by John Eider
Above the camp, from along the edge of the overhanging roadway, were a string of floodlights that bathed the area in orange sodium glow. I looked up at them in wonder as George led me down a designated walkway between tents,
‘They’re the first things people notice,’ he said, seeing my interest. ‘They drew people from all around when we first put them up – they looked at them like gods in the sky. But now most of those still alive around here are living somewhere within the cordon.’ He gestured to the area the other side of the road above us.
‘All of London,’ I uttered in amazement. ‘It’s a big place to manage.’
‘Well, most of it’s held down security-wise by patrols; but there are five main feeding camps, some of them in the famous parks, not that I’ve been that far inside the perimeter since I got here.’
‘And Parliament too.’
‘Ah yes, Parliament! Made it through E-Day unscathed, you know.’ (I had seen the photos in Le égal.) ‘Once all this is over the someone’ll probably turn it into a hotel!’
He turned to me, ‘You haven’t made it unscathed though, have you.’
I had forgotten my hand in the excitement at seeing the lights,
‘A fight with a Doberman.’
‘Ah, lovely things they are, they stick with you through thick and thin.’
I didn’t tell him how it ended up. I was led to a tent, the flap of which when it was pulled back revealed a medical centre; and in one of the beds was Wareing, in an even worse state than me.
‘A bit of a disagreement with a mine shaft, ‘he told me later. ‘Might hold us up a couple of days.’ But I wasn’t worried about that; as after a hot shower, having my wounds seen to, then making it to the canteen in time for a full breakfast, I found I was quite happy to sleep in a proper bed awhile; as indeed I did the whole next day.
‘Keeping up your nightshift?’
The words woke me up that evening. I had been found an empty bunk in a corner of the staff barracks.
‘We don’t trust daylight,’ I said groggily.
‘What are you then? A bloody vampire bat? Flapping about in your long coat, up to God-knows what?’
I sat up in bed.
‘Captain Linkater,’ he stuck out his hand. ‘I suppose you’re not even going to tell me your…’
‘Private Crofts,’ I said as we shook.
‘It can be hairy out there,’ he half asked/half told.
‘Yes, in places, though it’s mostly deserted.’
‘Don’t worry, the people will be back, once the lights are back on.’
‘So where are they? The owners of all those houses…’
‘Oh, France, Belgium, camps along our own coast for those who couldn’t get a boat. There’s still millions in the cities – you haven’t seen one of our drop off stations yet?’
‘No.’
‘Then you won’t be asking where everyone has gone when you see those crowds. Of course, I’m not denying that a lot of those empty houses may never have anyone return to them; even if the owners are alive. They might prefer… well, to live a different way.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘A thing like this is a shock, it brings people together. They might find they want to live closer to their family, to the people in their own neighbourhood, to focus more locally. At least for a while until the fear wears off.’
‘Like a commune?’ I suddenly remembered.
‘Oh, you’ve seen one of those?’
‘It was burnt out.’
‘A shame. A lot of green shoots have been trampled on; but those that have established themselves are the future, you mark my words. They’re how we’ll rebuild this country.
‘But you don’t know any of this, clearly,’ he continued. ‘So what have you pair been up to? Don’t worry, I can tell you’re not going to tell me. Well, I hope it’s something very important that I’m dropping you off for.’
I would have told him, had I known; and this was a new detail: Wareing and I weren’t there just to meet up again, but to be driven onto somewhere. What had Wareing said, ‘I shouldn’t think they’ll need us much past the Wash’? I needed to find a map.
Back to the medical tent, once the nurse had done her duties, I learnt of Wareing’s week. He told me firstly what was up: where I might have cracked one rib, he’d cracked three; while his right arm would be strapped up for at least as long as our mission was expected to take. In fact, no part of his right side seemed to have escaped damage, his ankle enflamed and head still lightly bandaged.
‘I’ve spoke to Linkater,’ he said, ‘he can stand to wait another day. However,’ he fixed me sternly, ‘if you think I’d be a hindrance, then you take the folder and go on solo.’
‘No,’ I said automatically, in a way I think cheered him. ‘Who’d want to be out there alone?’
‘You had a tough time too?’
I related the tale of the town, the dogs, the looting gang, ‘And yours?’
In hushed tones, I got the basic facts,
‘Mine was a bunker; and I mean a proper bunker, an old command post, built into solid rock beneath a former quarry. The Major had got it wrong though, it wasn’t forgotten about; in fact is still guarded, has a sentry post. When I saw this from the undergrowth I knew I had to get out of there, but it was night and I was crawling through bushes over old pit workings. I fell ten feet from a ledge – it could have been worse. Calling for help was all I could do.
‘They radioed in – probably to here or to the Whitehall bunkers – to tell them that they had an unidentified intruder. They interviewed me a little, though I was zoning in and out. Anyway, it’s a good job I remembered the name of the man we were coming here to meet!’
It occurred to me that I wouldn’t have had that knowledge to help me. Then another thought struck,
‘The folder!’
‘The Captain has it, so there’s not a thing he doesn’t know, though I’ve sworn him to secrecy.’ Wareing seemed downhearted as he told me all this, I guessed embarrassed at how it had all turned out for him, the mess he had literally fallen into. Perhaps also that I had made it there under my own steam, where he hadn’t.
It meant though another day of recuperation; which in the end became three. Not that my hand or side ached any less (my leg ache thankfully walking itself off), but being on my feet at least let me help out where I could – driving within the base, delivering messages, carrying and fetching for the Captain. By the morning of our leaving I imagined there was little I wouldn’t be fit to do, bar lift myself over any walls (how I had made it over the garden fence on pure adrenalin I still don’t know). Wareing though was not responding nearly so well. It was as though his being brought low was revealing some as-yet-unseen morose streak. By the morning of the leaving, though his head and foot were now unbandaged and his arm hidden by his coat, he still moved uneasily and hardly spoke. Though I would never have gone on without him, it seemed I’d been left Hobson’s choice.
The convoy was genuinely exciting. I was almost the Captain’s right-hand man by the (very early) morning of loading and coordinating. The forty or so heavy lorries – I lost count – were already lined up in what would have been the motorway’s middle-lane. Forklifts and manual loaders swarmed around the trucks, which looking like the aid convoys you saw on the news travelling through Africa. Next, the dozen machine gun-equipped Land Rovers joined them up on the suspended highway, and you realised that this was a full-blown security operation. These smaller vehicles, as with the trucks, were a mixture of olive, beige or yellow depending upon where in the world they and their crews had been three months before. Some were stripped to the frames, hung with netting and ammo pouches; others locked up tight with low skirts and inch-thick glass. We made for one looking something like a production model with doors and rows of seats. Every space not taken up by the driver, the Captain, Wareing or myself was filled by a fully armed squaddie.
I felt pathetic beside them, envying their weapons and insignia. Putting my rank
clothes back on over my showered frame had been like a snake refitting a shed skin; but Wareing had been insistent: nothing should be cleaned. My backpack may have been replenished, but it still bore my blood from rummaging through it for bandages after the dog bite.
Once under way then the Captain’s job was done until we reached each drop off; and in-between he chattered like a jackdaw, proud (in a collective way) of every part of the operation,
‘There are ten Army bases strung around the M25,’ he said, speaking of the road we were then travelling around, ‘each linked to the others by the road itself, and covering the area within and just outside it. That’s about ten square miles each. From there, we’re forging our ways along the motorways north toward the major cities and anywhere smaller but lucky enough to be en route. Manchester’s as far as we’re secured to go for now; it and Birmingham centres are as locked-down as London. Brave men are clearing the road to Newcastle; while the Americans have taken charge magnificently anywhere they can get an aircraft carrier near enough to the coast: Liverpool, Edinburgh, Southampton. Everything carried in these trucks, and that which feeds the London area, comes in along the Thames. The Port of London hasn’t been this busy since the War. I hope you get to see it one day, gentlemen – it is a wonderful sight.’
As he spoke, I looked out toward our capital. Never getting close enough for the sights, I still fancied that I could make out Canary Wharf, and even further in the distance the Wembley arch. Across the rooftops and between the blocks of flats there was smoke, even movement. And as the new day began, I imagined what these roads had once been like at that time: workers waking to the sound of milk floats and the sight of paperboys and girls on their rounds, the streetlights glowing into daylight before switching themselves off.
‘Looks quite civil really, doesn’t it,’ said the Captain looking out in the same direction. ‘From this distance at least. The centre is repaired and orderly, but the suburbs are choked with refugees from the regions, many in buildings in need of repair.’
That was the closest I have been to London since E-Day, we remaining on the ring road for some distance, before turning north along one of the cleared routes.
‘So, all these Land Rovers,’ I asked the Captain. ‘What trouble are you expecting?’
‘You haven’t seen a distribution station yet, have you?’
Around half an hour outside of London that morning, just as the day was setting itself properly, then the Captain went quiet.
‘Five minutes to the first point,’ crackled the radio (presumably from the lead car bristling with machine guns, we in third and just in front of the first truck).
Our guardian turned to us,
‘Then get ready for what Union Jack won’t show you on the news.’
All vehicles slowed, as we met a line of soldiers permanently based at the loading station. They guided us off the motorway and along a sharply guarded sliproad through wasteground, the bare earth dark with dew. We drove on towards tents and temporary-looking warehouses and many small vehicles. Just past this ground was a football or athletics stadium, along the top of which, made out like church gargoyles against the bright sky, were armed men stationed upon the roof. Along the site’s perimeter were many more troops, and beyond them – hard to tell, they stretching back so far – were what must have been a hundred thousand people.
I tried to make out individuals among the mass, to see their clothes, their hair, their faces; but in the dust in which they seemed already covered, it was impossible. I felt so sad: these were the men and women of Britain, who had sung in parks the day after E-Day, who I’d seen foraging for food in the shops of Southampton, who Scanlon’s traveller had been among that first candle-lit evening. Hell, he might even be in the crowd. So might his family.
Nearer to us, soldiers were also stationed in an inner cordon, surrounding the tents and their precious contents. I guessed the stadium was where a lot of the crowd now lived and were fed.
‘The stronger the guard, the less likely that there will be a need to use it,’ explained the Captain, scanning the scene like a hawk. ‘Trucks A and half of B for here,’ he said through the radio, before getting out to supervise. ‘You pair stay in here.’
The people who swarmed around Trucks A and B were not soldiers, but rather unarmed civilians in a variety of blue jumpers, shirts or overalls.
‘Who are they?’ I asked of the squaddies who remained in the Land Rover.
‘Volunteers,’ answered the soldier sat up front, ‘by which I mean survivors – we feed them and keep them. What else are they going to do with themselves?’
‘Why are they in blue?’
‘We can’t afford uniforms, so they’re put in anything blue they can find.’
Looking out along the perimeter, I imagined I could see the low fences moving with the weight of people behind them.
‘All men to reinforce,’ came the instruction on the radio. ‘One left per vehicle.’
‘Looks like we’ll have to love you and leave you,’ said the talkative one among our company, as he and the others got out. ‘You’re okay guarding the car, aren’t you?’ he asked me.
‘I’m coming too,’ I blurted.
‘You’re not armed, stay here.’ This was Wareing, sat behind me, the first thing he had said all journey. It would be a gloomy twenty minutes.
From the Land Rover I saw the crowd beyond the bolstered guard surging and swaying, like at a concert where the band have to stop and ask their fans to take a step back. ‘Not one shot to be fired!’ I heard a senior officer instruct; as a loud hailer fired up, ‘The supplies have to be unloaded, be patient and all will get food.’
And then the inevitable: the line broke, a fencepost giving way and the soldiers behind it getting pinned down by the chicken wire. As people rushed toward the breach, so the wave of pressure brought down other posts. Perhaps a couple of dozen people had scrambled across, before the gap became clogged with fallen bodies and soldiers dashing over in support. For the first time I saw the people behind the line, and they were filthy. They must have been waiting there for days. One by one the interlopers were brought down, rugby tackled or finding a gun pointing at them; but one had gotten through even the reinforcements, and was running for the nearest tent. A blue-shirted figure went up to them, and was pushed away with a hand to the face.
‘Halt!’ called a guard, the attention of all now fixed on this lone figure, running like a fox from hounds. With a single rifle-crack he went down feet from the tent. At this the whole company fell quiet, but for a low moan from the crowd.
The operation thus conducted itself in silence: the people falling back, the fence repaired, the body carried away. The other runners were lifted over the cordon and taken back by their kind. Two soldiers had been injured under the fallen wire. Order restored, our convoy reassembled itself, leaving only the empty Truck A as it continued generally northward.
‘We’ll come back for the injured men, and any others we can: we always do when collecting the empties on the way back.’ The Captain spoke to break the sombre mood. ‘You see now though what I said about the crowds? We estimate thirty thousand permanent residents in the sportsdome, and another two hundred thousand in the area who are kept by the supplies. We have a convoy most days, and keep huge stockpiles there; but you can imagine it’s hardly enough. I tell myself that it keeps them alive at least.’
‘How many stations are there?’ I asked him.
‘A hundred, give or take. There’s one set up every time we reach a new town; and then it only takes a few days for a crowd to swell.’
The day was bright but broken by storm clouds that ran for miles across the horizon, the sky polarised between yellow and black.
Chapter 18 – The Council House