Excerpt

 

She turned and dipped the ancient scrubbing brush into the bucket of scummy lukewarm water and then returned to the chore she'd been set. The long dimly lit corridor stretched out into the distance. Quickly she wiped a tear from her eye and began to scrub. She'd been here a month now. Just one month into a minimum twelve month sentence. Already she had been cowed and defeated. She had long since ceased to profess her innocence. That only brought her more punishment. She had learned the hard way that the only possible response to the accusations and insults from the staff was agreement. She was a racist wasn't she? Yes, Miss. She was a bully as well? Yes, sir. Any other answer was guaranteed to provoke her accuser into a paroxysm of fury. She would be kicked or slapped or one off the wicked little canes the staff all carried would be whipped across her buttocks or the palms of her hands. She found it hard at first to terms with her treatment. Like most she'd been conditioned to side with the 'oppressed ' minorities. She and her leftist friends simply refused to accept that the massive increase in immigration would have any detrimental effect on the country. So convinced were they that they refused even to discuss it. Now she knew better. Her business which she'd build from scratch over the last three years had simply been stolen from her. All the hard work and sleepless nights she'd endured had counted for nothing. Her reward was to find herself incarcerated in this nightmare prison. It wasn't actually called a prison of course. No, this institution was where preconceived attitudes were adjusted. She almost smiled when she considered that. The Campaign for Racial Equality assumed that every white person was a racist, until they could prove otherwise. Even Catherine's impeccable liberal credentials hadn't passed muster. A simple but brilliant idea. She'd lost her business through fraud, and she'd been imprisoned to prevent her fighting her case. A whistling noise and an agonising pain in her backside reminded her to keep on scrubbing the already immaculate stone corridor. "No slacking you kuffar whore" She hadn't heard the Asian man but she certainly paid the price for her lack of attention. The guard simply ignored her and carried on down the corridor. That's all she was to these people she realised, a whore. Her middle-class background, her university degree, her business skills all counted for absolutely nothing. The country appeared to have regressed to a sort of Victorian culture where men had all the power and women were treated as chattel.

Even the most hardened left-wing, supporting feminist couldn't deny that Hardwicke House was a prison for white women staffed exclusively by black and Asian officials. Although described in the literature as a re-education centre, that was simply a euphemism for a racial prison. It was nothing less than an attempt to re-educate women from a minority viewpoint. Consequently the education part of the process was taken very seriously. The residents of Hardwicke were required to attend a myriad of lectures on a wide variety of topics. The linking feature of all these topics was to promote a non-white, non-European angle. For example the British Empire was portrayed as a wholly fascist exercise. There was simply no discussion. The European, and especially the British colonisation of Africa and Asia, had been reclassified as 'genocide'. The descendents of those responsible had to be punished and re-educated to understand the viewpoint of the oppressed.

Catherine sat at a desk laboriously writing out by hand an 'alterative' of Colonial history. The view that she was required to understand, memorise, and then regurgitate was that the British excursion into its' overseas territories was a wholly negative history. There were no acceptable benefits accruing from Imperialism. The reign of Queen Victoria was understood to be 'genocidal'. Under her oppressive regime, Britain has slaughtered and enslaved millions of black and Asian people. That was the 'true' Holocaust. That was what people like Catherine and her ilk were paying for. The white, British race had to understand that reparations were now not only desirable, but essential.

Catherine risked another glance up at the board. She daren't risk catching the eye of her teacher. It was already demeaning enough to be sat at a child-sized desk in a ridiculous school uniform writing things out by hand. Computers were forbidden at Hardwicke House. Teachers didn't give out photocopied work. They simply wrote things on the board which their charges had to copy into their notebooks. Why would they discuss what was in the textbooks? There wasn't another opinion. In Hardwicke House and hundreds of other similar institutions up and down the country there was only one acceptable truth. Catherine remembered with a shudder how one girl, who must have been in her thirties, had attempted to engage in discussion with a teacher. The intimidating large black man had simply seized her by the ear, dragged her out to the front of the class and belaboured her backside and thighs with his large hand. Catherine remembered how upset she'd been at the time. Her male friends would certainly never dream of spanking a woman! The whole surreal incident seemed like a dream. Now she hardly noticed the constant punishment meted out by her teachers.