Kippers: Publication date January 1st 2021
By: Fred Atkins
Tags: Fiction, Borders, Satire, Kent, Novel

I started writing Kippers in 2017, intending it to be a semi-sequel to “Welcome to Kent: Sorry About The Racists.” At that point there hadn’t been a land border in mainland Britain since Hadrian’s era, but by the time I’d finished the first draft, over three years later, the government were announcing plans for a lorry border for vehicles entering Kent.

A couple of drafts later and Kent was in Tier 4, its residents banned from leaving the county. As I write a new-strain of COVID has mutated, France has closed its borders and this article has just appeared on VICE, including a line that brilliantly captures the Zeitgeist: “‘They chuck two-litre Coke bottles full of piss straight onto the roadside,’ says the 77-year-old retiree living on the outskirts of Dover in Kent, who voted Leave in the 2016 referendum.”’

It was at this point that I decided I’d better publish Kippers before I was accused of plagiarising reality.

Life imitated art in other ways. The book is partially set on a prison ship, an idea that had been discredited for several decades until Priti Patel announced she was considering bringing them back. The main character’s hatred of the handshake ritual pre-dated COVID.

What I’d intended as a gentle satire had evolved into a cold-war hellscape …

THE PLOT:

The United Kingdom is on the brink of disintegration. Ireland has reunited, queues at the Scottish border stretch back for 20 miles and now Kent has declared independence and rebranded as the Democratic Republic of England.

There’s a puritanical, totalitarian regime, bankrolled by an oil oligarch, on their doorstep, but MI6 are so broke they can no longer afford offices in London and are renting a warehouse at Gatwick.

When an agent makes the mistake of protesting, his punishment is to be sent over the border, where he’s arrested on suspicion of writing a scandalous biography of the DRE’s leader.

He’s sent to a prison ship, moored within the blast radius of the wreck of the SS Montgomery and forced to film a series of propaganda videos, knowing that a single word out of place could ignite a full-blown civil war.

HOW TO BUY THE FULL VERSION:

You can buy a Kindle version of Kippers for £2.99 or a hard copy for £9.99. At present the book is only available on Amazon, which I appreciate is a company with a chequered reputation, but which is, with the notable exception of Greg Adams of GCR Books, by far the best publisher I’ve ever worked with and certainly the fairest to its authors. (Yes, Breedon Books, I hope your ears are burning at a hellish temperature right now).

It is available for pre-order on Kindle, with the release date January 1st. The paperback is also released on January 1st and typically takes about a week to arrive.

HELP!

If you’ve made it this far and like the extract below, please consider sharing it on social media. Please also DM me if you would like a review copy, and better still if you know anyone who could help turn it into a film …

Thank you!

Fred Atkins

December 21st, 2020.

EXTRACT:

PROLOGUE

There was a running joke about the HMS Liberty.

Alcatraz, it was said, had been designed so its inmates could never see San Francisco, because its architects feared the views would drive them to insanity.

On the Liberty there were uninterrupted views of Sheerness to the south, while on a clear day you could see the Essex coast to the north. Compared with that, the punchline went, incarceration didn’t seem so bad.

According to the downloadable PDF I’d been instructed to read, entitled “Life on Board”, it wasn’t supposed to be. Its uncredited authors claimed the Liberty was a vision for the future: a progressive prison and a model of humane rehabilitation.

In its previous life as a cruise ship it was capable of carrying over 200 passengers. Security measures had reduced the capacity to around 80, but in keeping with the progressive ethos, these measures were as non-invasive as possible.

Inmates were obliged to wear GPS devices at all times, but although these were impossible for the wearers to remove, they were disguised to look like a standard sports watch.

The uniforms, although the standard prison orange, were provided by a top American sports manufacturer and made from the latest adaptable fibres. Inmates were issued with two pairs of trainers, two pairs of sandals, cooling t-shirts for the summer and a range of base-layers, fleeces and gilets for the winter.

The ship’s interior looked like a cinema foyer, with a deep-blue carpet and giant LCD screens that alternated between dimly cretinous motivational slogans and adverts for forthcoming entertainment.

It was kept immaculately clean at all times. The food was nutritious and always cooked on board, the library was well-stocked, albeit with uncontroversial material, and inmates were allowed to use the leisure facilities during daylight hours, including a gym, two swimming pools and a squash court.

The guards wore soothing green uniforms and were obliged to follow a charter that ensured prisoners were treated with dignity and respect at all times. Any guard found to have violated the code by either physically or mentally abusing a prisoner was liable to be suspended and/or dismissed.

Racism, sexism, ageism and transphobia were all sacking offences and even light sarcasm was frowned on, although this was all part of the manipulation. Prisoners ordinarily hated their guards, but here they cultivated an air of benevolence that was calculated to make you think you must have done something wrong to be there.

The physical abuse was even subtler. Guards were explicitly forbidden from even touching the inmates unless they were defending themselves from assault or preventing an escape. Even under those circumstances there were strict guidelines for where they were allowed to make contact, and they were obliged to wear bodycams at all times. Any claim of provocation had to be supported by video evidence, meaning an inmate knew he wasn’t going to “fall down the stairs.”

What we didn’t know was whether they were trying to poison us. Although its moorings were supposedly permanent, if the sea was anything other than calm the Liberty would list dramatically, inducing a permanent sense of nausea.

The health-care on board was better than it was for uninsured citizens on the outside, but there was a permanent shortage of sea-sickness medication which I presumed was deliberate.

As none of my fellow inmates seemed to be affected, this messed with my mind as much as it did with my guts.

We were allowed to mingle freely during daylight hours, so it was at night, when confined to quarters after the 11pm curfew, that the isolation really kicked in.

Our cabins were two metres wide and four metres long, with a sink and a toilet behind a partition and a porthole a metre wide.

If you were on the northern side of the boat you could see the wreck of the SS Montgomery, still laden with an estimated 1400 tonnes of explosives, its three masts poking above the water, around a mile to the north east. On the opposite side some of the less intellectually agile inmates claimed that when the wind was blowing from the south you could hear the howls from Deadman’s Island, half a mile away, where the corpses of plague victims had been dumped centuries beforehand.

Hard copies of books, newspapers and magazines weren’t allowed in the cabins, which meant that when we were confined to what they called the residential quarters, the only available stimulation was the prison-issue tablet, the screen-saver of which contained the words: “You will be released in …” and a countdown clock.

Using the Kindle app, inmates could read from an approved list of downloaded texts, play a selection of non-violent games like chess and solitaire, and send emails to half a dozen vetted contacts, although these would be read by the authorities before they were processed. If you alluded to your incarceration in any way, or even used the word “cell” instead of “cabin”, another month would be added to your sentence.

Although Google and Wikipedia were banned, “Life On Board” contained an entry on the Montgomery, an extract of which read as follows:

Beneath the surface, the SS Montgomery is loaded with 286 blockbuster bombs, weighing 2000lbs each. There are over four thousand 1000lb devices still on board and approximately 2500 cluster bombs, which, unlike the others, were transported from the USA with their fuses already in place.

A report by the erstwhile UK government in 2004 concluded the bombs had deteriorated so much over 60 years that there was almost no chance they could detonate by accident. However, an earlier report, dating back to 1970, estimated that any explosion would “break every window in Sheerness” and result in a tidal surge, with a wave of anything between one to five metres in height. This could potentially flood the estuary, but in the extremely unlikely event of this happening, the HMS Liberty would be one of the safest places to be and the reinforced windows would most likely survive intact.

In the worst-case scenario, a contingency plan is in place to evacuate all crew and inmates.

You were supposed to wonder what “almost no chance” really meant. They wanted you to linger on what might happen if some unspecified lunatic tried to blow up the Montgomery deliberately, and all but the most naive of the inmates knew that the contingency plan would involve rescuing the staff while leaving us to drown.

*

The provocation was subtle, calculating and continuous, to the point that after a while I almost started to admire it. It was so subtle that the man in charge of the provocation didn’t even realise he was provoking anyone.

Tony Kendrick was a fifty-something failed actor who’d carved out a niche for himself running speed awareness courses and had found working for the junta to be a natural progression. He commuted from the mainland to the boat every day, driving to the island and taking the staff shuttle from a jetty at Queenborough.

Kendrick wanted me to call him Tony, because Tony wanted to be my friend. He claimed he admired my work and said he was distraught that we’d met under these circumstances. He intimated that if only I could come around to seeing that I was his friend all this would be over, very soon.

He hoped we might even start seeing each other socially and as it was in my interest to keep on his good side I told him that, when all this was over, yes, I’d love to come and see him in the Sittingbourne Players’ production of The Producers, assuming it was still running. Yes, I was anxious to attend one of his poetry readings and jam with his band. Hey, we might even play cricket together someday.

What I didn’t tell him was that in the unlikely event I ever did see him anywhere near a cricket field, I planned to ram a stump into his thorax, hammer bails up each of his nostrils, batter his teeth and shove a cricket ball into the remaining gums, before caving his skull in with my bat and force feeding the liquidised remains of his brains to the 31-year-old girlfriend he was seeing behind the back of his monolithically obese wife.

*

To an outside observer our regime would have seemed lax. We were only actually locked up between 11pm and 8am, there was no work of any description and there was ample time to gaze at the fishermen on Garrison’s Point or the runners on the shingle beach. In lieu of work inmates were obliged to attend the prison’s university, with lectures starting at 9am every weekday. There were coffee breaks at 11am and 3pm, an hour and a half for lunch and “free” time from 4.30pm, after which we were effectively given the run of the ship.

We were even allowed on the deck, with its inviting, one-metre high perimeter railings. There was no electrification, no laser warning system and no safety fencing below, meaning you could gaze down at the waves crashing into the hull. It was an arrangement that would have almost goaded you into climbing over the side if the GPS watch didn’t automatically trigger the alarm.

There was no specified punishment for attempting to escape, because, officially, no one had ever tried. This was because on arrival all new inmates were taken to the induction chamber, a windowless cabin in the middle of the vessel, where they were given a medical, handed their tablet and uniforms and then asked to sit in what looked like an optician’s chair while their face was scanned.

The scan was downloaded onto the central security computer and its details uploaded to a SMART drone, which would bury itself in your skull if you strayed more than a metre from the ship’s perimeter.

According to Tony Kendrick, the SMART drone was our best friend. It rendered escape impossible and therefore reduced the need for oppressive security measures like barbed wire, watch towers, embittered guards and dogs that would rip out your throat.

The induction chamber and the computer room were the only parts of the vessel that were guarded, but as they were behind security doors for which you needed a swipe card, it felt more like a bank than a prison.

My fellow inmates were classified as “politicals” but most of them were just teenagers who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. One had been arrested for singing “Evans is a cunt,” at an Evanstown United match. He didn’t deny the charge but he’d been one of at least 100 fans doing exactly the same thing and just happened to have been the one singled out by the stewards.

Another was a sixth-former who’d defaced a school text-book, drawing a fake beard on a picture of the Governor and scrawling the number of the beast on his forehead.

Others transgressions worthy of jail time included blasphemy, chalk penises daubed on the window of a newly opened evangelical church, 3am rage tweets about the defence secretary, accessing pornography and trying to procure alcohol while on military service. These were offences which, if punished consistently, would have resulted in the incarceration of every single 16 to 18-year-old male in the republic.

Sentencing for a first offence was standard: one week, subject to the successful completion of the Liberty’s four-day RRR programme, part of a PR strategy designed to present the Democratic Republic of England as a modern, outward-looking European democracy.

1) Recognise your crime

2) Reform yourself and the behaviour that brought you here

3) Regain your place in society by completing your personal journey

Day One was History, during which Kendrick gave us a sanitised account of the independence movement and taught us that partition, while regrettable, was essential for the self-determination of the people of the DRE.

Day Two was Government & Politics, during which Kendrick explained the philosophy of National Humanism, how it was a way of preserving the integrity of nation states, with outward-looking, humane and progressive border arrangements. This included a lengthy digression on concepts of democracy, during which he explained that by only allowing party members to vote they prevented their elections from being hijacked by nefarious foreign agents.

On the third day, in Economics, he used the republic as an example of an independent nation that was thriving because of a lack of regulation. In Environmental Studies he revealed that “clever fracking” was actually a progressive, outward-looking green policy that was a clean and efficient source of both power and wealth.

On Day Four we were introduced to DRE Values. Kendrick explained that as one day the DRE hoped to be reunited with a liberated British state, we were expected to memorise the words to both “Land of Hope and Glory” and “God Save The King.” We were also expected to pledge allegiance to King Charles, who, even though he still resided in Buckingham Palace on the other side of the border, was technically our head of state, making us officially a republican monarchy.

As they weren’t sticking bamboo under our finger nails, making us eat our own shit and forcing us to denounce our relatives, the average prisoner was sensible enough to play the game because on the fifth day, at the end of every course, inmates were ordered, or rather invited, to take a multiple choice paper and a written examination, the title for which was simply: “In no more than 500 words, why are you here?”

After the end of my first week I passed the multiple choice section with a score of 95 out of 100, the highest of all 80 inmates to have taken it. I was also the only one of the 80 to fail the written exam.

We’d filed out of the exam hall, a converted squash court, and waited on deck, asking each other how we thought we’d done and what our plans were if we were paroled. My ethos was always to plan for the worst while hoping for the best, but I couldn’t help thinking about the logistics of my release. I had no idea how I was going to get home, or if I was going to be able to give HQ any meaningful debrief about what had happened, given that they’d confiscated my passport.

Less than an hour later I was sat on a sun lounger by the swimming pool, looking out towards Deadman’s Island, when I saw the notification window pop up on my prison-issue tablet.

Dear Lawrence,

Unfortunately you have failed your rehabilitation exam and are therefore ineligible for release. We hope you will reflect on the reasons for this failure over the weekend and will join us for the RRR course on Monday at 9am, prior to retaking the exam next Friday. We are very much looking forward to releasing you in the very near future.

Sincerely,

Tony Kendrick

I made a point of hiding the news from my fellow inmates. I hadn’t expected anything else, but I didn’t fancy having the same conversation a dozen times over, so while they were checking out I drifted off to the library where, with little else to occupy my mind, I did indeed spend the weekend reflecting on why I’d failed.

The following week I sat exactly the same course, scored 97 out of 100 in the multiple choice section and wrote a marginally more candid essay, only to receive an almost identical failure message from Kendrick, 45 minutes after finishing the exam.

Once again, every other inmate passed. Once again, I was told to reflect on my reasons for failure, but there were limits to what I could disclose and at the end of the third week I still wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear. The truth was we both knew why I was there, and we both knew that explaining it was going to take a lot more than 500 words.

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