!” she exclaimed, “So she must be the President’s daughter for the rest of her life after all! Her life must revolve around yours! For the sake of a cheap gesture you sacrifice your daughter’s privacy and freedom forever! You understand what you’ve done? Now no-one will look at her without thinking of you. Damn you. You should be ashamed of yourself. So much for Marxist-Larvartism!”

My father took it all with patience, as he always did.

“I’m a simple man, Marica,” he replied, “I don’t understand ideology. I never went to college like you. But if this Marxist-Larvartism of yours says that a man can’t hug his daughter, then frankly, I say to hell with it.”

“What did you say to the teacher?” I asked.

“I apologised for disrupting her lesson. I said I was so delighted by your marks recently that I felt I must come at once and congratulate her on your achievements… Er… I said the visit was informal, strictly informal, just a parent dropping in. I asked her not to tell the head teacher that I had come, or she would be sure to get out the committee and ask me to make a speech, and then I would be late and Stilin would begin fidgeting and we should all be in terrible trouble. And I asked her to remove the picture. My picture, I mean, the one on the wall. In Twentyland, we don’t have the cult of personality, I said: if I should come back another time with the Minister of Education, I should be embarrassed that my picture was on the wall. Not that I’m not flattered, I said, please don’t think I don’t appreciate the warm sentiment, but you know another thing about that picture is that I don’t like the way the eyes follow you around the room.”

“You couldn’t have said all that. You didn’t have time.”

“No, I suppose not.” he answered slyly. “Perhaps I just said ‘Excuse me, Miss’.”

I threw my arms around the President and gave him the biggest hug I could manage.

3,391 words. Woo hoo!