Chapter 7

The next day, Uncle Sid went with Nikolai to look at some of the things Nikolai thought they could usefully do with the Unimog. Somehow they managed to understand each other – enough for the purposes in hand, anyway. Meanwhile, Laima showed Granny Persie all the old radiation monitoring equipment.

‘The biggest problem is probably just batteries. I know Ivan managed to keep some of the stuff going for years with external power supplies driven from the tractor battery, and then from the dynamo after the battery failed.’

‘How did he start the tractor? We used to start our vehicles using a generator, but I don’t think you’ve got any electricity now, have you?’

‘You could start the tractor with the crank handle. It was damned hard work. It’s a good thing Nikolai’s a big strong chap. He was already, even when he was quite young. It would have killed Ivan if he’d had to crank start the tractor.’

‘What did Ivan die of? I hope you don’t mind me asking.’

‘No, I don’t mind. It’s a long time ago now. He got cancer – leukaemia – nothing we could do about it. He was seventy-two when he died, so not a bad age anyway. He was much older than me. I’d always known I was likely to be a widow for a long time.’

Lieđđi and Suonjar took us four children to find the goats.

The goats discovered that Lieđđi was approachable and friendly – or maybe Lieđđi had discovered that about the goats. ‘They’re not reindeer, but they’ve got surprisingly similar personalities. They’re not as shy though!’

‘We must fetch Gealbu. He’ll be pleased. He misses the reindeer.’

But Gealbu found some of the goats a bit too boisterous, and wanted to be helped back to the house. I too found the younger goats too excitable, and went with him. Gealbu didn’t put much weight on my shoulder as we walked. I think he was using me more to help him keep his balance than to support him.

Uncle Sid and Nikolai had taken the Unimog into the village to fetch some tiles and timber from one of the houses. The next easiest vehicle to manoeuvre was the tanker, so Granny Persie brought that up to the house to provide some electricity. Once she got power to the radiation monitoring equipment, she could see that it was basically working, but some small parts needed to be replaced before she could take any meaningful measurements.

‘I wonder if they’d have them in a store at the nuclear power station?’

‘I doubt it, they used different equipment there. This is from the Institute. Anyway, Ignalina pretty certainly never actually caught fire, but the site itself is probably pretty badly contaminated by now, just because of corrosion. I wouldn’t want to go there. It’s a lot further to Gatchina, but there’s a much better chance of finding the bits you need there, and at least the site will be relatively clean. There’s no power reactor there, just a low power research reactor and a synchrocyclotron. The decay heat from the reactor wouldn’t be enough to boil all its water off, so that’ll be fairly clean. Negligible contamination outside the reactor hall itself, as long as they didn’t leave it running, and I think that’s pretty unlikely. There were some power reactors at Sosnovy Bor, but that’s seventy kilometres from Gatchina.’

‘I think it’s worth going back there then, if you can show us where the Institute is. There could be other useful stuff there, apart from the bits for this kit. It took us four days to get here from Leningrad, so the round trip will probably take us a week, but I think it would be worth it. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get the instruments working properly, but they’ll be so useful if I can.’

It was eventually decided that we’d all go except Nikolai, who would have to stay to look after the animals. Most of us wanted to stick together, Laima had to come to show us the way, and Nikolai said he didn’t mind staying on his own at all. We wouldn’t take all the vehicles. We took the Bandvagn with the bowser full of petrol, and the truck that we slept in with a trailer full of jerry cans of diesel.

Granny Persie was a bit doubtful about taking the Bandvagn at first, worried about our petrol stocks, but Laima was confident of finding a supply in Gatchina, ‘and we can refill your jerry cans with diesel at almost any farm, I’m sure.’

‘We’d get to Gatchina and back easily with what we’re taking, and there’s plenty in the tanker when we get back here, but you’re right that it would be nice to keep topped up.’

There was one other thing that bothered Granny Persie. Was the Institute one of the places that would be in use by the people who actually made it into the shelter? Where were they now? Laima was pretty sure they wouldn’t have wanted to revive the Institute, but didn’t know where they were.

‘I know where the shelter was, obviously, but we went and took a look there, and it’s completely abandoned. We approached the area very circumspectly at first, but it was immediately clear that everybody had gone. Where they went, I don’t know. We’ve never seen any sign of them.’

‘Wouldn’t they have included the reactor in their patch?’

‘Ignalina? No, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t. The people who were left to shut it down would all be dead, and you can’t leave a reactor unattended for three months, even if it had been shut down carefully, and expect to start it again safely. You’ve got to at least keep the cooling systems ticking over. The shelter wasn’t close to the reactor – forty kilometres away from it – and where they went after they left the shelter, I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was another forty kilometres further from the reactor, or more. A fair few of the people involved would understand the danger very well.’

With just one truck and a Bandvagn and plenty of drivers, we could get further in a day than we had coming south. We stopped for a late lunch somewhere near the place we’d stopped the night before we arrived at Laima and Nikolai’s farm, and Uncle Sid managed to shoot a deer.

Laima encouraged us to try to get to Ostrov. ‘It’s only another fifty kilometres or so. We should stop by the river there, it’s a really good spot for fishing early in the morning. Ivan and I used to stop there on the way to and from Gatchina.’

It was really nearly sixty kilometres, but we made good time and arrived before dark. Laima directed us off the main road, and we stopped just by the end of an old chain bridge over a big river.

‘That bridge is only fit for pedestrians. You can’t take vehicles over it. You might get away with it, but it might collapse. The best fishing is the other side, on the island, just downstream of the bridge. That’s what Ivan always said, anyway.’

‘Is that an island? You’d never know from here.’

‘Yes, and there’s another bridge just like this one over the other half of the river.’

Laima took charge of the deer. Everyone watched as she skinned and gutted it expertly, then butchered it carefully. She cut the bigger muscles into long thin strips. She said that she and Nikolai had both learned how to do that watching Ivan, but that she usually got Nikolai to do it.

‘We’ll have the offal tonight, and with a bit of luck there’ll be fish for breakfast. But if we can find some string, I’ll string all the good bits of meat up to dry for you for your journey. We can hang it underneath the bridge. It’ll still be here when we get back in a few days’ time, and it’ll be nearly dried by then.’

‘You dry meat even though you have an ice cellar?’

‘Certainly. Dried meat keeps for years, wet meat only a few weeks in the ice cellar. We could make it colder using salt on the ice, but I don’t know whether the ice would last all summer if we did that. Probably not.’

‘You’d need a lot of salt, anyway.’

‘There’s plenty in the village. But you’re right, we’d run out in the end if we used it too freely. We used to dry fish too, but we’ve had none since Ivan died. With no car it’s too far to anywhere with good fishing.’

Grandad and Mum were up before dawn. They took the fishing gear over the bridge to the exact spot Laima had pointed out. By the time the rest of us were up and about, they’d caught several good sized fish. Laima knew the name of the species in Russian, but no-one knew what they were in English. It didn’t matter: they made an excellent breakfast anyway.

Despite Mum and Aunty Anna carefully deboning the littlies’ portions, Little Liz got a bone stuck in her throat and started to cry. Everyone was a bit surprised when Laima picked her up, turned her upside-down, and banged her on the back; then righted her, opened her mouth wide with one hand, and reached into her mouth with two fingers of the other – and produced the offending fishbone!

‘It still hurts!’ wailed little Liz, and Laima explained that the bone was out, but the bit of throat that had got poked would still be sore for a little while.

‘Only a little while, though. Mouths and throats heal really quickly. But a bit of that potato would help it feel better quicker. A pity we don’t have any bread, that’s the best thing. But bread’s history.’

Little Liz slowly came round to the idea of swallowing a bit of fried potato, and then smiled at Laima through her tears.

‘Better now?’

Silent nod.

I wondered what ‘bread’ was. If it was history, it obviously wasn’t the same stuff as the crispbread we’d got several cartons of.

Years later, probably about the same time that I found out what real bread was, I learnt that the fishbone Laima had produced had gone into Liz’s mouth between Laima’s fingers, and that swallowing the potato had really been the important part of the operation, to take the original bone down Liz’s throat. It was all psychology, an act designed to stop Liz worrying. ‘That was a trick Ivan used to play on Nikolai when he was small. I’m not sure Nikolai knows now that he was tricked. I doubt if he remembers anything about it.’

The main thing I remember about the rest of the trip back to Gatchina is that it rained and rained and rained. The worst thing was that we couldn’t tell which of the puddles were deep potholes, and which were just puddles, so the ride was even bumpier in the truck than it was in the Bandvagn. After a little while, Granny Persie stopped for a consultation, and it was decided to try putting Granny Merly and Gealbu in the Bandvagn instead of the back of the truck. They decided they preferred it there, and stayed there from then on.

Getting through Gatchina, which had been so difficult the last time we’d been there, was no problem with Laima to guide us. She took us straight to the Institute. We arrived there in the early afternoon, and spent most of the afternoon breaking into various buildings on the site. Laima didn’t know her way around the site, only how to get to where she used to meet Ivan.

Granny Persie eventually found a store containing not only the parts she knew she wanted for the instruments she’d already seen, but whole new instruments, and all sorts of other stuff. I have a clear picture of her in my mind to this day, standing there holding the pressure lantern high and gazing at the racks and racks of things with an expression of pure rapture on her face.

It didn’t last long. ‘I can’t take all this stuff, we don’t have room. And if I could take it, I could never use it all. There’s loads of stuff here I could never make work, the infrastructure to support that kind of work just doesn’t exist any more. I’ve got to think very carefully what’s worth taking, and what’s just so much junk now. And that’s most of it, really.’

Grandad had one contribution to make to Granny Persie’s thinking. ‘It’s not just what you can or can’t use, Persie. It’s what you can make use of to teach the children. Our grown-up children as well as the littlies.’

‘Hmm. I’m not sure this is the best place for teaching materials, but I’ll think about it. I’ll have to spend a while exploring and thinking. This store won’t be the only place with interesting stuff.’

It took Granny the whole of the next day to sort out the various things she eventually decided to take. I wasn’t aware at the time what a lot of the stuff was, just that there was quite a pile.

One particular thing that did stick in my mind was a box full of drill bits, that Granny hummed and hawed over for quite a while. ‘This is quite a set. Every size from 0.8mm to 10mm, in 0.1mm increments. With spares, plenty of them. But what would I ever need them for? I’ve already got a good set with 0.5mm increments. And I’ve only got a hand held power drill, no pillar drill. So I’ve no use for them really. But I’m so tempted.’

‘There’s a pillar drill here.’

‘We can’t take that. It’d be ridiculous to load ourselves down with that. There’s a lathe and a milling machine, too. What are we going to do? Restart industry? Our little generator couldn’t power those. It could run the pillar drill, but what for? Oh, I’d find a use, no doubt, but at what cost? Clogging the trucks up with junk...’

But she took the drill set.

‘If we ever want a pillar drill, we’ll find one in any machine shop. But we probably wouldn’t find a drill bit set like this.’

That was just an excuse, and we all knew it. The set only weighs a couple of kilograms, so no-one really minded Granny Persie’s little idiosyncrasy. We all love her to bits.

But Grandad quietly let me into a secret years later: Granny Merly had resisted the temptation to raid a jeweller’s. ‘Not that anyone has the slightest thought that there’s anything wrong with raiding a jeweller’s – but where would you stop? She could have filled the trucks with beautiful pieces, and weighed herself down like a princess, but what for?’

Granny Merly wore the necklace and earrings she already had before the war all her life. Grandad thinks she might have been given them by a boyfriend back in Hong Kong, but he never asked her and she never said. They might have been her mother’s.

There were huge petrol and diesel tanks actually on the Institute campus, and we refilled the jerry cans and the bowser.

All the way in both directions, I was in the front of the truck with Granny Persie and Laima. Sometimes Granny was driving, sometimes it was Mum or Dad or Uncle Sid. Granny said it was quite a luxury to have so many drivers for so few vehicles!

But the best thing for me was listening to Granny and Laima talking. Laima understands things in the same sort of way that Granny does, and they’ve both got sharp minds as well as a scientific and technical education. A lot of their talk went right over my head, but I managed to pick up a few threads and I’m sure it’s what got me started thinking the way I do.

One of the things they talked a lot about was the way the weather was getting worse every winter. They thrashed out a theory that it was a direct result of the collapse of industrial civilization.

‘We’ll never know whether we’re right or not, but it seems very likely. Humanity is simply not burning fossil fuels like we used to, and we’re not clearing forests any more – in fact, they’re growing again. We’ve seen that for ourselves, in just the last thirty years.’

‘The ice age that human agriculture has been forestalling for millennia is beginning to take hold now, you mean?’

‘Exactly that, if I’m right. Human agriculture – clearing forests and burning biomass, wood and peat mostly – had been forestalling the beginning of an ice age that was otherwise long overdue by now. By sheer luck, agriculture had grown at just about the right rate to stabilize the climate when it should have been getting colder, to judge by the history of previous ice ages. Then fossil fuel burning, increasing carbon dioxide much faster than necessary to keep the cooling at bay, was beginning to threaten to bring in a new hot period. If humanity had carried on the way it was going, burning more and more coal and oil, faster and faster, it wouldn’t have been an ice age, it would have turned the world into a hothouse. No ice caps, probably.’

‘And that would have meant a huge sea level rise. I wonder how much?’

‘I don’t know. Tens of metres, anyway. Enough to flood a substantial percentage of the world’s best farmland, and lots of big cities.’

‘But we’re headed the other way now.’

‘Seems so, but there’s nothing we can do about it, obviously.’

‘So heading south seems like an even better idea than we realized – for our descendants sake if not for our own.’

Mum, who was driving at this point, had been listening too.

‘Maybe you should come with us too, Laima? It can’t be easy here with no tractor, and from what you say the winters are getting pretty bad here, too.’

‘I was wondering that myself. I didn’t know how to ask. I’m old, and I could live out my days here and be happy enough, but it’d be good for Nikolai to have someone after his old mother’s gone.’

Mum laughed. ‘Yes, and there are more women than men in our group!’

‘I’ve not quite worked out who’s already attached to whom, but my impression is that all the unattached women are a lot younger than Nikolai.’

‘I don’t suppose that would bother him, and I’m sure it wouldn’t bother any of them. It didn’t bother you, did it? How much older than you was Ivan?’

‘Eighteen years. That’s a good point. Funny, isn’t it, how you don’t think about your own history when you’re thinking about your children’s future!’

They worked out that the difference between Nikolai and the twins was actually slightly less than that, and Lieđđi and Suonjar would be even closer to Nikolai’s age.

‘But we’ll have to let them all work these things out for themselves. I’m pretty sure that Suonjar’s got her eyes on Jake, and I know that Belle’s decided that Gealbu is something special. But what goes on in Lieđđi’s or Dot’s head I’ve not worked out. Belle and Dot always used to assume they’d have Jake’s children, but it’s not ideal because they’re his half-sisters. Greg’s my half-brother, too, but that’s life.’

‘I didn’t feel able to ask about that. So all your generation are Pete’s children?’

Mum started explaining all the relationships in our family. I knew all about that, and gave up listening. I stared out into the Russian countryside – or was it Latvian again by now? I wasn’t sure. No, it must still have been Russia, because it wasn’t long since we left Ostrov. We’d got more fish there again, as well as picking up the half-dried venison.

I spotted a rabbit, then lots of rabbits. I pointed them out to Granny Persie. She got Mum to stop, and climbed quietly out of the truck with the gun. Granny Persie is the best with the gun. She got a second rabbit, even though they’d all started running as soon as they heard the first shot. She’d got the first one in the head, which pleased Laima.

‘That’ll be a good rabbit skin! The other one won’t be quite as good with a hole in its side. But I’ll manage to do something with it anyway. We used to snare a lot of rabbits at one time, but we’ve got foxes now, and the rabbit population has plummeted. It’s good for the crops, though. We can fence deer out, but it’s hopeless trying to fence rabbits out.’

I saw several deer later on, but they’d heard us and were running before I saw them, and Granny Persie didn’t even get Dad to stop the truck.

We arrived back at Laima’s place after dark, but Nikolai had heard us coming, and came out to meet us with a pressure lantern. He looked relieved to see us. Apparently it was the longest he’d ever been separated from his mother – and he was thirty-five years old! But then, none of our family have been separated from each other for even that long, not since Grandad and the Grannies escaped from the camp. When there’s no-one else in your world, you don’t want to be separated for long.

Nikolai thought it was a wonderful idea that he and Laima should come south with us. ‘We never thought moving was possible, not once the car was finished. And we couldn’t have moved the goats even before that. It would have been difficult enough to move the chickens, although we could have taken fertilized eggs.’

‘Incubating them without a hen would have been difficult. I don’t think we could have done it reliably. We’d have managed to take a couple of hens, I think. But we didn’t see any point moving in those days. We’d had a couple of bad winters, but I hadn’t realized it was the start of a trend like this.’

‘With all these trucks, we could take the goats as well, if we can find a bigger trailer for the Unimog.’

‘Oh, there’s plenty of them around here.’

‘It’s finding one that still rolls along, preferably one with the same wheels as something we’ve got already.’

Wheels were always a worry – well, tyres really, but as far as possible Granny Persie wanted to treat wheels and tyres as a unit. She’d managed to find reasonable looking spares for the trailer we’d got, which seemed to be a fairly standard size, and there’d been spares for everything else in the military depots where we’d found the vehicles. But thirty-four year old tyres are only any good if they’ve been stored properly. The original tyres on our trailer were still okay, but the rubber was cracked all over the place, and Granny Persie was always conscious that they could burst any time.

‘If there’d been any weight in the trailer all those years, they’d have been completely flat and useless. There was no pressure in them to speak of. I was afraid they might burst when I first pumped them up.’

But they hadn’t, and they were still okay three and a half thousand kilometres later, despite being dragged through potholes and over jagged rocks. ‘We’ve been lucky. So far. But I wouldn’t want to load that trailer too heavily. I wonder if we’ll be able to find another one, big enough and with high sides, to carry the goats?’

‘Another question is whether the hitch will match on the trailer and the Unimog. There’s at least two different types of hitch around here, and they might be different from what they had in Norway.’

‘Oh, I’m sure we can cobble something together. The Unimog’s got quite a versatile arrangement, and if necessary I can unbolt the hitch it’s got and bolt a different one on. Even if the bolt holes don’t match, I can drill new ones. Tedious, but doable.’

It turned out that the hitch wasn’t a problem. We found a suitable trailer in the village, and the hitch was a simple eye, very similar to the one on our old trailer. It was a bit loose on the Unimog’s hitch pin, but Granny Persie wasn’t worried about that. She moved the plate the jaw was mounted on down as far as it would go so the trailer was horizontal.

Tyres were more of a problem. We couldn’t find wheels the right size with decent tyres on them anywhere. We found several more similar trailers, all with rotten tyres, before we eventually found a tyre store. For the first time, we had to change tyres.

Getting the old tyres off was the hardest part of the operation. The rubber had stuck firmly onto the rims, and the tyres came apart as Nikolai tried to lever them down into the well of the rim. Several of us, right down to me, spent a whole day scraping lumps of well-stuck-on rubber off rusty rims – and then scraping the worst of the rust off as well.

One of the wheels was so rusty that Granny Persie declared it unfit for use. She went off and got a couple more wheels the same size off another trailer. More scraping.

Then Nikolai had to lever new – thirty-odd year old – tyres onto all five wheels. Uncle Sid helped him.

‘I’m glad we never had to do that before. I’m not sure we could have managed without you, Nikolai.’

Laima wasn’t there to translate, but Nikolai somehow understood roughly what Uncle Sid had said. He looked towards the Unimog’s wheels, which were a fair bit bigger, and laughed – the truck wheels are bigger still. Granny Persie said that in other countries, a tyre store like this would have better equipment – a proper jig for taking tyres off wheels and putting new ones on. She was surprised they didn’t have one here, but if Nikolai was a typical Latvian, she could understand why they didn’t bother.

‘Half Latvian, half Russian,’ Nikolai said, pointing to his huge chest with a big grin. He knew more English than we’d realized. But the way he pronounced ‘half’ had an L in it, and there was an S not a Sh in the middle of Russian.

In fact, his parents had taught him to read and write English at the same time as they’d taught him to read and write Russian, because their large library contained more books in English than in Russian – and very few in Latvian, which Laima had never taught Nikolai at all. They’d initially taught him to say the English words, because that made it easier to teach the reading and writing, but once he was able to read the books quietly to himself, they never spoke English any more. So although he could read English quite well, he really wasn’t used to speaking English – nor to following someone else speaking. But that background meant that, with people speaking it all around him, he was picking up the spoken language very fast.

The trailer had been designed for transporting cattle, so it was ideal for the goats. ‘I’m sure they won’t mind sharing it with the timbers, and the weight won’t be a problem – goats are much lighter than cows!’

‘If we’d had a trailer like this before, we could have brought the reindeer.’

‘Yes, but they wouldn’t have been happy, and anyway, they wouldn’t like the heat where we’re going. I wonder how the goats will take to the trailer?’

‘Oh, goats are tough characters. They’ll take it in their stride.’

The goats and the chickens were used to each other, and no-one expected any problems about them sharing the trailer. The only difficulty was making the trailer chicken proof. The gaps in the sides weren’t big enough for the chickens to get out, but the top was open. At first Granny Persie thought that what they wanted was some wire netting, but eventually she and Laima settled on making a solid roof, to keep the rain off a little, as well as keeping the chickens in.

They didn’t want the weight of solid wood, and searched for and eventually found something suitable – the roof of an old van they found rusting away in a barn. The roof was the best bit of the van: it was aluminium. The roof of the barn had partly collapsed onto the van and dented its roof, but that didn’t matter. They levered up the bit of the barn roof that had been resting on the van with a couple of bits of timber, and then propped it up so that could get the van roof off.

Uncle Sid drilled holes in the edges of the aluminium and the top of the sides of the trailer, and he and Nikolai tied the roof on with baling wire. Nikolai decided that it would be useful to have a box on the front of the trailer, where the chassis extended beyond the main body to the hitch, and in no time at all he’d knocked one up.

There were a few things that Laima and Nikolai wanted to bring with them, apart from the goats and chickens. Everybody was pleased with the pressure lanterns.

‘We never saw any of these in Norway or on the way. All we saw were gas ones that screw onto disposable cartridges, and we never saw enough cartridges to make them worth bothering with. I think paraffin pressure lanterns had gone out of fashion in Scandinavia.’

The biggest thing Laima wanted to bring was all the books, but she knew that was too much. She spent a long time sorting through them to find the ones she thought were really worth taking. Nikolai picked out a few more.

Granny Persie started to look through the ones Laima was thinking to leave behind. The pile we were going to take grew. Grandad went to look too, and then he called me over. There were some children’s books in English, but the best ones were in Russian. Oh, the pictures! They were glorious.

How Laima laughed. We ended up taking about a quarter of their library altogether. At first we put them in the rear of the Bandvagn where half of us had been sleeping. They filled a substantial part of it.

‘We’ll bring the lávvu back into service. It’s just as well we didn’t leave it behind!’

Nikolai had a better suggestion: to keep the old farm trailer, and tow it behind the tanker. Granny Persie said the tanker didn’t have a towing hitch, but the trailer would attach to the Bandvagn easily.

‘We can clear out the back of another truck, partly onto that trailer, and partly into the Bandvagn. Then we’ve got two sleeping trucks. The truck is more comfortable to sleep in than the Bandvagn anyway.’

Nikolai and Uncle Sid decided that they would make another box on top of the trailer, to stop things bouncing out, and to keep the rain off everything. ‘Then we don’t have to worry about sorting out things that don’t mind getting wet.’

They went off into the village in the Unimog to look for some suitable materials. They came back an hour or so later.

‘All we’ve managed to find is a tarpaulin and some rope. There’s plenty of wood to make something, but it’d take quite a while and be horribly heavy. We can put the spare wheels on the old trailer and free up some space in one of the truck trailers.’

‘Don’t even need a tarpaulin for that, all we need to do is rope them on. Spare wheels don’t have to stay dry.’

‘No, but you don’t want rope damage on the tyres. Better just to put a tarp over them and tie it down round the edge.’

‘We’ve got one spare wheel for the cattle trailer, and plenty for everything else. I wonder if we could find at least one spare wheel for the old farm trailer? Or at least some spare tyres.’

Back to the tyre store. But there weren’t any tyres the right size. Granny Persie looked at wheels on a few vehicles to see if any of them might fit on the trailer in place of the wheels we’d got, but the wheel nut spacings were all different.

‘Oh well. It’ll last as long as it lasts, and they we’ll have to think of something else. Maybe we’ll find another trailer worth swapping it for sometime.’

‘With tyres? We can’t take a whole tyre store to make sure we’ve got the right ones.’

‘True. Maybe it’s worth trying to find another trailer here, while we’ve got a tyre store handy.’

Daft as it seems, I think people had become attached to our old farm trailer. It seemed sad to leave it behind, but there was a better one in the village. It was very similar, just a little bigger, with wheels the store had got three fairly decent tyres for. There was a small truck with a spare wheel the same size, too. The tyre on the spare was a bit worn, but unlike the wheels on the truck itself, otherwise in fair condition. It didn’t have much pressure, but held air once it was pumped up. Nikolai changed the tyres on the trailer’s own wheels. I helped with the scraping of the rims again.

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