Saki’s 1913 When William Came is the best guide to a Britain transformed overnight. | Daniel Hardaker

‘Things seem absolutely unbearable, but bit by bit, we find we are bearing them’.

On the face of it, nothing like this has ever happened before. Thus, we suffer from a severe shortage of material from which to draw comfort or guidance. How adrift we are to be wrestling with something which, especially in England, none of our forebearers has ever had to deal with. As there is absolutely no precedent for a medical-Stakhanovite England steaming into the horror of perma-biosecurity panopticon living, let me, then, suggest Saki’s 1913 When William Came. It is not perfectly suited – one has to compromise here –, but its tale of a Britain under the thumb of Imperial Germany has many remarkable parallels with the events of the last year.

The novel’s focus is the absurdity of a handful of Britons as they simultaneously attempt to adapt and to resist. I hope the tragicomic resemblance to our own behaviours and thought patterns offer at least a little release. It did for me.

A diplomatic crisis in colonial Africa inspired by the real-life 1911 Agadir Incident causes stock market nervousness that disproportionately affects Imperial Germany’s Reichsbank. ‘War between two such enlightened and civilized nations is an impossibility,’ declares a minister on the Friday. The Hohenzollerns, however, are spooked and can sense an opportunity. By the following Saturday, a dizzying snap-checkmate attack has caught out the heavily stretched Royal Navy and tiny standing British Army, with the speed and totality of defeat surprising even the victors. Britain is annexed, becoming an ‘Alsace-Lorraine washed by the North Sea’. A government in exile is set-up in India.

Parliament and the old political parties still exist, but they are clipped and pruned from above – muted marionettes of the one fundamental issue that now underlays all others. ‘It makes one smile bitterly to think that this time last year we were seriously squabbling over who should have the vote’, remarks one observer.

Try using Wayback Machine to check BBC News’ January 2020 output and reading something about a Trump impeachment attempt.

Murray Yeovil’s morbid curiosity compels him to seek out that which he knows will depress him. In once instance, deliberately choosing a Teutonic looking taxi driver fully aware that a request for ’38 Victoria Street, please’ will be met with a gruff confirmation of ‘Viktoria Strasse achtunddreißig’. Murray is driven to insanity by his inability to stop himself focusing on the dual-language signage and announcements, the double-headed eagles that have replaced the royal cipher on the post-boxes, and the outdoor cosmopolitan café-type seating cluttering the roads of a formerly serious, austere political capital that now displays a frivolousness previously more suited to the boulevards of Paris and Berlin.

Is this not a bit of the really-not-wanting but-wanting-to check the latest shock-doctrine insanity coming from the press conferences?

Cicely Yeovil, Murray’s wife, is, or was, a rugged individualist and genuine patriot. The bait she throws to her own conscience is perhaps the best approximation of the minds of those sceptics and conservative commentators who u-turned without much evidence when the realisation, conscious or not, of the scale of the leviathan and the threat to their own personal positions became apparent.

While even she may, on some level, recognise that not allowing the trauma of social dislocation and the severing of important friendships to be what chiefly is governing her actions, she is sustained by vast illogical fantasies of deft political intrigue, that of appearing agreeable to her German betters, but all the while aiding a yet-to-be-seen resistance.

When those dreams become too outlandish, then maybe one of a Liberal-Conservative England offering a pushback against Prussian Junkerdom from within the empire will suffice Similar must be occurring in the minds of most Conservative MP’s and libertarian think-tankists.

The dislocation pushes novelty. ‘People do nothing worth doing, say nothing worth saying, but do and say nothing over and over again’. Entertainment begins to adjust itself to the desperately unhappy, desperately attempting not to appear crushed or to avoid the truth staring them in the face.

In their case, a completely alien, vapid and un-British fad for ‘suggestion dancing’ grips London. Which, to me, is their version of the fake-crowd-noise football, stripped of all the vicissitudes of social ritual, sense of place, and communal memory forging: the post-spectator Spectator sport.

Ultimately, even Murray cannot help but acquiesce through a chain of small occurrences, notably being enlivened by a conversation with a German officer giving him a lift when he discovers they have similar hunting interests. He forgets, momentarily, the overwhelming despair of the situation and begins to warm to such a feeling, gradually withdrawing into a stupor of blissful ignorance.

Perhaps this is the fate for most of us with pre-revolutionary experience that have resisted this. Futile anger and indignation are difficult to maintain for a lifetime.

In the end, however, hope lies in the youth that never experienced what should have been their birth right. They learn of what has been taken from them through the cultural afterglow and heritage of literature, oral stories, and music, to which their oppressors have not had the means to completely eradicate. And slowly, they start to disobey.

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