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Yorkshire bred, strong in’t’ arm an’ thick in’t’ head!”
    “ Compelling ! Leeds United. Parks. Trees. Country pubs. Cheap beer. No shandy.”
    “You’re not even from Leeds, you Yorkshire twat!”
    Tommy’s voice betrayed angst. James was calm. The others suspected that he would have worn the same pokerfaced expression had he been part of the B Company 2 nd Battalion that faced the Zulus at Rorke’s Drift.
    “Shandy.”
    Stanley sighed at the familiar argument. “All right, all right,” he interjected wearily; clipped Norfolk tones cutting through the distinctively accented north and south spat. James tipped his typically Yorkshire flat cap to the cockney, and looked to Stanley, who resumed: “We’re in a bad spot right now, chaps. A bad spot. The jolly good news is that we’re apparently a damn sight more worthwhile than the Poles, and the SS are being uncharacteristically nice. I say until we work out what the devil is going on around here; we do our best to keep it that way.”
    “So what do we do?” Brian asked. It was the Yorkshireman that answered.
    “Go to class and learn how to be a perfect Nazi. Learn some German while we’re at it.” James scowled. “Then we’ll be able t’order sauerkraut in Hamburg, and one of those giant mugs of ale without using a translator. Family ’olidays…”
    “Hilarious guv’nor,” said Tommy sourly.
    “No, it’s very much not,” the Sergeant said, and shrugged. “But given the circumstances… in all probability, he’s right. Let’s just see what our new SS friends like Major Wolf have in mind.”
    James, unusually talkative but warming to his role as a sardonic commentator, looked over to the SS guard on duty in the dining hall. “I’m not looking forward to t’ next full moon.”
     

“The Land That Time Forgot,” the man intoned to himself, under his breath. The words were lost to the winds. As the gusts subsided at intervals, the sound of his footsteps echoing in almost total silence was unnerving; it felt like the main street of some remote Texan ghost town; a desolate chunk of humanity in the desert. Certainly not a central district of the capital of western civilisation; London, the city and beating heart of the world’s largest empire.
    “For now ,” he muttered again, verbalising his thoughts. All senses tingled; he was conscious of the rustle of leaves, shrill whoosh of the wind He crept on, through the eerily silent streets of Bloomsbury.
    The windswept street on which proudly sat the Royal Oak public house was a cobbled, stony testament to hundreds of years of London history; the loves, lives, blood sweat and tears of the capital’s melting pot of people had bled themselves over the stones until they were etched into the very fabric of the city itself, becoming part of its eternal energy, ethereal and tangible alike. The road seemed indistinguishable from the multitude of identical streets around that part of Bloomsbury, reassuringly in the interregnum between fashionable and unintimidating to the common man, and was a welcoming enough place for the Londoner in need of a drink.
    “Perfect,” old Arthur Speakman the landlord would say. “From the writers to these petit bourgeois the commies always chelp about, workers, students, graduates, locals to passing trade from the centre, we ’ave it all. We’re the hub.”
    Famed for its group of resident writers and intellectuals that took the area’s name as their own, and with a hotpotch that covered all bases of the lower-middle and middle classes, Bloomsbury was, much like Camden, a mixed bag. It was not uncommon to hear a medley of dialects from around the capital spoken there; indeed, several regular voices in the Royal Oak had more than a hint of Bow Bells, as opposed to the more local twang of vowels and consonants that is fostered within the sound of the church bells of St Pancras and St George. The trademark garden squares that punctuated the dense mass of duplicate