A Brief History of World War Two

Once upon a time, they all lived happily ever after, The End.

At least, according to some authorities.

According to Mr Clinton, however, what happened next was as follows:

Daisy, six, and Billy, four, lived in a refrigerator.

‘Daisy,’ said Billy, ‘I’m hungry.’

Daisy ignored her little brother. She was drunk on gin.

Mr Hitler’s doodlebug has smashed their house to pieces; Mummy and Daddy too.

The idyll could not last. Daisy and Billy were sent by the authorities to live with a Mr and Mrs Electron in the country in a big house with a big garden with statues and a tennis court and a stream with a trout named Ike and a boat. Mr and Mrs Electron talked about Scottish politics and ate kidneys and kedgeree for breakfast.

‘What is World War Two?’ asked Billy.

‘It’s the continuation of World War One,’ said Cook, and decapitated another rabbit.

‘Who stars in it?’ asked Billy.

‘It’s the prelude to World War Three,’ said Herbert, the second footman, who was shot the next day for unpatriotic and depressing talk.

Mr Electron based his life on an HG Wells novel.

Mrs Electron found a use for Billy when she discovered he had a knack for picking racetrack winners.

Billy, though enmeshed in history, had limited knowledge or understanding of it.

Mr Electron might have told him that World War One (which took place in a trench) had itself been preceded by the Franco-Prussian War, which followed the Napoleonic Wars, which followed the Seven Years War, which followed the Thirty Years War, which followed, or continued, millennia of conflict.

Mrs Electron, if questioned about causes, or Allied war aims, might have replied that Hitler was mad, and had to be stopped.

One night when there was a full moon, Daisy and Billy ran out into the garden and met a dragon.

‘What’s your name?’ asked Billy.

‘Jack Hawkins,’ said the Dragon.

‘I don’t like the country,’ said Billy.

‘Och,’ said the Dragon, it’s God’s country. You must make the most of it.’

‘I hate you,’ said Billy, ‘You’re a Triffid.’

The Dragon bit off Billy’s head. ‘Let that be a warning to you,’ he said.

Daisy flew on the Dragon’s cold scaly back across the black North Sea and deep into Occupied Europe. Cleverly the Dragon dodged anti-aircraft fire. Skilfully, it scattered KitKat silver foil to confuse the radar. Persistently (a thrifty Dragon) it munched KitKats and frequently was sick.

‘What’s your name?’ asked Daisy.

‘Albert Einstein,’ said the Dragon.

‘Are you a rogue male?’ asked Daisy. ‘Are you sure we’re flying in the right direction? When will we get there? Are we going to kill Mr Hitler?’

‘Look!’ shouted the Dragon.

Daisy was startled and nearly fell off his back. ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘What?’ she said. ‘I don’t see anything.’

‘An elaborate red herring,’ claimed the Dragon, ‘whizzing past. On a shoestring.’

‘That’s what wars are for,’ said the Dragon. ‘To scare people.’

Just then, suddenly, the End of the World took place.

But then, the next day, God changed his mind. And in a broom cupboard, door ajar, in Tooting Bec, a cat named Henry snoozed the snooze of the just, dreaming of torching prowling dogs. But then, a V1 landed on Henry, and that was the end of Henry. The Oxford Companion to World War Two does not tell how many cats perished from V1s, or V2s, in Hitler’s war. Nor dogs, come to that.

Another plot, said to derive from the deathbed ramblings of Simon Peter, tells how Moab of the Cushites smote Cyrus of the Tribe of Din and how God, pleased at the spectacle, instituted regular warfare, among humans, for His amusement; but like many an addict, came to require an ever stronger fix. ‘More blood,’ God would say.

Simon Peter’s plot is very long. Mr Mandelson is removing the ice from Greenland in order to cover the island with a six-storey library to contain the billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion volumes of Simon Peter’s plot.

‘There’s an awful lot of blood in your plot,’ said Tony Blair.

‘It’s all true,’ beamed Simon Peter, proudly stroking his plot. ‘Every word.’

Humphrey the cat frowned: ‘Don’t you think we should put that sort of thing behind us?’

Another plot says that Mummy and Daddy came back from the dead with a case of Spam and made everything better again, but not all plots are to be believed.

Finally, it was revealed, when the audience had forked out its hard-earned penny, and the curtains were parted, that Bill Clinton’s grandad is a black bear, to be seen on the horizon, that God does have a plan for the world, that Winston Churchill, when drunk, believed the number 23 to be the answer to the riddle of existence, that Guy Fawkes was a girl, that Saddam Hussein lives on the end of the President’s nose, that all is, possibly, for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that Corgis, in Outer Space, can subsist entirely on carrots; and these things being established, beyond a reasonable doubt, Daisy became a Benedictine nun, so she could stay permanently pissed, and Billy married blindingly healthy Aryan Hamburg blonde Erika, and they named their seven children Ohm, Plug, Watt, Volt, Superconductor, Battery, and Char.