Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25626-20170620165203/@comment-21519-20170705223334

Moving two comments I've made on talk pages here, now that I know this page exists:

Clement Attlee
So I'm a little less than halfway through A, and while I'm holding off on either making edits or sharing my thoughts till I'm done, I thought you guys might like to know that Attlee does turn up in the series at long last. He attends a peace conference with Truman, de Gaulle, and Stalin's replacement (I'll hold off on spoiling that one, not that it's any great shock). He and de Gaulle don't say a word at the conference, they just nod along with Truman's demands. Really quite pointless.

Anyway, in a private meeting with Truman, Attlee says the UK was supposed to have a general election in 1951, but cancelled it for the same reason they cancelled the elections of 1915 and 1940. That's not true, of course. The Parliament elected in 1950 could have sat till 1955 without any problem. Attlee called an election in 1951 (OTL of course) for the same reason May called one this year: He thought he saw a chance to turn a small majority into a large majority, but it backfired.

The inconsistency does give Truman an opening to announce a plan that may or may not come to anything later on. I suspect that, if not for that, HT wouldn't have written Attlee into the story at all.

Daisy Baxter
She didn't make it.

The last scene of Chapter 1 is Bruce's first as POV, and he uses it to wander into a churchyard just as Daisy's funeral is winding up. A burning piece of the shot-down bomber landed on top of her when they both bailed out of the car. He sustained heavy burns trying to pull it off of her, but she was already gone.

He's afraid to go in and actually take part in the service because he blames himself for getting her killed and is afraid the mourners will as well. There aren't many of them; most of her people died when Sculthorpe got nuked. He does end up chatting with Wilf Davies as the funeral breaks up, and Davies is glad to meet him because apparently Daisy had spoken fondly of him back in the day. Talk then turns to "Aren't you a bomber pilot who nukes Russian cities?" and "If I were I wouldn't be able to admit it, wink wink." Then McNulty privately reflects on how many deaths he's caused, as all the other bomber crews on both sides have done. If he's like Gribkov or Staley I'm sure we'll get plenty more like that.

But it's curtains for poor old Daisy. It really is a lovely sendoff for her. I just wish it hadn't been there at all. :(