by John Eider
Don’t be daft, no one knew which meal was their last…
So had said Wareing at the house we chose not to stay at, he unknowingly stumbling upon and, as it happened, summing up quite neatly a particular aspect of this disaster; namely that for most people there were no last words, no letters left, no recognised final moments to spend with loved ones, of holding their husband or wife as the sky went white. This was no meteor hitting, no date the sun would explode, no nuclear error four minutes forewarned. There was no common moment where we could sit there together and wait for death.
Instead, even among those who must have known that things looked hopeless, there was still no certainty that any moment would be their last, that they couldn’t get out of it somehow or find food or security somewhere. In the E-Day scenario people panicked at their own pace, went wild, lost themselves and each other, became mad with hunger. The couple in the house had engineered a final day by deciding then and there that things were terminal; but honestly, no day could have been said to have definitely been anyone’s last.
In the years since first reading the report and the reference above to ‘those who travelled for a living’, I have often found myself at idle moments (when they come) conjuring up just such a person in my mind; creating from, what is after all only a brief and passing reference in the report, someone less hypothetical and more, you might say, archetypal. That is to say concrete, a real person, who I could imagine going through these times, and though whose experiences I might better understand them.
I cast him (for it seemed quite obviously a him) around his early thirties, ambitious, practical and keen to get on. For emotional pull, he’d be recently married and with young children, and so slightly shocked to find himself with a domestic situation he finds hard to leave behind. This might motivate him to work even longer hours to support them, while at the same time wishing his job didn’t take him so far away from them so often. His dream would be to move on at his company to a more permanently based position; though even if this could not be secured, he would be beginning to consider that his days on the road were numbered. As for his wife, I find that the archetype of the proud young mother paints herself so instantly and vividly in the mind that she hardly requires delineation.
Now, had Scanlon’s long distance traveller – as imagined by me – been at a far-off motorway services, not on E-Day, but instead at the moment a three- or four-minute nuclear warning was sounded over the radio station he was listening to, then knowing he was cut off, alone from those he’d want to spend those final moments with, his actions would have been quite instant. He might have scrambled for his mobile phone, and most likely found the networks instantly crashed from the demand of a million people having the same idea. He might have sat stunned for some of this final allocation, before seeing others though his windows similarly shocked with the news, and going out to be with them, maybe even hug and say goodbye to these people he had never seen before, simply not to be alone at the last. Maybe, finding anything to write on in the car – the edge of a map, a log book, a sales pad, a receipt found under the passenger seat – and with the little pen he walked out of Argos with the previous month he might write, knowing it would never be read:
Jane, Ashlie, William, I will never see you again. I can’t get back in time. I love you, I love you, I love you…
This from a man who probably hadn’t shared a serious emotion with himself or with anyone else since the birth of his children.
The times we spent together were the proudest moments of my life. I hold you now in my arms and know, know I will hold you again in the…
…his words tailing off as the earth shakes and the windscreen shatters.
But instead this was E-Day, electricity day, the night the lights went out. He wouldn’t have known how bad things were at first, perhaps only noticing from his car that the streetlights were off that early evening, that the radio had gone dead. The people he met at roadside cafes or in the course of his business would report that their tills were stuck shut, their electric cookers failing, their laptops running on batteries but with no Internet available to connect with. His hotel, if he had one, would still be open, albeit with a wedge holding open the electric pass-key front door.
As those he met that first warm night were laughing about the Blitz Spirit and searching out candles, he would only see this as a local disturbance, have no idea that it was national; yet this rending of the usual way of things would surely unnerve him, would have him longing for the reassurance of home.
So let’s assume he had some intuition, some Irish blood, that he might have decided to turn around there and then and head back early. The petrol stations he would meet as he found the major roads would be busy hand-pumping what fuel they had; but he would press on, hoping to make it all the way home without needing to join those queues, or at least get far enough out of this increasingly unnerving brownout zone that seemed to expand for as far as he could travel.
Barring delays at junctions where the traffic lights had failed or where unusual numbers of cars had caused jams and collisions, he would soon be on the motorways that cut a swath through our fair nation, leaving behind the towns and cities to rise majestically over hills and dales. If he had left that first night, then once out into open country he would see not a light across the landscape, nothing beyond the lights of other cars, not even that purple/orange glow of a city beyond the horizon – the stars would never have seemed so bright.
On the highway he might also have missed the looting some places saw even on that first evening; and were he near enough home by morning then he would still have had a few days of near normality with those he loved.
However, wherever he found himself that next morning, he might have wondered what all the full was about, and at how he’d been so spooked by one night in the dark? A glorious day, E-Day+1 was the great phoney day of this crisis. With the warmth of the previous day continuing, there was no need for artificial light or heat. Many stayed off work, or if they went into town and found their office closed stayed in the town centres, congregating in the open spaces by churches or fountains. There are stories I have heard from survivors, always with a misty eye for the memory of that last great day of the old civilisation: of brass bands playing in parks; of Council staff, on promissory notes they would never have the chance to honour, buying up whole corner-shops’ stock of canned drinks and crisps and biscuits and distributing them to the people in the town squares and civic spaces; and as the evening drew in, the sky a perfect ripple of blue, orange and grey, of the landlords and ladies of the bars and pubs offering wine and warm beer for whatever coppers people had left in their pockets.
For deep down all knew this power-cut was everywhere now, people arriving from other areas reporting the same effect. It had been over twenty-four hours without either official announcement or the means for one to be made beyond the collective call of ‘Don’t panic!’ by a thousand jolly Council officers, a nation’s worth of Corporal Joneses.
(What the man and woman on the street didn’t know that warm day was that even on the night before, NATO troops, their commanders hardly unable to contact Downing Street or the Joint Chiefs of Staff on any frequency, had already flown in to secure Britain’s nuclear power stations and submarine ports; while the multinational corporations with billions of pounds worth of assets in our country – auto factories, oil refineries, airlines with jumbo jets stranded at our airports – were right behind them in bringing in their own security.)
E-Day+2 was the start of it for most people. The police, God bless them, were in a fix here. On the first day they had allowed the breaking in of some supermarkets just to let people get fed, and of course there was already speculative looting of clothes shops and electronics outlets, confusion in some people, fights and fires. But by the second day, with the recent heat having spoilt anything kept in fridge or freezer, and by now with no electric, gas or water for cooking and preparing food, then there wasn’t a shop with tinned or dried goods not being
cleared out.
The police saw this going on around them. They cried for orders, got none, and wouldn’t watch people go hungry. So they concentrated on the acts of violence; but soon even here they were swamped. This was the day the other troops and I at Salisbury had seen the great fires coming from Southampton, and by arriving there in the evening found the bodies and looted shops.
Scanlon’s salesman, had he not got home by this day, most likely never would.
Chapter 12 – Industrial Defence