Chapter 6

The roads were in a worse state in Russia than they had been in Finland, but a bridge over the canal near Vyborg that Granny Persie had been worried about was okay.

‘That’s good. This map’s not really good enough to be sure, but as far as I can see it might have been a really long detour inland if this bridge had been down, or unsafe looking. The route nearer the coast has so many bridges I really wouldn’t be confident of them all being passable. One of them might even be only a railway bridge, I really can’t tell from the map.’

‘A railway bridge mightn’t be a bad thing anyway. We could drive along it no problem, and it’s more likely to be in reasonable condition, I’d have thought.’

‘I wondered about that for one stretch in northern Sweden, where the railway was running more or less parallel with the road for a long way. Then at one point I got a good look at one of the bridges, and it didn’t have a track bed at all, just a metal framework supporting the rails. You couldn’t drive the trucks over it. Who knows which bridges might be like that?’

‘It’s going to get interesting when we get beyond the edge of the last decent map. I doubt if we’ll be able to find a shop with maps in it in Russia.’

‘I know. This map covers us as far as just past Leningrad, which is lucky because at least I can see where we’re likely to be able to get across the Neva – plenty of bridges in the middle of Leningrad, and nothing else as far as I can see until you’re practically at Lake Ladoga, where the M18 goes over. After Leningrad, we’ve only got the big atlas, and not much chance of getting a better map until West Germany.’

Granny Persie wanted to avoid going through the middle of Leningrad if she could. The map showed a bridge over the Neva where what looked like a ring road went to the east and south of the city. We followed the ring road. It was obvious that the Neva had flooded badly, probably many times, especially to the east of the road, but running right over the road in several places. Everywhere was covered in mud, and there was brushwood and other debris piled against every obstacle, even though we were actually surrounded by buildings. In some places the road was buried deeply in mud, and we couldn’t tell whether the surface underneath the mud was intact – until our front wheels dropped into a deep hole. Both of them at once.

Suonjar was driving one of the Bandvagns just behind the Unimog. She got out of the way and let Dad bring the tanker up behind the Unimog. Dad winched us backwards out of the hole.

Then Granny Persie took over the Bandvagn from Suonjar, and went forward to investigate whether it was even worth trying to follow the ring road any further. Lucky little me got to go in the Bandvagn with Granny and Uncle Sid. Somehow I was almost always in the lead vehicle now – the advantage of being the oldest of my generation, the only child really taking a big interest in what was going on.

The Bandvagn half floated across the mud, but didn’t have any trouble at all. There were several similar muddy stretches, and Granny Persie wasn’t sure it was worth trying to get the trucks through.

‘I’ve no idea how deep the mud is in some places. The Bandvagn just doesn’t find the holes the way the wheeled vehicles do. There are other bridges in the middle of the city, and the roads might not be as bad. On the other hand, that might have been the deepest washout, where the main flow went through during the floods. But we really don’t know how deep it is, under all that mud.’

Between the muddy stretches, the road wasn’t too bad.

When we reached the bridge, we could see why the river had been flooding. There were two large ships and several smaller ones jammed against the piers of the bridge, completely blocking the river at surface level. From the fact that the river wasn’t currently flooded, it was obvious that there was passage for the water underneath the mess, but much too restricted for the river’s maximum flow. The water level was a metre or more higher on the upstream side of the bridge.

‘There could be more boats under the water, and the ones we can see might simply be resting on top of a heap rather than floating. Who knows?’

Granny Persie didn’t want to take the Bandvagn over the bridge until she’d had a good look at it, so we all got out and walked. I remember noticing that there was a lot of brushwood crammed into every gap amongst the wreckage under the bridge.

The first side span seemed to be okay. Concrete arches soared high above us on either side. The concrete had spalled off in many places, revealing rusting reinforcement, but Granny Persie reckoned the arches were still plenty strong enough for our convoy ‘as long as we go over one at a time, not nose to tail putting the whole weight of the convoy on the bridge at once’. I think she was joking, and thought the span would carry the whole convoy, no problem.

The other side span was probably similar, but we never bothered to look, because the centre section, a bascule drawbridge, was so badly damaged that it obviously wouldn’t be safe to take a vehicle across.

Back in the vehicle, Granny Persie tried to contact Lieđđi, but couldn’t get any response.

‘That’s odd. I’d have thought someone would stay in the Bandvagn just to keep in contact with us. Not to worry, we’ll be back with them in no time.’

The approach road to the bridge wasn’t wide enough, and we had to reverse quite a way to a place we could turn round – the first time anyone had had to reverse one of the Bandvagns more than a few metres.

‘It’s not easy. Nastier than the trucks with trailers, in fact, which surprises me. Maybe it’s just that I’m used to the trucks, but the visibility doesn’t seem as good. And you’ve got to get used to steering it like a single vehicle, not like a vehicle with a trailer, even though you can see the trailer wiggling about in the mirrors.’

We found everyone in a bit of a panic when we got back. Granny Merly “wasn’t feeling well” as she put it, but it was much worse than just not feeling well. She had bad pains in her chest and left arm. Suonjar had taken charge.

‘Even when we were little, my aunty wanted to make sure I knew what to do if Gealbu had a heart attack, because she was afraid that he might.’

Gealbu’s mother – Suonjar’s aunty – had been a nurse, way back in the days when they’d herded the reindeer with snowmobiles and trucks, and some members of most reindeer herding families had had jobs as well.

Suonjar had got Granny Merly into a comfortable position, and Mum had gone through the first aid kit from one of the trucks, looking to see if there was anything that was any use. Reading all the labels – fortunately in English as well as Norwegian and several other languages – she’d decided that a nitroglycerin tablet there and then under Granny’s tongue, and warfarin tablets regularly thereafter was the best she could do in the absence of proper medical advice, and definitely better than doing nothing^*.

Granny Persie reckoned they’d done the best they possibly could in the circumstances. ‘Whether there’s still any active ingredient left in any of our stuff is doubtful, but it won’t do any harm.’

The nitroglycerine seemed to help a lot, and after a little while Granny Merly wanted to be put in the sleeping truck with Gealbu, who by this time was sitting up whenever the truck wasn’t moving during daylight hours, but who was still bedridden. He was champing at the bit to be back on his feet, but was very concerned about Granny Merly – as we all were.

Most of us stayed with Granny Merly in the back of the truck, while Uncle Sid and Lieđđi took the Unimog – without its trailer – to go and investigate a possible route to one of the other bridges. Uncle Jake suggested that he follow them in a truck, in case the Unimog needed pulling backwards out of a hole again.

‘Maybe the tanker. It’s got plenty of weight to pull the Unimog, and it’s easier to turn round if we need to.’

‘I’ll give you a call on the intercom if I need you. Just make sure someone’s in one of the cabs! But the more people stay with Granny Merly at the moment, the better. Love is the best medicine we’ve got, really.’

For once, I didn’t go with the exploring party – I wanted to stay with my beloved Granny. Grandad tried to persuade me to go, but I wouldn’t.

Uncle Sid and Lieđđi didn’t have much trouble finding a route to the bridge, and reckoned the bridge looked okay.

‘Granny Persie’ll have the last word, of course, but it looks okay to me. But if we thought Helsinki was in a mess, it’s nothing to the state the centre of Leningrad’s in. Half the buildings are burnt out, not just the odd one here and there. And there’s burnt-out military vehicles all over the place. And bodies.’

He meant the usual clothed skeletons, of course. I’d never seen any other kind of body – apart from the occasional skeleton whose clothes had disappeared somehow – maybe rotted or been eaten by rats. What he didn’t mention, but which I noticed myself when we all reached the city centre, was that one pile of skeletons had the charred, tattered remains of clothes, and several others looked as though a heavy vehicle had driven over them. Grandad noticed the same things, but it was a long time before he and I talked about it.

Granny Merly, meanwhile, was saying that she felt fine, and thought she was a complete fraud. Everyone else was telling her to take it easy. Granny Persie was trying to work out whether there was any possibility of getting hold of the means of making fresh supplies of drugs, and realizing that it really wasn’t a practicable proposition at all.

‘We can doubtless find old stocks of things, but whether they’re still any good, who knows? How could we possibly find out? We can probably find laboratory equipment and glassware, and we can probably make it work. Some of the more basic raw materials will last okay, but actually making things requires knowledge we don’t have and couldn’t find out – unless we could find books on the subject in a language we knew well enough. And the whole operation would in most cases be too much for such a small team. The only exception might be nitroglycerine – that’s relatively easy to synthesize. And our sample of that at least seems still to be active anyway.’

Granny Merly actually laughed, ‘or it’s still a perfectly good placebo.’

Little Liz snuggled up to her and smiled. She’d just turned four then.

Emma was three, and Dang eighteen months, but they both knew something was wrong with Granny Merly, and wanted to cuddle her too. Suonjar tried to stop them crowding her, but Granny Merly put her arms round all three of them and smiled at them. There were tears in her eyes.

‘Love’s the best medicine, Sid’s right. We should get moving again, no point hanging around here. We’re no nearer a hospital here than we are anywhere else, and a little bit of bouncing around won’t make any difference, I’m sure. Anyway, I feel fine now. Next time, I’ll take one of those magic pills at the first twinge.’

Granny Merly wasn’t fine at all, we all knew that – apart maybe from the little ones – but there was nothing we could do except hope she’d be okay.

Granny Persie agreed with Uncle Sid’s estimate of the safety of the next bridge.

‘The other bridge caught the drifting ships and stopped them crashing into this one! And the general deterioration for lack of maintenance isn’t nearly bad enough to weaken the bridges too much yet. But it’s only a matter of time.’

We crossed without incident, and got out of Leningrad as quickly as we could. We didn’t see the slightest sign of human life – in fact gulls were the only living creatures we saw – but the whole place was really creepy.

It was beginning to get dark by the time we’d cleared the south of the city, and we stopped for the night somewhere before Gatchina. In the morning, Granny Persie didn’t want to start moving until Granny Merly had woken up, had something to eat, and got settled comfortably. She began preparing some breakfast, and Mum and Uncle Sid and Uncle Jake went for a short walk ‘just to see what the world is like around here.’

Just a few minutes later they were back. ‘Give us the guns, Dad!’

Grandad got the guns out for them, and they hurried off again. I say ‘hurried’, but they were moving as silently as they could. We heard three shots, almost simultaneously, then silence. Then one more shot, then silence again.

A little while later they were back.

‘We missed. All three of us. Twice, in my case.’

‘Well, if you will try to hit a fast moving target, at a distance where all three of us managed to miss an almost stationary one!’

‘Sorry. Wasted ammunition.’

‘Don’t worry. We’ve got plenty, and I expect we’ll be able to find more once we get to Germany. What was it?’

‘Something like reindeer, but not reindeer. Smaller. Six or seven of them.’

‘Some sort of deer then. There’s lots of different sorts. I wonder what sort they have round here?’

The shots had woken Granny Merly, but she was quite perky and wanted to know why nobody had woken her before. ‘Don’t feed me too much though, Persie. Just a little for now, and maybe I’ll want a bit more later.’

Aunty Belle and Suonjar would stay in the back of the truck with Granny Merly and Gealbu. I was worried that there was no intercom in the back of the truck, and Granny Persie would be driving the Unimog.

‘No, but when Granny Merly wants anything, Aunty Belle can wave at the people in the truck behind, as long as they stay within a reasonable distance. They’ve got intercom.’

Granny Merly wanted the three little ones with her, but she told me that I should go in the Unimog ‘to look after Granny Persie.’ I think I actually understood what she meant – Granny Persie having me to look after would help her not to think and worry too much about Granny Merly.

Gatchina was confusing, and we somehow missed the route. We found ourselves on an increasingly minor road, that turned into a thickly overgrown farm track at the edge of the town. Our map wasn’t good enough to give us the faintest clue where we might have gone wrong, or even which side of the main road we were. Fortunately the main convoy had waited quite a long way behind, and only the Unimog and one Bandvagn had to turn round. Granny Persie simply pushed through a rotten old fence and mowed down several saplings doing a U-turn completely off the road, Lieđđi following in the Bandvagn.

We explored along the edge of the town, first to the north west, and then to the south east, before we found what seemed to be the main road heading south west. We retraced our route, found the rest of the convoy, and led them onto the road – but after a long straggly village not far out of Gatchina, that road turned into a track as well. We were lost.

It took most of that day, first one way and then the other, to find what Granny Persie was fairly sure was the right road. ‘I know the Russian alphabet, and I could read the signs if there were any that were still legible. But this road looks reasonable, and it’s headed the right way.’

There weren’t actually many signs at all.

The road did at least seem to keep on going on, it was two lanes wide, and it was generally heading in the right direction. It was badly potholed, and there were small trees breaking through the surface, but it didn’t have major washouts like the roads in Finland, Sweden and Norway had had.

We’d had less than two drivers per vehicle ever since we got the Bandvagns, but the Bandvagns were so easy to drive that Lieđđi and Suonjar were quite happy doing long shifts driving them, and we’d been able to keep going almost as long each day as we had before. Now, with three drivers out of action, we were reduced to shorter days. But with a relatively good road, we mostly made reasonable progress.

Granny Merly seemed to be recovering nicely. She was taking the warfarin tablets regularly.

‘Whether they’re doing anything, who knows? They’re long past their use-by date, but they were in well sealed packs and have probably never got more than vaguely warm. They might still have some potency. We’re probably giving her less than the optimum dose, even if they’re still 100% potent, but I don’t want to risk overdosing her.’

We saw deer several times, and Grandad thought they looked like roe deer, but he wasn’t sure. They’d always already heard the vehicles and started running by the time we saw them, so no-one even tried to shoot one. But then Grandad saw several rabbits – the first we’d seen since southern Norway – and they didn’t run until we’d almost reached them.

‘The co-driver in the Unimog should have a gun handy. Next time there’s rabbits, you should stop before you reach them, Persie, and let them bag one. I fancy a bit of fresh meat. I bet everyone does.’

Even now that there weren’t enough drivers to have a co-driver in every vehicle, there was always one in the Unimog, which led the convoy. But nobody managed to bag a rabbit.

The third evening after Leningrad, we stopped close to a river, and several of the grown ups went fishing. Fresh fish for supper and breakfast! What species they were nobody knew, and they were very bony – but what a treat. Gealbu in particular was almost bouncy.

Lieđđi and Suonjar were fascinated by the fishing rods, and said they’d never seen anyone fishing like that before. ‘Our parents always used nets across a gap in a little dam in a stream, and then drove the fish into the net from upstream – or threw a net, weighted round the edge, over fish in a lake. But apart from your tinned and pickled fish, we’ve not eaten fish since our parents died.’

I wondered which method was actually more effective, but no-one knew. ‘It’d be quite a challenge to make a dam across a river this size, though. Not the sort of thing you’d do for an evening’s fishing in a place you’ll never visit again.’

Grandad says we must have been very close to the border between Russia and Latvia at this point, but we never noticed anything marking the border at all.

Apart from Gatchina and a couple of other small towns, the road had been going through forest all the way since Leningrad. Much of it seemed to be old forest, but there were a lot of areas where the trees were all relatively small, on what Granny guessed had probably been farmland before the war. The old forest was mostly evergreens, rank after rank of similar trees, obviously originally deliberate plantations. The younger forests had many trees of the same species, but there were significant numbers of deciduous trees, especially birch, in amongst them.

Then, the evening after the fishing, just as we were thinking about stopping somewhere for the night, we saw a field with crops growing in it – the first field we’d seen since leaving our own farm in south Norway.

There was a fence around the field, but Granny Persie said it wasn’t a high security fence like there’d been around the camp the oldies had escaped from. It was quite tall, made of the trunks of small trees interwoven with thinner branches, leaving quite large holes. Granny Persie thought it was probably to keep deer off the crops.

‘It’s certainly not to keep people out – or in. It must need a lot of maintenance just to keep deer out. So someone is living somewhere near here. I hope they’re friendly!’

Our whole convoy had been together, because the road had been wide and we’d not worried that we might need to backtrack. Grandad came on the intercom from the tanker, just behind Lieđđi in the first Bandvagn. ‘Why have you stopped, Persie?’

‘Crops growing in a field, and a fence that’s obviously regularly maintained. I wonder how far we are from wherever whoever it is lives? I wonder if they’ve heard the trucks? I hope they’re friendly, and I hope we’ve not scared the living daylights out of them with these vehicles!’

The conversation had barely begun when I – yes, it was me – spotted a man, running away from us across a grassy area quite a distance away.

‘Look! Granny! There’s a man!’

Granny Persie spotted him just as he disappeared through a gap in a hedge.

‘So he’d heard us coming, and now he’s seen us. I think we should get down out of the trucks and walk slowly towards where he was going, so they can see we’re no threat.’

Grandad was nervous. ‘Maybe we should wait in the vehicles until we see whether he comes back with anyone else. If he comes back with people with guns, what do we do?’

‘I think that’s incredibly unlikely, and if they see a family group like ours, they won’t shoot, even if they are scared and armed.’

Granny Persie and I went. ‘An old woman and a little boy? Who’s going to do us any harm – with a convoy of seven military vehicles behind us?’

‘Just stay in our sight until we know what’s going on.’

It wasn’t long before the man reappeared with an old lady. They seemed as nervous as we were, and visibly relieved when they saw it was just Granny Persie and me walking towards them.

The woman was the first to speak – in Swedish.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak much Swedish, and no Finnish at all. Or do you know a little Russian, perhaps?’

Granny Persie replied in Swedish, ‘I know Swedish, but not very well, and almost no Russian. Do you know English, perhaps?’

The woman’s English was excellent. She’d assumed that Persie was more likely to speak Swedish, because she’d recognized the Finnish military Bandvagns. She thought, from our appearance, that we were probably Sami – or, in her word, Lapps. I’d never heard the word ‘Lapp’ before.

Granny explained that ‘Lapp’ is actually rather an insulting word for Sami folk, that Granny and I weren’t Sami, but that three of our party were. The lady was quite happy to be corrected, and I warmed to her immediately – I’m sure Granny did too.

The lady’s name was Laima, and the man was her son, Nikolai. Nikolai had a little English, but much less than Laima. Granny Persie was very interested to know how they’d survived, and whether they knew any other survivors; but was patient enough to let Laima ask all about us first, and tell her own story in her own good time.

After Laima and Granny Persie had been talking for some time, Granny sent me back to the trucks to fetch Grandad and some of the others. She explained to Laima, ‘They can’t all come out to meet you, because two of them are invalids, and at least one of the others ought to stay with Merly all the time.’

Then Laima wanted to know what was wrong with the invalids, and before I’d reached the Unimog, they were on their way to come and meet everyone at the truck where Granny Merly and Gealbu were.

‘You’re giving her warfarin? That’s good. I hope it’s still got some potency! We have some more here, but whether it’s any better than yours I don’t know.’

‘Do you still have a refrigerator?’

‘Not really, that packed up years and years ago. But Ivan – my husband – made an ice cellar, and we’ve managed to keep that stocked with ice ever since.’

‘So things were out of refrigeration for a few months, or so?’

‘No, he’d anticipated the fridge failing, and the ice cellar was ready already.’

‘So yours is probably better than ours. Ours will have been relatively warm during the summer, thirty-four times at least. But the nitroglycerine seems still to be good.’

‘Probably packaged in nitrogen rather than air, for a military first aid kit. They’ll have expected poor storage conditions, even if they didn’t expect a thirty year plus storage time! I don’t know whether there’s any way to improve the shelf life of warfarin, but they’ll have done that too if they knew some way to do it.’

‘Hmm. All the stuff has information leaflets in multiple languages, not just Norwegian – or Finnish and Swedish in the Bandvagn kits – so I’m not sure it’s really special military issue stuff.’

‘Oh, I expect it is. It’ll have been manufactured in America or Britain or anywhere, for sale to multiple different military customers.’

Laima had a good look at both Granny Merly and Gealbu, and expressed her opinion that they were doing very well, considering the circumstances. Then Granny Merly wanted to know what Laima’s background was, how she knew so much about medicine.

‘Self taught, after the war. I was a meteorologist before that, but medicine seemed so much more useful when there were just the three of us.’

‘Just three of you? How did you come to be survivors?’

‘Ivan was a nuclear physicist. He was one of the very few people who was supposed to be given the warning, and get us all into the shelter, but he had suspicions about what would happen afterwards, and he understood the requirements for a proper shelter. As long as we weren’t in an area that was actually hit by blast or heat, which was unlikely here, the important thing was to have a sealed space, with a microfiltered air supply, and plenty of food and water to last us a few months.’

Granny Persie nodded. ‘We’d figured that out, too – but only afterwards, of course. None of us knew anything beforehand, we were just shepherded into the shelter without warning, but we realized that the people running the camp we were moved to from the shelter were bullshitting us when they said it wasn’t safe outside the camp. Your man was right to be suspicious, if our camp was anything to go by.’

‘Ivan knew from the design of the official shelter that three months was expected to be sufficient. The same design of shelter was equally good whether the danger came from nuclear, biological, or chemical agents – and in all three cases, our future depended on the agents, whatever they were, having limited lives in the environment. But since the future of anyone in any other shelter depended on that same issue, there wasn’t much point working on any other assumption. Ivan made a simple shelter here at my old family home, and when the warning came, we sealed ourselves in here instead of going to the official shelter. They must think we simply failed to get the warning in time, but here we still are. Except that Ivan died thirteen years ago.’

‘It must have been difficult, not telling your neighbours around here.’

‘Very. But our own survival depended on it. Nobody knew we were here. It was just an old abandoned house in woodland, where my old family farm had been turned into state forest land when everything was collectivized. When we eventually came out, we went into the local village, and of course we found everybody dead – but many of the houses in the village had been looted before the last of them died. Thank goodness no-one thought there’d be anything worth looting here – if they remembered the house was here at all.’

Laima and Nikolai invited us all to a meal in the house. ‘Nikolai caught a deer in one of his traps just yesterday, so we’ve plenty of meat for everyone. We’d invite you to stay in the house, but it really isn’t big enough for so many!’

But they insisted we stay where we were at least one night. We’d been going to stop somewhere near there anyway.

Granny Merly was mobile enough to get to the house, walking slowly, leaning a little on Suonjar, and taking a breather every now and then. Gealbu’s bones had healed enough that he wanted to walk, but Granny Persie insisted that he mustn’t put too much strain on them yet, and Nikolai – who was much bigger than any of our men – just picked him up and carried him like a baby. Laima translated Granny Merly’s instruction to be careful of his ribs for Nikolai, but Gealbu was already gesturing very clearly that they were fine.

I had my first taste of fresh milk. I wasn’t sure I liked it. I’d only had condensed milk from tins and milk made from powdered milk before, and was used to that although I didn’t get it very often. We’d not found any more since halfway up Sweden, and the grown-ups wanted to conserve supplies for the littlies.

Granny Merly took a sip of my milk, and told me that it was good goat’s milk, that goat’s milk tasted like that, and that I’d get used to it. ‘You’ll prefer it to cow’s milk after a while. And fresh milk of any kind is better than condensed or powdered.’

But the littlies wouldn’t drink the goat’s milk. Little Liz said it was ‘orrible’. I felt obliged to drink it to show them a good example.

Then Granny Merly realized that condensed milk tastes sweet, and suggested sweetening some goat’s milk for the littlies. Problem solved! I decided I’d be big and grown-up and drink it without sugar.

‘Do you want some sugar in yours, Mikey?’

‘No thanks. I like it ’orrible!’

Nikolai caught the mood and laughed as much as everyone else.

The house had clearly been quite grand in an old fashioned sort of way, but that was long ago, and it was now rather shabby, with ramshackle repairs everywhere. ‘We didn’t do anything to the outside until after the war, because we didn’t want anyone to know we were there. It was in a very bad state.’

They’d raided the neighbouring village, but hadn’t raided as widely as we had, always returning home every evening. ‘We didn’t trust our car to get us home if we let the engine stop. And of course eventually the morning came when we couldn’t start it. The tractor we stole in the village lasted a few years longer, but we never took that further than into the village and back. Mostly we just used it around the farm. But that died too, a long time ago.’

‘Farming must be really hard, with no tractor and no animals.’

‘We’ve got chickens and goats. Ivan bought some from a farmer the morning he got the warning, on the way here.’

‘But nothing that can pull a plough for you, obviously.’

‘No, we couldn’t have kept a horse in the shelter! Never mind two, and one wouldn’t have lasted any longer than the tractor did. It is hard, but at least we get plenty of meat since the deer and rabbits arrived. Getting enough vegetables is hard work though, and maybe we don’t really get enough. How did you all manage?’

Granny Persie and Grandad did most of the talking from our side. They told Laima all about – well, everything, eventually. Laima translated for Nikolai, but I thought he must have missed a lot, because she said much less in Russian than she heard in English. Maybe he caught up on a lot later, after we’d all trooped back out to the trucks, late that night. The three littlies and I were fast asleep long before that.

I do remember that there was no electricity in the house. They did have a couple of good bright paraffin lanterns, though, and a beautiful warm stove that they burnt logs in.

Laima wished that we’d brought one or two tractors with us, but understood that there were more important things for us to bring, and that our little convoy could only carry a limited amount of stuff.

‘I think our tractors were nearing the end of their lives really, anyway. We’d collected all kinds of vehicles from all around the area, but they were all pretty well finished. We were very lucky to find the military depot with all these vehicles almost unused and mothballed. With luck the Unimog will make a good workhorse for a good few years, wherever we end up.’

Laima wondered whether we could stick around for a while, and help them with a few jobs with the Unimog; and then they all got to discussing whether we ought all to stop right there, or whether to continue with the original plan to head further south.

‘There’ll be a lot more useful stuff to raid in western Europe than there is around here, and the weather’s better.’

‘There’s everything we need around here, too, but you’re right about the weather. But there’s another worry about western Europe. Here, I’ll get the map for you. This is something Ivan made, right after the war, as soon as he realized that survival rates really were very low indeed.’

It was a map of Europe’s nuclear reactors. Ivan had realized that while many of the reactors would have been shut down safely even during the crisis, many of them would not have been. Either there’d have been no-one competent available to do it, or desperate people, desperate for their electricity supplies to continue, would have pressured the operators into keeping the stations running up to and beyond the last possible moment. The end result of which would have been the same anyway: no-one competent left to shut the reactor down safely^†.

‘Didn’t they have automatic safe shut down systems?’

‘Not really. The nuclear chain reaction itself could be shut down automatically. All nuclear reactors have that built in, because sometimes it has to be done more rapidly than you can expect human beings to react. But reactors don’t stop producing heat just because the nuclear chain reaction stops: the radioactive fission products and activation products keep on producing heat. A lot of heat – enough to boil all the water out of the reactor, and then melt the reactor completely and set it on fire. The end result is radioactive contamination everywhere – on a scale that makes the radioactive effects of nuclear weapons look trivial.’

‘Did Ivan work on a nuclear reactor site? Was he supposed to be one of the people shutting it down?’

‘He was a researcher at the Leningrad Nuclear Physics Institute in Gatchina, but most of his work in the years just before the war was actually at the Ignalina reactor, just forty-five kilometres from here. He was worried that Ignalina might not be shut down properly. He prepared this map so that we could move rapidly out of the area if necessary, avoiding going any closer than necessary to any other reactors that might also have contaminated large areas.’

‘So Ignalina was shut down successfully?’

‘It must have been, at least reasonably well, because the levels of radioactive contamination around here are quite small, and almost certainly come from further afield. Ivan was pretty sure that quite a lot of other reactors elsewhere must have made an awful mess. It might have been lucky for you that you moved out of southern Sweden into Norway. You said you came via Helsinki? There’s one just east of there, Loviisa. You must have come right past it. I hope it was shut down properly, and that none of you got any significant dose. Hmm. Driving past once, about ten kilometres away, thirty-four years after the event? Unlikely to be significant, unless it was a really dreadful mess.’

‘If it’s close to Helsinki, to the east, we drove past twice. We spent a bit of time in Helsinki, too. How far is it from there?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe about eighty kilometres. Almost certainly nothing to worry about for a short visit like that. It might not be healthy living anywhere near there long term.’

‘No point worrying about anything now anyway! What’s done is done. But it looks as though it would definitely be worth studying Ivan’s map carefully before we move on. While we’ve still got transport, it would be good to get some­where with a better climate. Looking at that map, it doesn’t look as though southern France or Spain would be such a good idea. That’s where we originally thought we’d head.’

‘Sadly, none of our monitoring equipment works any more, so we can’t actually tell whether an area is contaminated or not. But no, it’s pretty unlikely that France or Spain will be clean. And you’d have to get through Germany first, and that’s probably pretty badly contaminated, too. In itself that might not matter much, as long as you take enough food and water, and don’t have to live off the land on the way.’

‘Tinned and bottled stuff would be okay anyway. We found plenty of that in Scandinavia, and I don’t suppose Germany would be any different. We’ve not really tried raiding in Russia or Latvia yet.’

‘Oh, houses are pretty good. People used to keep plenty of stuff in stock, because you never knew whether the shops would have anything in stock or not. If you’re heading for Greece, which looks to me to be the best destination, I think you’ll find the same all down through eastern Europe. There’s a few nuclear sites to avoid – one in Hungary, a couple in the Ukraine, and one in Bulgaria – but you ought to be able to find a route okay. Western Europe looks pretty impossible to me.’

‘You said that none of your monitoring equipment works any more. Is there any chance that we might be able to repair it, do you think?’

‘Not since Ivan died. I don’t know enough about it. I don’t suppose any of you do, do you?’

Granny Persie thought it would be worth having a look. ‘Tomorrow.’

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