Free Rule Britannia by Daphne du Maurier Page A

been crisis, all wished to give an account of his or her own experiences during the weekend.
    “I was just sitting down to tea, and I said to Father…”
    “Sleep? I couldn’t close my eyes. And the roar…”
    “Takes me back to wartime, I said to Jim, seeing all these fellows around, and they say they’re going to be here weeks. It’s the threat, you see, of what might happen if they packed up. Jim says…”
    Mad swept purchase after purchase into her wire basket, and ended up beside the salesman who sliced the ham—when in doubt, Mad always said, one can live on cold ham. She fixed him with a cold blue eye. He was not a local man, but had been sent down from Bristol when the supermarket first started.
    “Well,” she said, “what do you make of the invasion?”
    “Invasion?” he queried, then smiled. “Now, you mustn’t call it that. I’ve been telling my wife it will be the saving of the country. We should have done it months ago, years ago, even.”
    “Oh, really?” asked Mad. “Why?”
    “Well…” He considered the matter as he sliced the ham. “It stands to reason, doesn’t it? They’re like our own people, aren’t they? We all speak English. It’s a wonderful thing for the English-speaking countries to get together. America, Australia, South Africa, ourselves… you won’t get the foreigners trying to push us around now.”
    “Aren’t we being pushed around at the moment?” said Mad. “I’ve just been issued with a pass coming down Poldrea hill. No one to be allowed to move without a pass.”
    “Security,” said the Bristol ham-slicer, and looking over his shoulder dropped his voice to a whisper. “You’d be surprised the things they say. Oh, not just that the continentals might be slipping over to make trouble, but our own people, folk like you and I, just biding their time to upset the Coalition Government, or make things awkward for the Americans. We must all be on our guard.”
    “Yes,” said Mad, “I think we must.”
    Emma, who had been keeping a close watch on the boys in case they slipped something into their pockets and not into the wire basket, followed her grandmother out of the supermarket. Mad was looking rather grim.
    “Where now?” asked Emma.
    “I think I’ll have a word with Tom,” said Mad. Tom was the fishmonger, and had fished the waters of Poldrea, man and boy, for fifty years. “Well, Tom?” This time Mad’s eye was not so cold. She was fond of Tom. “How do you like living in a state of siege?”
    “Don’t fancy it one bit,” was the answer from the gray-haired skipper of the
Maggie May.
“They’m turning the country upside down. And what’s more, tryin’ to boss we. I don’t hold with it. And what do they think they’m to out there in the bay—diggin’ for sand-eel?”
    Mad smiled. “We used to do it half a century ago,” she said. “They call it showing the flag. It’s to impress the natives.”
    Tom shook his head. “It might impress some folk,” he said. “It don’t impress me. I’ve lived too long.” He looked down at his flabby wares displayed on the slab. “Nothing here to tempt you, my dear,” he said. “Caught Wednesday and been on the ice ever since. They’ve lost their bite, like the speakers up Whitehall. Will you go to the meeting?”
    “What meeting?”
    “There’s notices posted round the town. Meeting at town hall seven o’clock. Questions from the general public to be answered by our Member and this Yankee colonel who’s in charge.”
    “Ah ha!” said Mad, and she turned to her granddaughter. “I’ve a very good mind to attend.”
    Emma’s heart sank. She knew exactly what would happen. Mad would make remarks under her breath, or not under her breath, the entire time people were asking questions. And the M.P. for the constituency was one of her bêtes-noires. She was a woman, for one thing, and had called at Trevanal a few years previously before the by-election, supremely confident that Mad would