Beyond the Strandline

by ToClark

Annabelle was a little ray of sunshine from the very beginning. She faced the world with a wide-mouthed, albeit initially toothless grin that captivated everyone on whom it was bestowed. Annette was delighted with her. Alexander, like everybody else was quite besotted with his baby daughter and, as soon as the weather turned into an early and even warmer spring than last year, delighted in carrying her around in her papoose carrier. Pictures of her peering over his shoulder from under a floppy pink hat with what seemed to be an ever-broadening and captivating smile circulated almost daily on Facebook.

  “Hardly ever cries!” he proclaimed proudly to anyone who would listen and especially on making the acquaintance of strangers. Annabelle would gurgle and occasionally hiccup in confirmation of these affirmations.

  “Breastfed!” he would explain knowledgeably to his audience. “There’s no substitute and Annette seems to have plenty of it.” He was prone to saying “Haven’t you, darling!” if they were walking together, causing her to become somewhat flustered and blushing. But she said she didn’t mind really and after all, that was what motherhood was all about!

  As a family, they drew together against a worrying outlook. William was pretty much bankrupted and now joined Alexander among the swelling ranks of the unemployed. They had never before had to cope with the strictures of being in financial difficulties and counting the pennies did not come naturally or easily to William, at least. The house was paid for as was the family car but it was only the dwindling amount of a reserve building society account that acted as a buffer between them and the food banks.

  Only Alexander took it upon himself to line up along with a lengthening, shuffling and increasingly demoralised queue of hungry welfare recipients. Coming home from one of these dreary and long waits with a parcel of basic foods (“My wife is nursing the baby – she needs milk supplements”), he began to wonder how soon it would be before proper rationing was introduced.

  The old man next to him had broken into his reverie. “Just like in the War” he had said.

  “Which war?”

  “WW2 they call it nowadays, don’t they? Like it was ancient history.”

  “Well, it is, isn’t it? History, I mean.”

  “Maybe to you youngsters but I remember it well enough. Bombing and doodlebugs. Not much to eat half the time. My father kept rabbits and chickens so we did better than some families. He used to trade eggs for a packet of tea. My mother was a real teapot, he reckoned it kept her from going nuts, especially in the winter.”

  Warming to Alexander’s audience attention, he became expansive. “You had to go to the railway station for your ration of coal. I used to go with him with my old pram to carry it back. They only let you have one sackful at a time. It was a hundredweight. Great big sack, he couldn’t have carried it on his back because we lived too far away. No cars in them days, you see – and they wouldn’t let you take it on the bus. There weren’t many of them either” he added. If we could afford it my mother would take the pram back for another sackful later on.”

  Alexander nodded. It helped to pass the dreary waiting.

  “He couldn’t abide the cold, you see.”

  “He?”

  “My father. He was stationed in the Yemen until he was demobbed. Couldn’t stand the winters after that. Made him pretty miserable at times and I got many a clout if I got on the wrong end of his temper. Which was quite often!” he added.

  “We had an Aga, too, I remember.”

  “An Aga?”

  “One of the old kitchen ranges. My mother tried to keep it in all night if we had the coal. Kept the whole house warm. Used to send me and my big brother out to get wood if we could.”

  “Wood?”

  “To light it with. No gas pokers in them days. They hadn’t been invented

  “What’s a gas poker?

  “You don’t know, do you? Christ, how things change in this world!” He jabbed with his arm as if using a sword to fight an imaginary enemy. “Long thing, gas burner, a bit like inside a gas cooker. You lit it and shoved it in amongst the coal to get it alight so you didn’t need screws of old newspaper and bits of wood. It was much better, especially when the smokeless coal came in or if you had coke. Bugger to get going otherwise. Especially if it was coke. Made a lovely fire once it got going, though. None of the filthy fumes and smoke you got with the old stuff we had before.

  “Only you said they hadn’t been invented then?”

  “No, not ‘till after the war. After the winter of 1947 come to that. Terrible winter, ’47. Snow on the ground ‘till Easter.”

  Alexander shook his head bemusedly. The conversation was beginning to sound surreal. For a moment he felt as though he didn’t know which century he was living in.

  “Of course” the man continued with a little chuckle “everybody’s got central heating nowadays. Funny that! My father wouldn’t have it until my mother threatened to move out and live with her sister in her flat in Bromley. He reckoned it dried out the air and gave everybody colds and itchy eyes and asthma and stuff. And it cost a fortune to run and if we couldn’t have afforded it we would have had to go to bed in a cold house because where was no fire you could light and where was the sense in that?”

  Alexander was spared further rhetoric by reaching the head of the queue.

  “Might see you tomorrow then?”

  “Sure! You know, you ought to write a book about it.”

  The old man nodded. “Thanks for listening. I don’t think people care anymore. It was another world then, wasn’t it.”

  Alexander suddenly wanted to shake his hand, resisted the gesture and fraternally patted his arm instead.

  “See you!” he said, gathering up his share of society’s past-the-sell-by date largesse. “What was it they used to say?

  “It’ll all be over by Christmas!”

  “Well, they were wrong about that, sure enough.”

  They watched with a kind of sickened fascination as the man was slowly hauled up the tower crane, highly visible in the Guantanamo Bay style jumpsuit they had made him wear. Once at the top, he was with equal slowness run out to the furthest extension of the jib. The crane then began to slew round until it was extended out over the waterside before coming to a stop. The video then panned in to bring the man up to maximum magnification so that his petrified face could be discerned in clear closeup as he swung from side to side in the wind. This view was held there for maybe a minute before panning back to a distant size that showed the crane in its entirety. They could see that he had something heavy attached to his otherwise bare feet. Then they dropped him.

  It had been going on all morning. Al Jazeera was showing nothing else but interspersing the awful spectacle with its own horrified commentary.

  To complete the nightmare, as soon as the victim had fallen, a second camera would play over a large caged area containing several dozen others, all dressed in the same jumpsuits. A squad of armed guards would then enter and drag one of them out, apparently at random, struggling and screaming as they were taken to suffer the same fate.

  Isis was stridently showing itself in its true jihadist colours.

  Since the fall of Baghdad they had become confidently aggressive. An ever-enlarging fighting force, armed with a fearsome arsenal of weaponry boosted by materiel acquired from Iraqi military deserters swept into Nasiriyah and massed in readiness to advance into Basra. It was now obvious that once that objective was achieved the next target would be Kuwait and a spectre of a repeat of the 1991 first Gulf War when Saddam Hussein’s 100,000 strong army invaded resulting in the environmental catastrophe of the destruction of the Kuwaiti oil industry.

  A NATO - UN Summit meeting was hastily convened in The Hague. Russia was included amongst the participants and with the Chinese as observers.

  The deliberations took place behind very closely guarded doors and lasted without interruption for almost 48 hours. Minutes were declared to be classified info
rmation.

  The participants dispersed in tight-lipped silence.

  Another 124 persons, mostly Europeans working with or for the Americans as advisors were executed in the same manner as before. The ghastly deed was perpetrated in batches of twenty followed by prayers according to Islamic tradition, five times daily. Despite a worldwide wave of protests, they were completely ignored.