IF HITLER COMES describes the early years of the war. After a phoney war period there is peace. A government weaker than Chamberlain's takes power, while fascist agitators provide the breakdown of society that gives the Germans an excuse to send a peace-keeping force. Opposition is demoralised and quickly collapses. The fascist leader, an Irishman, realises that he has been used and turns to resistance but socialist opposition ends with a single shooting accident, the Labour Party does nothing. The narrator of the story, a New Zealand journalist, escapes home before the ultimate bloodbath to write his true account, for his journalism was false, censored and manipulated by English and Nazi alike. The manuscript is supposed to have been discoved and published by Maori archaeologists of the far future.

Even though the book only appeared after the outbreak of war it is very much a warning of the dangers of pessimism, collaboration and the hope of cohabitation with the Nazis. The abuse of parliamentary democracy- the failure of the Opposition to oppose - is a strong element. Some real people appear in the book, but fortunately they acted in reality in a better way than Brown and Serpell thought they might.

In his essay "Worlds Without End Foisted Upon the Future - Some Antecedents of Nineteen Eighty-Four" (in Christopher Norris, ed. INSIDE THE MYTH Orwell: Views From The Left), Andy Croft describes many of the anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian novels of the 1930s (without mentioning IF HITLER COMES) but he concludes "There is no evidence that Orwell ever read ... any of the anti-fascist novels mentioned above". I wonder, though, did Orwell have a hand in writing IF HITLER COMES.

Compare a passage from the book with another published eight years later:

'"I shall never forget the frantic plea of a Reader in CLassics at London University, on being told that he would be held in "protective custody" there. "Stoke Poges!" he screamed. "No, no, not Stoke Poges! Anywhere but Stoke Poges! Please don't send me to Stoke Poges."' (IF HITLER COMES chapter seven "Terror")

'"I've got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn't six years old. You can take the whole lot f them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch it. But not room 101."

'"Room 101," said the officer.' (NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR Part three chapter one)

Ideas from Orwell's other writings also appear -

• that a British fascist leader would not be English,
• media manipulation,
• the loss of language,
• the use of economic autarky.
• A fascist meeting in Leeds in the novel is similar to a meeting in Barnsley recorded in Orwell's diary;
• Bernard Goldsmith - for a short time parliamentary opposition to the collaboraters - has a "sheeplike profile and gold pince-nez", while Goldstein in the Two Minute Hate has a "long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep". Goldstein, of course, was supposed to be based on Trotsky, but why should a British Home Secretary be descibed in a similar way?

As late as 1943 when Orwell reviewed some pamphlets he wrote of one, I ,JAMES BLUNT that it was a "good flesh creeper, founded on the justified assumption that the mass of the English people haven't yet heard of Fascism". IF HITLER COMES is in parts a flesh creeper but manages to be serious as well. Did Orwell know Serpell or Brown, or are the similarities only coincidence? More information would be gratefully received.

I sent this account to Andy Sawyer, then editor of PAPERBACK INFERNO, and he forwarded it to David V. Barrett, who published it in VECTOR:THE CRITICAL JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION, under the title "Not Stoke Poges". Barrett pointed out that the book is listed in I.F. Clarke's VOICES PROPHECYING WAR. John Brunner in a letter suggested "Not Stoke Poges" was a phrase in everyday use.