Dark Earth: Never Had it So Good

Googling it it seems that this tomte comes from Nordic folklore. am i correct.

Never Had it So Good Part 8

“Sam. Sam!” The words broke through the pleasant haze of sleep and Sam shook his head to wake himself up.

“Who? Where? What?” he babbled as he blinked at the afternoon sunlight shining directly in on his eyes.

“Simon Bailey, in his library and would you like some tea?” Bailey rattled off his responses in a good natured manner.

“Yes, of course! How long was I asleep for?”

“Only five minutes or so. I decided to let you kip where you were while I had a bit of a go at the Times crossword. Hmmm…28 letters and ending with ‘m’ and the only clue is ’Silly nonsense’. Ah, got it! ‘Antidisestablishmentarianism’.”

“You mentioned something about tea…”

“Ah, of course. It should just be ready now. I’ll be mother.” Simon reached forward onto the small table and poured a pair of perfect measures of black tea into two delicately painted china cups. The fragrant steam woke Sam up fully and set his senses afire with anticipation. He was quite gratified to see that Bailey was not a barbarian, adding milk and sugar afterwards.

“There you are. I had Victoria bring in a few cucumber sandwiches and what not in case you were a bit peckish. Battenberg?”

“Yes, please!” Sam dove in to the provender with a great gusto that surprised himself. Perhaps it was something strange in the air here that built up the appetite in such a manner. Bailey nibbled on a bit of cake thoughtfully before putting aside his newspaper and rising.

“Well, I don’t know about you, old boy, but I’m going to have a bath and freshen up a bit. There’s one up across from your room as well in the guest wing.”

The idea struck Sam as an eminently agreeable one and, with a last wistful glance at the remaining Battenberg, he clambered out of the very easy chair, made his way upstairs and found the bathroom. It was beautifully appointed in gold, crimson and royal blue and the polished white marble floor sparkled as it was lit by the bright rays of the sun shining through the high leaded window. A luxuriantly large bath lay opposite the gilt sink and vanity, replete with four taps and a dignified rubber duck. He soon discovered that they were for varying temperatures of water and found the four coloured buttons on the panel positioned conveniently within arm’s length as he reclined dispensed effervescent bubbles, aromatic oils, iridescent unguents and a steady stream of pleasant steam respectively. Another dial controlled the ambient temperature of the air or, when pressed in first, offered a range of waterproof magazines from a retractable alcove. As he wondered how he could recommend these sensible features to interior designers once he got home, he was once again surprised by the discovery of a radio dial.

“Let me see…My options seem to be the BBC, more BBC, Auntie, still more BBC and, for a bit of a change, the BBC.” Sam mused to himself as he turned the knob before finally deciding on the Light Programme and stretching back in the hot water. As luck would have it, he tuned in just in time for the news.

“…the news. Her Majesty the Queen has attended the commissioning ceremony of the Royal Navy’s first atomic super battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth at the Armstrong-Whitworth shipyard in Newcastle-on-Tyne in front of a crowd of over 50,000. The Stockholm Summit has come to a successful conclusion, with the great powers agreeing on a timetable for the normalization of the European situation and issuing a joint statement supporting peaceful coexistence. Fighting continues to rage in the Congo for the fourth successive week and the Belgian authorities are facing renewed pressure to consider a peaceful solution to the crisis. President Kennedy has announced that the first mission to Jupiter and Saturn by the Orion spacecraft will be launched in 1963 in an expansive speech at the opening of a new NASA Space Centre in Houston, Texas. A meeting of the Arab League has called for a new path of independence in the Middle East. In London today, Milo Standfast became the first halfling to jump the Thames on a motorcycle. This evening, fine and mild across England with fog developing over the Home Counties.”

Just the usual stuff then – nuclear spaceships, détente and midget daredevils. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the warmth, but was awoken by a faint beeping sound that he discovered came from the bathtub itself, informing him that the water temperature was approaching a non-optimal level and that he had been in for 39 minutes and 26 seconds, which was probably enough time to a good old soak, without putting any undue pressure upon him. If there was one thing that this world did better than his own, it was the nice manners of the domestic appliances.

With a reluctant groan, he arose from the tub and dried himself with the exceptional fluffy towels hanging at the edge of the bath. Wrapped up like a wanderer through the deserts of Arabia, he padded across the hall to his room, where a new set of clothes and underthings had been thoughtfully laid out for him on the bed. As he picked out the black tie from a selection of five, he noticed that his own freshly laundered clothes were folded neatly on a chair in the corner and had to pause to brush a speck of dust out of his eye as he briefly remembered his own home, so very far away.

He ran into Simon at the foot of the stairs, looking ruddy and fresh faced. “Feels better, doesn’t it, old boy?”

“You can say that again.”

“What did you think of the book?”

“I only got a chance to flip through it briefly, but it filled in a few of the gaps for me.”

“Tanks.”

“You’re welcome.” groaned Sam. “I couldn’t quite believe the numbers of Crusaders and Centurions.”

“Well, we have been a little busy for the past few decades. Now that the big factories in Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield are going at full pelt on the Chieftains, the War Office started to distribute some of the old war reserves to villages and towns for, ahem, ‘display purposes’. We’re meant to get a Centurion here.”

“The Home Guard with tanks. Seems a little excessive.”

“Not after 1940.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sealion.”

“Oh, come on! Don’t tell me that the Germans actually invaded?! The whole plan was completely impossible!”

“Maybe to you and I standing here in 1961, or the commanders in their bunkers at Whitehall. But for the cold and tired Tommy manning a machine gun on the coast of Kent , the sailors out on the destroyers sweeping the dark waters of the channel, the brave young few up in the sky or even a rather callow yet good-looking fifteen-year old guarding a Buckinghamshire laneway when he should have been in bed…it was a matter of when Jerry came, not if. Things changed, of course, after the fools actually went and tried it.” A bright yet grim light sparked up in Simon’s eyes and the corner of his mouth turned in a sardonic grin.

Sam blanched “Sealion actually happened?”

“I said they tried. I never said they succeeded. The Battle of the North Sea, they called it in the newsreels. It just so happened that they tried to cross on the very night that the Channel Fleet was heading over to attack the invasion ports and the Grand Fleet was out on a covering sweep in the Dogger Bank. Pure coincidence, naturally. A few years afterwards, I met a German prisoner of war who was pulled out of the water that night. He talked about the sea being on fire, of gas shells exploding over their barges, of the huge waves churned up by the destroyers and cruisers and the battlewagons steaming out of the smoke and mist to simply crush everything before them. He was one of the fortunate ones; there were almost ten thousand who weren’t so lucky. If there is ever a next time, the enemy might not have the tactical genius of Herr Hitler. So we keep a few tanks around. For display purposes.”

Bailey fished out his pocketwatch and cast an eye at it. He looked up with a bright smile. “Just before five. Dinner is at 6, the children aren’t at home yet, Victoria hasn’t spotted us and the sun is past the yardarm. Follow me.” He set off at fast clip, Sam tagging along behind as they wound their way through several passageways into what appeared to be a drawing room. His host went across to the wall and flicked a switch. A drinks cabinet that had been concealed behind a painting sprung open automatically, revealing all manner of bottles. Simon poured two large measures of gin, added tonic and ice and offered one to Sam with a playful grin.

“Cheers, Sam. To Australia!”

“Australia.”

They settled down in two Chesterfield chairs and looked out on the garden in contented silence. The green grass and bushes and riotous rainbow of flowers were tinged a gleaming gold by the intense sunlight. A black cat wandered into the room and settled down in a warm spot next to Sam’s chair where he absently mindedly stroked its head. Several white butterflies fluttered out of the trees and gamboled lackadaisically about over the lawn before they scattered, followed by a muffled chorus of high-pitched meeps and squeaks and what seemed to be tiny butterfly nets racing on the top of the grass.

“That’ll be the pixies. I’ll have to have a word with Nils about keeping them in line. Last week I caught the boys betting their pocket money on a mouse race that the little devils were running down past the toadstools.”

“What did you do?”

“Backed the winner for two pounds and then had a stern word with all involved.”

“You know, Simon, sometimes I don’t know when to take you seriously or not.”

“Victoria says the same thing. My advice is to take the serious things in life with a stiff upper lip and the rest with a cheerful smile. It is the British way and Britain is…”

“The greatest country in the world?” Sam cut in wryly.

“Of course. You don’t think so?”

“No, I can’t say I feel the same burning sense of national pride as you do. On some things, we really are worlds apart”

“Never a truer word was spoken. I’d like to visit your neck of the woods sometime. It sounds…remarkable…”

Sam was about to reply when a bit of movement outside caught his eye. As he focused, he saw the unmistakable massive silhouette of a far-off airship chugged its way across the horizon at a tremendous speed.

“These airships much faster than ours were.”

“Mmm. They have to be, these days. It’s not like the war anymore, when they could match a flying boat or a transport plane. That will probably be the Manchester Skyship, off on the All Red Route for Ceylon or Kenya. You can set your watch by it.”

“What’s the difference between a skyship and an airship?”

“Skyships are larger, faster and can carry a dashed sight more cargo. Cost a pretty penny, though. That one will be carrying six or seven thousand tons of textiles destined for Mars. Quite the lucrative trade.”

“Let me guess, it is powered by a magical steam engine?”

“How did you know?” Simon sounded delighted.

“Just a wild stab in the dark. What about all this house and all its gadgets? Does it have a wizard furnace in the cellar or something like that?”

“No, I haven’t heard of one of those in years. Our modern conveniences are run by far more prosaic means – cheap electricity, the cheapest in Europe, actually. All that coal, oil and gas, you see, along with the new atomic plants.”

“Aren’t they dangerous?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go swimming in them myself. And we get more fuel for our atom bombs to boot, so it serves the nation twice over.”

“You seem a bit overly exuberant about nuclear weapons. I can’t say they were as popular where I came from.”

“They’re not exactly a cream tea and a pot of leprechaun’s gold here, either, but they keep the Empire safe and the Reds in their place. There was a little ditty about it back in ’56 that was rather popular:

We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the H-bomb too
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true
The Russians will not have Constantinople!

Bailey sung the verse jauntily, swinging his arm as he went and finishing up by leaping to his feet and downing the rest of his gin. Sam was struck by a mixture of shock, distaste and the impulse to laugh.

“A bit Victorian, don’t you think?”

“That’s what the Russians thought. They think a bit differently now.” Simon’s mood changed abruptly and he stared off at something in the distance, his mouth drawn in a firm line.

“What actually happened in the ’56 war? You said you won.”

“Oh, we won alright. It started off with some Egyptian nationalists kicking up a fuss that, with a little external encouragement from Uncle Joe, set the whole Middle East on fire. We wouldn’t stand for that and went in to sort things out and then things really blew up out of hand.”

“Sound vaguely familiar.”

“Really? How curious. Anyway, that was followed by a bit of a wee disagreement between us and the Yanks, then Reds got ready to kick off, but Stalin went and had a stroke and a heart attack at the same time, poor fellow; the stress must have really got to him. Everyone settled down, but the West was split and everyone wished it had been a bad dream. Sometimes victory comes with costs.”

Sam sipped at his drink and decided that the best thing to do would be to change the subject.

“If I’m to be here until Friday, what will we do during the week? Sit tight here?”

Simon recovered from his momentary reverie and turned around, gesturing expansively and chuckling. “Far from it, my dear fellow! You’ve chosen quite the week to be here in Ashford. Tomorrow being Sunday, there is church and the weekly banquet – yummo!. Monday is a holiday and there’ll be quite a parade for D-Day, followed by hunting on Tuesday, the village fair on Wednesday and a little dinner party we’ve been planning for a while on Thursday. We’ll be doing many things, but sitting tight certainly isn’t one of them!”

The sound of laughing and shouting children started up in the distance and Bailey put down his glass and straightened his tie as it grew closer.

“Ah, sounds like the natives are revolting again. I wonder what it has been this time. Well, old boy, time to head in for dinner.” Bailey started to walk out towards the dining room and Sam moved to follow, but his egress from the room was halted by an outraged voice.

“And why do you think your petty dinner means that you can stop patting me?” The cat looked up at Sam with a look of profound horrified scorn and utter disgust.

“Oh, go off and catch some mice, Sebastian!” Simon called out over his shoulder.

“Why? So you can race them and lose more money to the tomte? Sometimes I wonder if you humans will ever be properly domesticated…” Sebastian grizzled as he pranced across the room, jumped up on the windowsill and began licking his paw in cold, cold fury.
………………………………………………………………………………………………

“Are you sure you don’t want some more Turkish delight?” Victoria asked a horrified Sam just over an hour later as she cradled a softly cooing baby George.

“Yes, do have some! It’s super stuff!” Richard’s boyish treble broke in from across the table, accompanied by the non-verbal agreement of his elder brother, whose attention was somewhat occupied by his second helping of ice-cream, fruit salad and lemon sherbet sauce.

Sam groaned. “Not even if it is wafer thin. That was, without a shadow of a doubt, the largest meal I’ve ever had.”

It had begun sneakily enough, with flavoursome fried whitebait, a rich tomato soup and a particularly toothsome prawn cocktail, but then had simply gone on and on. Through the after dinner haze that lay heavily upon him, he could not properly recall how he had managed the four inch thick rare sirloin steak and superbly salty chips nor their accompanying roasted tomatoes, fried mushrooms and watercress, let alone the juicy slices of the huge roast chicken and the delicious rack of venison with blueberries that followed. Some vague dread of asparagus in hollandaise sauce hung upon his soul like a body snatcher loitering around a cemetery and a few corner crusts of the Welsh rarebit had stood at the edge of his place like the forgotten remnants of a long-lost Persian statue. He had managed only a few spoonfuls of the delightful dessert before throwing in the towel and no manner of temptation with various chocolates, candied nuts, cheeses and jellies could shake him back into the fray.

“I think our young friend could do with a more comfortable chair, my dear.” Bailey rose from the table, extending a solicitous hand to Sam. “Let’s be off to the sitting room. According to the Radio Times, they’re playing Desert Victory followed by Sink the Bismarck.”

“Oh, Father, please can we watch the film? We’ll go straight to bed afterwards and be ever so good, we promise!” Elizabeth acted as the children’s chief advocate with the full support of her clients.

Simon and Victoria looked at each other for an instant and Sam thought he saw an extremely subtle wink exchanged, although it could have merely been a trick of the candlelight or the last vengeance of the pickled beetroot.

“Very well then, as long as its straight to bed without a single complaint. Clear?”

“Yes, Father. Thank you, Father.” chorused the children, synchronised through long years of practice. There followed a scramble as the five children scrambled over each other to be the first to grab their ideal positions in front of the television. Sam, Simon and Victoria got up to follow as Mrs. Beaton and a younger maid who looked to be her daughter hustled into the room and began to clear the remainder of the table.

“I’ll go and put George in his cradle and then be through to join you. He’ll be happy enough and Jenny will look in on him.”

The remainder of the evening passed in a very pleasant manner. Sam had seen both films before back at home, but they seemed very different here, what with the blazing Technicolour wartime picture of the Battle of El Alamein ending with a scene of the fleet on its way to the invasion of Sicily and the climax of the main feature seeing the infamous German battleship finally smashed down by good old HMS Hood and King George V after a spectacular chase through the North Atlantic. The aircraft footage was frighteningly realistic and in his opinion, the special effects would have put modern movies in the shade. As he stretched back in his bed, still packed to the gills and by now drifting off into the warm embrace of sleep, Sam wandered what new surprises the morrow would bring.

If you had the Germans succeed in Operation Sealion i would think the Darkearth verse was unrealistic, but you did a good job in explaining what surely would have happen if the operation happened in OTL.

Are there ruins of Atlantis on the Azure Islands.

Steve, you're most welcome.

Lordroel, there are scattered ruins, but most have been worn away by time or used for building materials.