by John Eider
My story has to end somewhere, and where better than here, with the six-year anniversary just passed – though it’s not one we celebrate. Six years – I must have aged twenty. They have been busy times. It is May now, my days taken up with the duties of the farming team I manage in the West Country, my evenings since December taken up with writing these words. But to tidy up the threads…
Alas, the Captain’s promise of getting me onto his delivery runs never happened, first he being moved hither and dither, and later myself, amid the changing patterns of Byzantine complexity that were the British Army and United Nations’ efforts in rebuilding Britain’s infrastructure from the ground up.
‘You know,’ the last thing I remember the Captain saying to me before he moved on, ‘had we managed to condense this effort into those first three day after the disaster, we could have carried on as if nothing had happened, without people hardly noticing.’ He was not the first to voice such an impossible lament.
I never did make it back to Major Trevellyan or even to France, but I did receive a letter from him: thanking me for my efforts, and asking for the exact location of Wareing’s grave. My reply must have gotten through, for I soon received another: confirming he had been buried well, and that the town I ‘helped found’ (the Major’s phrase) was doing well, Patrick still in charge there, and was a part now of a greater farming collective managed by the Norwegian Air Force. Apparently their lands now stretched many miles along that coast, and as many inland. Wareing and I were remembered by the townsfolk apparently, and had been nominated for some kind of award (though this was several years ago, and I’ve not been sitting here waiting for my medal).
Nor did I ever get to visit the Council House again, my duties never taking me anywhere near enough to it to skip off for the week that even a short hike there and back would have taken. Scanlon’s papers, and later the various editions of his report, mentioned their commune when he spoke of instances of spontaneous sustainable developments; but with no mention of their Head Grower herself. I only hoped that this was because there were so many doing what she did that she was no longer exceptional, on those terms at least.
‘But, six years?’ I can imagine anyone reading this abroad asking. ‘Six years? Surely in that time you could have found a way..?’
Let me put it in perspective: from the day the Captain brought me back into regular duties, then I, like every soldier here, like every Repatriate Corps volunteer, like those found alive and given jobs, like everyone working a commune field or securing an aid station or guarding a motorway or ploughing away with ageing tractors… I, like all these people, have been working all day every day without breaks, leave (where would any of us go?), terms of employment beyond any pledge we made on entry to the service, or any concept of pay beyond a few coins that are little more than tokens. (For those who don’t follow the financial pages, Sterling is still technically a currency, but after falling from the fifth to thirty-fifth largest economy in the world in the year of E-Day, Britain has since dropped off the scale as a measurable nation).
The situation isn’t much better for the charity workers, the volunteers from France and around the world who simply made there way here to help (nor for their overseeing UN officials); for like in a warzone, transport in and out of the UK is slow or almost impossible. At least though they have a small pot of monies building up in a foreign bank somewhere. To be British is to work for the reconstruction, it ends there. We have no culture, economy or entertainments bar those we make ourselves. People get married, babies are born, but families have to fight to be together. Flashing fancies and shared songs can hardly be factored into the Government in Exile’s plans. I say all this simply to explain how impossible it is for anyone here to assume any kind of right for themselves to undertake a trip; and that’s before broaching the dangers of crossing such a lawless land.
I think Wareing and I took for granted the freedom of movement we had in those early days, travelling in the only way any without an armed convoy could back then: in as small a group as possible and on routes that essentially avoided all human contact; for humans were the key factor here – we had become untrustworthy, mad, bad, selfish, even murderous. Which wasn’t to say that everyone busy in the business of surviving went that way, but you could no longer trust that anyone you met hadn’t already succumbed first to that wildness caused by hunger pangs and dehydrated brains, and second to the lack of any law to check that wildness. Back then, a slip of food or slug of water could have had you killed – at least the aid stations ended that.
I remember my old partner saying once, on one of our endless trampings, ‘We’d spread ourselves so thinly in the old days: a day here, a day there, a visit to the parents, weekends at the coast. Who would have imagined that transport could just end one day, and leave us stranded incommunicado at any one of those points?’
Chapter 36 – The State of Things