The Night the Lights Went Out

by John Eider

‘I doubt he’ll be in much of a position to help her,’ said Wareing as we walked back up the hill, ‘Not once farmer Tommy’s found out he let outsiders in and led them right to his dirty secret.’

  ‘He didn’t try and hide the bodies when you asked to see them?’

  ‘No, he seemed glad to show me. The fight had gone right out of him. His daughter was in that barn, I’m sure.’

  I accepted this, but I still had questions, ‘So… how did the little girl not know about the bodies? I mean, if she played around the farm?’

  ‘Oh, she knew alright.’

  ‘But…’ I stammered.

  He explained, ‘She knew and she didn’t know; or rather she knew and didn’t want to know, so made up a story about the people leaving in a way which may have seen them one day return.’

  ‘And anyway,’ I asked, ‘who put Tommy in charge? Who gave him power to kill those people, to take new wives?’

  ‘You already know the answer to that one. Okay, let me spell it out: the question isn’t Who had allowed him to do these things? So much as, If he fancied doing these things, then who was there to stop him?

  ‘Remember what the Major said,’ Wareing was here recalling further nuggets from our training, ‘about how, without central government, people would revert to primitive forms of leadership? There is no long arm of the law with national reach now. Instead think in terms of chieftains, godfathers, robber barons… You have heard of robber barons? They did still teach history at your school?’

  I took this Officer’s dig at my Private’s education on the chin,

  ‘Yeah, we drew cross-sections of castle walls and everything.’

  ‘Then you know how the King let a man in each county keep half the taxes he raised in return for keeping order? Only now there isn’t even a King, no national sense at all, not even a clue of what’s going on over the next hill.

  ‘Anyway,’ he concluded his point, ‘it could be far from the worst thing for that town to have someone like Tommy take charge.’

  ‘Are you serious,’ I asked, incredulous. ‘A psychopath who kills his own neighbours… his own wife?’

  ‘Oh, it’s far from perfect I grant you; and at any other time I’d want him locked up just like you. But he’s strong willed, evidently tough enough to keep order; and he’s a farmer, Crofts: he’ll get the harvest in, and that’s vital.’

  I thought back to the training day, the Major talking and I not really listening – he was chuntering away all day it seemed, I absorbed with some piece of kit or other – about how if we had had to have had E-Day happen then it couldn’t have happened at a better time of year: May, the start of summer, the crops planted and we having till August to worry about bringing them in. ‘The tragedy,’ he went on, ‘would be letting crops die in the ground, whole acres of barley and wheat rotting about them as the population starved.’ Hence why finding diesel for combine harvesters and labour to form gangs were among the UN and the Government in Exile’s first priorities. The way he spoke, I wondered if within a couple of years we wouldn’t be tethering able horses and making ploughshares out of scrap metal?

  Wareing was still talking as we reached the hilltop and gathered up what had been left in a hurry,

  ‘To be driving around in his tractor now means he knows he has enough diesel for his machines come autumn. I guess he owns a fair piece of this valley anyway, and that he’ll also be harvesting as much of anyone else’s – or what was anyone else’s – land as he can, just to have as much produce to barter with when whatever happens next happens.’

  ‘And the other local farmers, you reckon they ended up..?’

  ‘In the barn? Possibly, or Tommy is only one of several running things together. But anyway, that’s not our concern. We have too much to get done. You good? Come on them.’

  And off we went once we had our things, trudging over open country, in what soon became apparent as an arc around the town, to then continue in the north-easterly direction we’d been following since landing. Yet Wareing didn’t quit talking as we trod along the edges of what may well have been Tommy’s fields… only now he was chastising himself,

  ‘That was a terrible example to give you on your first day.’

  ‘How d’you mean..?’

  ‘Just for the record, that little scene at the barn was outside of our remit, and not what we’re here for. No, not at all. We cannot afford to care every time we see atrocity. You have to learn that, Crofts. And I’ve gone and given you the worst possible example on our very first engagement.’

  ‘Well,’ I attempted to leaven the tone, ‘perhaps we can call it your one indiscretion, your single act of mercy; and then maybe, when the chance arises, you’ll allow me mine?’

  ‘Easier said than done, my friend. Easier said than done…’

  As we walked we found a trainline, weeding up already with disuse. I guessed from its direction that it would’ve taken you right into London, an hour or so’s commute. Tommy’s and others like it had been dormitory towns, full of those with good jobs in the city. There would be a few farmers still around to tend the fields and to provide local colour, to offer the illusion to the incomers that they were living something like the rural life. Well, they were living it now: I wondered how many hadn’t gotten out, hadn’t had the money, the contacts or the luck to earn a passage somehow and find places on a boat or chopper? There’d still be many there I thought, living under Tommy’s rules, and who’d probably be spending the next however many years sweating like navvies for him; while the famers they humoured would be sat there, shotguns on their lap guarding the harvest, and living off the odd slaughtered pig. Or so ran my idle fantasy.

  ‘They must have a ton of diesel stored somewhere,’ repeated Wareing, still fascinated by the tractor, ‘to be burning it up just driving around town, when we might not hear another engine for days.

  ‘Of course, there seems to be a misconception that even if the British had petrol again that our cars still wouldn’t run, because the charged atmosphere of E-Day affected their electrics. Yet there was no evidence of this happening even on the day. Their batteries might be a bit flat by now of course, but that’s quite a separate matter; while diesel engines wouldn’t even have that problem.

  ‘I think that in the public’s mind anything electrical has become confused with radios,’ he continued, ‘for the atmospheric static from the storm did affect those devices, and the interference this caused would be the last thing that listeners would remember hearing before their power supplies ran out. I expect they think that even with a fresh set of batteries that that’s all they’d still pick up now; when in fact the radios have been working since the storm passed, and so they could be tuning into anything broadcast strongly enough from Europe.’

  I asked, ‘I thought the Army were dropping those clockwork radios off everywhere they went?’

  ‘They are, they are,’ he concurred. ‘Invented in Britain, made in Cape Town – who says God doesn’t have a sense of humour? As if to dare to build an Empire requires the acceptance of the possibility of complete reversal. How would you better put it? “Those whose empires the gods wish to destroy, they eventually drive mad.”’

  He declared this at the top of his voice in deliberate misquotation, a nearby bird startling from her nest in response to the noise.

  At midday we paused in a small wood, the ground there dried by what sunlight broke through the leaf-cover. I looked at Wareing’s case as he dropped it to the dirt.

  ‘It’s all in the folder,’ he said, noting my interest. I opened it – the first time I had been allowed to see its contents – and took out the papers, reading,

  ‘“Civil Defence”?’

  He sat down beside me, whittling with his knife at various items from among the leaf litter found on the ground, talking as he worked,

  ‘After the Second World War Britain was left with a whole network of watch stations, looking out for attacking aircraft and reporting their positions to HQ; HQ being in London or w
herever the Joint Chiefs of Staff were at that time based. The people who manned these watching stations were called the Royal Observer Corps, and it was their calls with reports of positions of incoming aircraft that saw the pieces being moved around the large table maps you see in old war movies.

  ‘The planes soon got faster though, travelled higher, and radar became better at tracking them than people; but there was something new to watch out for in the sky, something that could do a lot more damage that a Dornier dropping bombs on the wrong warehouses.’

  ‘Nuclear?’ I blurted.

  ‘Indeed; though how able the Joint Chiefs thought people might have been at giving a calm and collected position of a nearby mushroom cloud, I don’t know. Bear in mind that these would be volunteers from the nearest town, the town the cloud was at that time billowing over and killing everyone they knew. But anyway, the watch stations were put to this new use, and with any new stations built after this time being fitted with underground rooms and blast-proof doors… and every single station had a heavy duty phone-line installed with a direct line to HQ.

  ‘By the late Sixties, with the nuclear threat never materialising, the stations began falling into disuse. However, with the fear of “the Bomb” returning in the Eighties, many old positions were brought out of mothballs in the name of what was then called Civil Defence.

  ‘Think about it a moment,’ he offered as an impromptu thought experiment, ‘had the Bomb dropped in say Nineteen Eighty-five or -six. These bunkers were concrete buildings, nestled underground, some of them dating from the War and out of use for maybe twenty years. I mean, back then the buildings we were throwing up above ground were bad enough – rotting concrete, damp walls, poor build quality. Imagine you were a watcher seeing a nuclear strike on the horizon, locking yourself in and calling the Home Office. You’d be stuck down there in those grotty rooms for three, six, twelve months before you could even risk poking your head above ground to view the carnage. Everyone you lived with in your town as likely dying as dead; and you consigned to an eternity of subterranean civic architecture! It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘With the fall of the Berlin Wall of course, the project was finally over; but by then there were hundreds of these places – watch stations in parks, in fields, on the roofs of public buildings and attached to bunkers in the basements. And that’s not all, as by then a whole web of regional command bases had been built; while essential telephone exchanges and TV relay stations were built bomb-proof and several stories down, their lines to London running deep underground.’

  ‘But how haven’t I seen all this?’ It was an obvious question; to which he answered,

  ‘But do you see libraries, Council depots, day centres? There’s been little built since the War with the public purse that didn’t have something hidden under or around it.

  ‘Think for a moment, in the old world, how often you went past a door between houses, a little concrete structure off an alleyway, a small civic installation tucked alongside the road. If you even stopped to look at such an object you might only think it were a junction box, an electrical substation, a pump house, a telephone exchange. You wouldn’t believe would you, that even if one of those was the structure’s actual function, that behind the door there might also have been a staircase down and rooms spread out beneath your feet, rooms once full of maps and switchboards and bunk beds. We were fighting the Cold War, my friend. Measures had to be taken else we might all have been killed.

  ‘Don’t worry, once you’ve seen a few you’ll know what I’m on about.’

  ‘That was what was in Tommy’s town?’

  ‘Yes, a wartime watch point ran out of the local Army Cadets’ base, later given a few underground rooms when the Civic Hall next door was renovated in Nineteen Sixty-eight.’

  ‘So what was down there?’

  ‘Not much of any use to anyone now I expect, like most of those we’ll encounter; But who’s to say? That’s the reason we’re here, to note the ones that have been cleared out, and to make certain of those that haven’t.’

  My head was spinning with information, but a thought came clear,

  ‘But this is all twenty years ago.’

  ‘Oh, half a century so in some cases!’ he shot back. ‘Some of these bunkers have been slowly rotting down for decades. But imagine if you found one with its old equipment still intact, even in part? A switchboard, a hotline to the heart of Government, books full of codes and call signs; the ability to misinform or to be sent classified intelligence, to call an airstrike or bring a regiment out of barracks. Imagine the fun someone could have with that?’

  I tried to think of what most people would have made of finding such a bunker, whether they’d even know what it was or what it might be used for. I said,

  ‘But are you seriously thinking Tommy, or Grampy or the little girl..?’

  ‘Oh, if that mob happened to fall down the manhole then I expect they’d see there was no wine or anything sellable down there and climb straight back out sharpish.’

  ‘So why all the effort?’

  ‘Crofts, don’t let the kindness of the French blind you, or the last sixty-five years of peace kid you into believing that Britain falling into such decline as we’ve seen since E-Day wouldn’t in the past have seen us invaded before now. The Russians had as detailed records of these sites as we do, the East Germans too; and who knows what of that data is on the open market now. There could be spies here living much as we are now, scouting around the place for any advantage or point of weakness. The Americans too, if only to check we’re keeping ourselves secure. Don’t kid yourself that the international community is content sitting in France sending over care convoys.’

  ‘So you really think that… someone… would think of using one of these bunkers in an attack?’

  ‘Imagine you were them, finding a still-active location. Bed yourself in down there with your headset on, making control believing you’re part of some local task force, and you’d be privy to everything going over the phonelines. Tap it, and you’ve got that information being listened to by whoever around the world might want it listened to.’

  I tried to think through the implications; Wareing seeing my doubts,

  ‘Look, you don’t have to be convinced – the Major and others think it’s a risk, and one it’ll only take a handful of us to put a cap on. Unless you’d rather be thrown onto dog work on the motorway convoys? Anyway, it’s not just old holes in the ground. Some of these systems are still operational, even weaponised, and so checking them is just as important in a completely different way.

  ‘Now, think about Britain as a whole. The reconstruction can only take place at such a pace: the power can only go back on in an area, as the security cordon is pushed back around it, and as the transport links are cleared to bring food in. It’ll take years to get back to our old state; hence throwing us into the badlands beyond the cordon to get to certain touchy points first.’

  Chapter 7 – The Hollow in the Woods