Classic British Holidays (1): The great Brentford Panic of ’04.

caravanserai photo  

Left: DSS Caravanserai Holiday Camp before the disturbances. Right: the scene after the riot. Brentford Leisure Centre is to the immediate left.

 Patricia Farson reports on the recent holiday of two of the domestic staff of the House of Panzerben

Regular Combat Viewers will remember that our Chief Cook Elmon and his assistant, Siedlitz, left us temporarily to go on their annual semi-compulsory State Subsidised holiday.

They were taken under Social Services armed escort to the Bingo Caravanserai Camp, with a good supply of their

official experimental medication. Their holiday was by courtesy of the National Re-Socialisation and Compulsory Detox Scheme. Located behind Brentford Leisure Centre, the Bingo Caravanserai Camp is one of a network of Social Security Holiday Camps specially reserved for those with a high enough arrest record and enough dole vouchers to form what is unofficially termed an impeccable social  security history.

For the average Welfare Consumer, the Bingo Caravanserai Camp has a formidable appearance. “Let’s Try Again” banners flutter from the top of the razor-wire fence; “One Step at a Time” is spelt out in wrought iron on the entrance gates, and Bull Pit dogs patrol the perimeter. But there are happier things. The camp has Health and

Strength programmes based on unique fantasy-decontamination software designed by Brentford pelicans. There are courses for Designing you own Personal Social Adjustment Plan, and How to Relate to the Imaginatively Maladjusted in terms of Ethnic Analysis and Real Time Integration. There are Community games. Everything is Community. And everything is real.

There is Real Community food and dining, Real Community Socialization, and Real Community free time. As we at the Combat Diaries waved them good bye, we knew that if Elmon and Siedlitz had their way, there would also be Real Trouble.

Trouble did indeed begin during the Consolation Contest for Rejected Claimant’s Wives, illustrated above. Elmon refused to be rejected for the fourth time, and Siedlitz caused a riot when he got on stage to rescue his humiliated partner (=wife, see above). Disturbances then began, with inmates and playmates hunting for the scalps of every left wing psychiatric social worker who had not fled behind the police lines. Under normal circumstances, such a scalping would have been acceptable by both the Police and community and nothing would have been said had not Dame Nature decided to take a hand.

The trouble was, that like most local council constructions, the entire Bingo Caravanserai Camp was built of ticky-tacky and water. Moreover, the huge underground complex for Compulsory Medication and the even bigger Semi-Optional Bio-Implantation Experimental Wards had been built by GungeTack Corporation Ltd. This was a firm which, like

 most corporations, was steeped in drugs, prostitution, white slavery, and kiddie-pornography, to name just a few just things discovered in passing by something called an “investigation committee,” a phrase written on every 21st century gravestone.

Of course, after “investigation,” those accusations which were not investigated were more than sufficient to secure a hefty grant from the local Labour Party. Thus all would have been well but for GungeTack’s policy of employed illiterate disabled workers from Third World countries, and the strange behaviour of the “experimental” building material, “Gungetack” itself, which had pioneered by means of a “scientific breakthrough,” yet another phrase written on every 21st century gravestone.

To cut a long story short, the said Gungetack dissolved under the first heavy rain of the year. It was most unfortunate that this occurred at the same time as the serious rioting.

At this point, the Leisure Centre Management Team being quite overwhelmed, the Brentford Housing Trust decided to lend a helping hand.

After some two days not one member of this august non-sectarian body of heroes was ever seen again, and upon the site of their mysterious disappearance were discovered traces of cannibalism, human sacrifice, incest, and indescribable occult practices.

It was then decided that an Extraordinary Meeting of Brentford Council Housing Department was due. This was attended by 4000 Senior Executives, 2067 Area Executives, 6000 typists, 2567 Ancillary Social Workers, 5000 Receptionists and one fellow-travelling tenant. It was decided to let matters be for the time being pending the raising of more funds to make the project “viable.”

With the press screaming about a Social Security 9/11, and with the Leisure Centre used as an emergency prison, the Brentford Chamber of Trade decided to bulldoze the entire DSS Caravanserai.

But even a simple act of demolition was beyond the pelicans of Brentford. Within the merry month of May, twelve Assistant Managing Directors of various pedigrees and personal inclinations killed themselves.

There were eleven resignations of Managing Chief Executives, ten Architectural and Building Standards prosecutions, there were countless assaults by contractor upon contractor, and the costs soared beyond

all thought of even Brentford’s liberal financial imagination.

As always, only the Public Relations operation was good. The bribery lobby of Brentford Chamber of Trade claimed it was a show of local difficulties within a Definitive Operation within a Prototypal Time Share Solution Framework.

Others took another view entirely. It was thought by many that Brentford being the great sceptical centre of British Downer Culture, the very connection between Belief and Matter had become so depressed that the very fabric of the Protestant Firmament was so broken in twain such that yeah, certainty and deterministic predictability had become cosmically unstable, even. (forgive Patricia’s Jewish expressions –ed)

The result was that Savants, Gurus, Priestesses and Heresiarchs of every kidney descended upon the site. Various eschatologists claimed the DSS Caravanserai was built on a piece of God’s little acre that was eternally unstable, creating crises in both belief and the structure of the material world. 

To top the excitement, as Elmon and Siedlitz were handcuffed eating Quorn Fungus Turkey Fingers in the Leisure Centre, UFOs were seen over the Cliff Richard Centre ruined holiday caravanserai.

But it was a sighting of the fabled Griffin of Brentford that really brought the nation’s attention to the troubles experienced in this spot. A full account of the appearance of this fabulous mythological bird can be seen in the article “Brentford is the Garden of Eden” by Andrew Raine of the Hounslow Guardian, available in full at the end of the Introduction to Combat Diary 22.

In this article, a certain Robert Rankin is mentioned. He wrote (we jest not – see Amazon) The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, and The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag. Would you buy a second-hand belief from such a man? He claims also to have written seven books on Brentford. Mr Rankin says that the alleged sighting of the Griffin was a hoax started by himself and some friends:

“For months, the town was awash with residents claiming to have seen the mythical beast, half-eagle, half-lion, flying around the town. There was even a Griffin Crisis Centre', set up to cope with distressed griffin spotters. Others held that perhaps the sightings were connected in someway to the place the Griffin occupies in the town's collective subconscious - it features on the old coat of arms for the former borough of Brentford and Chiswick.”

And for the world to see, we now have the final proof of the connection between Brentford and John Rimmer, the Brentford Polonius, Editor of Magonia Magazine. Mr Rankin comments:

"It was a hoax, what did you expect? I created it with the help of John Rimmer, who had been working with Magonia magazine at the time.”

Well all we can say is that whilst the claimed Griffin sighting might indeed have been a hoax, events within the DSS Holiday Caravanserai just behind the Leisure Centre over several months could hardly have been hoaxes, such was their scale and intensity. What other explanation could there be other than chronic occult instability of both Matter and Idea for the following incidents over a period of three months? Writing in the Brentford Post, the writer Paul Smith (author of a psycho-social study of the area entitled Brentford: a Sceptical Town) lists truly incredible events that occurred in the building of the DSS Caravanserai months before Elmon and Siedlitz arrived for their semi-compulsory State Subsidised holiday. Says the unblushing Paul Smith:

“There were divorces numberless, the site sank two feet the following August, their were six cases of homosexual rape amongst the voluntary Marxist women workers, and the Leninist Site Manager was never see again after he sold illegally two of his beloved tractors about which collectivist poems had been written. Worse was to come. Several staff members of the John Pilger House of Real Thinking had their throats cut by holiday campers with the space of a single morning; the Site Stoker was found crucified; the Cook from the Arthur Scargill Happy Peasants Home defecated in the cocoa tourine, and was caught ejaculating in a huge vat of worker’s ham and pea supper soup. This caused a riot the like of which has not been seen since the Brentford Eisteddfod of 1947, to be described on another occasion.

The following month the whole and entire site sank another three feet. The DSS tracked and armoured Site Payout Vehicle was incinerated by Molotov cocktails because of its lack of central heating, and both the Claire Short Togetherness Complex, and Folk Arts Centre were destroyed by arson. The Proletarian Emporium collapsed, being made of Gungetak, and three fully-armed women socialist community “real” proletarian doctors, being dispensers of compulsory experimental medication and electro-shock, were overwhelmed and taken prisoner. They were shot, and their heads mounted on poles above the Leisure Centre.”

The latest news is that a very dim lamp has been seen on the site, and the sound of flutes can be heard, caught almost imperceptibly through the derelict holes of the shattered Gungetack structures still standing.

When they are duly released from The Bing Crosby Private Memorial Jail we expect Elmon and Seidlitz back home any time to relate  further episodes of their astonishing life, times, and astonishing Welfare Holidays.

More next month we will have more on these incredible events in the Brentford Area.

Yours in love and danger in the visionary Last Days.

Patricia