Chapter 5

Close to the border on the Finnish side, but still well to the north of where Granny Persie wanted to cross into Russia, we did find another military depot. There was no hill overlooking it that we could study it from discreetly, but we’d reached its gates before we realized it was there anyway. It was pretty obvious that it was abandoned. Its gates were open, and there were small trees growing through the gates and along the foot and top of the boundary wall. As the road had been good and wide for some distance, all the trucks were close behind the Unimog. Granny Persie, Grandad, Uncle Sid and I went in to take a look around, while some of the other grown-ups prepared a meal.

The place had clearly been raided. Granny Persie and Grandad reckoned it must have been after the war, not in those terrible days while they’d been hidden away in the shelter and everybody else on the surface was dying.

‘Well, nearly everybody else. Not Lieđđi’s parents, for example.’

‘It must have been after the war – long after. Someone’s shoved those skeletons out of the way to move a vehicle. They surely wouldn’t have got tangled up like that if they’d still been whole corpses when they were moved.’

‘So somebody survived somewhere around here. It’s the first sign we’ve seen of any survivors since Lieđđi and co. Do you think it’s raiders from a camp like our old camp? Or another independent lot?’

‘Who knows? Whoever it was, it was a long time ago, I’m pretty sure. They left the gates open, and the trees have grown through them since.’

‘Unless the gates were left open during the war, and then the raiders came much later. Could have been yesterday.’

‘Maybe, but the odds are it wasn’t particularly recently. The odds of there being anyone around while we’re here are minuscule. Let’s take a good look around and see what they’ve left – if anything.’

Granny Persie and Grandad reckoned whoever it was had probably taken some vehicles, but they hadn’t taken them all. There were a couple of trucks very similar to the ones we’d already got, a tanker, and several jeep-like vehicles.

There were also a couple of interesting looking vehicles, articulated in the middle, with broad rubber tracks on both halves instead of wheels. They had seats for lots of people in the rear half and half a dozen in the front half.

There was a room that looked as though it was probably a battery store, but there were no batteries in it.

‘Hmm. Looks as though whoever raided this place took all the batteries. I bet there are none in the vehicles, either. I doubt they were expecting anyone else to come raiding, but they’d think they’d scuppered them anyway. But we only want one truck, and we’ve got batteries.’

‘If they’ve taken the batteries, that probably means they weren’t expecting to come back here at all, or not often anyway. Either they’ve got a camp a long way away, or they were moving out of the area. Very likely heading south, like us. But that wouldn’t be a big group – a big group would have taken all the vehicles, I’m sure. Well, if they were moving away, anyway.’

‘Not necessarily, not if they were worried about fuel supplies.’

‘They’ve left a tanker.’

‘True. So most likely it’s either a small group like us – and one has to wonder how they survived – or a camp somewhere at a fairly considerable distance.’

‘They could have survived like Lieđđi and co – just happened to be lucky with where they were. But only people born after the war survived long-term up in northern Sweden, and their parents died when they were quite young. It would have been hard to pass on the kind of technical competence that whoever raided this place seems to have had.’

Lieđđi and Suonjar had seen the tracked vehicles before.

‘Bandvagn. There are a couple of those near where we spent the winter. All rotting away now, but I remember what they were like when we were children. We used to play in them sometimes. Mum told me they belonged to the soldiers, and the soldiers used to play games with them, driving them around on the snow, getting practice using them in case they ever needed to do serious work with them. But all they ever really did was play. But they can drive over deep snow. A damn nuisance they were, Mum said, because they crushed the snow and made it hard for the reindeer to dig. They can drive on water, too.’

‘They’re amphibious? That could be very handy. We should probably take one of those. Maybe even both.’

‘We’d have to leave one of our trucks behind if we took both, though, unless we decided to manage with less than two drivers per vehicle.’

Lieđđi and Suonjar had started learning to drive, but they didn’t drive for very long each day yet, partly because it slowed the whole convoy down when they were driving, and partly because Granny Persie and Uncle Sid found it very tiring being their co-drivers – more tiring than driving the vehicles themselves. Only Granny Persie and Uncle Sid felt confident enough to supervise them.

It turned out that the Bandvagns had petrol engines.

‘That’s hopeless. Fuel would be an awful problem. I bet their fuel consumption’s terrible, and we can only carry five hundred litres of petrol in the jerry cans. And we can’t refill them very fast, either.’

‘We’ll get a fair way on five hundred litres, even if the fuel consumption’s really bad. I’d rather fill up every chance we get though. You never know when it might be an awful long way before the next chance to refuel. It’s boring wiring up the generator and swapping pump innards in and out, but we can survive that. We’re not that pressed for time, really.’

‘I’m worried about crossing Russia and the other communist countries. I don’t know how easy it’ll be to find fuel. Diesel’s likely to be easier to find than petrol, I think. And we can certainly go a lot further between refills if we stick to diesel.’

The grown-ups spent quite a long time working on one of the two trucks, but eventually decided it really wasn’t going to start. The second one wouldn’t either.

‘This might be why they didn’t take all the vehicles. Maybe they couldn’t start them, either. I wonder if any of the jeep things will start?’

They had petrol engines.

‘We might as well take a Bandvagn if we’re going to take anything. If one of them will start.’

‘It’d be fun to play with one for a while, anyway. But I can see us having to leave it behind sooner or later. And how useful would it really be to be able to go anywhere that we can’t take all the trucks?’

‘Who knows? I can imagine a few scenarios where it could be very useful, but how likely any of them are to actually occur, I don’t know.’

‘We’re not actually running out of room in the vehicles we’ve got, really. How likely are we to find any more people?’

‘We know – or we’re pretty sure – there are more people around here somewhere. Whether they’d be friendly, who knows? My guess is it’s a camp, and it’s probably quite a long way away. The odds of actually bumping into them are pretty small, I reckon.’

‘It could very easily be in Russia, not in Finland at all. We’d have no common language, unless some of the older ones knew a little English. At least if it’s in Finland, they’d probably know Swedish.’

‘If it’s in Russia, it’s probably near Leningrad, and we’ll have to go through that area whether we like it or not – unless we go all the way round the other side of Lake Ladoga. Whichever way we go, we’ve got to hope the bridges have survived. There’s no hope of fording the Neva or the Svir, and I don’t know about some of the other rivers, either.’

‘Don’t. I can’t bear the thought of having to go back now.’

‘I suppose we could get across with the Bandvagn, if we take it, and then try to find some more trucks the other side.’

‘That sounds like an awful palaver.’

‘I hope we never have to do it, but I suppose it could come to that.’

‘So we should take a Bandvagn. If one of them will start.’

‘Or even both of them. I think we should.’

‘But I don’t think it’s especially likely any camp will be particularly near Leningrad. Think where our camp was – right in the middle of nowhere.’

‘Okay, maybe not. But we’ve no idea, really. Just because there was no camp anywhere around Oslo – or if there was, they’d got everything they needed and didn’t bother going raiding – doesn’t mean to say there couldn’t be camps near other big cities.’

‘No. But we’ve no reason to suppose there will be, either. They could be absolutely anywhere, although I guess somewhere farmable is more likely. We’ve just got to keep our eyes skinned everywhere, that’s all.’

‘Most of the time we can’t see far enough. They’d hear us coming before we had a clue they were there. We’ve just got to hope they’re friendly, or at least not unfriendly.’

‘Why should anyone be unfriendly?’

That was a good question. It was a fear Grandad and the Grannies had had ever since they first escaped from their own camp, after Granny Persie had killed a soldier who’d been trying to rape Granny Merly. But that was a story none of the rest of us got to know until many years later. We just knew that the oldies were always afraid that people, particularly people running camps, might be unfriendly.

Grandad had become thoughtful, and considered for a while before answering.

‘Your neighbours were unfriendly to you, weren’t they?’

‘Not really unfriendly, the way you seemed to be saying. Just not positively friendly. Anyway, they knew us already. No-one we meet now will know us.’

Granny Merly, usually the quiet one, spoke while Grandad was still thinking. ‘That’s true. We should stop being so paranoid. All that was donkeys’ years ago and thousands of kilometres away. Nobody we meet now will know any of us.’

‘True. But a camp with a military regime is still a camp with a military regime. They won’t want their inmates to know there are independent survivors out here – not if they’re operating the way we imagine our old camp probably is.’

‘It’d be even worse for them if their inmates knew they were attacking independent survivors outside. They’d have to maintain a defensive force out of sight and earshot of their camp. We know our camp wasn’t doing that.’

‘I’m pretty sure any camp will be assuming there aren’t any independent survivors. They won’t know what to do about us. That’s what I’m afraid of – that they might act first and think afterwards.’

‘If we just get away again as soon as we see them, we’ll be fine. They won’t be armed and ready to fire because they won’t anticipate there being anyone to fire on. They’ll have some fun explaining our appearance and disappearance to their inmates if any of them spot us, but there’d be no sense in them coming after us. All they’ll see is a convoy of military vehicles. They won’t be heavily armed, and they’ll be more scared of us than we are of them. They’ll see these vehicles and think we very likely might be well armed.’

‘Unless there are wars going on between rival groups. I can imagine camps like our old one spreading their raiding over wider and wider areas, and eventually coming into conflict with another lot.’

‘Perish the thought. But that’s one of those troubles that could have reached us where we were just as easily as us finding it elsewhere. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. If we come to it. I hope we never do.’

‘There’s a fair bit of weaponry in this depot. We could be prepared.’

‘I’d rather not. We’re not experts in its use, and I certainly don’t want to spend time practising. Playing with weapons is a risky game in itself, anyway. Add to that, the weapons would take up valuable space in the trucks. I’d rather carry as much food and fuel as we can.’

‘That makes sense. It’d be worth seeing if there’s any ammunition for the guns we’ve got, though, or any other suitable hunting weapons with ammunition.’

Most of this conversation was going on in English. Lieđđi and Suonjar were catching quite a lot, but not all of it. Sometimes the Grannies addressed them directly in Swedish, but then they had to translate for the rest of us – when they remembered. Granny Merly was pretty good about that. She also did some translation into Swedish, when she could see that Lieđđi and Suonjar were wondering what was going on.

But Lieđđi and Suonjar didn’t immediately cotton on to the possibility of anyone actually shooting at us. Guns were strictly for hunting for food – and great care was required to make sure there weren’t any accidents. They understood that very well.

None of the weaponry in the depot was suitable for hunting, and there wasn’t any ammunition to fit our guns.

We did find some other useful things, though: a two thousand litre petrol bowser with its own electric pump and hoses, and another dozen jerry cans.

‘That pretty much solves the fuel problem with the Bandvagns. We’d better see if they’ll start. If the pump on the bowser still works, of course.’

‘I bet it will. It’s quite dry in here. Even if it doesn’t, we can still use the bowser. It’ll just be a lot less convenient.’

Both the Bandvagns started easily once all the preparatory work was done, and the pump on the bowser worked, too. There was even plenty of petrol in a big underground tank in the depot – but the diesel tank was almost completely empty.

‘So whoever raided this place before either doesn’t have any petrol vehicles, or they’ve not been back here much.’

‘They could be keeping it for later. Maybe they’ve still got plenty of ordinary filling stations closer to home.’

The Bandvagns were actually very easy to drive. They took in their stride appalling road surfaces that were hard work for the drivers of the trucks, and they had automatic transmission. Lieđđi and Suonjar found them much less tiring than the trucks, and it wasn’t long before Granny Persie and Uncle Sid let them take full shifts driving. The biggest disadvantage was that they had a different type of intercom operating on a different frequency, so the people in the Bandvagns could talk to each other, but not to the rest of us.

After that, the Bandvagn that wasn’t towing the bowser went ahead with the Unimog. It could turn round almost anywhere. It didn’t matter how soft the ground was, it could sink in a bog until it was floating and it’d still get through.

Uncle Sid and Dad removed all the seats from the rear half of one of the Bandvagns. Then we had two sleeping trucks, and Lieđđi and Suonjar didn’t need to put the lávvu up any longer. They left the seats in the other Bandvagn, ‘in case all of us ever need to travel in the Bandvagns.’

Grandad didn’t want to say it, but I knew he was thinking that maybe there’d come a time when the trucks simply wouldn’t be able to get through somewhere. The biggest worry then would be whether the Bandvagns would be able to pull the petrol trailer through – without it, we’d have thirty odd jerry cans in the back half of one of the Bandvagns, and not a lot of room for food.

We managed to avoid actually crossing into Russia until the end of the border, on the Baltic coast. Before we crossed, we made a detour into Helsinki in the hope of finding a gunsmiths. We topped up our diesel and petrol supplies at an ordinary filling station, and stocked up a huge quantity of food – for once, not by raiding dozens of houses, but at a warehouse on the outskirts of Helsinki that hadn’t been ransacked.

‘It looks as though there aren’t any camps anywhere near here. They’d surely have emptied this place out.’

We did find a gunsmiths. Grandad tried a few samples of each sort of ammunition before loading several boxes into a trailer. ‘No point loading ourselves down with dud stuff.’ But he didn’t find any duds.

Our family was still well supplied with clothes and footwear, but Granny Persie suggested to Lieđđi – there were just the two of them in the leading Bandvagn – that maybe she and Suonjar would like some clothes like ours.

‘Oh, yes, that’s a good idea. We’d feel more part of the family if we wore the same sort of things the rest of you wear. But you haven’t got anything that would fit us. Maybe Gealbu could make clothes for all of you out of the old lávvu. It seems a shame to spoil the lávvu, but we don’t need it any more now we’ve got the Bandvagn to sleep in.’

‘That would be another option – but would there really be enough material in the lávvu to make so many clothes? I’m sure we can find a place to get clothes for you in Helsinki anyway.’

We could and we did. Lieđđi and Suonjar were very funny in the clothes shop, trying things on and looking at themselves in a big mirror that Uncle Jake dragged to the front of the shop where it was light for them. Granny Merly helped them find things that were actually practical.

Gealbu was still bedridden at that point, so he stayed in reindeer skins.

‘We’ll find somewhere to kit him out later, maybe in Poland or Germany.’

Helsinki was a bit of a shock to all of us. We were used to finding bodies – well, just clothed skeletons really – lying about every now and then, but in Helsinki we saw the first signs of physical violence. The first thing we noticed was burnt-out buildings, and at first we thought maybe they were simply fires that had happened accidentally – maybe lightning strikes. But after a while it became obvious that many of them were probably arson. There were overturned and burnt-out cars and a burnt-out police van rusting away. And then we found skeletons that had obviously been the victims of violent attacks.

‘I suppose it’s not surprising that things like that would happen in the complete breakdown that must have occurred in those last days. What an awful time that must have been.’

‘This is where I was supposed to have been – where I would have been if our plane hadn’t had a technical problem.’

‘If it really did. Maybe from the very beginning the whole idea of the bargain basement holiday was to fill the shelter with slave class people. Same for our Lappland visit.’

‘Yeah. That had occurred to me, too.’

But apparently it was the first time anyone had actually mentioned it.

The borders between Norway, Sweden and Finland hadn’t impinged on my consciousness at all, but the Russian checkpoint certainly did. There was rusty barbed wire everywhere, and concrete blockhouses. The concrete was spalling off all over the place, revealing rusting reinforcement, and there were trees growing out of cracks in the buildings. There was an air of desolate foreboding about it all.

‘Nobody’s been through here since the war. We’re going to have to break through the barriers.’

‘Wait a minute. We’d better think how exactly to do this. They could be booby-trapped.’

‘Good thinking. Just as well we didn’t just drive straight at them. But how do we disarm any booby trap without knowing what it’s like?’

‘I wish we had a spare vehicle we could send at the barrier with a brick on the accelerator.’

‘We could find one in that last village, but the odds of finding one we could start are pretty small.’

‘We could spend a battery sending one through on its starter motor, as long as the engine’s not seized. A Jeep has a low enough ratio for the starter motor to drive it.’

‘That’s a lot of hassle. Couldn’t we just push a car through with one of the trucks?’

‘I don’t really want to be that close. I don’t suppose they really have a huge bomb under their own barrier, or an automatic weapon that automatically sprays the whole area with bullets. But it’s not a chance I’d like to take.’

‘We could put a telegraph pole on the Unimog’s trailer and push something with the Unimog in reverse. The trailer’s disposable, really.’

It didn’t take long to find a suitable vehicle, in a village just a few kilometres back up the road. They didn’t even bother to break the steering lock – they just chose a big van whose wheels were pointing straight forwards already.

‘Who cares what happens to its tyres? They’ll last long enough for our purposes even if we drag them sideways!’

They towed it to a point from which they could push it straight forwards through the barriers.

Getting a telegraph pole was harder. They found they couldn’t simply pull one over with one of the trucks’ winches as the grown-ups had hoped. You could use a telegraph pole as an anchor point for a truck to haul itself along.

‘If we could get far enough up the pole and attach the cable high up, we could do it.’

In the end they decided that the Unimog would be safe enough with just the trailer full of timbers between it and the car. Granny Persie backed the Unimog until the sacrificial van was well past the broken barrier and the trailer was halfway through before coming back, turning round and pushing the van forwards and out of the way.

If there had ever been a booby-trap, it wasn’t working any longer. Most likely there’d never been one, and they’d relied on armed guards.

‘There might well be landmines all along the fence. I wouldn’t want to try crossing anywhere but a checkpoint.’

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