by John Eider
The park revealed itself as beautiful as the sun rose, a near-chaos of meadow grass and beds of roses rampant red. I could have lain there an hour, but needed the half-light. As I reached the point at the railings where I had climbed in, I heard it: a muffled boom that I fancied shook even the earth I stood on. Absurdly, I crouched among low bushes a minute… as if anyone could know that I was responsible. And who anyway? The park was deserted even of rats (no larger creatures could get in to die and then be eaten, I later reasoned).
Milkmen and paperboys can tell you (for I was once the latter) that there are hours of serviceable sunlight before most have risen. It must have been about four or five a.m., and the trees, the railings and the tall houses beyond them were vivid, bathed in a cool blue-green light. Yet, like a vampire, I knew I needed cover before it got brighter. I had considered staying there in the calm deserted park; but if there were people nearby who hadn’t yet been caught by the dog pack (and someone had burnt out the commune) then what would draw them over the railings more then the mother of all explosions?
Nor was that disturbance quitting: for as I left the park I heard the initial blast giving way to the rumblings of concrete collapse and the thrashing of boughs, as the trees grown-up around the bunker fell into the pit. With the streets deserted, I also considered making a break for the countryside there and then; yet it would only take one tramp or street thief to find me and cause a commotion, and I would be drawing attention to myself all over again.
Now, I had blown the site a day ahead of schedule, but my instructions were still valid – to find somewhere to hide, and then get myself and my pack secreted there before daylight; there to rest up and move again that evening. The last streets I had passed along the night before had been silent, I remembered; and so somehow getting back over the railings (my bad leg getting no worse again, yet my bitten arm becoming a low ache) I walked back up between those grandiose blocks of bedsits, picked one without too much damage, and went around the back to have to – reluctantly – kick in the stout and possibly original kitchen door. Within, it not even occurring to me that there could be people living in these buildings to hear me, I found a room with a front view two floors up; where, on a bed that threw up dust as I collapsed on it, I slept until mid-morning.
I woke to the sounds of dogs barking… and a flash of panic. I moved to the window and saw them through the crack left in the curtains, jostling and scampering in the street. Wide awake in seconds, I tried to remember if I had secured every door behind me as I had broken in and come upstairs?
Treading gently, I left my room and retraced my steps as far as peering into the curtained gloom of the kitchen, to see that the chair rammed under the door handle was still there. The kitchen reeked – they all did now, it was the drains – but had been hardly touched, and still had tinned foods in the cupboards. I found two cans of beans with meatballs, and another of spaghetti hoops – these would be just as welcome cold. Also a pack of biscuits, which I found myself thinking I might not see again for a while… before remembering you could buy them in any shop across Europe! I opened the draw to find an opener and saw the knives. I felt at my belt with dread, for I knew, the moment before my hand confirmed it, that I didn’t have my own blade, it last seen sometime last night in a fight with a Doberman. I had flung it over the fence with the backpack, before trying to get over myself with one good hand…
My hand. I took the food and some cutlery upstairs, and left them a minute as I checked through my belongings for anything of use: a first aid kit, splattered with blood (along with most of the contents of the pack) and with no bandage left; a small packet of squirrel (which I put with the cans); and a canteen and a half of iodine water. Putting it off no longer, I found what had been fresh towels in the airing cupboard (this house was like the Mary Celeste), and a strange bottle of something ‘For Sores, Bruises and Swelling’ that had been in the kitchen cupboard. Laying out the towels on the bed, I peeled back my bandage. Giving myself the half-canteen to wash the wound, I found that the cuts to my wrist and grazes to my knuckles had stopped bleeding, yet the joints had almost seized; and that what hurt most was the bruise from the vice-like bite the Bull Terrier had given me through the protective material of my coat – I could even make out toothmarks in the yellow/purple swelling. I dripped on the medicine, the smell and sting of which reminded me of the witch hazel my Mum had used on me as a kid with grazed knees; before binding it all up again with a ripped hand-towel.
I would take some kitchen knives with me when I left, but this wouldn’t be in daylight – I was stranded there for the day. Knowing that I needed energy whatever I did, I started on the food; and so with my tins of meatballs and smell of witch hazel, I stayed up there eating, then rested on a full stomach for once.
I heard the dogs again, on and off throughout the day; and then later other sounds and human voices coming down the street. Looking around the curtain I saw them: they were a small group of men and women wearing leather coats and metal hats like home-made Viking helmets. Rusted chains were clanking about them. They fended off the dogs with long steel pipes that they swung and often missed with, but which when they connected sent the poor pup off whining. (Was this treatment why even that savage Terrier was wary of me when I faced it down?)
Three or four of the people were dressed like this, before others of both sexes and unprotected appeared in the stretch of road their leaders had secured behind them, dashing in and out of each house in turn and carrying out what they could. Their bounty – tinned food, dried food, clothes, cutlery, bedding, household goods, even some silverware (how pointless) – was then thrown in a cart bringing up at the rear and pulled by two more protected men. They were taking so much that I thought they must have been working for a larger group.
I cursed. What a day for them to pick this street, I thought; before wondering if that enormous second explosion had brought them this way? My good hand reached among the eating things for the table-knife I had been using; before putting that down for the fork; before putting that down for the pronged can-opener.
There was order in the gang’s movements as I watched from above, with each house visited in turn. Were I to pack up then and scarper down I wouldn’t get out in time; go that second without my stuff and I might survive, but for how long? And they’d know someone had just been there.
Even thinking for that minute had lost me my chance, so I packed up the bag and hid the other evidence of my stay beneath the bed. There was a wardrobe big enough for me, but clothes were one of the things they would be looking for. Stood at the top of the stairs, I heard a bang against the house’s heavy front door, before they thought better of it and I heard footsteps following mine around the side of the building. Next, my kitchen-door barricade was clattering as the chair-legs dug into that room’s linoleum flooring.
I thought of the spaces I had passed through in the house, trying to think of one they wouldn’t bother with. On the top landing was a small door starting above the skirting board – an attic. The door opened easily, and led up through a twisting staircase to a low gloomy loft. In the poor light I could tell the room was perfect, and pulling myself across the floor behind some old boxes, I waited, breathing in dust and trying not to sneeze.
I sat up there, clutching my can-opener, longer than I care to contemplate, logic telling me it must have been a good six hours. As the sound of looters ransacking the rooms below me receded, so I then heard the same routine starting up next door, before again they were back in this house. Perhaps these large and untouched places were offering rich pickings?
Of course, eventually one tried the attic door, and came up the stairs. As they began with the boxes nearest them, so I held the tin opener behind the boxes nearest me, and prayed to no one in particular. My visitor left one box behind, and then another tried another, and then another. We must have shared that loft for twenty minutes. I never actually saw them and so had no knowledge of their age or armaments, but knew that if they found me then I would hav
e to kill them; just as I knew that this would then bring others up there who would kill me. I tried not to breathe.
‘Nah, nothing up here,’ they called down to the others at last, before leaving, not to return. Those felt the happiest words I’d ever heard.
The old building had holes under the corners of the roof, through which shone shafts of reflected light, and which also let in sounds from the street. With the din they made, that caravan of lost souls must have been parked within twenty yards of my front door. I didn’t hear them move off again until ten o’clock that evening.
By the time I felt it safe to move from my space behind the old tea chests, I could hardly feel my legs. The house was a mess as I left it. Trusting that any local person would belong to the gang, and that any local dog would be following them for scraps, I barely checked each street as I dodged out from between houses and my feet found the pavement.
Those days were the most terrifying of my life, even bearing in mind what was still to come on the mission; or of any time before or since, encountered in the Army or elsewhere. Southampton had been confusing and then a blur, Calais a limping phoney war, while things I have seen in the years since, in their cruelty and degradation, don’t bear thinking about. I knew though, that night as I ran terrified from the broken town, hoping only to make it to the treeline, to rural cover, that walking these lonely streets and hills and woodland would be the work of the rest of my days; that whether alone or belonging to any of the services that remained and would have me, I would never leave my islands.
The getting away would prove easy in the end, bar one odd interruption: a few miles along, very early the next morning, jogging between some apparently empty buildings, a window by me shattered, and then a puff of dust came from the wall beside it. Hearing the gunshots ricochet along the moonlit street, I couldn’t see who was firing at first; before hearing a voice and turning to see a gun being waved at me. Waved none-too-skilfully, I noted… but still. The waver was a bearded man in a first-floor window across the road, who continued to shout,
‘Get out of it! Get gone! I’ll kill, ya!’ He didn’t seem to like shooting whilst also talking, and so I let him carry on a while, I slowly backing away along the houses. ‘I’m not afraid to use this!’ he concluded needlessly; before a woman’s voice, coming from deeper in the room behind him, started up on a similar theme. Verbal duties thus transferred, he was free to lower his aiming-eye to the barrel and take another shot. By then however, I was half way down the street; as the pair of them, wanting only privacy and to be left alone, did a perfect job of revealing their location.
Of course, I realised then that there must have been a million still in their homes: not going too mad, maybe arming for protection, not killing neighbours, not ripping up farmers’ fields, just going on day-to-day, still making ends meet. I thought of all of those who at any time, though hardly as belligerently as he with the shotgun, had only ever wanted a quiet corner of the world in which to go about their business. This personal space though had been hard enough to find before E-Day, and was even harder now.
After that the streets were deserted, and open country where possible regained. I’m afraid I rather stopped observing after a point though, my thoughts on other things… For I remembered learning in school that historians estimate that, when the Bubonic Plague came to England in the Middle Ages, that it killed between a third and half of the population. I felt then that I wouldn’t need to wait for the eventual World Health Organisation report to tell me that this time around such an estimate could be conservative. I didn’t know what that weird looting gang I’d so narrowly escaped from would find in the homes they invaded, but I could guess it would often include the bodies of those starved to death, or who had died of thirst or of sickness caused by taking bad food or water. Anyone suffering a similar fate out in the open would already have had their bones picked clean. I was feeling pretty bleak around that point.
Leaving each district I passed through without fanfare, I considered not for the first time how odd it was that the time of day once considered the most dangerous to be out and about, i.e. late evening, was now the safest; while the bright, light, open days had become a holy terror, a land of lawlessness, its people driven mad by hunger, or at least seriously deranged. With my coat around my shoulders, my hand around the handle of a kitchen knife, I skipped down deserted, shadowed paths and streets, my eyes soon adjusting as an animal’s would, as human eyes had had to for millennia until we built lights to do that for us…
Just before dawn, I began to sense just such lights ahead of me, not yet seen over the roofline but suggesting their presence by glints on windows and reflections on car roofs. I was close to the rendezvous now, which the map suggested was to be met through a maze of ‘out of town developments’, retail parks and sliproads. As I turned the final corner, I jumped at the sight of men with rifles; then ran toward them at full speed upon realising that they were British Army, that they were me! They were guarding a series of tents in the shadow of an overhead motorway junction, the motorway I knew encircled the capital and which now formed the New Greater London Zone.
‘Who goes there?’ they asked with sudden attention focused.
‘Crofts, Private, Royal Fusiliers.’
‘Where’s your uniform?’
‘I… I was required not to wear it on my last mission.’
‘Papers?’
‘We didn’t carry them.’
‘Commanding officer?’
‘Wareing.’
‘Rank?’
I remembered that I didn’t know. The more senior-seeming of the guards looked me over, unimpressed,
‘You one of Linkater’s lot?’ (I didn’t know the name.) ‘We had another of you fellows turn up here yesterday, claimed to be Army but wouldn’t tell us a thing about himself. George!’ the sentry called to a man inside the doors, ‘Show Private Crofts here where he can get cleaned up, he’s one of the Captain’s.’
Chapter 17 – Convoy