by Holroyd, Tom
We were escorted to Exeter airport flying over a landscape dotted with refugee camps and touched down off the main runway. We were met by an Army Major and a squad of soldiers who welcomed us to the Safe Zone, the news crew were led away and I think sent to one of the refugee camps and my co-pilot and I were conscripted. No pomp no ceremony we were just told “Welcome to the army” by a smiling Major and a squad of soldiers, not really a lot you can say to an offer like that. But I can’t complain we were in the Safe Zone and for the first time in three months I felt safe.
CONSOLIDATION
Resources
Hever Castle, Kent
Set in the beautiful English countryside, Hever Castle was most well known for being the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII. In the pre-War years it was a popular tourist attraction but throughout the War, the castle was home to a small band of survivors who lived in relative safety and comfort thanks to the deep moat and extensive vegetable gardens.
Hever Castle is now the home of Lord James McMillan. In the years before the War, Lord McMillan was a successful businessman running a well-known chain of high street clothing stores. When the Panic hit he managed to evacuate his entire family and many friends to his estate in Scotland where he helped to feed and re-locate many refugees. It was this philanthropic effort which brought him to the notice of the Government. He was offered the newly created job of Minister for Resources, a role he held throughout the war before becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer, the position he still holds today.
I was offered the role of Minster for Resources a few weeks after the Royalist Movement trounced the politicians. I was at my estate near Crieff and was trying to organising all the refugees that I suddenly found on my door step, when a helicopter came in and landed on what was left of my front lawn. Most of it was by then in the process of being converted into veg gardens. I was in my study and in the middle of a full-blown row with one of the estate’s farmers, who didn’t want his prime Aberdeen Angus cows moved off their grass land and slaughtered. I was trying to get across the point that for the resources that one herd takes up I could feed hundreds of people. I was so engrossed in the argument that I barley registered the helicopter, nor the two soldiers who stood in the door way to my office. It was only when one of them yelled “Make way for the Prince Regent” that I stopped shouting and took notice.
I had no idea how long the Prince had been standing there but he had obviously heard enough as he had a slight smile on his face. He turned to an aide standing by his side and said “He’s the one, he will be perfect”. After recovering from my initial shock I asked what he meant, the Prince replied that he needed someone to organise the Safe Zones and get the country on to a war footing and from what he had just seen I was the perfect man for the job.
What did you say?
I said yes of course, you don’t say no to the deputy head of the country when he asks you to help save it.
When did you start?
That was my next question. The Prince smiled and said “Now”, then told me to join him on the helicopter. I said a quick goodbye to my wife, turned over management of the estate to her then got on the helicopter and took off. The Prince was straight down to business; he briefed me in the air en route to the new seat of Government at Balmoral and explained the situation in the country as he saw it and what needed to be done. It was only then that the enormity of the task before me became obvious.
Can you explain his view?
The short version was that things were in a pretty sorry state, some sixty percent of the population was either dead or un-dead. The remaining forty percent were either in the Safe Zones, Burghs, on ships off the coast or hiding in The Grey. There was precious little food available, no industrial base to call on, supplies of oil, gas and petrol were dwindling and we were basically in danger of sliding back into the Dark Ages. On top of all this was the fact that the Safe Zones were not even fully clear yet, the military were still conducting “Sanitation Operations” and every day brought fresh sightings of the infected. All this the Prince relayed to me in such a clear and calm way that he made it seem like it was just a small snafu and everything would sort itself out. It really gave me a confidence boost knowing I had his support. I know he had gotten a lot of stick in the past but when the chips were down the Prince and the Royal Family as a whole, showed their true colours. They gave everything to ensure the survival of this country and I watched a true servant of the people work himself to the bone so that others could have a better life and a chance at survival, “Cometh the hour, cometh the man” as they say.
Where did you start with such a massive task?
Well, I began with the refugee camps. There was something like three hundred in the northern zone alone and every one of them was a huge drain on resources; food, guards, water, power, everything. They had to be emptied and fast.
Before that though we had to find places to send them and so we began the census. It was probably the most meticulous survey of the state of a nation since The Doomsday Book in 1086 and was appropriately nick-named The Armageddon Census. We recruited four thousand volunteers from the camps, gave them each a bicycle and sent them out into both Safe Zones to begin their work. They counted everything; the number of people, their names, where they lived, even if that was a tent in a camp and what skills if any they had. What possessions, equipment and supplies were available, how many rooms a house had, what houses were empty, what factories were working and what they could produce. Basically, anything that could be counted or surveyed was.
All of it was catalogued and the results collated by another group of volunteers into a huge database run out of a small room in Balmoral Castle. That was the heart of my empire, a series of rooms in one wing, staffed by about a hundred-people drawn from all walks of life. I had ex-military, farmers, members of the Red Cross, even a lady from the Women’s Institute, anyone who had any knowledge of marshalling and organising resources found themselves working for me.
Our next biggest challenge was time. Winter was coming and all of the meteorological data pointed towards it being a really harsh one, we were running out of resources and people were still dying, we had to act fast. The surveyors had been given just two weeks to gather their information and get it back to “The Ministry”. The computer geeks then had another two weeks to collate it and I had about ten minutes to work out what we were going to do with all that information.
What was your first step?
As I said, the first priority was to empty the camps. During the survey everyone had been asked about their skills and former jobs, this was recorded and each person given a card with a grade on it. The three grades were based on how useful we considered people to be. P1s were people who had a useable skill; an ex-soldier, a farmer, gunsmith, blacksmith, anything that could be used to improve the situation. P2s were people who could be used as administrators and coordinators and P3s were the unskilled labour and as you can imagine there were a lot more of the latter two than the first. You have no idea some of the jobs that were listed as skills; manager of this, co-ordinator of that, all perfectly suited to the pre-war, post-industrial society that we all used to be part of but absolutely sod all use in the current situation. Some of the local council ones were the best; my favourite was “Walking Co-ordinator”. We used to have a pin board with some of the most amusing jobs ranked on it, a bit mean I grant you but it kept moral up.
Anyway, as I said we had to get these people working and housed fast, so we set up housing offices in each camp, staffed by the P2s and used the data the survey had collated to find people new homes. We put people wherever we could. Most of the time it was in empty houses and some of the time it was in houses that already had a family living inside. There were a lot of people who were not happy about that but needs must. People needed a roof over their head and if one family had a large enough house they doubled up. It didn’t always work and sometimes people had to be moved to prevent them killing one
another but more often than not they knuckled down and got on with it.
The next step was getting people working and this was a top priority, not just because we had lots of work that needed doing but because it helped people to deal with the shock and trauma of everything that had happened. We didn’t know why at the time but people were still dying, just going to bed at night and not waking up. We thought that work would help keep people’s minds off their troubles, give them a reason to get up in the morning.
There was so much that needed to be done in those first months and I barley slept for most of it. We had to clear streets of rubble, get roads and rail lines re-opened, bodies burnt, God there were so many of those. There was the harvest that had to be brought in and myriad other jobs, fortunately though we had a vast pool of labour to draw on.
The P1s were all busy setting up their relevant industries with whatever resources we could give them. If a blacksmith needed iron to make nails, we found it for him but more importantly we gave them apprentices and I considered this to be our most valuable resource. It was my hope that by training as many people as possible in useful skills we could scatter them across the Safe Zones and make towns and villages as self-sufficient as possible and therefore less reliant on Government aid.
At the same time the best of the P2s were being drafted into the new Civil Service and the P3s were being used for all that unskilled but physical labour that needed doing.
Of course once all those manual labour jobs ran out we had to find things for the P3s to do and that was where the civilian re-training program can in. We formed training teams made up of P1s all of whom had different skills. We made sure each team had at least one farmer or gardener to teach people how to grow their own food. There was a soldier to advise on defence and security, a plumber, electrician and builder to give people the practical skills and a medic or where possible a doctor to train people on basic first aid and health. We sent them to every settlement in the Safe Zones and they would stay as long as they felt was necessary to get that place on its feet before moving on. It was really heartening to see these people from different parts of the country come together and begin to form a new society, it really helped to bond people together.
I know a lot of countries had similar problems to us when it came to harnessing their work force but we also had the additional burden of a vast Welfare State. It seems so alien to us today how anyone would want to be a drain on society, not working and not contributing but just sitting at home watching daytime TV and bleeding money from the Government. Thank God that’s gone the way of the Dodo and people work hard, contribute and support themselves. But back then we had a whole swathe of society that expected everything to be done for them; even after having seen the world essentially end they were not prepared to do anything about it and expected the Government to sort it out for then. It was so bloody frustrating. Not everyone was like that I hasten to add but there were enough to make life bloody difficult.
What about food, surely that was in short supply?
Actually, we weren’t too bad off when it came to food. The Panic had started in the first half of the year after the spring plantings had taken place, it was now late summer and near harvest time so we had a vast amount of grain and vegetables in the fields ready to go. What we lacked were people to harvest it. There was a chronic shortage of fuel for the farm vehicles so the entire harvest had to be done by hand. The solution was to essentially “collectivise” the farms and turned them into communes under central Government control. We moved people from the camps to the farms and created a chain of command to help run the settlement. The farmer was the subject matter expert, there was a civil servant on hand to act as an administrator and co-ordinate the effort and there was a Police officer to help co-ordinate security and keep order.
I got a lot of stick for that idea and had to fight the Prince pretty hard to get the bill signed. It’s not really surprising when you consider that on the surface it looked like we were selling people into a modern form of serfdom but looking back in hindsight you can see how well it worked. It brought people together, gave them a sense of community and purpose and gave them a reason to carry on. We always moved people as families and on every farm I visited I met people who were genuinely happy with their situation. You just have to look at how many families have settled on their original farms to see that it worked. Sorry if that seems a bit defensive but as I said I got a lot of grief.
Anyway, the harvest came in and people had enough of the bare essentials to survive the winter but it was two factors that helped to feed the population, the first was the Dig for Victory campaign and the second was Vertical Farms.
The former was essentially a rehashing of the World War II policy of turning every square inch of available ground over to food production, everything from vegetables and chickens to goats and pigs. It was surprisingly easy to implement as in the years leading up to the war there had been a growing trend throughout the country for growing your own food, the upside of which was a pool of knowledge in almost every town that could be harnessed for the community. It was fantastic and by the following summer allowed almost every town to become self-sufficient in terms of food.
However, the real life saver was Vertical Farming. Essentially this was the idea of growing food by using hydroponics in a controlled environment, while making use of all available space. The advantage of this technique was that we could grow large amounts of any type of food, all year round. The real drivers of this program were a team of agricultural students from Edinburgh who had been running a prototype system in an old cattle shed on the outskirts of the city. I got a quick tour and once I saw how they were growing four acres worth of tomatoes in a one-hundred-meter-long shed I told them their trial was approved and they could have whatever they needed. Sadly, that wasn’t very much, a few trucks and some workers but what I could give them was licence to take over empty buildings and first dibs on whatever salvage they could find.
I was genuinely amazed at what they achieved, within weeks they had their second site up and running in an abandoned warehouse in Edinburgh having built a system out of office furniture, plumbing supplies and strip lighting. It was a bit of a struggle at first but once the country started to get back on its feet we were able to offer them more and more support and it grew from there. By the end of the second year we had Vertical Farms in every city and large town in the Safe Zones and had transmitted the plans to every Burgh and settlement we could reach. In my opinion, it saved this country from starvation and the guy who developed it should be given a bucket load of medals and knighted.
What about power and infrastructure?
Again, we were actually quite well off. Two of the country’s nuclear power stations were in Scotland, as where a number of hydroelectric systems and offshore wind farms. We were even able to plug a few of the nuclear submarines in Faslane into the National Grid. Once we had secured the stations and gotten them up and running there was almost no problem with energy and thanks to the National Grid we could supply power to any part of the UK that still had a working substation. A central node was set up in Dundee that could control the flow of electricity; it essentially allowed us to supply only those areas where we knew that there was a settlement or Burgh. It may have seemed harsh to those people somehow hanging on in London or some of the other big cities but there was no way we could supply the huge demands of energy that cities that size needed. All those automatic streetlights or traffic systems, even lights or TVs left on in people’s houses would have sucked up huge amounts of power, so we shut them off. I cannot stress how such a simple thing helped to save so many people, it gave hope to all of those in the Burghs or the Grey just by having something as simple as the lights back on.
With power we could pump water, flush toilets and process sewage, although a lot of this went straight onto the fields or vegetable patches. We could talk to other parts of the country again through the National Communication Network and we could supply facto
ries with enough energy to begin the process of salvaging resources and getting an industrial base up and running. Most importantly we could get power to the oil rigs in the North Sea and get them pumping precious oil and gas to the refinery at Grangemouth. However even then that was not a perfect solution. In the years running up to the war the government had taken the decision to resume oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. Because of this, most of the wells were dangerously low and there would not be enough to meet all of the nation’s needs, especially when you started to add in aviation fuel for the heavy lift aircraft and heavy oil for all the shipping, it was a real concern.
We needed a radical solution and I was open to all offers. Fortunately, I was again rescued by a group of university students who had been working on bio-fuels that used algae as its base. I was sold the first time they pitched it to me and within weeks we had set up the first farm on the coast. After that the whole process just took off with almost every bit a coastline given over to algae farms and refineries.
It was a miracle. Not only did we now have a renewable form of fuel we could put in any vehicle but it created jobs and helped to move the country away from an oil dependent economy. I am especially proud of the last part. For too long the country had been dependent on insecure foreign oil which had put us at risk in the past, now we were free of that burden and energy independent.
