On the way we stopped at the garage so that I could refill the car and buy and fill as many fuel cans as they had on the shelf. The garage had the usual small shop inside so we also bought all the non-perishable items they had left.
At home, once I had unloaded the fuel cans and bags of food, I repositioned the cars on the drive so that the Land Rover wouldn’t be blocked by Becky’s car. Then I backed the Land Rover into the garage area to hide it out of the way. Becky walked up to the supermarket at the top of the road to see if there was anything left worth buying. I decided to remove the car batteries from the Land Rover and Becky’s Volvo and put them into the Faraday cage as well. Why not? If I didn’t, they were going to be rendered useless in the next few hours, so I may as well try to save them. It was a bit of a pain unwrapping the aluminium foil and chicken wire from around the cage, but I could only blame myself for not thinking of it before. Then again, I’d had quite a lot on my mind over the last few days, so I didn’t feel too stupid.
I had to laugh as Becky returned, pushing a supermarket trolley down the road with the wobbliest wheel you’ve ever seen. I told her she was starting to look like the local tramp. The telling off I received suggested that today was probably not the best day for bad jokes. She’d had to take the trolley as she’d bought too much to carry home and the staff seemed to have bigger things to worry about than stopping her from pushing one of their trolleys out of the door and down the road. The shelves were really empty now, but if you weren’t too picky about the goods you wanted, there was still some stuff there. I decided that we would try a few more trips together and that if the trolley was full I would carry a few extra bags. I wanted to see how empty the shelves were for myself and to get her a better trolley.
She was right. It was chaos in there. The place was full of angry customers and very stressed looking staff who were trying to calm them down. But if you kept your head down and looked carefully, there were still enough goods to be had.
People were so stupid; if the store had run out of Heinz baked beans, they didn’t seem to think supermarket own brand baked beans were good enough. We filled the trolley and headed out of the door for the short walk home.
Becky was ahead of me, pushing a fully loaded shopping trolley, and I was weighed down by four heavy carrier bags when it happened. From the High Street just behind us, came the sound of cars crashing into each other and screams. A car driving past us down the road suddenly slowed down, swerved a few times as if the driver was having trouble steering and then crunched into a parked car. We looked at each other in horror, I told Becky to stay there and I ran back up to the main road. It was chaos. Cars, buses and HGVs had all crashed, either into each other or into the buildings on either side of the road. I wanted to help, but I knew we had to get our children back home safely. I ran back to Becky who was in tears. I gave her a hug and told her,
“It’s going to be fine my love, we knew this was going to happen and we are as ready as we can be to survive this. Now let’s go and get the kids.”
“Should we go and see if we can help anyone up on the High Street? People could be hurt.” Becky asked. Typical of her to think of others even at a time like this.
“No, we must go and get Stanley and Daisy first, they’re our priority and anyway darling, there should be loads of people up there to help, we’ll only be getting in the way.”
We ignored a man standing beside his crashed car, looking at his mobile phone and wondering why it wasn’t working, and rushed home to get ready to collect our children from school. While Becky quickly packed a rucksack with some drinks and snacks, I ran down to the garage, ripped the foil and mesh off the Faraday cage and opened it. I grabbed the first thing I could out of it, my e-reader, and turned it on. IT WORKED! “Yes! I’m a genius,” I thought.
I ran up into the house to tell Becky the good news, put the rucksack on my back and we left to collect Stanley and Daisy.
It was a strange walk. It was very quiet without the usual traffic noise, which you can never normally escape from in a city. The roads were full of stopped cars; quite a few had crashed into each other, but there didn’t seem to be any serious injuries. People were just milling about, looking in a bewildered fashion at their now useless mobile phones, while others had the bonnets up on their cars and were trying to work out why they’d suddenly stopped. Many people asked if they could borrow our phones as their own phones had stopped working. The only thing to do was to say “Sorry, our phones aren’t working either,” and keep walking.
After a brisk ten-minute walk we arrived at the school. Everything was normal and the school secretary apologised about the lights being out.
“The maintenance man is trying to fix it.” She complained that she would have phoned the supply company, but the phone had stopped working as well. She looked a bit baffled when we said we were there to collect Stanley and Daisy. It occurred to me then that it was wrong not to tell these good people what was happening. The children in the school were their responsibility, and even though most parents lived and worked locally, and would be able to walk there and collect their children, some would find it difficult, as they would be stranded, possibly a long way away. The school needed to be aware of what had happened, so that at least they could plan what to do.
I asked to see the Headmaster immediately regarding a very urgent matter. Why do you always feel nervous sitting in a chair in front of a headmaster? Is it me or do you always feel you are in some sort of trouble?
Becky and I told him everything we knew. We explained what had happened and what the consequences were.
He asked a few questions, but he obviously understood the main points we were making. He admitted to having read some fictional books about it on holiday last year, so it didn’t take much to make him believe that fiction had actually turned into fact. I asked what he was planning to do and he sat quietly at his desk for a minute, leaning back with his eyes closed. He responded that, obviously, he needed to make sure all his pupils and staff were safe. He could see that some of the children would be stuck at school for a while until their parents could collect them. He knew that some of the parents would be unable to collect them if they were stranded a long way away. He would either have to keep them at school with him, or see if they were prepared to go home with one of their friends. The school had a lot of food in stock, as it obviously prepared a lot of meals in one day and if there were only a few of them, the food would certainly last quite some time. “What a selfless man,” I thought, “he’s far more concerned about the welfare of his ‘charges’ than he is about himself. An example to us all.”
We agreed that it would be best if he told every parent what was going on when they eventually collected their children. It would be up to them if they took the information seriously, and hopefully took what steps they could to give themselves a chance to survive. Becky and I were a bit emotional when we collected Stanley and Daisy from their classrooms, said goodbye to the headmaster and wished him luck. Another part of normal life, going to school, was now probably a thing of the past. What would the future hold for us?
Walking home, we told the children what had happened and why so many cars were stuck in the middle of the roads, and why people were walking around in confusion, still trying to get their phones to work, with baffled looks on their faces. They accepted what we told them in that matter of fact way that children have, and reacted with great excitement when we told them that they weren’t going to be able to go back to school for the foreseeable future.
They were disappointed, though, when we told them it would be hard for them to see their friends.
When we arrived home, I showed Stanley and Daisy all the supplies we had gathered in the last couple of days, and also what we had already collected over the past year or so. I couldn’t emphasise enough times the importance of not telling people how much stuff we actually had. I really had to get that message home to them.
Stanley was very excited about all the guns I had
and wanted to start cleaning them immediately. I’d started introducing guns to the children over the past couple of years, mainly to get them used to them and to start teaching them the basics of gun safety. Always check a gun is not loaded and therefore safe when it is handed to you, and never point a gun at anyone either loaded or unloaded.
One of the jobs they enjoyed was helping me clean my shotgun after I’d used it. I’m a firm believer in introducing children to firearms in a controlled, closely supervised and safe manner. That way, they’ll fully understand how dangerous they can be in the wrong hands, and it also takes some of the mysticism away from them. They’ll understand them and know how to handle a firearm safely and responsibly, if and when they are allowed to hold, or in the future, own one.
CHAPTER SIX
The rest of the day passed quietly. I unpacked the Faraday cage and brought the items needed into the house, then I reconnected the battery to my Land Rover. I held my breath and crossed my fingers when I turned the key in the ignition and said a silent prayer when it started first time. Yes! We still had transport.
We roped the kids into helping us sort out the mountains of supplies that had collected in various rooms around the house. I cleared a path to the partitioned off area at the back of the garage that I had built to hide our initial supplies when the quantity had become too much to explain away. Those supplies were the oldest, so logically, it made sense to start using them first. It was a mammoth task and it was going to take us weeks to carefully unpack and separate it all. Becky would then have to catalogue it so that we could keep track of supplies used and easily find out what we had left.
But what else did we have to do? We figured we might as well fill our days productively, if only to keep the boredom away.
After a few hours of hard work for all of us, I decided that we’d done enough for the day. We let Stanley and Daisy have some iPad time as a reward for helping us, and Becky sorted out what we were going to have for dinner to go with our left-over Chinese from the previous night. In the meantime, I walked up to the High Street to see what was happening.
It was like a scene from a movie in which the refugees are escaping ahead of an invading enemy, but instead of a rabble of poorly dressed locals pushing handcarts piled high with their worldly possessions, the refugees were well dressed people in business suits and dresses, carrying handbags and briefcases. Even though there were no cars, people still kept to the pavements out of habit, so all the cyclists had to avoid were the cars littering the road.
Clearly these were the thousands of office workers making their weary way home. The pub on the corner was doing a roaring trade, with all the thirsty, tired people stopping off for some refreshment on their way home. The Landlord, never one to miss an opportunity, had a table outside with a member of staff selling bottles of water and crisps and chocolate bars to those who didn’t want to stop. Most of the shops, including the supermarket, had closed and pulled their shutters down with hand written signs on them saying, “Closed due to power cut. Back open tomorrow”. A couple of policemen were out on foot patrol, either by choice, or perhaps because their car wasn’t working either. They were besieged by pedestrians asking what was going on, and why. There was nothing to gain by hanging about on the High Street, so I went home to spend time with the family.
Getting Stanley and Daisy used to the idea that our lives had changed forever and were going to be a bit harder, was going to be a long process.
Slowly drip feeding them information was probably the best way. Kids normally adjust better to change than adults, so we would just have to see how it went and take it one day at a time.
We had a great evening. We made an adventure of it, eating our meal by candlelight and telling them stories about how we remembered the power cuts of the 1970s due to the miners’ strikes. We explained that this was similar and told them about how we’d entertained ourselves.
The one thing the government hadn’t lied about was the Northern Lights. We had the most spectacular light show and we sat out on the patio with the kids for hours, just admiring the beauty of it. Recorded accounts of the Carrington event had reported that you could read outside at night by the light emitted by the Northern Lights and I’m sure we could have done the same. We sat there in awe of what we were seeing.
The kids were shattered by the time we decided to put them to bed, so after a quick story they went straight to sleep. We gave them both a torch in case they needed to go to the toilet in the night.
Becky and I decided to turn in as well. We were absolutely exhausted after the couple of days we had had. It didn’t take us long to drop off.
The morning, apart from the fact that the lights and the television weren’t working, could have been almost normal. Our hot water tank was very well insulated, so the water was still hot enough for us to enjoy one last shower and to bath the kids.
As I stood heating up a pan of water on the hob, to top up the hot water in the bath for the kids so that they could stay in the bath a bit longer (the hot water was now getting cold), another thought struck me. WATER!
We had plenty of bottled water to drink and a clever water filtration device that looked like a compact cylinder vacuum cleaner.
You put one hose into whatever water you wanted to drink, operated the hand pump, and out of the hose at the other end, once the water had passed through a series of filters, came clean, drinkable water. It was a brilliant little gadget but the filters only lasted a certain amount of time before they needed changing. I did have a lot of spare filters, but they weren’t going to last forever. I didn’t know how long the water was still going to be coming out of the taps, so why not fill every sealable container we had in the house with as much water as possible for drinking, and then every saucepan, jug, or anything else that could hold water, for cooking and cleaning? We had water butts on every downpipe on the house, which we used for watering the garden, and I had a few extra stored at the bottom of the garden. I’d always planned to link a few together to increase the capacity so that we still had enough during dry spells in the summer but I’d never got around to it. We could use the water from those to flush the toilets and, when necessary, we could filter it for drinking. It would save a lot of leg work, hauling water up from the stream in the park and would be a simple solution to extending our water supplies. I hadn’t thought of it until now.
While Becky was going through our rapidly defrosting fridges and freezers in the house, working out meal plans so that we didn’t waste anything, I noticed a few neighbours out on the street chatting to each other. I decided to go and join in the gossip. Stanley and Daisy came out with me, as a few of the neighbours’ children they liked to play with were out as well. As there were no cars flying up and down the road, it made a nice change for them to be able to run around and not have to worry about traffic, and soon a game of football was underway, with an ever growing number of children joining in.
Obviously the talk was about the power cut and why their cars were not working, and the fact that even things in the house that were battery powered had broken as well. It had taken one of my neighbours five hours to walk home from work.
I played my cards close to my chest. I didn’t want to give away too much information at this stage, so I nodded and agreed to the general comments, moaning a bit about how inconvenient it all was etc.
I wanted to walk up to the High Street to find out what was happening there, so I made sure the kids were OK. The game of football was in full swing, jumpers as goal posts, the lot. They were fine, so I popped into the house to tell Becky where I was going. Making sure I had some cash on me, I walked up the road pushing our “stolen” shopping trolley before me, with the intention of returning it to the supermarket. The supermarket had a sign on the window saying that it would remain closed for the duration of the power cut, for health and safety reasons.
“Oh well, that means forever then,” I thought. You could still see food on the shelves through the window. “How long be
fore someone decides to start helping themselves?” was my next thought.
Most people should have food to last quite a few days in their cupboards, but when they started running out and hunger threatened, people would turn to desperate measures to feed their families. Breaking the window of a supermarket to get some food that was just sitting there wouldn’t seem much of a crime.
I continued up the road, still pushing the trolley, to try a smaller independent mini-market, because I figured the owner wouldn’t be as bothered about health and safety as the bigger operators, and would see an opportunity to make some more money. It was open, but it had a big sign outside saying, “CASH ONLY. CARD MACHINE NOT WORKING”.
Great, that was one thing I still had plenty of, so I decided to see what was left on the shelves. It was busier than usual and a bit darker but there was quite a lot left. The main problem was that most people were still trying to pay by card, so it was chaos at the till.
People were not getting too angry about it yet; they were probably just a bit embarrassed, as they were emptying their purses, wallets, pockets and handbags to try to scrabble enough money together to pay for at least some of what they wanted to buy. Consequently, there were a lot of trolleys and baskets stacking up around the till with goods that people were unable to pay for. The poor staff members were trying their best to keep the aisles clear and put the goods back on the shelves as quickly as possible. I filled my trolley full of goods, waited patiently for my turn, saw the look of relief on his face when he saw that I was going to pay in cash, and pushed the trolley back home.
It was turning into a bit of a party in our street. More neighbours were gathering and more kids were joining in the football match. It was a lovely sunny day, warm for the time of year, so people were gathering, and chatting away about the power cut and how they couldn’t get on with their jobs around the house because nothing was working.
UK Dark Series (Book 1): UKD1 Page 5
