Children of the Dust

by Louise Lawrence

  ‘I’ll call you Kate,’ she heard him say. ‘And you call me Johnson. There will be others, I expect, but it’s you and I who have to make ready.’

  Johnson and Catherine, the pram and the shopping trolley, went rattling away towards the house as Sarah headed home up the long track. She had no reason now to go on living. Death would be a relief, Veronica had said, and in the sideboard drawer the bottle of tablets waited. She would give half to William and take the rest herself, two lives ceasing together. It was better that way.

  Pains gripped her stomach and she vomited blood, and the hood of her duffle coat rubbed raw the sores on her scalp. In a world that was dark and ugly, where the wind whined through the silences, Sarah knew that she was ugly too . . . her youth and prettiness, her love and life and hope, laid waste by the holocaust of war. But some things could never be destroyed . . . a child with her dreams . . . a man with his visions . . . and a gorse flower that bloomed in the dust. Sarah touched it, damp yellow petals, gold and fragile and strong. Alive and beautiful, it bloomed for the future, radiated the glory of God. In the end people turned to Him, and Sarah could not be sorry.

  OPHELIA

  Quite by chance Bill Harnden survived the nuclear war. Normally he would have been lecturing at Bristol University but that afternoon he had to drive to Bath for a meeting of the South West Arts Committee. Suddenly a woman came running from a wayside cottage and flagged him down. She told him her name was Erica Kowlanski and she was a leading authority in the cellular cloning of vegetable and animal protein. She showed him a blue identity card which guaranteed her a place in any nuclear fall-out shelter, and begged him to drive her there.

  Bill had been fully aware of the dangerous international situation but that was the first he had heard of the imminence of a nuclear attack. It was the car radio, not Erica Kowlanski, which finally convinced him it was really happening. His first instinct was to turn the car around and head for home. But home was thirty miles away across the river Severn, and London had already been hit. With Bristol next on the strike list he knew he would never make it. All he had time for was to save the woman and himself.

  ‘My pass will cover both of us,’ she said urgently.

  Shocked out of thinking, Bill Harnden followed her directions, drove along by-roads east of Bath. The road led uphill towards a wooded escarpment and he could see the streets of Georgian houses below, traffic snarl-ups along the motorway, and hear the sirens of police cars wailing. Then the road dipped down again and quiet fields took over, England on a sleepy afternoon in early summer, full of bluebells and buttercups and cattle grazing. He could not believe it was all about to end.

  ‘Turn left at the next junction,’ Erica Kowlanski said.

  High wire fences and red notice boards told him that the area ahead belonged to the Ministry of Defence, and wire gates guarded the entrance to a disused stone quarry. Soldiers checked the woman’s pass and waved Bill through. He parked among armoured cars and black official limousines, transferred to an army truck full of civic dignitaries and top civil servants, and was driven away.

  A concrete tunnel and a roadway of curving light led deep inside the hill. Corridors branched away in all directions like blood vessels from a heart. He stood and waited in a great reception hall, a lone civilian among all the military personnel. It was more than a bunker. It was a vast purpose-built subterranean city, a labyrinth of rooms and passageways, as if the whole hill had been hollowed out. It was not the only one, Erica Kowlanski informed him. Scattered over England there were maybe a dozen underground complexes such as this. He guessed he could count himself lucky as the outer doors closed and sealed him inside.

  Or was it luck, Bill thought, to be separated from his wife and children, to know that they died whilst he lived on? Alone in his cell room shared with a couple of American GIs, sitting on a hard bunk bed and staring at the blank pale green walls around him, somehow he could not think of it as luck. Apart from his briefcase containing lecture notes, a volume of Shakespeare’s Hamlet which Veronica had given him for Christmas, and a photograph of her and the children which he kept in his wallet, he had brought nothing with him to remind him of his former life. He was a man in a vacuum, and everything he loved was swept away.

  Time, of course, healed his grief. He grew used to the regimented routine of the bunker, mealtimes and work shifts, days and nights that began and ended with the sound of a buzzer. He grew used to the communal living of dining halls, assembly halls, shower and relaxation rooms, Grant and Elmer who shared his cell, and the total lack of privacy. A degree in English literature was useless there, and so was he. He was put to work in the supplies department, shifting dehydrated foodstuffs from the storerooms to the canteen kitchen, a man in a navy blue government-issued overall, number 423 on the admissions list, his identity gone.

  Among all the high-ranking Army and Air Force personnel, among all the Lord Mayors, County Surveyors, Education and Police Chiefs, top scientists, communications experts, District Administrators, and gum-chewing Americans from the nearby airbase, Bill was just a low-status civilian in the bottom grade of the hierarchy. He did what he was told and was not expected to question it, nor did he know what went on among the upper echelons of power.

  General MacAllister, who was in charge of the Avon bunker, was not a man to be found mixing socially with his subordinates. A remote moustachioed figure in a khaki uniform, he issued the orders, but he did not confide. All Bill knew of the overall situation was what filtered down to him through the ranks. As Elmer so succinctly put it, the contingency plans for surviving nuclear war had been one almighty cock-up.

  The Avon bunker had been constructed to house seven hundred and fifty people, with supplies for up to two years. In actual fact less than five hundred of those who had been designated places reached it in time. Due to radioactive fall-out communication with other bunkers was impossible to establish; nor, at the end of the statutory fourteen days, could anyone begin to administer law and order and emergency aid to the surviving population of the Bath-Bristol region. It was more than six weeks before the radiation level dropped below critical. By that time there was apparently no civilian population left alive. The cities were flattened and the nuclear winter had already set in.

  Temperatures plummeted way below zero. England became as cold as Siberia and the dust remained in the upper atmosphere obscuring the sun. Snow lay six metres thick, covering the ruins of cities in a white freezing shroud. There could be no reconnoitring, no aerial surveys to assess the final damage. Radio communication still remained difficult, but it seemed that three major bunkers at Plymouth, Cheltenham and Cardiff had not survived. Those surviving in the minor bunkers were cut off, some buried beneath the rubble of buildings, some short of supplies. But the blizzards raged. Hurricane force winds had been recorded. And Avon could not assist.

  Stocked to administer to the requirements of the whole Bristol-Bath catchment area, there was no shortage of food or clothing or medical supplies in the Avon bunker. But the pre-fabricated field hospitals, tent-shelters for the homeless and mobile soup-kitchens, were never used. The pre-war estimates for survival had been proved wrong. For those outside the chance of survival was next to nothing, and those in the bunker were there for life. Bill Harnden would never be going home.

  The nuclear winter lasted for almost two years. Not until the sunlight returned and the long darkness ended could the government bunkers begin to collate their evidence. From Cambridge, Cumbria, Avon, Aberdeen, Hereford, Derby and Yorkshire, the helicopters made their surveys. Incredibly people had survived outside but the population of the British Isles which, before the war, had been an estimated sixty-five million, had been reduced to a handful . . . tiny scattered settlements of people struggling to survive in the desolate wastes of a once productive land. And for them it was only the beginning. Sickness, starvation, mutation and radiation-linked cancers, would reduce them still further over the years to come.

  Nothing grew in the cold
black deserts of nuclear dust. But the slow sun warmed the land and in a few more months, the scientists predicted, it would begin to grow. Then it was discovered that the ozone layer around the earth had been damaged by the holocaust and too much ultraviolet light was passing through the atmosphere. This would cause skin-burns, skin cancer, retinal damage to the eyes, and congenital deformity. Protective clothing had to be worn by anyone venturing outside, and it seemed that human beings would never again freely inhabit the surface of the earth.

  Bill Harnden continued his life in the Avon bunker, but he was not entirely happy with the situation. Military men with no one left to conquer, administrators with no population to administer, civic dignitaries, civil servants, and police chiefs, were all professionally redundant, no different from himself. Yet they continued to cling to the ranks the world had once bestowed on them, and expected him to obey. They seemed to think that they, like the children of Israel, were the chosen few . . . the military, civic and academic élite, destined to rule over a kingdom that would soon recover. A Union Jack flag fluttered, red, white, and blue, a symbol of triumph on the top of an empty hill. It did not occur to them that Britain, like the rest of the civilized world, had been defeated.

  ‘It is our duty,’ General MacAllister said, ‘to restore this country to what it was.’

  He actually believed it could happen, that the mines would reopen, the factories would be rebuilt, and industry would start again. Planning committees were formed. New contingency plans were drawn up and submitted to Central Government in the Berkshire bunker, and their own bunker extended outward. Bill was transferred from stores to manual labour. Along with Grant and Elmer, supervised by an American army colonel by the name of Jeff Allison, and dressed in white protective suits, he helped to clear the surrounding land of its sterile surface of dust. The prefabricated field units were put into use, bolted to metal girders, and the whole area roofed over with sheets of transparent corrugated plastic to form a vast glass-house. They grew fresh vegetables and cereal crops and Erica Kowlanski went to work in the food-processing laboratory.

  The first batch of cloned root vegetables were harvested eight weeks later, and army personnel with government requisition orders scoured the surrounding countryside for any animals which might have survived. Half a dozen sheep, a few dozen chickens and three goats, were brought to the bunker from a settlement in the Cotswold hills, legalized theft which formed the basis of a breeding flock. Egg yolk was cloned. But the fertilized chicken embryos all showed signs of mutation, and new grass in the outside fields seared brown in the sun. They lacked the means for successfully breeding and raising livestock and women, who had not rated very high on the government’s list of priority survivors, suddenly assumed a significance.

  Apart from a few elderly wives and growing daughters, there were only thirty-two women in the whole bunker who were capable of conceiving and giving birth to children, and Erica Kowlanski was one of them. Bill never really knew why she sought him out. It had nothing to do with love and little to do with affection. She admitted, quite freely, that she had never wanted marriage or children, that she found the idea abhorrent. But now she saw it as a necessary duty and she was not the kind of woman to turn her back. Bill understood. She was not offering to be a wife to him in the way Veronica had been. She had simply chosen him to father her child. And one year later, after a long and difficult labour, Erica gave birth to a baby girl.

  She was forty-one years old and Bill was almost fifty. And even if it was her duty, Erica swore she would never go through it again. She was a woman devoid of all maternal instincts and maybe that was why she had chosen Bill for a mate. She had sensed perhaps that he would make up for her inadequacy, that he had fathered before and would love the child enough for both of them.

  Under the white hot lights of the hospital ward Bill took his daughter in his arms. She did not remind him of William or Catherine. She reminded him of Sarah, Bognor Regis polytechnic, and a marriage gone wrong. Marriage to Erica was wrong too, but he could not regret this child. She would make up for the children he had lost and he could not love her more.

  In the next bed to Erica, Jeff Allison’s wife cradled her second Anglo-American son. Wayne Jeffrey, like his brother Dwight, had been conceived out of love, not duty. Next time, Mrs Allison vowed, she too would have a girl. But Bill smiled down at his own little daughter and knew he would never have another. The small face puckered to cry and Erica handed him the feeding bottle.

  ‘What will you call her?’ Mrs Allison asked.

  ‘Ophelia,’ said Bill. ‘And let her not walk i’ the sun.’

  Ophelia assumed she would never walk in the sun. For her it was a dim yellow disc seen through the plastic roof of the cultivation area, an m-type star ninety-three million miles distant. It shone on the great solar panels on the hilltop above her and indirectly provided her with warmth and light, charging the battery cells that worked the electric generator on which life in the bunker depended.

  She was not unhappy in her little regimented world of rooms and passageways. She had been born and brought up there and knew nothing different. In the schoolrooms her father taught what life had been like before the holocaust, but to Ophelia it did not seem relevant. And although she loved the rich language of English literature . . . sceptred isles set in silver seas and seasons of mists and mellow fruit-fulness . . . it was all remote and unreal, as unreal as the images seen in dreams and instantly forgotten. It was ancient history. Western Civilization, like the Greek and Roman Empires, was irretrievably gone. Only the memory was kept alive, the ambition to rebuild it which General MacAllister conceived as a duty, and Dwight Allison said was futile.

  Ophelia did not much care who was right or wrong. She saw only what was actual, an outside world that was treeless and hostile, a landscape eroded by wind and rain and sun. Telescreens showed it in the main communications room, outside cameras panning the rock-strewn deserts of Avon and Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Somerset. Rain had washed away the surface soil. Snow, and frost, and fog of winter gave way in summer to bleak baked hills and barren valleys where nothing much grew . . . just tussocks of brittle grass, a few hardy flowers and pockets of vegetation along the river margins. Packs of scavenging dogs hunted the tiny nomadic herds of sheep and goats that roamed the plains, and red pins on a map of England showed the scattered communities of human survivors. But there were none nearby. It was bad land around the bunker and the ultraviolet light was too intense for agriculture.

  Down in the valley by the river conditions were a little better. Men in white protective suits planted wheat and potatoes in fields of dung and dust, and reaped a small annual harvest. But the conifers had shrivelled on the hillside and the few surviving sheep were horribly deformed. Most of them were blind. Some had stumps instead of limbs and gave birth to lambs with multiple heads and twisted spines, and chickens hatched in the laboratory incubators with white pupil-less eyes. The white-eyed gene was a dominant mutation, Dr Stevenson said. Even rats were affected, and the only things that thrived in the land outside were lizards and flies.

  Mostly the northern hemisphere could not support much life. Years before the aerial surveys had shown the continents laid waste, from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, across industrial Europe and the United States of America . . . a world gone dead. Now the supply of petrol and diesel had almost run out and no one knew if anything had changed among the settlements of human survivors. There was no population census and long ago people had moved away from the surrounding countryside, taken what animals they had and fled to the hills to escape from the government requisition orders.

  Inside the bunker nothing ever changed. It was a constant environment, just as Ophelia had always known it. Maybe, as Dwight said, it got a little crummier with every day that passed, but it was hardly noticeable . . . except when the electric generator broke down and had to be repaired. And although the concrete structure was cracked and crumbling in places, the videos and computers
went on working, and Ophelia assumed they would go on working for ever.

  Cloned vegetables grew in the culture tanks in Erica’s laboratory. Edible protein was culled from blue-green algae, and extract of sugar beet provided sweetness. Food plants flourished in the cultivation area where the sunlight filtered through the plastic roof and the rain rattled. Ophelia liked to go there, walk among the smells of damp earth and green things growing, among the splashed colours of ripe red tomatoes and yellow marrow flowers.

  Sometimes, after watching a video film or visiting the cultivation area, she could almost envisage the lost world her father talked of. But she could not imagine the taste of chocolate biscuits, the smell of beefsteak braised in wine, or the song of the blackbird. Bill Harnden could not convey taste, or scent, or sound, to someone brought up in concrete corridors, on cloned egg yolk and carrot juice, where human voices were the only natural sounds. He could not convey past realities in a windowless classroom to these children of the dust.

  Without text books or writing materials he tried to teach them literature and history. With only computer video pictures he tried to teach them art. Lacking the basic tools for making things he tried to teach them crafts. He insisted they needed a fully comprehensive education, that concentration on maths, and science, and computer learning, did not make for a balanced intellect. He believed that a teacher was more than an educational supervisor, that human interactions were of paramount importance to understanding, that the stimulation of a child’s imagination was even more necessary than teaching it to calculate. On those issues he clashed with the bunker hierarchy, with the Education Chief, with General MacAllister, and with his wife.

  ‘We need creative thinkers,’ said Bill. ‘Not a generation of automatons!’

  ‘Logical thought can be just as creative,’ Erica said.