Out of Place · Midnight Disease Productions LLC

Entry #010: "Victory"

December 24, 2020·21 min·1 clip

A mysterious vinyl record reveals a World War I where Britain won with nuclear weapons at the Battle of Messines.

The episode opens with the narrator describing a domestic crisis: Lola's father has returned from an extended absence after the death of his wife, and with quiet resignation accepts that Lola will continue living with the narrator and Mike. The narrator reflects that he has unexpectedly become a kind of parent, a fact that surprises him more than it bothers him. At work, he receives a large flat package left on his desk — the latest artifact from the mysterious project. This one was purchased at the Vance Auction House in London for three thousand pounds by a contact who leaves a note asking to be reimbursed. The package contains a ten-inch vinyl record from the First World War era, in a cardboard sleeve showing a pianist in a pub surrounded by soldiers in uniform. The two songs are Eat Your Mushroom Kaiser Bill by Charlie Rackham, and The Ghosts of Flanders by Phyllis Vaughan. The liner notes indicate proceeds support a Brotherhood and Sisterhood of Relief for the People of Flanders. The narrator has a friend of Mike's digitize the record and then listens and transcribes the lyrics. The title song is a jolly Cockney pub tune celebrating what appears to be an Allied march into Berlin and full German surrender — something that never happened in the real First World War, where Germany signed an armistice before being occupied. The narrator traces the implied divergence to the Battle of Messines in 1917. Messines was already the site of the largest non-nuclear man-made explosion in history, when twenty underground mines were detonated simultaneously under German positions. The narrator imagines a timeline where someone developed a nuclear device before that point and used it at Messines, producing a literal mushroom cloud — the mushroom the Kaiser was forced to eat. He reasons through who could have developed such a device: a slightly more aggressive scientific tradition, a less pacifistic Marie Curie. The second song, the mournful Ghosts of Flanders, connects to the other consequence of a nuclear blast in Belgium: radiation sickness spreading through the civilian population in the form of an unrecognized new disease, with the relief charity existing to provide palliative care to the dying. The narrator concludes by arguing that a Britain with a nuclear monopoly, given its colonial violence including the Amritsar massacre and concentration camps, would not have produced a better world. He files the record away and returns home to Lola, reflecting that caring about her future has made him want the world to be better in a way he never has before.

As heard by us

A rare record becomes a careful mystery about preservation and inference.

Entry #010, "Victory," makes a rare record feel less like a novelty than a problem to solve. It stays with the practical work of getting it played, the caution around letting Mike in too far, and the sense that every object in the project carries some baggage.

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Why you'd press play

You want one rare record to unravel into a wartime mystery.

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