The London Pride Read Online Free Page A

we’ll bring you the Georges. We’ve a lot of soldiers to move before midnight or it will be disastrous. It’s going to be Dunkirk all over again, except by land.’
    She rose, wings swirling the air into a down draught that buffeted them as she turned and flapped towards the museum.
    ‘Dunkirk?’ said Tragedy. ‘Who’s he?’
    ‘It’s not a he,’ said Jo.
    ‘She, then,’ said Tragedy. ‘Pardon me. I ain’t educated like some.’
    ‘It’s a place,’ said Will, remembering his history lessons. ‘In the Second World War the army got stuck on the wrong side of the English Channel and all the little boats and ships of Britain went over and brought them home, all higgledy-piggledy, little yachts and pleasure-steamers and coal barges and whatever floated. Ordinary people did it, saving the soldiers. Because they couldn’t save themselves.’
    Tragedy looked round.
    ‘Well, we’re ordinary enough,’ he said. ‘We better get on with it.’
    There was a pause.
    ‘I should like to take a peek round the corner though.’ Tragedy stepped off the chariot. ‘You coming?’
    ‘Will?’ said Jo.
    ‘I’ll be right back,’ he replied. ‘It’s just up there; I’m not going far.’
    He followed Tragedy the fifty metres to the corner and looked around. There were figures moving everywhere, stone and bronze statues of all ages and sizes weaving through the forest of frozen humanity, gingerly carrying the unmoving bodies of military statues as they wound their way through the maze.
    Will had felt torn about coming to see this, worried about leaving even fifty metres between him and Jo, but when he saw the crowd of helpers working together to rescue the fallen, he knew he’d done the right thing. Of all the weirdness he had witnessed since time stopped and the dragons began moving, this was the most strange, and he would not, he admitted to himself, have missed seeing it for anything.
    He was watching two worlds impossibly coming together, not colliding, but passing through each other. The statues took care not to knock any of the people, but only in the way you wouldn’t want to walk into a tree trunk if you were walking through a forest, and the people … Well, as far as he knew, they could not see any of this, and if they did, they would not remember it when they started moving again. If they started moving again.
    He saw strange combinations as they passed – bewigged politicians and aristocrats carrying tin-hatted soldiers from both world wars on their shoulders as if they were carrying a boat between them. He saw winged Victories and angels labouring in flight just below the level of the rooftops as they carried away stiff bronze bodies hanging from each hand. He saw a statue he recognised as the Officer from the Artillery Memorial, the one who had led the sortie against the museum, being trundled past on another chariot, this one driven by two fierce girls in flowing robes.
    ‘Oi!’ said Tragedy. ‘Icy Girls, where’s your mum then?’
    One of the girls looked at him.
    ‘She stopped moving like these ones. We left her behind.’
    As they passed, Tragedy turned to Will.
    ‘Their mum. Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni. Call her the Red Queen, we do, cos she was such a warrior. S’pose that’s why she’s stopped too.’
    The firemen ran up. They were carrying two small statues and a big one of a soldier in a tall bearskin hat with a long bayonet on the end of his musket.
    ‘Come on,’ they said. ‘No time for standing round gawking with your mouths open. Thought you wanted to help!’
    They put the big statue into the back of Quad’s chariot and wedged the two smaller ones on either side of it. They were indeed the St Georges who had made friends with Will, and he had seen that they made up for their size with speed and bravery: they wore armour but had their heads bare, heads that looked much too modern for their medieval get-up, like a couple of ‘jolly good chaps’ from the 1920s. Which is, in