by John Eider
We are a nation of lists now: lists of soldiers, of volunteers, of the saved, of the missing, of those made contact with in one place or another. But there is one list too long to be saved on a spreadsheet, exported onto a car battery-powered laptop, or made sense of in a ream of paper on a mess officer’s wall. This is the list of those not on any other list: the list of those whose bodies we found trampled at the aid distribution points after the crowds had left, those we find even now in ditches and in shuttered up end terraces, those whose bones were scattered by the dogs. This is the black hole even we at the sharp end fear to look into. We work on an estimate of a third, and even that can feel rounded up.
Yet even when bearing all of this in mind, the biggest number by quite a way is still of those living. However, from re-reading parts of this story back to myself, I fear the reader may be under the impression of Britain having emptied like a sink with the plug pulled.
An attempt to explain…
Based on pre-E-Day numbers, we once had an average population density of around six-hundred-and-sixty people per square mile – one of the highest in Europe – this rising in the cities, and reaching thirteen-hundred people per square mile when accounting for London alone. Yet take away those cities, and you were left with the vast, vast majority of Britain – in a purely geographical sense – having an average population density of four to five people per hectare; or, as I remember someone putting it, like four people sharing a rugby pitch.
There was a story we were told in school: that in historical times, before we chopped down our forests to make roundhouses and galleons, a squirrel could jump from one end of Britain to the other without touching the ground. A myth apparently, there being large areas of Britain that had never borne trees; but the story comes to mind now as I think of how a clever pair of heads like Wareing and Trevellyan could plot a route through Britain made up of so many of these rugby pitches strung end-to-end.
But still… where are we all now? The fact is that Britain is still packed with people and activity. So how are we living?
It’s always difficult to visualise a population, the people in the background always either there or not. Think of a play, for instance, where a world may be conjured up in six players. Yet we know that there are millions gone overseas, millions more attached to hundreds of massive aid stations, to thousands of farms. Meanwhile, London, for all its magnetism to trouble, sustains further millions within its ring of Army bases. Add in all the other groups and individuals living off the land or off their wits; those living in new ways or ‘off the grid’ who simply can’t be accounted for, and you’re getting to something like the full figure. At least, that is the best I can come up with.
And the best thing was that after the crisis, things really did stabilise, the death rate fell. To speak in general for a moment, if you’d made it through that first winter then you are probably still around now. You would either have found your way through the chaos to some place of security and organisation, or else be strong or clever or wild enough to be surviving on your own in whatever capacity.
(As I say, I write all this for those in other nations who have only seen the headline news reports, for none of this is news to us who live here.)
The long term aim for Britain, and also its biggest problem, became how to reintroduce a currency and an economy into a land where most of those known to be present were either in the military, on farms, or living off aid. Yet as more and more people became settled in farm projects, and as the numbers at the aid stations were increasingly found work, so some dormant spirit of commerce and barter reasserted itself.
The earliest new populations being centred around farming, in was in these areas that a black market emerged, with unrationed foods, hard-to-find necessities, novelties, items of nostalgia from the old world, even luxuries like gold bath fittings, traded for pennies. These items were looted from houses, or imported by channels hardly more legit that that of Ashe and Kronkear, and were bid for with whatever goods an impecunious soldier or labourer could themselves beg, borrow or steal.
Soon what currency had been left lying around came into play in these transactions, with coins trusted more than notes, though their old values hardly seeming to matter. It became a common sight when walking through mess halls or the kibbutz-style communities farm workers began to develop, to find someone nursing a silver ornamental ink well, a Betty Boop figurine, or hoarding a stash of grubby currency as though it were a horde of Roman coins.
Banks were soon broken into, flooding a town with new coinage; though any advantage brought to those who’d found the loot was soon diminished, as the riches were dispersed and inflation only meant everyone had to carry more coins around. Regional variations of the value of different commodities hardly seemed to matter when travelling was so difficult, though this in turn led to the most dedicated prospectors forging new routes overland, in the hope of buying things cheaper or selling what they had for more.
Of course, this led to gangs, even under martial law – in this broken empty place there was just too much space between the controlled areas available for lawlessness to flourish in. We had no choice but to let a lot of it go. A sub-sector of this free trading was the emergency of protection gangs, either charging a tax at points along unsecured roads, or demanding payment to escort traders between towns. However, there are many tales of such groups robbing and killing those who they had been paid to protect.
And so the matter of reintroducing money took care of itself, with commerce allowed to flourish down whatever multifarious ways anyone had the imagination to set it off along. Under pressure from increased thefts from the farms, a percentage of a site’s crops were allowed to be sold for currency. The proceeds in turn were then distributed between the soldiers and workers billeted there as an allowance, letting them join the market honestly, and thus relieving the temptation many felt to be involved in those thefts. Traders began occupying empty local shops, landlords started letting properties, and a kind of Dickensian street life was allowed to flourish.
An aspect of all of this was that it happened in the countryside, the market towns, and not the cities. The city centres – no one has the money to rebuild them, or a use to put them to. Even the aid distribution points named after our metropoli are only somewhere on the outskirts, where there’s open land. The city centres are a mess, a tangle of purposeless buildings with their glass walls blown out, the streets beneath them piled with cars no one has cared to clear away and the remnants of the mania that gripped those first few weeks. Those streets are hardly trod these days but by daring looters. Cities: I think deep down we must have hated them.
Their outskirts though, and the smaller towns, have life in them still. There is even industry, where big firms got in quickly enough to secure their factories and assets; and empty housing near such sites has been allocated to the workers in these industries. Army numbers are enormous now, and most places of note have a permanent garrison. The earlier rogue gangs, like those I saw collecting from the derelict houses, have long since been ‘disbanded’ (to put it politely) or have moved out into wilder lands to fulfil other functions (as described above). The dogs can still be a problem, but we’re starting to fall back in love with man’s best friend. All in all, many areas are becoming really quite liveable. Powered and guarded, the refuse cleared away, and civil life allowed to flourish, these pools of enlightenment are stretching ever outward, and are a cause for hope.
I can’t leave this section without a final thought on our anecdotal traveller, he perhaps now finally having the money and the means to complete his homeward journey, several years late. If his coach wasn’t robbed or overturned, then what would he find? For many the only hope would be that those they longed for had lived near enough to countryside to get out and find someone friendly; near enough to somewhere that had an armed guard and so got some protection; or had held on long enough and near enough to an aid station. Even if our imagined family had survived, and the odds are in their favour, then they
would still not be where our traveller had left them; and given the chaos of mismatched lists which still exists – even with the introduction of the Agency for the Displaced – it is uncertain that he would quickly find them. It is a horrible scenario.
Chapter 37 – Kent, Hampshire and the West Country