Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

every product they consumed: food, fuel, drinks, energy, shoes, clothing. ‘Starve and shiver’ had become the byword of a people who’d defeated Hitler proclaiming ‘V for Victory’ and ‘Thumbs Up’.

      Only one family in fifteen had been able to find and afford a Christmas turkey for the holiday season just past. Many a child’s stocking had been empty that Christmas eve. The treasury had slapped a 100% purchase tax on toys. The word most frequently scrawled on the windows of London’s shops was ‘No’: ‘No potatoes’, ‘No logs’, ‘No coal’, ‘No cigarettes’, ‘No meat’. Indeed, the reality confronting Britain that New Year’s morning had been captured in one cruel sentence by her greatest economist. ‘We are a poor nation,’ John Maynard Keynes had told his countrymen the year before, ‘and we must learn to live accordingly.’

      Yet, if Londoners did not have enough hot water that morning to make a cup of tea with which to welcome the New Year, they had something else. They could, because they were English, lay claim to a blue and gold document which would guarantee their entry to almost a quarter of the earth’s surface, a British passport. No other people in the world enjoyed such a privilege. That most extraordinary assemblage of dominions, territories, protectorates, associated states and colonies which was the British Empire, remained, on this New Year’s Day 1947, largely intact. The lives of 560 million people, Tamils and Chinese, Bushmen and Hottentots, pre-Dravidian aborigines and Melanesians, Australians and Canadians, were still influenced by the actions of those Englishmen shivering in their unheated London homes. They could, that morning, claim domain over almost three hundred pieces of the earth’s surface from entities as small and as unknown as Bird Island, Bramble Cay and Wreck Reef to great, populous stretches of Africa and Asia. Britain’s proudest boast was still true: every time Big Ben’s chimes tolled out over the ruins of Central London that New Year’s Day, at sunrise, somewhere in the British Empire, a Union Jack was riding up a flagstaff.

      No Caesar or Charlemagne ever presided over a comparable realm. For three centuries its scarlet stains spreading over the maps of the world had prompted the dreams of schoolboys, the avarice of her merchants, the ambitions of her adventurers. Its raw materials had fuelled the factories of the Industrial Revolution, and its territories furnished a protected market for their goods. ‘Heavy with gold, black with industrial soot, red with the blood of conquest’, the Empire had made in its time a little island kingdom of less than 50 million people the most powerful nation on earth, and London the capital of the world.

      Now, almost furtively, a black Austin Princess slipped down the deserted streets of that capital towards the heart of the city. As it passed Buckingham Palace and turned on to the Mall, its sole passenger stared moodily out at the imperial boulevard passing before his eyes. How often, he reflected, had Britain celebrated the triumphs of empire along its course. Half a century earlier, on 22 June 1897, Queen Victoria’s carriage had come clattering down its length for the festival that had marked its zenith, her Diamond Jubilee. Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, Hausas from Africa’s Gold Coast, the Fuzzy Wuzzies of the Sudan, Cypriots, Jamaicans, Malaysians, Hong Kong Chinese, Borneo headhunters, Australians and New Zealanders, South Africans and Canadians had all in their turn marched down the Mall to the plaudits of that energetic race to whose empire they’d belonged. All that had represented an extraordinary dream for those Englishmen and the generations that had succeeded them along the Mall. Now even that was to be snatched away from them. The age of imperialism was dead and it was in recognition of that historic inevitability that the black Austin Princess was running its lonely course down the avenue which had witnessed so many of its grandiose ceremonies.

      Its passenger sank back in his seat. His eyes, this holiday morning, should have been gazing on a different sight, a sundrenched Swiss ski slope. An urgent summons, however, had interrupted his Christmas vacation and sent him to Zurich where he’d boarded the RAF aircraft which had just deposited him at Northolt Airport.

      His car passed Parliament Street and drove down a narrow lane up to what was probably the most photographed doorway in the world, Number 10 Downing Street. For six years, the world had associated its simple wooden frame with the image of a man in a black homburg, a cigar in his mouth, a cane in his hands, fingers upthrust in a ‘V’ for Victory. Winston Churchill had fought two great battles while he’d lived in that house, one to defeat the Axis, the other to defend the British Empire.

      Now, however, a new Prime Minister waited inside 10 Downing Street, a Socialist don whom Churchill had disparaged as ‘a modest man with much to be modest about’.

      Clement Attlee and his Labour Party had come to office publicly committed to begin the dismemberment of the Empire. For Attlee, for England, that historic process had inevitably to begin by extending freedom to the vast, densely populated land Britain still ruled from the Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin – India. That superb and shameful institution, the British Raj, was the cornerstone and justification of the Empire, its most remarkable accomplishment and its most constant care. India with its Bengal Lancers and its silk-robed Maharajas, its tiger hunts and its polo maidans, its pugree helmets and its chota pegs of whisky, its royal elephants caparisoned in gold and its starving sadhus, its mulligatawny soups and haughty memsahibs, had incarnated the imperial dream. The handsome rear-admiral stepping from his car had been called to 10 Downing Street to end that dream.

      Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, Viscount Mountbatten of Burma was, at 46, one of the most noted figures in England. He was a big man, over six feet tall, but not a trace of flab hung from his zealously exercised waist line. Despite the terrible burdens he’d carried in the past six years, the face, familiar to millions of the readers of his country’s penny press, was remarkably free of the scars of strain and tension. His features, so astonishingly regular that they seemed, almost, to have been conceived as a prototype of facial design, his undiminished shock of dark hair setting off his hazel eyes, conspired to make him seem a good five years younger than he was this January morning.

      Mountbatten knew well why he’d been summoned to London. Since his return from his post as Supreme Allied Commander South-east Asia, he’d been a frequent visitor to Downing Street as a consultant on the affairs of the nations which had fallen under SEAC’s command. On his last visit, however, the Prime Minister’s questions had quickly focused on a nation that had not been part of his theatre of operations, India. The young admiral had suddenly had a ‘very nasty, very uneasy feeling’. His premonition had been justified. Attlee intended to name him Viceroy of India. The Viceroy’s was the most important post in the empire, the office from which a long succession of Englishmen had held domain over the destinies of a fifth of mankind. Mountbatten’s task, however, would not be to rule India from that office. His assignment would be one of the most painful an Englishman could be asked to undertake, to give it up.

      Mountbatten wanted no part of the job. He entirely endorsed the idea that the time had come for Britain to leave India. His heart however, rebelled at the thought that it would be he who would be called on to sever the ancient links binding Britain and the bulwark of her empire. To discourage Attlee he had thrown up a whole series of demands, major and minor, from the number of secretaries he’d be allowed to take with him to the aircraft, the York MW 102 he’d employed in Southeast Asia, which would be placed at his disposal. Attlee, to his dismay, had agreed them all. Now, entering the Cabinet Room, the admiral still hoped somehow to resist Attlee’s efforts to force the Indian assignment on him.

      With his sallow complexion, his indifferently trimmed moustache, his shapeless tweed suits which seemed blissfully ignorant of a pressing iron’s caress, the man waiting for Mountbatten exuded in his demeanour something of that grey and dreary city through which the admiral’s car had just passed. That he, a Labour Prime Minister, should want a glamorous, polo-playing member of the royal family to fill the most critical position in the empire that Labour was pledged to dismantle, seemed, at first sight, an incongruous idea.

      There was much more to Mountbatten, however, than his public image indicated. The decorations on his naval uniform were proof of that. The public might consider him a pillar of the establishment; the establishment themselves tended to regard Mountbatten and his wife as dangerous radicals. His command in South-east Asia had given him a knowledge of Asian nationalist movements few in England could match. He had dealt with the supporters of Ho Chi Minh