God's Country

Part Seventy-Five

'The fear of the Lord is the instruction of wisdom; and before honour is humility.'

Proverbs 15:33

Downing Street had started to resemble Meadvale. Charles Buckingham smiled at the idle thought as he nodded to the security guard on the gate and walked towards both his home and his office. He liked to walk between government offices if he could do so, although he always had to be followed by his nervous protection detail, and the changes were much more evident at walking pace. Despite the residential space on the upper floors of numbers ten and eleven Downing Street was basically a long connected government office block. He gazed in several windows as he strolled past, pleased to see several veiled women concentrating hard on their computer screens. But even outside the government enclave, where he could not yet prescribe a strict dress code, modesty was certainly much more visible on the streets. More importantly immodesty had been almost totally removed from public life with the police reporting little need to arrest anyone. In other words, the people were operating within the boundaries that the CDP had set, without resistance, and Buckingham believed that was good for everyone. It was all for the greater good, of course.

However, it was still rare to see a traditionally dressed Reformist out and about anywhere other than Meadvale, or within a relatively small group of ministers, senior civil servants and their families in London, centred on Westminster. Philip Henderson had likened it to seeing a veiled Muslimah on the streets, and he had a point of course. In certain places it was quite a common sight, as the Muslim communities tended to flock closely together in places like Bradford, Birmingham or areas of London like Southall or Bethnal Green, but elsewhere it was relatively rare. The same was still true of Reformism, and Pastor Winstanley had been collecting data from his growing army of congregations around the country. When Charles Buckingham first arrived in Meadvale the First Congregation numbered just under a thousand people. Less than half of those were women, and even some of those did not veil apart from services at the Cathedral and some formal social events. In a matter of months, since the Reformists started reaching outside their epicentre, the First Congregation had rather more than doubled in size. Every single woman within that burgeoning number veiled every day and Winstanley had to hold two services every Sunday morning to fit everyone in to his Cathedral, his pride and joy. Across the country, church attendance had also doubled, and because of the demands imposed upon people, they were going much more regularly than ever before. His estimates suggested that some ten thousand women owned proper church clothes and veiled 'sometimes' as the pollsters put it. Still a tiny amount in the great scheme of things, although the press seemed to delight in trying to suggest that the practise was widespread, to fuel accusations of a Christian crusade. But the truth was that the number of level one Reformists, another pollster's term growing in popularity and daily usage, was incredibly small, even if it was growing quickly. So it was impossible to accuse the CDP of starting an extremist revolution, even if those at the very centre of government were all increasingly committed level ones. Philip Henderson had made another salient point, using revolutionary Iran as an example. The Iranian regime were all ruthless, relentless hardliners to a man, imposing their ideals on the people, but compliance was not, in general, fervent or passionate. Outside of the 'bubble' in Tehran, people went on with their lives, complying with the basic laws without going to extremes. The women wore long black chadors over western clothes in many cases and were not pilloried for it.

In London, because the majority of high profile Reformists all worked in and around Westminster, the press could always snap a traditional Daughter of Eve somewhere, but elsewhere they would have struggled to find any, outside of Meadvale and the surrounding area. Having said that, Charles had been told that the Reformist style of dress, usually slightly watered down and rather less restrictive, was becoming quite fashionable in many places and situations. Most stores stocked such items all of a sudden and they were selling quite well for that to be the case, with David Harrington and Paul Craig investing in a factory in Pakistan to make even more. Even the big fashion designers were following the modest, more feminine trend, according to his advisors. Projections suggested that, over the life of the first CDP parliament of five years, level one Church membership would rise to roughly fifty thousand people, a staggering rise but still no more than a drop in the ocean with a population of approaching seventy million. That was why Winstanley talked of a renaissance rather than a revolution, because he wanted to change public behaviour, not necessarily convert people in a huge unmanageable rush. In the initial phase, it was enough to see the underlying principles of Reformism – decency, modesty, piety and obedience – becoming engrained in society by both law and behaviour. They were certainly setting the scene for a possible revolution, but to be ultimately successful they needed to take baby steps towards the overall objective.