March, March...

1st July, 1972…

Thomas was nervous, and primed for trouble, but it was important that he be here, when so many people couldn’t be.

He was in the dress uniform he’d kept after the Second World War, medals pinned to the chest. Peter wore his medals, too, even though he'd been invalidated out of the second go around. Let anyone watching see that Queer men existed everywhere, and had fought and died for King and Country just like everyone else.

Reg, Syl, Theo, Kit… all of the old crowd from the Criterion, lost in the First World War, because German bullets didn’t care if you were Queer or Straight, even if the Army Brass did.

Tully and Jessop, passed from old age more than 20 years ago now, who’d been more like his father than Mr Barrow ever was, nevermind the unknown man his Mum had been seduced by.

Peter squeezed his hand, and even after almost 60 years together, it still felt like a miracle. Thomas told himself that all their old friends and comrades were marching beside them, today.

Rouse and Allenby were also somewhere in the March, with a nursing home orderly hovering about them as both of the retired doctors grumbled about the need for canes and walking frames just as Thomas had that morning.  Rapidly approaching his 90th birthday, Thomas couldn’t really protest that he didn’t need one. Thomas really didn't think either of his old friends were fit to be up and about like this, but he wasn't going to be the one to tell them to skip it, either.

An arm linked with his, and Thomas smiled down at Kate, standing beside him. She’d had a few flirtatious relationships with other women, over the years, but never settled down like Mary and Moira and their horde of adopted children, standing on Peter’s other side.

Ruby was at Grantham House, arranging an afternoon tea for after the March. George Crawley had fallen head over heels for her the first time they met properly, and courted her gently for almost six years, through Ruby’s slow recovery from the traumas of her youth. Half a century ago, Viscount Downton marrying a refugee commoner had been the talk of the scandal sheets, even though no-one could fault the manners Thomas had instilled in his daughters. Thankfully for Thomas’s blood pressure, that had been the only scandal the current Earl of Grantham had been involved in, which was more than could be said for Lady Caroline Crawley, at the forefront of the Woman’s Rights Movement beside her Aunt Sybil.

Sybil Branson would have loved to be here today, even if only as an Ally, but she and her husband had passed three years ago in France, having moved there after the War to transform the manor inherited from Dowager Countess Violet into a Wellness and Palliative Retreat for those who never quite recovered from the war. Liam Branson and his family - he’d somehow convinced a Frenchwoman to marry him - ran the Retreat now, and last Thomas had heard from them, were making considerable strides in the treatment of Shell-Shock, or Post-Traumatic Stress. Thomas didn’t pretend to understand half of what Liam and Chloe were talking about in their postcards, but he hoped that it did some good in the future.

There came a shout of “Smile!” and a bright flash.

Alice Wiggins, threads of steel-grey in her nearly white hair, took several photos before re-joining the lines next to her husband, Martin Wiggins.

Thomas had known that men like Syl existed, but he hadn’t been aware that there were women who also felt that they’d been born wrong, too. Trans, they called them these days, rather than Impersonators.

Most of England, if they’d bothered to read the bylines at all, probably assumed that Marigold Gregson, wartime correspondent, had retired upon marrying, or chosen a different career, when her name stopped appearing in The Sketch.

Martin Wiggins, a slight, slender man who never left his shirt unbuttoned, had quickly replaced her at The Sketch, making a name for himself through human interest stories, partnered with his wife, Alice, as photographer. The Jewish Diaspora and Holocast Survivours, Documenting the damage of the Anti-Intellectual movement Refugees from Europe, Exposure of Nazi sympathies in the upper class…

They’d never be household names, but they’d risen to take over the business when Lady Edith and Michael Gregson finally retired, only a year before their deaths. Martin had been their only child, despite trying for years to have more, and perhaps that had made a difference when it came to accepting that they had a son now, rather than their beloved daughter.

Volunteers came running down the edges of the staging area. “Everyone ready? We’ll be starting in a few minutes!”

Beside him, Peter laughed as Mary and Moira hefted a banner between them, printed with the faces of the London Peculiers that Peter had somehow managed to dig up in preparation for the day. All of them looked through time, laughing and happy, as they had been one summer in London, 59 years ago. “Ready? Lad, we’ve been waiting on this for decades!"

Somewhere up ahead, music began to play. Thomas still wasn't sure that this wasn't going to end in disaster, but if it did, he'd go down fighting, and make sure Alice got a good shot of police tackling a war veteran in his 80s.

The people in front of them began to move, and Thomas leaned over to kiss Peter on the cheek as they marched toward the future.

I wrote this as the epilogue for a Downton Abbey fanfiction series, which was in turn a spin-off/continuation of another Downton Abbey AU fanfic that takes place before and during World War I.

As I was writing it, I started thinking how much that first Pride March in the UK, more than 50 years ago, must have meant to the people who took part, less than 6 years after homosexuality was technically legal, but Gay, Lesbian and Trans people were still being arrested at unimaginable rates for comparatively minor offenses that were definitely related to their Queer identities.

I couldn't not include it in the Pride Challenge.