Empire Day

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It is a fact generally acknowledged that when a squad of heavily armed policeman and soldiers breaks down one’s front door, drags one out of bed – ignoring the screams of one’s wife; incidentally, I had no idea she could scream so loudly – and pins one to the floor with the muzzle of a gun to one’s head that, all things considered, it is not wholly unreasonable to conclude that one is probably in a lot of trouble.

Things calmed down a little after the initial excitement.

‘Isaac Putnam Fielding,’ a plain clothes police officer had informed me, a little breathlessly, ‘you are under arrest for suspicion of fomenting sedition.’

That had not happened lately.

What was it they said about variety being the spice of life?

I was hauled to my feet.

Sarah, my wife, had stopped screaming; we had only been married a year or so – well, in the common law sense of the term – but none of that ought to have come as much of a surprise. Our very common law ‘marriage’, I mean. She was twenty-eight years my junior, had been one of my graduate students and in the beginning at least, seemingly infatuated by my reputation for being one of, well, most of the time, the University’s only surviving dissident from the old days. That had been the attraction: Sarah was bright, ambitious, angry – and as cute as Hell – a redhead with Irish green eyes who ought to have shacked up with somebody her own age and started a family by now. Instead, she had moved in with my much-diminished brood; or as my unwanted guests would say: former ‘nest of seditious vipers’.

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