Chapter 2

I remember the day we moved out very well, too. Grandad, the Grannies, Mum and Uncle Sid had been at the farm for twenty-nine years – almost the whole of Mum’s and Uncle Sid’s lives – and all the rest of us had been born there. I remember the tears in nearly everyone’s eyes. But there was a lot of excitement, too. We were going on an expotition.

Okay, I know it’s an expedition really. That’s one of Grandad’s little jokes. It’s from one of his stories. He’s got lots of little stories, and I remember how much I loved them when I was little. Tell the truth, I still do love them – but I love the way the littler ones enjoy them even more. I know Grandad enjoys telling them, too, especially because of the effect they have on us kids.

He draws hilarious pictures to go with the stories. He says they’re not very good, and that he wishes he had the original books, especially for the pictures.

‘Maybe one day we’ll raid a bookshop that has them. Maybe they’ll be Finnish or Russian or Polish or German translations, but the pictures’ll be the same, and I can remember the words. I can remember the pictures too, but I can’t draw them properly.’

But he never has found those books.

At first, the going was very good. There were potholes in the roads, of course, but there was a recognizable road almost all the way. Here and there it had been washed away completely, but with big wheels, all driven, we just drove through the mess – slowly and carefully, but pretty much straight through. We did nearly two hundred kilometres the first day.

Grandad says he still translates distances into miles every time, but Granny Persie laughs at him.

‘The trucks think in kilometres, all the road signs are in kilometres, all the youngsters think in kilometres. You don’t know how long a mile is any more than you know how long a kilometre is, anyway!’

‘Yes I do. A mile is one point six kilometres.’

‘Of course, but how far is that? How far away are those rocks on that hilltop?’

Then Grandad laughs. ‘Okay, you win. I’ve no idea.’

I’m not sure Granny Persie knows, either, but I don’t say anything.

Most of the road signs were illegible, the writing either peeled off or covered with lichen. Or a bit of both.

Granny Persie had an ancient opisometer, and had shown me how to measure distances on the map with it, but nobody used to bother. They estimated distances just by looking at the maps and knowing the scales.

‘Even the opisometer doesn’t really give you an accurate distance. The map doesn’t show you the smallest wiggles, and they can make a huge difference, especially in the mountains. The distance doesn’t tell you much anyway, because both time and fuel consumption depend so much on the condition of the road.’

We crossed over into Sweden somewhere on the third day. Grandad talks about the border crossing, but I don’t remember it, and borders don’t mean anything any more anyway. I didn’t understand about borders at all at that time, and they don’t really make much sense to me even now.

The further north we went, the worse the roads got. The washouts got bigger and more difficult to cross. Eventually we came to one where the second truck got stuck. I was in the first truck, with Granny Persie and Aunty Dot. Aunty Dot had been driving, but Granny Persie took over for the difficult bit through the washout. Whether it was that Granny Persie was a more expert driver than Grandad, who was driving the second truck, or whether it was because our truck had made some deep ruts that Grandad got stuck in, we’ll never know.

Uncle Sid was driving the tanker. He’d been waiting at the edge of the washout for Grandad to get through before he drove into the mud himself. He got down out of the tanker, put on some huge boots that came halfway up his thighs, and waded into the mud. They’d worked out the procedure beforehand, and he knew exactly what to do. He grabbed the big hook on the end of the winch wire on Grandad’s truck, and signalled to Grandad to release the winch.

It was quite a struggle for Uncle Sid, getting through the mud pulling the winch cable to hook it up to the back of Granny Persie’s truck, but he managed. He signalled to Grandad when it was hooked on safely. With six big wheels driving and the winch pulling, Grandad drove through the mud, up the bank, and onto the road behind Granny Persie’s truck.

‘I’m not sure about getting the tanker and the other truck through there, though. I don’t think the Unimog will have much trouble, but what are we going to do about the other two?’

There was no question of leaving them behind! Not that we’d have had to leave any of the people behind, of course, or even all of the stuff. But the truck was worth a lot to us, and the tanker full of diesel was vital.

Granny Persie and Uncle Sid walked up and down the banks of the river that had washed the road away, looking for a place they could cross more easily on foot. They found a place they could wade across in their long boots. Then Granny Persie took over driving the Unimog from Granny Merly, and they drove up and down that side of the river looking for a better place to take the trucks across the river.

I waited anxiously with Grandad and Aunty Dot, and Aunty Belle, who’d been in the second truck with Grandad. At first we were standing on the last bit of road, right at the edge of the washout, waving at the rest of the family standing on the last bit of road on their side; but then it started to rain, and we all got into the cab of Truck Two, and the others all got into the cab of the tanker. They could see our trucks, but we could only see theirs in one of the mirrors.

I felt as though they might as well be a thousand kilometres away. At least we had the intercom, so we could talk to them. At first, we could talk to Granny Persie in the Unimog as well, but then the link became intermittent, and finally broke completely.

‘They’re either too far away, or hidden behind a hill. Don’t worry, Mikey.’

But the time stretched out, and there was still no sign from Granny Persie. I began to worry. I think it took longer before Grandad and the twins started to worry, but after a while I could tell they were worried, too.

Eventually Grandad spotted the Unimog in the distance. He wasn’t sure which side of the river it was on.

‘Persie! Can you hear me? I can see you now!’

‘Really? I’ve not spotted you yet! Oh, I see you. We’re on your side of the river now, with a drivable route to a place I’m pretty sure we can get the trucks across. But I’ve not found a drivable route back to the road on this side yet. It doesn’t look good, in fact. I think we might have to go back and try to find a different place to ford the river – either further upstream still, or maybe downstream.’

Granny Persie and Uncle Sid spent all that afternoon searching up and down the river for a route, without success.

‘We’ll spend the night here now, obviously. If we can’t find a route tomorrow morning, I’ve got an idea how we can get through here.’

There really wasn’t an alternative crossing with a drivable route back to the road, and Granny Persie’s method had to be used.

‘I just hope the spare wheels survive, that’s all. I’m pretty sure we’ll get the trucks through all right.’

They unloaded six of the spare wheels from the trailer, and with much grunting and puffing and swearing and getting very muddy, the four men managed to manhandle them into position across the deepest ruts in the mud. They hooked up the winch before the third truck even entered the washout.

‘If we can possibly keep the truck moving, hopefully we’ll avoid making any more big holes for the next one.’

Granny Persie’s trick worked perfectly. The tanker and the last truck, with its trailer, came across steadily with no problems at all, and the Unimog came across easily without even a winch cable.

Getting the spare wheels out afterwards was harder. Grandad took one look and knew they couldn’t possibly manhandle them out. The only way was with the Unimog’s winch. Granny Persie insisted that Grandad and Uncle Sid should put another two spare wheels on top of the winch cable, near each buried wheel, before she pulled.

‘I don’t fancy having a flying wheel coming crashing into the front of the Unimog when it comes free!’

They certainly came out with a big plop and knocked the piled wheels about, but I’m not sure they’d really have catapulted all that far. Better safe than sorry, though.

‘I’m glad the Unimog was able to pull them out. Turning a truck round to use one of the bigger winches would have been a real pain.’

Then they had to fetch bucket after bucket of water up from the river to wash down the wheels before they loaded them back onto the trailer. One of them had lost all its air – the valve had got wrenched out – but the rest were okay.

‘We’ll keep that one anyway, even though we don’t have a spare inner tube for it. It’s still a good wheel and a good tyre.’

‘We don’t have any way to get a tyre on and off a wheel.’

‘No, but we’ll find a place that has the equipment. It’ll be more of a problem to find a tube for it, for a tyre this size. If there’s rubber solution that’s still any good, we’ll cut a valve and a few centimetres of rubber out of a different size tube, and patch it into this tube.’

‘It would’ve been better if we’d had some big baulks of timber – railway sleepers or the like – rather than risking spoiling our spare wheels like that. But even if we find some, we’ve no room for them in the trucks or on the trailers.’

‘But there’ll be more washouts like that, beyond a doubt. Probably worse than that. We’ll have to decide what to leave behind if we’re lucky enough to find some timbers.’

‘Or find a farm trailer, and pull it with the Unimog. We could regard a farm trailer as disposable, and just leave it behind if it gets stuck. There’s hundreds of them around.’

‘We’ll always be able to pull through with the winch, I’m sure. And we won’t want to leave a trailer stuck, even if we do regard it as disposable, because we might want to go back and we won’t want anything blocking the road. Even if we’re not going all the way back home, we might want to backtrack a little way to find a different route somewhere. We’ve been assuming the 88 is likely to be less broken than the E4, but we don’t know that for sure. Even some of the minor roads might be better in some places.’

We found a farm trailer easily enough.

The timbers to fill it took longer. By the time we found them – a pile of rough cut timbers Grandad and Uncle Sid could barely lift, and so long that they overhung the trailer quite a lot – we’d been through several bad washouts, but only once had we had to use the spare wheels again, because Granny Persie and Uncle Sid had worked out a new procedure.

Whenever we got to a washout that looked the least bit difficult, the Unimog went through first, without its trailer, with the tanker’s winch cable, running free, already attached. Then the tanker went through, pulling the next truck’s winch cable, and so on. But the Unimog went back before the last truck came through, so its winch cable could be attached. Finally, the Unimog came through pulling its own trailer.

That way, none of the vehicles dug themselves into big holes at all in most places.

Later, we found a bigger trailer and wondered if we should swap them.

‘It’s heavier, but it’s got the same size wheels as the trucks, which is better than those little ones. And we won’t have to rope the timbers on.’

‘Yes, but it’ll be a lot more awkward getting the timbers on and off.’

That was a telling point, and we kept the smaller one.

Several days later and still heading north, we reached a place where there was obviously no chance of getting the vehicles across, even though we had found the timbers by then. The road went along the crest of a dam that had failed. The river had cut a channel through the dam, right down to the natural floor of the valley. The road ended in an almost vertical drop of about fifteen metres, facing a similar cliff maybe twenty metres away.

Granny Merly wondered why we’d ever set off on this hopeless expedition. Grandad was a bit disappointed, and wondered whether we’d have to go back after all. Even Granny Persie was a bit worried.

‘Even if we manage to find a ford somewhere upstream or downstream this time, with passable routes to it on both sides of the river, sooner or later we’re going to get to a place we really can’t get past, come what may.’

It was Uncle Sid and the twins who persuaded everyone not to give up hope.

‘We’ll find a way round, even if we have to make a bit of road to do it. We’ve come all this way without getting stuck, and we’re doing fine for time. We could take a week moving rocks to make some spot passable, and it wouldn’t matter as long as it didn’t happen too often. Look how far we’ve come already, and this is the first place that’s really been difficult.’

‘I know we want to get well south again, the other side of the Baltic, before winter, but even if the worst comes to the worst, we can survive the winter stuck in the far north if we have to. We’ve plenty of food and fuel.’

‘We’ve been passing farms often enough, too. We’ve not even been bothering to raid them to replace food we’ve eaten. I know we’ve only eaten two weeks’ worth, and we’ve got enough for about a year, but even so.’

In the end, Granny Persie and Uncle Sid, in the Unimog, found a route around the big washout. It involved several places where we had to put timbers down and use the winches to get across boggy ground and we lost several of the timbers, but it was a detour of only a few kilometres. We were back on the road.

‘We’ll find some more timbers I expect.’

After that, we raided the next few farms. At one of them, Grandad had a brainwave.

‘I hate being so destructive, but what the hell? There’s more farms here than what’s left of humanity will want in a hundred years, and they’ll all have fallen down before then.’

He hooked the Unimog’s winch to a big beam in the old farmhouse, and pulled the whole place down. Then one by one, they pulled out several hefty joists, and loaded them into the trailer. We’d got plenty of timbers again, and we knew how to get more if we needed them.

Then we gave up raiding farms.

‘We’ll wait for a village, where we can raid several houses relatively quickly.’

And that’s what we did.

We had to make detours off the road in a few places, and in one place we had to fill in a ravine with rocks, which really did take about a week. The Unimog went back and forth, fetching trailer load after trailer load of rocks from a boulder-strewn hillside a couple of kilometres away. All four men were exhausted by the end of each day, manhandling the biggest rocks they could manage on and off the trailer. I helped too, but looking back on it, the little stones I loaded and unloaded can’t have made much difference, and I was probably getting in the way really.

When it was done, the trucks rolled across with no problems at all.

Heading north up through Sweden, that was the worst place. We were beginning to feel confident we could cope with anything by one means or another. At one point, we stopped at a filling station, and topped up the tanker with diesel. ‘We’ve only used a tiny fraction of a tankerful anyway, but it’s no trouble stopping and I feel more comfortable with the tanker full.’

‘It’s reassuring to know it’s so easy to get at the tank in a filling station, too.’

‘It might not be as easy at some of them. That’s part of why I’ll feel more comfortable if we fill up long before we need to.’

‘The pumps are the same sort there were back at Østerby.’

That was reassuring too, but we didn’t actually need to run the station’s pumps, because we’d not used any petrol at all.

We’d seen no signs of any human activity more recent than the war – or the cull, whichever it had been, if there’s really any difference anyway – all the way.

Although our farm had been overrun with rabbits, and we’d seen quite a lot in the south, there didn’t seem to be any further north. We’d seen hares, rats, a few birds of various species, a few foxes, and traces of wolves – but not the wolves themselves. Granny Persie and Uncle Sid had shot a few hares, which made a nice change from tins, pickles, dried stuff and root vegetables. Grandad and Mum and Dad had managed to catch a few fish, too.

I remember that I was missing Granny Persie’s seaweed stews. By the time I was born, the freezer had been dead for years, so I’d only had seaweed when we’d been down to the coast – trips I don’t remember at all. If I hadn’t got to know seaweed again later, I expect I’d have forgotten what it was like by now – but I definitely remember missing it.

All the grown-ups say it’s very sad that I don’t remember the Norwegian south coast, that was so near our old farm. They say it was a wonderful place.

Late one morning, Granny Persie and Uncle Sid were investigating a possible ford just a few yards upstream of a place where a bridge had been washed away. They were on foot, poking about in some mud, seeing whether they thought the vehicles would be able to get through without having to put timbers down, when Uncle Sid shouted, and Granny Persie ran over to him. Watching from the road, we all heard him and saw her running. Then Uncle Sid came running back to the road, leaving Granny Persie crouching down looking at something in the mud.

‘Come and look! Mum (that’s what Uncle Sid calls Granny Persie) isn’t sure what they are. She thinks you might know, Dad (that’s Grandad) or Aunty Merly might.’

Granny Merly didn’t know, and Grandad wasn’t sure either.

‘I’m no expert. It might be goats, but maybe a bit big for goats. I think it’s some kind of deer. Up here, probably reindeer.’

‘That was my guess, too. Looks like there’s quite a few of them.’

‘Those prints can’t be thirty-four years old. In fact, I reckon they’re pretty fresh. They’ll be gone the next time this river rises – maybe even next time it rains. They’d surely at least have lost their crispness if it had rained since whatever made them was here.’

‘So they’re probably just a few hours old, unless the rain we had earlier on was just local.’

‘I vote we make camp here tonight. We don’t absolutely have to press on as hard as we can, all day every day. If we sit quietly, maybe they’ll show their faces again.’

‘I wouldn’t want to shoot a reindeer, though. We get plenty of meat from the hares, and we couldn’t finish a whole reindeer before it went off.’

‘I’m not so sure about that, with ten adults. How big is a reindeer? I don’t know. But I wasn’t thinking of shooting one anyway. I’d just like to see them.’

‘So would I. But is it worth hanging around half a day, just to see reindeer? As you say, we don’t need one for food. If there’s been a herd of them here, it’s likely there’ll be more.’

‘I don’t know how big reindeer are, either, but they’re certainly a good deal bigger than hares or foxes or wolves. Biggest animal we know to have survived in the wild. Unless of course they were in a shelter somewhere.’

‘Maybe the war didn’t really reach here.’

‘It must have done. There’d be lots of people up here if it hadn’t, and they’d have spread south by now. Even if we hadn’t actually met any, we’d surely have seen signs of their presence.’

‘I don’t know. With the roads this bad, and most vehicles surely knackered by now, even if there were still lots of people we’d be pretty unusual being on the move like this. People won’t be migrating very fast. Migrating on foot, thirty-four years isn’t long enough for people to be likely to have spread very far at all. I doubt you’d migrate more than a long day’s march in a generation.’

‘They could be migrating by boat. You could carry more, and move small children more easily, that way. You might go a lot further in a generation.’

‘You might. The whole coast might be getting repopulated, and we wouldn’t have known until they got right round to the southern tip of Norway.’

‘This is all just speculation. Let’s just keep on moving, and we’ll see what we see.’

Granny Persie never lets Grandad get away with that.

‘There’s nothing wrong with speculation, Mr Collins. Without speculation, you don’t know what you’re looking for, and you’ll miss important observations that might support or confirm your speculations, or make them seem less likely or impossible.’

She only ever calls him Mr Collins when she’s making a point like that, and we all think it’s hilarious. Even Grandad himself laughs. Every time.

‘Okay. What I’m still wondering is whether it was just a few odd reindeer that survived, like the few odd rabbits down south, and they’ve gradually re-established themselves, or whether they survived in big numbers in the first place. They obviously don’t breed as fast as rabbits, but I’m pretty sure they breed a lot faster than humans.’

‘So if there’s a lot of them – and this doesn’t seem to have been a very small herd – you’re thinking that a lot must have survived, and that maybe quite a few humans survived, too?’

‘You seem to be thinking that as well.’

Granny Persie and Grandad often score points off each other like that. Granny Persie nearly always wins. It’s all entirely good-natured though. They’re still very much in love even after all these years.

‘Sort of. But we’ve increased from three to fourteen in a generation and a half. If reindeer reach sexual maturity in say six years, and each female has one calf each year, they’ll have increased an awful lot in thirty-four years. Rabbits absolutely exploded in just a few years.’

‘Maybe we should look carefully to see if there are any human footprints here before we go, anyway. If I remember aright, the Sami people often travel with herds of reindeer.’

‘There’s lots of our own footprints around here by now anyway. We’ve no hope of telling which are which.’

‘Except that ours are on top of the reindeer prints. Any that have reindeer prints on top of them can’t be ours. And we could follow where the herd went for a little way. Then we’d have a better chance of seeing any prints that weren’t ours.’

But away from the muddy area, we couldn’t see where the herd had gone at all. ‘An expert could probably tell. But until we meet the Sami and they teach us, we don’t have any hope.’

Granny Merly laughed. ‘IF there still are any Sami, and IF we find them, you’re going to spend a few months with them learning to track reindeer? You’ll have to learn their language first. Some of the old ones might know Swedish, so Persie and I might be able to talk with them, but I’d be very surprised if any of the young ones even know Swedish. Seriously, I’m pretty sure that the last Sami must have died thirty-four years ago.’

They drove the Unimog through the ford, and decided that it would be best to put timbers down in a couple of places before driving the trucks through. So it took a few hours to get past that point. They’d not used a lot of timbers, but getting them out after the trucks had driven over them was always a slow process. As usual, a few were impossible to dig out, and a few others were so badly damaged they weren’t worth retrieving. Uncle Sid thought it was probably quicker to get fresh timbers out of an old farmhouse than to dig used ones out of a bog, but nobody really liked pulling farmhouses down. It just seemed so destructive.

‘You never know who might want to use them one day, even if they’re in very decrepit condition by that time. It could be the difference between life and death for someone.’

‘If there’s anyone left apart from us. But you’re right, it’s not a lot of extra trouble, if any, to rescue as many as we can. And we really don’t know whether there might be other independent survivors around. There can’t be all that many in this part of the world at the moment, or we’d have met them or seen evidence of them, but there could be some, or people from somewhere else might arrive here later.’

By the time we’d finished digging out the last of the reusable timbers, it was the middle of the afternoon. Then there were two more washouts. They weren’t as bad, and we didn’t need to put down any timbers, but we did use the winches just in case, and even that takes time. All in all, we didn’t get much further that day.

We reached yet another washout late in the afternoon, and Granny Persie, driving the Unimog at the front of the convoy, decided to call a halt.

‘We don’t want to be halfway through crossing this place when it gets dark.’

There was still about an hour of daylight left, and Grandad and Uncle Sid decided to climb a steep little hill a kilometre or so from the road, to scan the surrounding countryside with the binoculars. They took the Unimog across the rough country to a point as close to the hill as they could, and scrambled up the hill from there. It was beginning to get dark by the time they got back to the Unimog, and they drove back with the headlights on. It was the first time the headlights had been used, apart from checking that they worked when we first got the trucks.

‘Interesting. I wish I hadn’t had to use the headlights though. It might have scared them away.’

‘Scared what away? Did you see reindeer?’

‘Better than that. There are people here, with the reindeer. Not very many, I don’t think, but some, I’m pretty sure. From up there we could see what look like two herds of reindeer, and each one seems to have a tent nearby. They’re a long way off, and I can’t be absolutely sure they’re tents from this distance, but they look like it. I’d guess they’re made out of reindeer skins, by the colour. They could just be rocks, but the other rocks around don’t look the same.’

‘If they’re so far away you can’t really make them out very well through the binoculars, do you think they’d even have seen the Unimog’s lights?’

‘Unless they were all inside their tents, I’m sure they would have. They might not have known what they were, if none of them are much more than thirty-four years old, but no-one could miss beams of light dancing about like that, I’m sure. If you didn’t know what they were, they could be pretty scary. And even if you did know what they were, if you’d not seen any for donkey’s years you’d probably be pretty worried about whose they might be.’

‘I suppose you’re right. It would have fairly put the wind up us, back at the farm, if we’d seen headlights around.’

‘And we can be pretty sure there’s been no-one else around with motor vehicles for a good long time. There’s no roads for anyone who’s less well equipped than we are.’

‘I’d love to be up that hill in the dark, actually. I bet they’ve got fires. We’d be able to see fires further away, or in more camouflaged locations. We might be able to see more than just two small encampments.’

‘I’m not sure you’d see their fires anyway. I’m pretty sure the fires would be inside their tents, and whether much light would escape I’m not sure. You might see the smoke if you were up there at dusk.’

‘We were up there at dusk! If there was smoke, it was too well camouflaged – harder to see than the tents.’

‘Without a torch, we can’t get up or down that hill in the dark anyway, and I certainly don’t fancy spending a whole night up there.’

I’d never seen a torch, but I’d heard about them. For the first few years after the war, Grandad and the Grannies had had a big rechargeable torch. They’d been able to raid deep into shops where daylight didn’t reach, without having to trail cables from a vehicle; but the torch’s battery had eventually died like all the rest. They’d been disappointed, but not surprised, that there hadn’t been any small batteries in the battery store at the depot.

I’ve seen torches now, but I’ve still never seen a working one. Museum pieces, like so many other things. Not that they’re in a museum – except in the sense that most of the world is a museum now.

Grandad’s told me lots about museums, but I’ve never seen one of them, either. I wonder if I ever will? Grandad says there must have been some in Oslo, but we never went looking for them.

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