The Invention of the NVLA - A Warning From Alternative History

Currently, I'm offering some of my titles at various discounts on Smashwords, in support of their big end of year sale - and I've included On Chestnut Tree Lane as a free giveaway. 

Which has resulted in a number of readers very kindly looking me up or messaging me through my Reddit profile to say thank you (and even to make quite adorable whimpering noises where my books have been particularly effective!). 

As part of those conversations, a couple of people have asked me how I got the idea for the NVLA and how - in universe - something like the world of the NVLA came to exist. I completely understand this curiosity, because as awful as the NVLA is, it's also oddly seductive in some ways.

To be honest, the question of how I got the idea at all isn't very interesting (as I've said before, it was at least partly to annoy Mrs Whitehouse!) - but the history of that world is. And, in fact, I briefly toyed with including an "Afterword" to On Chestnut Tree Lane to explain just how that world ended up how it did. 

Because quite early in trying to write Chestnut I had begun asking how the world made sense. Just as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four attacks totalitarianism by showing the aftermath of a world which has taken a different political direction to ours (in the then future), so I was showing a totalitarian state in the mid century of the past. I wanted to understand that logic, even if neither Orwell nor I wanted to put it on the page. 

And so, I reasoned, I should try to understand the NVLA's world through a sort of faux-historical source, a "This is what happened and why" from inside the universe, written long after the events of On Chestnut Tree Lane itself. 

But the more I tried to write it the less it felt like a piece that belonged in the book. It weakened the ending of Chestnut to include it, and it drew the focus too much away from Scott to even feel satisfying. 

But, like so much of my work does, it also ended up as an examination of power - albeit in a creepier, less erotic register than the one I'm normally comfortable working in.

I'm glad it's not a part of Chestnut - but since people are asking how that world got like that, it is perhaps useful as an in-universe origin story for the awfulness of the NVLA's purity culture. 

Just be warned, though... It is not a nice origin story. I'd even argue it should be a warning - and I'd definitely argue that you shouldn't trust a historian without listening to what their book is really trying to say, as well as what it claims to describe... 

But here it is - the faux academic history which I invented to explain how an otherwise rational world could discover it had become tangled in the embrace of the NVLA. 

********

SOURCE 1:

From 'Under Her Boot: Britain & Fascism Under the NVLA'
(Prof. Diana Ansloe, University of New Halworth, © 1997.) 

Chapter One: Spark on the Tinder: Context, Counterfactuals - and Carter

    Any historian examining the darkest part of Britain's recent history must accept that the search for a single "origin point" to the origins of the NVLA’s brutal regime will probably never be concluded. Nevertheless, in most attempts to explain how what was once called “the mother of parliaments” became the last bastion of fascism in Europe, the same moments always appear. These are those moments when, in wishful thinking, one might imagine history taking a different path, and the plight of so many downtrodden men, many innocent, having been averted.

    Even the non-historian must have wondered something like 'if Winston Churchill hadn't been shot down flying back from Casablanca in 1943, would things have gone differently?' 

    Among historians, it is worse. Any barman who has worked a conference with myself and my colleagues develops a sixth sense, their ears pricking up like a fox in the underbrush the very moment anyone clears their throat to say "Ah - but only consider: had Churchill and Roosevelt both lived to 1945...". 

    This is the moment to quietly bring a few more bottles of whisky from the cellar, and perhaps to send the younger staff home: once that phrase has been uttered the small hours will be drowned in good-natured counterfactual debates imagining all kinds of outcomes for the postwar world. 

    (My own doctoral supervisor, the late Professor Kenneth Banks, would never forgive me if I did not here mention his own pet theory that an Allied success at the Battle of the Bulge could have led to an even split of Germany between the United Nations rather than the Soviet bloc taking control of virtually all territory east of the Rhine!) 

    This phenomenon of historians confronting the biggest and most complicated geopolitical questions of the 20th century by dividing into ever narrower groups is so well known - and so famously lampooned by 'Baron von Took's Flying Circus' in their recurring "Dissident Academics" sketches ("Splitter!!") - I feel compelled to reveal my own pet theory here, so readers can understand the biases informing my analysis of alternatives to the NVLA regime.

    And, for the avoidance of doubt - I'm not a Dissident Academic: I find those sketches as funny as anyone. 

    I must state, then, that while I cannot imagine the might and fury of the Stalinist war machine would have been satisfied with anything less than near-total control of a defeated Germany, I do believe that - had the Allies successfully contained the Ardennes Breakout by March 1945 - they could have then advanced in time to secure a partition of Germany somewhere between the Rhine and the Weser, perhaps even with a divided Hamburg serving as a shared power-base and meeting point for the great powers. I am, of course, aware how fanciful this sounds to the laywoman, however, there are some indicators that a hypothetical (perhaps even an equitable) division of Germany into distinct "occupation zones" was considered: some records suggest this was tentatively mooted during discussions at the 1943 Tehran conference, a principle on which I base much of this theory. 

    In truth, of course, this matters little. Germany fell to the Red Army almost in its entirety, and the postwar Baden-Baden conference of July-August 1945 set the stage for all that was to follow, from Stalin's coded warnings to Truman that the capture of so much German research gave the Soviet Union access to "weapons of inconceivable destructive power" to the gradual obeisance of France to the Soviet economic sphere. 

    And of course as France - traumatised, economically exhausted, and terrified of a third conflict within two generations - slipped from the American sphere, the situation in the UK declined further. 

    Men returned from war to bombed-out homes, stagnant industry, and - often - wives who justifiably felt they had fought to keep the country alive, working in factories through the danger and trauma of the blackout and the bombers while their men - men who had shipped out promising to "write a postcard from Berlin!" - slunk shamefully home having never made it further than Dortmund. They had promised to return as heroes: instead, they became a burden. 

    Likewise, General Bernard Montgomery, elevated to the leadership of the Conservative Party at the demand of the troops who cheered him as "history's greatest Briton," achieved only a Pyrrhic victory in the election of 1945, proved incapable of controlling his people, his cabinet - or even his most passionate supporters. And - unsuccessful though it was at the time - the Labour Party's call, "Let's put the men to work - quick!" resonated on a far deeper level than anyone in 1945 supposed... 

    At the same time, it became rapidly apparent that the United States had no interest in anything outside the Pacific Theatre.

    Any hope that the faltering British economy could be boosted through some hypothetical extension of the wartime Lend-Lease agreement ended abruptly as Truman's invasion of Kyushu entered the stalemate of 1946, and unemployment, resentment, and rationing began their steady, almost inevitable climb. 

    But even accepting these facts, one alternative path remains open, almost screaming down the years.

    Time and again, in exploring the factors that caused the utterly inhumane Purity Culture of the NVLA to come to be, the historian must face the awful possibility:

    What if the Red Lion Attack had never taken place?

    What if the arch-criminal Sid Carter had been less jealous? Less demob-drunk? Less vilely male? What if, rather than react to the rumours of his fiancée consorting with an unknown American pilot in exchange for access to some of the minor creature comforts of the PX Store with rage and inhuman cruelty, he had instead shown her compassion and understanding?

    In short - if Britain had not stumbled from the horrors of the Second World War into the ashes of victory; alone, imperially bereft, economically stagnant, and saturated by disaffected, jobless men of violence like Sid Carter - could the 1950s–70s have become, as some sociologists have since theorised, the era of Male Liberation? 

    If Lily Charrington had not suffered the abuse she did, if both she and the world had been spared the violent attack Carter and his former platoon carried out in vile “retribution” for her supposed lack of chastity… could the NVLA have ever come to power? 

    If Lily had been spared, it seems obvious that Julia Charrington would never have begun her moral crusade, that the NVLA's Lily Flag would not have been flown at every house that dared not risk its windowpanes - but would that have been enough? 

    Or was some malign fate at work, determined to ensure that, by 1953, the Male Purity Laws would condemn every adult British male to the strictures of the NVLA's obsession with enforced male purity and reeducation through denial?

    In this work I will interrogate both the orthodox assertion that the NVLA's rise was inevitable, and the somewhat controversial assertion that, had Lily Charrington been spared, her sister Julia might never have entered politics at all. 

    The existence of the latter school is of course seductive - how much easier we would sleep if we could believe the lie that no elegant woman in a tailored suit could seduce Britain into fascism armed with nothing more than the shocking image of Lily's battered face and the demand that men's baser urges demanded the enforcement of traditional Victorian values of chastity and gender hierarchy! - but the truth, I suspect, is darker. 

    Even had Julia Charrington remained at Lily's bedside instead of weaponising her, another figure would have worn the same clothing of respectability, weaponised the same simple solutions that required just a little more power to be placed in her hands. 

    In interrogating the rise of the NVLA, I have been privileged - and occasionally horrified - to have access to the so-called Black Archive of the NVLA itself, and to interview both survivors of the regime and some of the men convicted of criminality, particularly those who were condemned under the Male Purity Laws. 

    The only clear conclusion I can draw is that, faced with economic stagnation and the fragility of a male population discarded and directionless after the Second World War dragged to an end in Europe, there were all too many eager to assert control. Women, forced out of jobs as war work wound down. Men used to taking and giving orders, thrown, jobless, into demobilisation. Tradesmen feeling the pinch as rationing dragged on. 

    The Red Lion Attack was only the excuse. The Lily Pledge was only the touchpaper. The NVLA was only a movement demanding change - but that movement was enough to condemn men to decades of chastity and punishment in order to maintain British purity. Not all of them, at the time, knew the regime's worst excesses. Many of those who did assessed the benefits, and turned a blind eye. The remainder were chiefly men, and whether they walked willingly into the lioness's cage or not, once in they could never safely escape it. 

    Readers are therefore cautioned that much of the content of this volume may be distressing, and it should also be noted that the Reconciliation Acts specifically absolved all women working for the NVLA of any immoral or inhumane actions.

    Those men whose stories are referenced in this volume are speaking the truth, as they understand it. They should be commended for this - I saw, firsthand, the terror it caused them even now, to openly criticise the NVLA to a woman (and I commend them particularly for doing so repeatedly when ordered) - but we must remember that they rarely had the full picture of the challenges faced by the State. 

    I have done them the justice of recording their statements as vividly and with as much detail as I could extract from them, but I must note that we may safely assume that such anecdotes and reports of one or two bad apples - whose corruption and inhumanity to the chastised and teased males in their power I will not dispute - must not be used to tar the entire NVLA Regime. 

    During that period, many 'Male Liberationists' opposed the Male Purity Laws on the grounds it was unfair to judge and abuse every man by the behaviour of Sid Carter and his fellow men. It is only right and just that, now, the women, the officials, and the re-educators who strove so hard to hold the line of decency, enforcing the Male Purity Laws as efficiently as possible be granted the exact same privilege. Yes, abuses did occur - but we cannot judge every case by the extremes. 

    This work, then, aims to understand the NVLA's origins and the social context which enabled it to flourish so rapidly - and then decline with such jarring, unexpected speed. 

    Even so, I am increasingly convinced that the underlying debate will never be settled. 

    Was the NVLA inevitable? Was the price of utopia too high, when those years of peace and sexual harmony were built on the backs of absolute moral purity and the deliberate disincentivising punishments of the "Long, Sharp, Shock" of mandatory edging and denial? 

    Only time will tell. And, so, as the nation looks with hope and trepidation towards the 21st Century, we must ask ourselves: which elements of our history do we risk, or dare, to repeat? 

********

...As I said, when it came time to publish On Chestnut Tree Lane, I decided it was better if these hypothetical sources never got a word in within the story itself. 

And, really, I think that's for the best - having read them, I imagine you can see why. 

Because exactly how his world got this way doesn't matter to Scott. The sociology, the politics, the moral failures - none of it matters once you're trapped inside the machine.

All Scott knows is that he's being edged and broken by the authoritarian regime that's engulfed him, and his handlers do not care whether he deserves it or not. 

It's simply the way his world is. And I think that's far more chilling - and perhaps more delicious - to read than any dry apologist historian. 

Alternatively - if you'd rather relax into the calm certainty of knowing that past sins can still deliver tenderness and intimacy and comfort (for which I would not blame you!) - then Anna Voss's Christmas Carol is available now.