by John Eider
Wareing woke to find me standing before him with my knife drawn,
‘A British soldier still spooked from sleeping outdoors? Do you know how noisy woods can get once the wildlife wakes up?’
‘This was big,’ I said.
‘Just a sound?’
‘Several, from different sides.’
‘He rose to stand beside me,’ Well, if whatever it was wanted us dead then it would have pounced earlier. As it is, it’s woken us just in time. Come on, we can use the twilight.’
We gathered our belongings and kicked over the fire, as with still-warm meat to finish off we walked to the first of that night’s targets.
Wareing strode confidently down paths between fields of over-waist-high crops, holding his maps and compass before him. Back in Calais, amongst the various items of kit I had asked about and was laughed at for requesting (including such soldier’s fundamentals as helmet, body armour and a gun) had been night vision. ‘You only need night vision in areas with both lights and darkness,’ Wareing had explained. ‘Half an hour of pitch darkness and you’ll see things an owl would miss.’
It was only an hour before he pointed,
‘There it is,’ and sure enough, just beside the ridge between fields we were walking along, rose a small hump. On closer inspection it was man-made, a concrete mound about four foot high and twice as wide, with a large manhole cover on the top. In an arrangement I would become used to seeing, it was held in place by rusted bars and a padlock. I noticed we were quite high up, on something of a land-locked promontory, and with fine views as far as my night-adjusted eyes could see.
‘What was this place?’ I asked.
‘An observation post manned by men from that village.’ He pointed down the slope to what I could only make out as a higgledy-piggledy assortment of trees, shadows and rooftops. ‘Well, don’t stand on ceremony.’
Not needing asking twice, I swung the jimmy out from its hook beneath the sleeve of my jacket; and with a series of horrific clanks that rent the night air as they did the metal, I had the hatch open within the minute.
‘Torches only when out of plain sight,’ he advised as we climbed down the ladder that ran down the inside of the revealed concrete tube, ‘and don’t look at the beam – you’ll wince, and it’ll set your night-sight back twenty minutes.’
Six foot down, I turned mine on and shone it into the gloom below,
‘I can’t see a thing.’
‘Well, keep going. It can’t be too deep.’
Eventually, the optical illusion of an infinite pit of darkness below me resolved – in slightly sickening fashion – into a featureless floor of indeterminate distance. Only judgeable by finding the end of the ladder, my foot touched the floor at the same moment that the tunnel above us resounded with a huge metallic noise.
Clang.
‘Someone’s closed us in!’ I shouted from the bottom of the tunnel.
‘Probably just the wind,’ said Wareing, as he climbed up and pushed the lid back open. ‘There you go,’ he said, peering out as if a submarine commander on his observation deck, ‘no one around.’
But chasing Wareing back up the tunnel, I heard something else,
‘Voices!’
‘They could be anything.’ He snapped, ‘And for God’s sake keep your voice down.’
‘But you heard them too?’
Yet he only asked to be let back down again, I holding the ladder with one hand as he squeezed past me and into the murky depths.
‘Watch the lid doesn’t close this time,’ he instructed from below.
As I rested on the rungs, my elbows on the rim of the opening, I heard the voices again, fainter and moving away,
‘They sound like kids to me – out at this time? What are the parents doing?’
The response echoed from the chamber,
‘If their children are still alive, then I’d say the parents are doing a great job.’
‘I wonder if that’s who was watching us earlier?’
‘Don’t be fanciful.’
‘It was a way away, I suppose. Anything down there?’
‘Keep your voice down, and turn that torch off.’ His voice came clearer, before he was again bounding up the ladder and shooing me out of the way,
‘It looks like it’s been cleared out. I can’t even find a phone cord, if there ever was one. Come on, there’s one more I want to reach before morning.’
‘So, we don’t need to..?’
‘Make it safe? No, the bunker in Tommy’s town,’ (as we had come to talk of it) ‘was better-equipped. It had a row of phone sockets in the wall, and an old switchboard someone could have got going. There’s nothing worth the explosive down there,’ he said, nodding at the pit as I closed the lid and tried to pull the broken bars back over it. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll talk on the way.’
We started down the hill, continuing in the direction we had been going. The ridge we had walked along before led on in this way, and that suited me, not wanting to walk too quickly through a ploughed field in darkness. Then, over the sounds of wind-rustled corn, came what was that time the unmistakable sound of human voices.
‘There,’ I said, each of us instantly standing stock-still. ‘I told you there was someone else here.’ Yet these voices were different: older, less playful. Instinctively we bolted for the field to our right – lower ground, more sunken – and dived to the earth a few yards behind the line of crops. I feared even to move, to breath… but the sound of the close-grown stalks moving in the breeze was more than enough to mask any noise we made, we rising to crouch just below crop-height. From our vantage point we saw a group of men approach along the path we had just been on, and – for all their swinging about to point their guns in all directions – go right past us without a pause.
‘They were up here, Daddy,’ a small voice led them on.
‘And what were you doing here out this late?’
‘Look here, the metal’s all bent…’
But we were not there to hear any more, already moving in a crouching motion on a route that took us away from the posse and very close to the small cluster of houses, which as I neared I saw had candles in their windows. From there, we dashed as quickly as was safe on the rutted ground, out into hillier fields full of cabbages and carrot tops.
‘I told you there were voices,’ I repeated, feeling secure again.
‘I knew there were.’
‘That was close,’ I gasped in relief. ‘If they’d have heard the slightest thing from that path…’
‘I guessed we would only be in the neighbourhood a few minutes. This is the risk we take.’
‘But you don’t seem too bothered?’ I chanced.
‘I’m not; and if anything I’m glad to see them, to see people so organised, planning their future, looking after their crops.’
I gave him a quizzical look.
‘You’re looking but not seeing, Crofts.’ He pointed to the ground we had just crossed, to the root crops snug at ground level, giving away again now as we left the village to enter further banks of gently swaying corn.
‘See how they grow each vegetable along just a few furrows, the crops getting bigger as you move along each line, until there’s an empty patch where they’ve pulled out the ripe ones and new seeds have gone in. Pre-E-Day they probably sold their vegetables at local market stalls or supermarkets, growing larger numbers in each batch; but now the village is only feeding itself, then they don’t want more ripe at any time than they can eat that week.
‘They’ll have a lot to do at harvest though, when the corn needs bringing in – you can’t stagger that through the year.’
I thought of my partner’s similar admiration for Tommy and his tractor. Where was Wareing getting all this stuff from, about farming and crop cycles? Did he even know what he was talking about? These were questions I would ask myself without needing to know the answers.
He burbled on, once safely past the houses,
‘Power is one thi
ng, law and order another. The absence of either ends any pretension of belonging to a modern society – but food supply, that’s the one that leaves people in big cities dying in the street.’ He had knelt down earlier to inspect the crops, and holding out his hand now I saw he had kept hold of what in the dark might have been a swede, he saying, ‘Right now this vegetable is the most valuable commodity in Britain.’
He went on, ‘Pre-E-Day, the chain of growing, picking, transporting and delivering had extended and extended over the years, to the extent where millions of people lived in vast cities with no agriculture, and who relied entirely on rural areas and the transport links between them to bring them the food that they needed to survive. Without these transportation networks, people were starving in a matter of days. Anywhere now without the capacity to grow its own food, or where aid supplies can’t be delivered quickly and repeatedly, now has the capacity to be a charnel house.
‘Without people for labour, power for machines, fuel for transport, or cold storage for food to be grown one week and eaten in another, then the fear is that ninety percent of crops like those we see in the ground around us, if not looked after like they are here, will rot there, and will not get re-sown next cycle. Meanwhile, those far away who need them will never get them.
‘You’ve heard of Scanlon? No, you probably haven’t.’ (Indeed I hadn’t then.) ‘He was – still is, I suppose – a Government scientist. He was found in Leicestershire a month ago, and would you believe he had already got a commune going on his research farm. It’s manned by local people, glad to find someone who knew what they were doing at the time of crisis. He’s written a few papers I got to see copies of at the Major’s: he speaks about the “Cycle of Sustainability”. What I think he means, is that we in modern societies rely on certain cycles and can become quite blasé about them; yet if we let them break down for longer than the duration of that cycle then they’re hell to get back up and running again. For instance, the cycle of keeping power lines repaired faster than they break down, of keeping forecourt tanks refilled faster than they are emptied by motorists, of getting food on shelves faster than it’s bought, the cycle of planting and gathering, the cycle of…’
And so he continued, caught in something of a cycle himself, endlessly on repeat…
Chapter 9 – Bunker Mentality