The Darling Buds Express
- Thread starter Ed Costello
- Start date
Sideways
Donor
This is beautiful. What a lovely last line there. Is this the end?
What I really really like about this is how it took big ideas in AH and instead of using the characters to show them off it's focused on character, and do be that well. And even then, you've been content to tell us a little bit about love(Autocorrect error, but I'll let it stand) . No guarantees, nothing massive. But something important.
What I really really like about this is how it took big ideas in AH and instead of using the characters to show them off it's focused on character, and do be that well. And even then, you've been content to tell us a little bit about love(Autocorrect error, but I'll let it stand) . No guarantees, nothing massive. But something important.
Tuesday
It had turned out nice again. The sun was warm and the breeze gentle; cotton-wool clouds scudded across the sky. In the distance, a train’s whistle echoed through a tunnel with a sound like a kettle on a flame that wouldn’t burn out.
Laura and Henry walked together through Titfield, Laura’s suitcase making a pleasant rumbling sound as it rolled over the pavement behind them. They passed under the same cherry blossom they had the day before; the street was carpeted with petals, and though they were still falling in the breeze there didn’t seem to be all that many left on the branches. Laura could feel the changing of the seasons coming, the little meteorological tells – the slightly warmer sunlight, the weakening of the breeze, the dark red tint of cherry blossom leaves.
They approached the station just as a column of smoke appeared on the final climb to the village. They stepped onto the platform and watched the train draw up, the little black tender engine gleaming and hauling its three pristine coaches.
“You know,” said Laura thoughtfully once the hissing had abated slightly, “I never understood why British Railways decided to build new engines to a Victorian design.”
“Well, this was back during Austerity,” said Henry authoritatively, “and they wanted designs they knew would work rather than spending money they didn’t have building engines that might not work.”
“But weren’t they building engines that didn’t work anyway?”
“Well, yeah – I think that’s why they went back to the old ones.”
She smiled and wrapped herself around him, her chin resting on his chest. “You know, I never though I’d miss your encyclopedic knowledge of railways until this moment…” He chuckled and embraced her back; he moved as if to whisper something in her ear, but the wheesh of the safety-valve cut him off.
“Five minutes, guys!” called Ollie as the engine uncoupled to run around its train.
Laura turned to Henry. “I guess this is it, then,” she said nervously.
He smiled back at her. “Not for long. Next month, remember?”
She nodded, and hugged him. “I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too. Love you.”
She kissed him on the cheek, and climbed aboard. He lifted her suitcase in behind her, and swung the door over. As it clicked shut, an idea occurred to her; she opened the window hurriedly and poked her head out.
“Hey!”
“What?” he said, startled.
“I could…” she faltered. “I mean… what if I were to come back before next month? Just for the weekend?”
He blinked, taking in what she’d just said. “Yeah. I mean – yeah! That’d be… grand. I’d like that.” She smiled, and so did he. “But will you be okay with work? Can you manage that?”
“It’ll be fine. It’s only ninety minutes, after all – if you get the right trains…”
“But there’s no fast trains on the weekend,” he replied, and smiled again. “Take the slow train, take your time.”
She leaned further out of the window and kissed him; it was awkward and the upper sash was digging into her ribcage, but he was kissing her back and she couldn’t possibly stop herself from smiling.
“All aboard!”
They broke apart reluctantly; they said nothing as the shrill whistle rang across the platform, but as the engine lurched to life and began to draw them apart, he raised an arm and waved at her. It was a small, sad movement at first, but as she got further away it became more and more energetic until it was almost frantic. He never stopped smiling, a smile full of love and joy. She waved back, hanging out of the window, until he disappeared from sight around the bend; only then did she close the window and return to her seat.
Laura smiled to herself, and thought again of the city. She felt sadness flush her heart, but love washed down like summer rain, diffusing it, transmuting her self-pity into something nobler. She closed her eyes, holding onto that last image of Henry, waving and smiling and loving.
The train rolled on down the valley in the spring sunshine, a moment of history steaming into the future.
It had turned out nice again. The sun was warm and the breeze gentle; cotton-wool clouds scudded across the sky. In the distance, a train’s whistle echoed through a tunnel with a sound like a kettle on a flame that wouldn’t burn out.
Laura and Henry walked together through Titfield, Laura’s suitcase making a pleasant rumbling sound as it rolled over the pavement behind them. They passed under the same cherry blossom they had the day before; the street was carpeted with petals, and though they were still falling in the breeze there didn’t seem to be all that many left on the branches. Laura could feel the changing of the seasons coming, the little meteorological tells – the slightly warmer sunlight, the weakening of the breeze, the dark red tint of cherry blossom leaves.
They approached the station just as a column of smoke appeared on the final climb to the village. They stepped onto the platform and watched the train draw up, the little black tender engine gleaming and hauling its three pristine coaches.
“You know,” said Laura thoughtfully once the hissing had abated slightly, “I never understood why British Railways decided to build new engines to a Victorian design.”
“Well, this was back during Austerity,” said Henry authoritatively, “and they wanted designs they knew would work rather than spending money they didn’t have building engines that might not work.”
“But weren’t they building engines that didn’t work anyway?”
“Well, yeah – I think that’s why they went back to the old ones.”
She smiled and wrapped herself around him, her chin resting on his chest. “You know, I never though I’d miss your encyclopedic knowledge of railways until this moment…” He chuckled and embraced her back; he moved as if to whisper something in her ear, but the wheesh of the safety-valve cut him off.
“Five minutes, guys!” called Ollie as the engine uncoupled to run around its train.
Laura turned to Henry. “I guess this is it, then,” she said nervously.
He smiled back at her. “Not for long. Next month, remember?”
She nodded, and hugged him. “I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too. Love you.”
She kissed him on the cheek, and climbed aboard. He lifted her suitcase in behind her, and swung the door over. As it clicked shut, an idea occurred to her; she opened the window hurriedly and poked her head out.
“Hey!”
“What?” he said, startled.
“I could…” she faltered. “I mean… what if I were to come back before next month? Just for the weekend?”
He blinked, taking in what she’d just said. “Yeah. I mean – yeah! That’d be… grand. I’d like that.” She smiled, and so did he. “But will you be okay with work? Can you manage that?”
“It’ll be fine. It’s only ninety minutes, after all – if you get the right trains…”
“But there’s no fast trains on the weekend,” he replied, and smiled again. “Take the slow train, take your time.”
She leaned further out of the window and kissed him; it was awkward and the upper sash was digging into her ribcage, but he was kissing her back and she couldn’t possibly stop herself from smiling.
“All aboard!”
They broke apart reluctantly; they said nothing as the shrill whistle rang across the platform, but as the engine lurched to life and began to draw them apart, he raised an arm and waved at her. It was a small, sad movement at first, but as she got further away it became more and more energetic until it was almost frantic. He never stopped smiling, a smile full of love and joy. She waved back, hanging out of the window, until he disappeared from sight around the bend; only then did she close the window and return to her seat.
Laura smiled to herself, and thought again of the city. She felt sadness flush her heart, but love washed down like summer rain, diffusing it, transmuting her self-pity into something nobler. She closed her eyes, holding onto that last image of Henry, waving and smiling and loving.
The train rolled on down the valley in the spring sunshine, a moment of history steaming into the future.
THE END
Thanks for the comments, chaps – I hope everyone has enjoyed finally getting to finish this little tale.
As it's the holidays, I have a few little tidbits to share (and they really are tidbits) – some of the planning-out I used to try and keep this world vaguely coherent whilst writing this story. They aren't strictly canon, but I hope you enjoy them!
As it's the holidays, I have a few little tidbits to share (and they really are tidbits) – some of the planning-out I used to try and keep this world vaguely coherent whilst writing this story. They aren't strictly canon, but I hope you enjoy them!
The World
The Ikhwan revolt against Ibn Saud, rather than being crushed at the Battle of Sabilla, manages to overthrow the Kingdoms of Nedj and Hejaz and establish a Wahhabi Caliphate in Arabia (I know this is supremely unlikely, verging on ASB, but it actually provided a far more ‘natural’ PoD for the world I wanted to explore than I was prepared to engineer). Come WWII, the fanatically anti-British Ikhwan side with the Nazis – who hope to gain a reliable source of oil – in return for arms and a free hand in British protectorates in the area; both sides regard it as a ‘deal with the devil’ in much the same way as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and absent any other factors would likely have had a similar result – war makes strange bedfellows. The British are thrown out of Iraq, and end up fighting a furious insurrection in Palestine; Turkey is forced to abandon its strict neutrality, cosying up to the USSR for protection. With most of the Middle East lost, the ‘Anglo-Soviet’ occupation of Iran is rather heavier on the ‘Soviet’ aspect than OTL. The Soviets also lead the effort to reconquer the Middle East, and thanks to the accession of Henry Wallace to the Presidency in 1943 the British have less support in regaining their protectorates; with the end of the war in 1945, the Middle East nations become part of the Ankara Pact, which is not only Soviet-aligned but dominates the world’s oil production – and isn’t particularly keen on sharing that wealth with the West.
There is a trade-off; although the Red Army is instrumental in liberating Eastern Europe, they never reach Berlin (which is liberated by Anglo-American forces) and don’t make much of an effort to puppetise their neighbours – an attempt in Poland is kicked over not long after Stalin’s death in 1949, with the new republic described as ‘belligerently neutral’; the other border states are happy to just be Finlandised (well, happy compared to what their fate might be otherwise).
Having been deprived of its primary source of oil, Britain is forced to reorient its economy around two things: electrical technology, and its vast coal reserves (Attlee’s Austerity government is actually very well-suited to this; he gets ten years of government before his majority collapses). Private vehicle ownership collapses, with petrol and diesel being prioritised for the armed forces; railway dieselisation is DOA (which means both a rush to electrify everything, and – paradoxically – a reprieve for steam, because of the aforementioned coal); buses are converted to run on gas, coal byproducts and (later) battery power; diesel wagons die off and are either converted to battery power, replaced by steam or bodged into horse-drawn vehicles. Nuclear capability becomes a major priority, but for power reasons rather than bombs (okay, maybe for bombs).
One big upside is that the African colonies become much more important – and European governments are more keen to listen to them and help them in order to keep them onside. Kleptocrats, authoritarians and ethnic strife are still distressingly recurrent issues, but less so than OTL; by the same token, independence often took longer but was achieved on a more stable footing. The legacy of colonialism is still present, and just as weighty and poisonous as in our world; but earlier income from oil revenues, combined with bolstered democratic processes and more robust state infrastructures, mean that the Africa of 2016 – whilst still miles behind the developed world – is still wealthier and healthier than in our history.
The discovery of North Sea Oil in the 1960s doesn’t actually have the transformative effect one would expect; the desire to stockpile fuel for the army, the shift towards battery power, the greater emphasis on public transport, the growing demands of the airline industry, the perception of the motorcar as being a rich man’s plaything rather than a society-wide necessity – all these factors and more add up to a negligible impact on the economy, although more plastic-based consumer products slowly begin to appear on the market. One happier benefit is that there has been no oil-shock in TTL, and in consequence none of the disruption that so abruptly damaged Britain’s manufacturing sector and shook the foundations of the Welfare State. The Postwar Consensus has evolved and changed, but endures – after a fashion.
Domestically, British politics has stayed in a two-party system rather longer than OTL; what is different, however, is that it is Labour, rather than the Tories, who are seen as the ‘natural party of government’ (albeit not so conclusively as the Conservatives are in OTL). The prewar effects of the POD include the Tories grinding the National Liberals under them rather than subsuming them as in OTL, which results in a postwar Conservative Party with less liberal influence of the kind personified by Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke; the Ulster Unionists never split off, but the party is dominated by ATL-cousins of the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies. A more substantial Liberal base remains than in OTL, although the party never reaches the heights the Lib Dems under Charles Kennedy managed. Ironically, the Liberals do gain large swathes of Scotland after a disastrous move by the Keegan Government in the early Noughties to do away with the Scottish Law system; outside of the solidly Labour Central Belt, the SNP stronghold of the Western Isles and a few lonely Tories, north of the border is decidedly Pantone 1235C. In a further irony, the Liberals are nowhere in Wales, where ‘Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales’ (or ‘the Party of Wales, Plaid Cymru’) have managed to build a quasi-centrist coalition between Cymraeg and English speakers based off an ‘all things to all men’ platform, and now have almost the same number of seats as the Welsh Conservatives.
With no Warsaw Pact, there is no NATO; with Palestine sovietised, there is no Israel (although a ‘Free’ State of Jerusalem, including Bethlehem, is carved off as an associate member of the Ankara Pact in the 1960s, along with a rump Hejaz around the Holy Cities – both strictly secular, you understand). Europe drifts into a ‘new Concert’, a much looser economic bloc which includes most of the continent except Switzerland (for much the same reasons as OTL), Yugoslavia (still a brutal dictatorship riven by ethnic tensions, just not a Communist one) and a few of the nervier Soviet neighbour-states. With no Soviet puppets on its borders to act as a bulwark against Germany’s rehabilitation took longer ITTL, and her acceptance into the Concert in the late 1980s was controversial; it was partly the efforts of Manfred Rommel to foment reconciliation as Chancellor, and partly a belief that having Germany in the tent might just be better than having them outside it, that managed to get it to pass. The Concert has no democratic element, and operates rather like EFTA – indeed many of its critics are arguing for an introduction of democratic accountability; proponents of a ‘European Congress’ are notable for their garish purple-and-gold posters and rosettes come election time across the continent, although they remain very much a fringe opinion.
The Soviet Union is still there, grown rich on petroroubles; although the corruption and inefficiencies of the Soviet economy – to say nothing of the effect on the environment – are having deleterious effects. The Ankara Pact is also still going; riddled with Ceausescu-analogues, but spared most of the conflict and ethnic-baiting of the region in our world. The Kingdom of Egypt is a stout Western ally, albeit little better than Nasser and his successors; after an attempted Communist uprising in 1956 (which was put down by the US, UK and France, and which led to the fall of the Gaitskell government) the nation is built up as a bulwark against Communism, and today incorporates both Libya and the former Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.
India has cleaved closer to the Commonwealth; some of the economic mis-steps of our Cold War were avoided, as were the excesses of certain Congress rulers – the trade-off being some pretty hairy periods of Hindu-nationalist rule in the 1970s and 1980s; this culminated in the threat of nuclear war with Pakistan over Kashmir, before British arbitration managed to bring about a once-and-for-all settlement. India is today a burgeoning economic power, and is widely believed to be the dominant power of the 21st Century.
China wasn’t so lucky; Mao was killed in the closing stages of the Civil War, and his Communist successors were efficient but unimaginative. There was no Cultural Revolution, or any other Maoist horrors, but the economic miracle never arrived; the Communist regime collapsed in the early 1990s, and the shakily democratic regime lost Tibet and Manchuria to independence, with the Uighur Front keeping up an insurrection of varying strength in Xinjiang for a quarter-century. The Taiwanese government tried to stake a claim to legitimacy, but it quickly became apparent that was going nowhere (and probably wasn’t that desirous for the rapidly-developing Taiwanese anyway) – the new regime ceded its claims over the island in return for Taiwan dropping its counterclaim to the mainland (which, incidentally, happened at the same conference where Britain managed to renegotiate its lease on Hong Kong; this was put in a referendum to the populace – who, with no independence option, chose an ‘undetermined’ British lease with a distant prospect of self-rule over the uncertainty of the new situation in China Proper).
The PoD induced no particular butterflies in the Pacific Front, and Japan went down as OTL, nukes and all. Korea was split pretty much as OTL, but there was no Korean War – well, there were several Korean Wars, but they were very localised conflicts which never managed to draw in the wider alliances to which either side supposedly belonged. At least, not until the Korean Border Crisis in 1963 – the prospect of nuclear annihilation over a bit of needless, unapologetic provocation made it clear to Moscow that Kim il-Sung was becoming a bit of a loose cannon, his Soviet patrons had him replaced by a more moderate/pliant Party official (involving the former Dear Leader and his family suffering an ‘unfortunate and regrettable accident’ over Mongolian airspace); the concession of free elections ten years later – and of the subsequent ‘Korean reunification’ in 1988 – was a key sign of Soviet glasnost… and a key factor in the fall of the Chinese regime.
And then there’s America. Yes, there is hysterical anti-communist rhetoric – but that’s kind of to be expected in a world where the Cold War never ended. Internal combustion vehicles are more common; the lower 48 are no less vast than OTL, and for a lot of smaller rural communities they are the only way to survive. Gasoline is, however, rationed by Federal law; there is no interstate system, the fear of running out of internally-produced gasoline is a constant national fear, and the stereotypical libertarian/survivalist caricature in this world rides a horse. America’s most famous President is Barry Goldwater; although that is as much to do with his assassination on April 15th 1965 as his policies over the previous four years. His environmental policies, emulating those of the Douglas-Home government in Britain, are his most enduring legacy; he was notably intransigent on civil rights, at least on a federal level, although that didn’t stop President Dirksen proclaiming the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1966 as ‘completing the work Barry started’. The US is less of a ‘global policeman’ than our world; after the uncomfortable isolationism of the Taft administration, and the interventions of the ‘Eisenhower Democrats’ in his second term (Ike pushed for intervention in Suez, and also helped kick over Franco after some nastiness in Spanish Sahara – Taft’s rise pushed him to intervene in politics as in OTL, but the former’s greater success made the Republicans a non-starter so far as the latter was concerned), American foreign policy tries to steer a middle course. Whilst still possessing global force projection, and slightly more willing than OTL to go in and stop a genocide (at least one that happens outside of the Soviet sphere), the thought of something like OTL’s Iraq War would be beyond the political pale. Washington does, however, keep the rest of the Americas firmly in line; there are no dictators – well, except for the odd five-year-long national state of emergency – but an awful lot of elections contested between right-wing populist pro-US parties and right-wing corporatist pro-US parties. Brazil is a Permanent Member of the United Nations Security Council, a legacy of the Wallace administration – some say the only good one, despite his thumping re-election in 1944.
‘Green’ politics are – paradoxically – both less and more of ‘a thing’ in this world’s politics. A lot of environmentally beneficial policies have been mainstream ideas for decades; (very) basic recycling was a key tenet of the Labour Austerity government, whilst environmental conservation is a core Conservative plank and has been for a long time, to give two examples. The obvious result is that, because certain tenets have become subsumed into the wider ideology of the other parties, environmentalism as a movement is much more of a fringe position than IOTL. Where ecological parties form, they tend to place an emphasis on being ‘beyond the left-right spectrum’ a la OTL’s Pirate movement (although they wouldn’t use that term) – the stereotypical ‘eco’ voter would be akin, but not identical, to the stereotypical hippy, keen on ‘free love’, ‘smashing the system’ and ‘living naturally’, fond of pseudoscientific theories of living but not of washing, yet rather disdainful of psychotropics.
The Ikhwan revolt against Ibn Saud, rather than being crushed at the Battle of Sabilla, manages to overthrow the Kingdoms of Nedj and Hejaz and establish a Wahhabi Caliphate in Arabia (I know this is supremely unlikely, verging on ASB, but it actually provided a far more ‘natural’ PoD for the world I wanted to explore than I was prepared to engineer). Come WWII, the fanatically anti-British Ikhwan side with the Nazis – who hope to gain a reliable source of oil – in return for arms and a free hand in British protectorates in the area; both sides regard it as a ‘deal with the devil’ in much the same way as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and absent any other factors would likely have had a similar result – war makes strange bedfellows. The British are thrown out of Iraq, and end up fighting a furious insurrection in Palestine; Turkey is forced to abandon its strict neutrality, cosying up to the USSR for protection. With most of the Middle East lost, the ‘Anglo-Soviet’ occupation of Iran is rather heavier on the ‘Soviet’ aspect than OTL. The Soviets also lead the effort to reconquer the Middle East, and thanks to the accession of Henry Wallace to the Presidency in 1943 the British have less support in regaining their protectorates; with the end of the war in 1945, the Middle East nations become part of the Ankara Pact, which is not only Soviet-aligned but dominates the world’s oil production – and isn’t particularly keen on sharing that wealth with the West.
There is a trade-off; although the Red Army is instrumental in liberating Eastern Europe, they never reach Berlin (which is liberated by Anglo-American forces) and don’t make much of an effort to puppetise their neighbours – an attempt in Poland is kicked over not long after Stalin’s death in 1949, with the new republic described as ‘belligerently neutral’; the other border states are happy to just be Finlandised (well, happy compared to what their fate might be otherwise).
Having been deprived of its primary source of oil, Britain is forced to reorient its economy around two things: electrical technology, and its vast coal reserves (Attlee’s Austerity government is actually very well-suited to this; he gets ten years of government before his majority collapses). Private vehicle ownership collapses, with petrol and diesel being prioritised for the armed forces; railway dieselisation is DOA (which means both a rush to electrify everything, and – paradoxically – a reprieve for steam, because of the aforementioned coal); buses are converted to run on gas, coal byproducts and (later) battery power; diesel wagons die off and are either converted to battery power, replaced by steam or bodged into horse-drawn vehicles. Nuclear capability becomes a major priority, but for power reasons rather than bombs (okay, maybe for bombs).
One big upside is that the African colonies become much more important – and European governments are more keen to listen to them and help them in order to keep them onside. Kleptocrats, authoritarians and ethnic strife are still distressingly recurrent issues, but less so than OTL; by the same token, independence often took longer but was achieved on a more stable footing. The legacy of colonialism is still present, and just as weighty and poisonous as in our world; but earlier income from oil revenues, combined with bolstered democratic processes and more robust state infrastructures, mean that the Africa of 2016 – whilst still miles behind the developed world – is still wealthier and healthier than in our history.
The discovery of North Sea Oil in the 1960s doesn’t actually have the transformative effect one would expect; the desire to stockpile fuel for the army, the shift towards battery power, the greater emphasis on public transport, the growing demands of the airline industry, the perception of the motorcar as being a rich man’s plaything rather than a society-wide necessity – all these factors and more add up to a negligible impact on the economy, although more plastic-based consumer products slowly begin to appear on the market. One happier benefit is that there has been no oil-shock in TTL, and in consequence none of the disruption that so abruptly damaged Britain’s manufacturing sector and shook the foundations of the Welfare State. The Postwar Consensus has evolved and changed, but endures – after a fashion.
Domestically, British politics has stayed in a two-party system rather longer than OTL; what is different, however, is that it is Labour, rather than the Tories, who are seen as the ‘natural party of government’ (albeit not so conclusively as the Conservatives are in OTL). The prewar effects of the POD include the Tories grinding the National Liberals under them rather than subsuming them as in OTL, which results in a postwar Conservative Party with less liberal influence of the kind personified by Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke; the Ulster Unionists never split off, but the party is dominated by ATL-cousins of the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies. A more substantial Liberal base remains than in OTL, although the party never reaches the heights the Lib Dems under Charles Kennedy managed. Ironically, the Liberals do gain large swathes of Scotland after a disastrous move by the Keegan Government in the early Noughties to do away with the Scottish Law system; outside of the solidly Labour Central Belt, the SNP stronghold of the Western Isles and a few lonely Tories, north of the border is decidedly Pantone 1235C. In a further irony, the Liberals are nowhere in Wales, where ‘Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales’ (or ‘the Party of Wales, Plaid Cymru’) have managed to build a quasi-centrist coalition between Cymraeg and English speakers based off an ‘all things to all men’ platform, and now have almost the same number of seats as the Welsh Conservatives.
With no Warsaw Pact, there is no NATO; with Palestine sovietised, there is no Israel (although a ‘Free’ State of Jerusalem, including Bethlehem, is carved off as an associate member of the Ankara Pact in the 1960s, along with a rump Hejaz around the Holy Cities – both strictly secular, you understand). Europe drifts into a ‘new Concert’, a much looser economic bloc which includes most of the continent except Switzerland (for much the same reasons as OTL), Yugoslavia (still a brutal dictatorship riven by ethnic tensions, just not a Communist one) and a few of the nervier Soviet neighbour-states. With no Soviet puppets on its borders to act as a bulwark against Germany’s rehabilitation took longer ITTL, and her acceptance into the Concert in the late 1980s was controversial; it was partly the efforts of Manfred Rommel to foment reconciliation as Chancellor, and partly a belief that having Germany in the tent might just be better than having them outside it, that managed to get it to pass. The Concert has no democratic element, and operates rather like EFTA – indeed many of its critics are arguing for an introduction of democratic accountability; proponents of a ‘European Congress’ are notable for their garish purple-and-gold posters and rosettes come election time across the continent, although they remain very much a fringe opinion.
The Soviet Union is still there, grown rich on petroroubles; although the corruption and inefficiencies of the Soviet economy – to say nothing of the effect on the environment – are having deleterious effects. The Ankara Pact is also still going; riddled with Ceausescu-analogues, but spared most of the conflict and ethnic-baiting of the region in our world. The Kingdom of Egypt is a stout Western ally, albeit little better than Nasser and his successors; after an attempted Communist uprising in 1956 (which was put down by the US, UK and France, and which led to the fall of the Gaitskell government) the nation is built up as a bulwark against Communism, and today incorporates both Libya and the former Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.
India has cleaved closer to the Commonwealth; some of the economic mis-steps of our Cold War were avoided, as were the excesses of certain Congress rulers – the trade-off being some pretty hairy periods of Hindu-nationalist rule in the 1970s and 1980s; this culminated in the threat of nuclear war with Pakistan over Kashmir, before British arbitration managed to bring about a once-and-for-all settlement. India is today a burgeoning economic power, and is widely believed to be the dominant power of the 21st Century.
China wasn’t so lucky; Mao was killed in the closing stages of the Civil War, and his Communist successors were efficient but unimaginative. There was no Cultural Revolution, or any other Maoist horrors, but the economic miracle never arrived; the Communist regime collapsed in the early 1990s, and the shakily democratic regime lost Tibet and Manchuria to independence, with the Uighur Front keeping up an insurrection of varying strength in Xinjiang for a quarter-century. The Taiwanese government tried to stake a claim to legitimacy, but it quickly became apparent that was going nowhere (and probably wasn’t that desirous for the rapidly-developing Taiwanese anyway) – the new regime ceded its claims over the island in return for Taiwan dropping its counterclaim to the mainland (which, incidentally, happened at the same conference where Britain managed to renegotiate its lease on Hong Kong; this was put in a referendum to the populace – who, with no independence option, chose an ‘undetermined’ British lease with a distant prospect of self-rule over the uncertainty of the new situation in China Proper).
The PoD induced no particular butterflies in the Pacific Front, and Japan went down as OTL, nukes and all. Korea was split pretty much as OTL, but there was no Korean War – well, there were several Korean Wars, but they were very localised conflicts which never managed to draw in the wider alliances to which either side supposedly belonged. At least, not until the Korean Border Crisis in 1963 – the prospect of nuclear annihilation over a bit of needless, unapologetic provocation made it clear to Moscow that Kim il-Sung was becoming a bit of a loose cannon, his Soviet patrons had him replaced by a more moderate/pliant Party official (involving the former Dear Leader and his family suffering an ‘unfortunate and regrettable accident’ over Mongolian airspace); the concession of free elections ten years later – and of the subsequent ‘Korean reunification’ in 1988 – was a key sign of Soviet glasnost… and a key factor in the fall of the Chinese regime.
And then there’s America. Yes, there is hysterical anti-communist rhetoric – but that’s kind of to be expected in a world where the Cold War never ended. Internal combustion vehicles are more common; the lower 48 are no less vast than OTL, and for a lot of smaller rural communities they are the only way to survive. Gasoline is, however, rationed by Federal law; there is no interstate system, the fear of running out of internally-produced gasoline is a constant national fear, and the stereotypical libertarian/survivalist caricature in this world rides a horse. America’s most famous President is Barry Goldwater; although that is as much to do with his assassination on April 15th 1965 as his policies over the previous four years. His environmental policies, emulating those of the Douglas-Home government in Britain, are his most enduring legacy; he was notably intransigent on civil rights, at least on a federal level, although that didn’t stop President Dirksen proclaiming the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1966 as ‘completing the work Barry started’. The US is less of a ‘global policeman’ than our world; after the uncomfortable isolationism of the Taft administration, and the interventions of the ‘Eisenhower Democrats’ in his second term (Ike pushed for intervention in Suez, and also helped kick over Franco after some nastiness in Spanish Sahara – Taft’s rise pushed him to intervene in politics as in OTL, but the former’s greater success made the Republicans a non-starter so far as the latter was concerned), American foreign policy tries to steer a middle course. Whilst still possessing global force projection, and slightly more willing than OTL to go in and stop a genocide (at least one that happens outside of the Soviet sphere), the thought of something like OTL’s Iraq War would be beyond the political pale. Washington does, however, keep the rest of the Americas firmly in line; there are no dictators – well, except for the odd five-year-long national state of emergency – but an awful lot of elections contested between right-wing populist pro-US parties and right-wing corporatist pro-US parties. Brazil is a Permanent Member of the United Nations Security Council, a legacy of the Wallace administration – some say the only good one, despite his thumping re-election in 1944.
‘Green’ politics are – paradoxically – both less and more of ‘a thing’ in this world’s politics. A lot of environmentally beneficial policies have been mainstream ideas for decades; (very) basic recycling was a key tenet of the Labour Austerity government, whilst environmental conservation is a core Conservative plank and has been for a long time, to give two examples. The obvious result is that, because certain tenets have become subsumed into the wider ideology of the other parties, environmentalism as a movement is much more of a fringe position than IOTL. Where ecological parties form, they tend to place an emphasis on being ‘beyond the left-right spectrum’ a la OTL’s Pirate movement (although they wouldn’t use that term) – the stereotypical ‘eco’ voter would be akin, but not identical, to the stereotypical hippy, keen on ‘free love’, ‘smashing the system’ and ‘living naturally’, fond of pseudoscientific theories of living but not of washing, yet rather disdainful of psychotropics.
Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland
Ramsay Macdonald (Labour) 1929-1931
Stanley Baldwin (National (Conservative)) 1931-1936
Oswald Mosley (National (New Labour)) 1936-1939
Winston Churchill (National (Conservative)) 1940-1945
Clement Attlee (Labour) 1945-1955
Hugh Gaitskell (Labour) 1955-1956
Alec Douglas-Home (Conservative) 1956-1962
Ernest Marples (Conservative) 1962-1965
Barbara Castle (Labour) 1965-1975
William Whitelaw (Conservative) 1975-1980
William Beveridge Liddell (Labour) 1980-1989
Terence Feery (Labour) 1989-1995
Joseph Keegan (Conservative) 1995-2005
Richard Edwards (Labour) 2005-2008†
Alloysious Bankole (Labour) 2008-2013
Isobel Campbell (Labour) 2013-2015
Timothy Wheeler (Conservative) 2015-
Ramsay Macdonald (Labour) 1929-1931
Stanley Baldwin (National (Conservative)) 1931-1936
Oswald Mosley (National (New Labour)) 1936-1939
Winston Churchill (National (Conservative)) 1940-1945
Clement Attlee (Labour) 1945-1955
Hugh Gaitskell (Labour) 1955-1956
Alec Douglas-Home (Conservative) 1956-1962
Ernest Marples (Conservative) 1962-1965
Barbara Castle (Labour) 1965-1975
William Whitelaw (Conservative) 1975-1980
William Beveridge Liddell (Labour) 1980-1989
Terence Feery (Labour) 1989-1995
Joseph Keegan (Conservative) 1995-2005
Richard Edwards (Labour) 2005-2008†
Alloysious Bankole (Labour) 2008-2013
Isobel Campbell (Labour) 2013-2015
Timothy Wheeler (Conservative) 2015-
General Secretaries of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Joseph Stalin (Communist) 1924-1949
Alexei Kosygin (Communist) 1949-1961
Lazar Kaganovich (Communist) 1961-1963
Yuri Andropov (Communist) 1963-1973
Yuri Gagarin (Communist) 1973-1993
Valentina Tereshovka (Communist) 1993-2003
Vladimir Abramovich (Communist) 2003-
Joseph Stalin (Communist) 1924-1949
Alexei Kosygin (Communist) 1949-1961
Lazar Kaganovich (Communist) 1961-1963
Yuri Andropov (Communist) 1963-1973
Yuri Gagarin (Communist) 1973-1993
Valentina Tereshovka (Communist) 1993-2003
Vladimir Abramovich (Communist) 2003-
Presidents of the United States of America
Herbert Hoover (Republican) 1929-1933
Franklin D Roosevelt (Democrat) 1933-1943†
Henry Wallace (Democrat) 1943-1949
Robert Taft (Republican) 1949-1953
Dwight D Eisenhower (Democrat) 1953-1961
Barry Goldwater (Republican) 1961-1965†
Everett Dirksen (Republican) 1965-1969
Hubert H Humphrey (Democrat) 1969-1973
Edmund Muskie (Democrat) 1973-1977
Charles Holley (Democrat) 1977-1981
Hiram Williams (Republican) 1981-1989
Berry Gordy (Democrat) 1989-1993
Ursula K Le Guin (Democrat) 1993-1997
George Bush (Republican) 1997-2001
Ramon Estevez (Democrat) 2001-2009
Alan Hetfield (Republican) 2009-2017
Herbert Hoover (Republican) 1929-1933
Franklin D Roosevelt (Democrat) 1933-1943†
Henry Wallace (Democrat) 1943-1949
Robert Taft (Republican) 1949-1953
Dwight D Eisenhower (Democrat) 1953-1961
Barry Goldwater (Republican) 1961-1965†
Everett Dirksen (Republican) 1965-1969
Hubert H Humphrey (Democrat) 1969-1973
Edmund Muskie (Democrat) 1973-1977
Charles Holley (Democrat) 1977-1981
Hiram Williams (Republican) 1981-1989
Berry Gordy (Democrat) 1989-1993
Ursula K Le Guin (Democrat) 1993-1997
George Bush (Republican) 1997-2001
Ramon Estevez (Democrat) 2001-2009
Alan Hetfield (Republican) 2009-2017
Yes, Gagarin and Tereshkova were both cosmonauts ITTL. Gagarin was given a sinecure on the Politburo by Andropov in the mid-Sixties but turned out to have a surprising aptitude for politics, as evidenced by his two decades in the top job; Tereshkova's ascension as Gagarin's hand-picked successor was more tempestuous.
I've started reading this one from the beginning again, and have just read through the Argleton Junction - Titfield/Henry, Donald and Mavis post. I'm going to endeavour to give some feedback which goes beyond "nice, I like this".
There are so many things I'd missed the first time through, but they all add to the world building.
Some of it is explicit, as seen in the kitchen table discussion about African colonial policy and the crushing of the Sikkimites. Other bits, like the discussion surrounding the car, give more titbits than first appear. Not only is petrol an issue, but there seems to be an awful lot of paperwork involved, potentially hinting at more government involvement in day to day life. Then, there's the tiny little asides. The "brass wheels of the suitcase" on the portland stone of Argleton's platform is such a minor thing, but it's great. By this point, we know it's a modern setting. Or modern enough to have text messages and the internet. But the suitcase wheels are brass. Which then means that plastic, which is essentially ubiquitous in OTL, is nowhere near as common in this TL. Why? Well, it all seems to link back to the Ankara Pact, as demonstrated in the discussion about Nigeria and the like not producing enough oil to make up the shortfall from the Middle East.
And the anorak in me notices that it's still British Railways, rather than British Rail. But I suppose that without plentiful diesel supplies (useless batteries or steam being the only options for those not under the knitting, as we see in this chapter) then the XP64 modernisation is all stillborn.
So, yes. Good characters, good world building, and several successful ways of introducing exposition without it becoming infodumping or as-you-know-Bob-ery.
I hope to respond to another update or two today, in similar style. I hope that this is helpful.
There are so many things I'd missed the first time through, but they all add to the world building.
Some of it is explicit, as seen in the kitchen table discussion about African colonial policy and the crushing of the Sikkimites. Other bits, like the discussion surrounding the car, give more titbits than first appear. Not only is petrol an issue, but there seems to be an awful lot of paperwork involved, potentially hinting at more government involvement in day to day life. Then, there's the tiny little asides. The "brass wheels of the suitcase" on the portland stone of Argleton's platform is such a minor thing, but it's great. By this point, we know it's a modern setting. Or modern enough to have text messages and the internet. But the suitcase wheels are brass. Which then means that plastic, which is essentially ubiquitous in OTL, is nowhere near as common in this TL. Why? Well, it all seems to link back to the Ankara Pact, as demonstrated in the discussion about Nigeria and the like not producing enough oil to make up the shortfall from the Middle East.
And the anorak in me notices that it's still British Railways, rather than British Rail. But I suppose that without plentiful diesel supplies (useless batteries or steam being the only options for those not under the knitting, as we see in this chapter) then the XP64 modernisation is all stillborn.
So, yes. Good characters, good world building, and several successful ways of introducing exposition without it becoming infodumping or as-you-know-Bob-ery.
I hope to respond to another update or two today, in similar style. I hope that this is helpful.
Thanks, @Geordie, that's very kind of you - any issues you pick up on would be very greatly appreciated!
None that I can see in the first two updates. The second is slightly harder to keep in my head as an entity, what with it going all the way from Argleton to Henry and Laura's swift departure from her parents. Still, I didn't notice any clangers.
I'm back with another bit of feedback.
Flying is an extravagance, which again, subtly suggests that oil is very much a rare commodity in this TL. Computerised design also appears in its infancy, despite the fact that the GPO (and competitors) have computers and t'internet in households, and there's a mobile in every pocket.
Laura grew up eating, and disliking, Woolton Pie? That's a turn up for the books. Again, it's not a point you ram home - it's just there, and lets the reader understand the significance of that tiny little statement. There's some lovely worldbuilding again, hints about changes on the continent, a European Compact, Amsterdam and Paris. The suggestion that Henry went to Durham university is clear to a North Easterner, seeing as I can see no other earthly reason why he'd be living in Pity Me.
Seeing as I promised useful feedback, I'll go with a negative - the only one I can find. The only bit that felt a bit off was the Reichstag photo, the set up and internal monologue on the point. Probably more the former than the latter. The fact that it's Tommies in the image is an important point to get across, and it's co-option by Right Nationalist groups sadly inevitable. It just felt slightly heavy handed compared to the rest of the post. It's difficult to explain what feels off, but it just comes across as a bit clumsy compared to the very nuanced work in the remainder. Oh and there's a "lass" that should be "less" in Henry's revelation that he chats to his old chums on Linkwise.