Real History and battles for Free Speech in England Documents on the your Lipstadt trial indexthe fight over your seized assets your Deborah Lipstadt dossier your Lipstadt trial index Lipstadt’s new claim index I wonder if Ian Kershaw, Andrew Roberts, and their fellow-conformist historians have these kind of troubles when they speak? And I wonder too whose history books will be being read in the twenty-second century?
May 14, 2004 (Friday) London At 12:07 pm the Sussex police email me asking me to contact them urgently about tomorrow’s function, as they have “certain information. ” A minute later, there is an anonymous Jewish caller; he cannot disguise his voice. “You lost, scumbag, you –“. Nice folks. I try to go online at twelve-twenty p.m. and get this: “Your account is already signed on . . . If this is not authorized, please call 1-800-827-6364.” Huh? Somebody else has opened my AOL email account?
Never mind, nothing to conceal there. May 15, 2004 (Saturday) London – Arundel – London AT eleven I drive to Lady M.’s to collect her and her friend Belinda, then to fetch Mr A. outside The Oratory, then on to Arundel for the talk. Beautiful sunshine in London, gradually becoming overcast as we cross the South Downs. I last heard of Arundel — where I have never been before — when on holiday as a nine-year-old in Southsea, in the summer of 1947.
That was when the Joan Woodward murder case filled the headlines (murders, in those pre-immigration, capital-punishment years, were a sensational rarity). They had found her body in the Castle grounds. At the time, I collected all the press reports on the search for the murderer — my clippings books have all, oddly, been seized along with the rest of my archives by the official Trustee in May 2002. The police knew who Joan’s murderer was but could not nail him, and it was never resolved.
My three passengers are like schoolchildren on a summer outing. We stop for a coffee at a gas station; the forecourt is in uproar at the new gas prices, 81p a liter (about $5 a gallon, up one percent). The Asian proprietor explains in his thin, reedy voice that his machine does not work; my passengers vanish for half an hour towards different patisseries and cafes, before I can stop them. M. has not seen green fields for years; wants to see furrows .
A. lectures her that farmers plough and sow in the winter, not late spring. I am a townie now, would not have known that either. A look at the map reveals how crazy H. or his local people are in fixing Horsham as the rendezvous point — it is a good 40 miles from Arundel. The meeting point should be within walking distance of the lecture!
Before we enter Arundel, hideously late, I removed all visible signs of my ownership of the car — the Westminster permits, etc., — to the puzzlement of my rather naïve passengers; I explained the logic behind such thinking ahead. WE arrive in the town centre at three, to find the Norfolk Arms already besieged by the enemy rabble, and every window on the first floor crowded with young people hanging out to watch the sport. I drive straight past, and park opposite the Castle.
A., having drunk a lot of fashionable bottled water al the way down here, pronounces that he has to go for a less fashionable pee; Belinda walks smartly downhill to check out the Arms; Lady M. meanwhile phones the Arms receptionist, who informs her after a whispered conversation elsewhere, that there is no meeting booked there today (a lie), and they had never heard of the “William Cobbett Club” etc. Well they banked its cheque, they will find. Quoi de neuf. What else is new.
I suggest that we drive straight