“Just remember that you can expect to see some horrific crashes on the motorways. Try to prepare your family for the sights they might see,” I warned them.
Everybody was running low on food, but I didn’t want to open the food bank yet, because I believed there was still probably food to be had out there, if you looked hard enough.
The situation was not desperate yet, and if two of the families in the street were planning to leave, how many more were thinking about it? This would mean there would be more food to go round when the time was right. I was not trying to play God, I was just trying to be practical with the limited supplies I had available, in order to help my friends and neighbours.
A few days later, I walked around the streets again, trying to get some idea of what was going on. The streets were quiet, but on the High Street every shop, including the supermarket, had been broken into and looted. Looking through the broken glass of the supermarket, the place had clearly been ransacked and every shelf had been stripped bare.
“People are running out of food and getting desperate,” I said to myself. “Now is the time to start taking home security seriously. Desperate, normally law abiding people will be breaking in and trying to take what we have.”
Walking down the next road, I saw a crowd of youths surrounding someone. As I got closer, I saw it was an old man pulling a shopping trolley, one of those two-wheeled ones your grandma always had. They were pushing and jostling him, asking him what he had in his trolley. A few people had crossed the street, not wanting to get involved, but, being stupid, I decided I couldn’t let this happen in broad daylight a few streets away from my house.
“Hey! Leave him alone!” I shouted, trying to sound as tough and authoritative as I could.
“Piss off, what are you gonna do about it?” came the reply from the one who was obviously the leader. He was a skinny eighteen year-old lad in the classic tracksuit and baseball cap. All his clothes looked brand new, even his trainers.
“Been helping yourselves from the local shops then?” was my thought, but that was the least of my concerns, as they all turned their attention on me.
I'm not a small bloke and I could have handled one or two of them I suppose, but unfortunately there were five of them, not good odds at all. Luckily another man, who had initially walked past but had probably had an attack of conscience, decided to join me, saying,
“If you don’t piss off right now, I’m gonna come over and rip your head off your scrawny neck and stuff it up your mate’s arse!”
I looked over at him, admiring his command of the English language, and nodded in thanks. That made the youths think a bit. Two against five were clearly not such good odds for them, particularly as the man who had joined me looked as if he could follow up on his threat. He was about six foot six and looked as if he played a lot of rugby. There was a shout from further up the road and looking round, I saw a policeman jogging towards us.
The youths spotted him and decided to run away, shouting obscenities over their shoulders as they ran.
“Thanks for helping,” I said, and shook his hand.
“I’m sorry I didn’t stop them earlier, but I’ve been trying to find some food for my family, and I didn’t want to get involved in anything that might stop me. But when I saw you step in, I thought I should as well.” The policeman arrived out of breath. It was my barbecue friend again.
We checked that the old man was all right, which he was, and he told us he’d been on his way home from his allotment, where he’d just been harvesting some vegetables to eat. He offered me and the other man (to my regret, I never got his name) some of his vegetables as a thank you. I refused, but his other saviour was very grateful, saying that he and his family had run out of food the previous day and he was desperately trying to find some.
On hearing this the old man said, “Why don’t you take all these then, I can easily get some more, and if you want to come with me up to my allotment again in the morning, in return for being my bodyguard, I can give you some more.” The man was so grateful, he insisted on escorting him home. As they said goodbye I only hoped that a mutually beneficial relationship had begun.
CHAPTER NINE
The policeman and I, as we had now met a few times, introduced ourselves to each other. His name was Allan. We walked along together, and talked about the situation.
“It’s getting out of hand,” Allan told me, “Gangs are robbing every shop they can get into, and if the shop owners are there, they’re beating them up as well. There hasn’t been any official communication from central command or any of the other stations. When I’ve bumped into other officers from neighbouring stations, they’ve told me about similar scenes. Most officers have stopped reporting for duty now, because they think they need to be at home to protect their own families. I’m not married and I haven’t got any family close by. I’ve even started to sleep at the police station, because it’s got a few camp beds. It doesn’t seem worthwhile going home when I’m working fifteen hours a day and all the food’s at the station, while my cupboards at home are bare.”
“Come on back to my house for a cup of coffee and some food,” I said, and he gratefully accepted. Sitting at my kitchen table, eating bowls of soup and drinking big mugs of coffee, I asked him what the current policy would be on protecting your home and family from being robbed.
“Well, of course you can’t step outside the law, but in my opinion, leniency should be given to those protecting what’s theirs, as long as excessive force isn’t used.” I argued, “Yes, but whatever the law might state at the moment, the EMP will mean that nothing is likely to return to normal in the near future and that possibly, it might never do.”
“EM what?” was his reply. I couldn’t believe that nobody had told the police what was happening. They were the people who were responsible for keeping public order. What a monumental cock up that was!
I told him everything I knew, including what Jerry had told me about the government going into hiding, my predictions about the countrywide food situation, or lack of it, that most people were experiencing, and how help was unlikely to be arriving any time soon (unless the government had some amazing plan so save us all).
“Yes, but all the diverted food supplies must be stored somewhere.” It was a good point, but I explained,
“No matter how carefully it’s distributed, the food will only last the country a matter of days, or a week or two, at the most. It’s only going to delay the inevitable starvation that will follow, and with winter approaching, the situation isn’t going to get any better. People are going to start dying soon and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”
Allan left to carry on his patrol and his single-handed effort to keep order in the local area. I wanted him on my side, so I offered him two of my walkie-talkies so that he and another colleague could stay in contact, and coordinate their efforts if necessary.
“If you drop them in when you’re passing, I’ll recharge them from my solar charger and you can pick them up later on.” He was very pleased with the offer and thanked me for trying to help the community. I suppose I was, but having a police officer visiting regularly to drop off and collect the walkie-talkies would be no bad thing. And if I was seen as “the good guy”, if anything happened in the future, I hoped they would automatically assume I was in the right and was only trying to do my best in difficult circumstances.
That night the gas stopped flowing. Water was still coming out of the taps, but the pressure was reducing daily and sometimes it was a bit cloudy.
I decided to stop using it for drinking, as it was likely that the treatment plants wouldn’t be working and therefore you couldn’t be sure if it was safe to drink anyway. I brought up the camping cooker and grill and set them up in the kitchen.
I figured we’d have enough gas to last over a year, but we may as well be careful how much we used, to make it last as long as possible.
We were fine for water, with all the water butts in the gar
den, the stream in the park and the means to filter it all for drinking, so I wasn’t worried about that at all. We also had a good supply of bottled water. But it was going to get much more difficult for other people now.
In the morning, as we were having breakfast, there was a knock at the door. It was Pete, one of our neighbours.
“Bad news, I’m afraid. A house at the bottom of the road has been broken into overnight, while the family were asleep. They’ve been roughed up a little, but they’re fine. But their remaining food has been stolen and I want to call a meeting of all the neighbours to see if there’s anything we can do to help protect ourselves more.”
“Great,” I thought, “this is what we need, a proactive neighbourhood watch. It will help us all.” As I was leaving my house with Pete to round up the rest of the neighbours, Allan turned up with the walkie-talkies for charging. I told him what had happened and invited him to the meeting.
We managed to bring about twenty neighbours together, half of whom lived on our road. The remainder didn’t want to be involved and were not concerned about helping others. Frustrating, but understandable. But they wouldn’t mind selfishly benefiting from our efforts, would they!
Mentally, I removed those people from my food bank help list. The meeting was very productive and we quickly organised a patrol rota, split into three-hour shifts, so that at least two of us would be “on duty” twenty-four hours a day.
We asked Allan how far we could go in protecting ourselves and our property from attack. He thought for a while and then said, “As of this morning, I’m now the only policeman reporting for duty in Moseley, and given what you told me only yesterday, as far as I’m concerned, I’m the only help that’s going to arrive. So, in my view, you should do what you think is necessary and what your consciences will allow you to do.”
That statement made us all go quiet. We were now the Law! It was like the Wild West. I just hoped it wouldn’t result in hanging the bad guys from the nearest lamp posts to teach the rest a lesson. That started a very lively discussion about how far we would be prepared to go, with the liberals suggesting that a stern telling off would be sufficient to deal with the ruffians, and the more right-wing members, me included, argued.
“The only way to deal with them will be to give them a taste of their own medicine and show our strength. That will make them think twice about bothering our small community. There’ll be no police cars screaming down the road with lights flashing so we’re on our own.”
I steered the conversation around to food in an attempt to find out how well my neighbours were coping. Most were running low, which was a concern, so I made a suggestion.
“Why don’t we organize trips to all the local shops to see if any food is still available, and then we can share it out with everyone who’s joined in with our efforts.”
Allan said not to bother, as he had walked around all the local businesses in the last few days, including those that sell food.
“In my opinion,” he told us, “not one of them has got anything left to sell, or they’ve closed and are saving what’s left for themselves. There are still a lot of supplies left at the police station, though, even after most of the officers stole what they could to take home to their families. If you’re willing to police your road, and help to keep order, then I’m willing to share the supplies from the station, once I’ve taken what I think I need for myself.” This was a generous offer and we gratefully accepted.
I had read in a lot of survival books, how some groups had barricaded their roads to keep out trespassers. I put this forward as an idea.
Most people didn’t want to do this just yet, which I understood, as it had only been a week since the EMP.
Although things were bad and there were no signs of it getting better, taking the decision to barricade ourselves in seemed a step too far at that moment.
We soon established a routine of patrolling in pairs and, apart from the shifts in the early hours of the morning, which nobody enjoyed, it seemed to give everyone a sense of purpose and worked well. The neighbourhood seemed to become closer and there was a real community spirit. Even some of the neighbours who had initially refused to help saw the benefit of what we were doing, and joined us. Pete assumed the position of leader of the neighbourhood watch, which none of us minded. He’d run a large and very successful business, so he had great people skills and was very well liked and respected on the street.
Of course, the food supplies given to us by Allan, the policeman, helped, so no one was going hungry yet. Everyone’s basic needs were being met, and therefore, jealousy about what other people might have had not come into the equation. We were just mucking in together to help each other out.
I kept in regular contact with Jerry. His neighbours were not doing anything to help each other and there had been quite a few robberies on the road. A lot of them had left to try to get to friends who lived out of the city, or just anywhere where there might be some food.
He seemed exhausted, as he spent nights awake, in case someone tried to break in. He hadn't taken any of the guns out of the crate yet.
“You must,” I urged him. “You need to protect yourself and your family, and because you’re on your own, weapons are probably the best answer.” We agreed that I would visit him, so that I could give him some basic instructions (providing I could work out how to use the guns myself).
He told me where he lived and I arranged to go round the following morning.
I told Allan, by now a daily visitor to our road, what Jerry had said.
“Yes,” he confirmed, “as far as I know, you’re the only road to have banded together to help each other out. The situation’s getting worse by the day. Gangs are beginning to roam the streets, mugging anyone they come across and breaking into houses to steal supplies. I’m beginning to feel very vulnerable and exposed when I’m out patrolling on my own. I really don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to do it. I can’t be everywhere at once and as soon as the criminals watch me leave an area, they just start again.”
“Are you still carrying one of my walkie-talkies, because remember, we’ve already said we’ll come to help you if you need us.”
“Well, I think that, since no property or person in your road has been attacked, word must have got around about your patrols. For the moment, there are easier targets out there.”
Bangs that sounded like gunshots were becoming daily occurrences and at any time of the day you could see a plume of smoke rising, presumably from another house on fire.
I couldn’t help thinking, “Where are the people who could help, the police, the military, anyone? The only official person we’ve seen in the past week is Allan and he’s doing his best, but he can’t arrest anyone any more. There’s no one else to pass the prisoners on to; all he can do to try to prevent crime is stay visible and chase the bad guys away.”
I told Allan, “I’m going to see a friend in Kings Heath tomorrow. Would you have any objection to me taking my shotgun for protection.?” I had told him early on that I was a shotgun licence holder and so I had a few guns in the house.
“Tom, do whatever you want, I’m not going to stop you. Just be bloody careful and don’t do anything you'll regret.”
CHAPTER TEN
In the morning, I called Jerry on the walkie-talkie and told him to expect me in about thirty minutes. I kissed Becky and the kids goodbye and promised to be careful. It felt strange to be walking up my street with a shotgun over my shoulder. (OK, I’ll admit it was pretty exciting as well.) The walk was uneventful and hardly anyone was around. The High Street was a mess, with every shop and pub broken into. Peering inside the broken windows, it was plain to see that anything of use had already been stolen. A lot of houses looked empty, most with doors kicked in and windows smashed. I spotted a few people looking at me from behind windows. I waved, but no one came out to say hello. I suppose the shotgun must have had something to do with it, so I just carried on walking. I thought to myself,
“How many people are left in the city and where have they all gone to? The whole place feels abandoned and it’s only been just over two weeks.”
I walked past my sister’s house and felt a pang of sadness, wondering where she and her family were. I hoped they were surviving. The front door had been kicked in, so I went inside. The place had been ransacked and every cupboard in the kitchen had been emptied in the search for food.
I knew Jane kept most of her food in her cellar, so I tried the door. It was still locked. The idiots had been so busy stealing my sister’s now useless television, and grabbing things that were easy to find, that they hadn't done a thorough search. I would have to return later with some help to get whatever was in the cellar.
I knew Jane was in the habit of ordering a big monthly delivery from the supermarket to save shopping weekly, so potentially, there could be a lot of food stored in there. As I left the house, I took care to leave the front door open, so that it was obvious it had already been broken into, in the hope that this would deter others.
Jerry lived in a nice detached house on the Moseley/Kings Heath border. He was looking through the front window, waiting for me to arrive, and he opened the front door as I walked up the drive. We shook hands and he introduced me to his wife, Fiona, and his two children, Larry (who was four) and Jack (who was six months old). I called Becky on my walkie-talkie to tell her I had arrived safely. Because we chatted most nights on the walkie- talkies, we didn't have lot of catching up to do, but I filled him in on what Allan had told me the previous day about the gangs and how, in the space of two short weeks, society had collapsed. I told him that things were likely to get worse the hungrier and more desperate people became.
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