Chapter 1

It was about three months before we got out of the shelter. The shelter had obviously been designed for a siege at least that long: all the supplies kept coming on schedule, no problems. I still wonder whether the duration of our incarceration was determined by the design of the shelter and its supplies, rather than by exactly what was going on on the surface.

Unless someone had made extraordinary preparations before the war began, people had been hard at work on the surface for some while before we came out. We only knew we were coming out a couple of hours before we actually did: there was an announcement from the speakers in Hall Two – as I’d thought of it ever since arriving in what I thought of as Hall One – and we finally left through the big steel doors in Hall Two.

As at the entrance to Hall One, there was a shower area between two sets of massive doors, and beyond that a long, bare concrete tunnel. But this tunnel ended not in a deep shaft with a series of staircases, but in a garage where several coaches were waiting for us. They looked just like the coaches that had brought us from the airfield to the hotel, and could well have been the same ones.

The coaches were wet, and I wondered whether it was raining outside; but as we left the garage, we passed a massive version of a car wash, and a coach just arriving was being washed down. Powerful jets of water were playing on the underneath of the coach as well as all over the upper body. It had obviously already passed through a set of huge rotating brushes that were dripping foam.

Decontamination. We’re going to pass through a contaminated area. I wonder if it’s radioactive, chemical or biological contamination? Presumably our coach will get decontaminated again before we arrive wherever we’re going.

We must have been a mile or two from the shelter by the time we surfaced. It was night. I was sitting with Sharon, and Donna was fast asleep flat out across both our laps.

So the people who started in Hall Two probably arrived by coach from somewhere – probably the nearest town. They probably arrived after things had kicked off, and knew something about what was going on. As long as they got into the coaches before anything happened, they could have driven in through areas that were already contaminated.

We drove for a couple of hours, and then our coach went through a decontamination wash. It was just getting light, and I could see a high steel mesh fence stretching a few hundred yards in each direction. After the decontamination, we went in through a huge steel gate in the fence.

The coach pulled to a halt under a canopy alongside a large building, and we all tumbled out with our canvas bags. Mine still had my scruffy old kitbag in it. Armed men in military uniforms ushered us into the building, which housed a large room with, I estimated, about two hundred seats.

Does that mean there’ll be half a dozen sittings, for just the people from our group? And then another half dozen for each of the other groups? Or aren’t we all coming to the same place?

How long will we be in here? How long will it take for all the coaches to arrive?

We weren’t in there long at all, and it was actually the decontamination that was the bottleneck, not the briefing.

We were addressed by a man in military uniform.

He told us that the fenced area had been cleared as clean, and was expected to remain so because the immediate surroundings were clean – but that anywhere more than a few hundred metres from the compound could not be guaranteed clean at present.

‘As far as is known, the only survivors almost anywhere in the world are those who took refuge in competently constructed shelters.

‘Efforts are ongoing to find additional clean areas, or to decontaminate others, and the enclosed area will be extended whenever it is safe to do so, or additional enclosures may be established into which groups of you may move.

‘There are enough huts for everyone as long as no-one expects a hut to themselves. Meals will be served in here between seven and eight thirty in the morning, between twelve and one thirty, and between five and six thirty. There is sufficient land here to grow all our own food. We have seeds, chickens and goats. Training in farming will be provided. If everyone shares the work fairly, it won’t be onerous.

‘Essential services will be organized on a rota basis, and everyone will be expected to pull their weight.

‘It will be up to you to organize yourselves for any other activities.

‘I’ll see you at breakfast later. Now go and find huts for yourselves. The next coach load is ready for their briefing.’

And we were ushered out of the building by different doors.

I think it’s three coach loads per briefing, actually.

‘Concentration camp, or what? I wonder how long we’ll be here? No suggestion of any possibility of trying to get back to England, not yet awhile, anyway. Farming? They think we’ll be here for years.’

Sharon seems upset, but remarkably accepting of the situation. I’m not sure how I feel about it.

‘Why the big fence, though? Are they afraid we’ll try to escape? If it’s true that large areas around here are dangerously contaminated, why would anyone want to escape? And if it’s not true, what’s going on?’

‘This can’t be the only place like this. Is there going to be any coming and going between them? Perhaps we’ll be able to migrate home gradually, from one concentration camp to another, a step at a time.’

‘I doubt that. I don’t think they’re going to be running coach services between the various sites, somehow. They’ll be afraid of some sites ending up without a sufficient labour force, and others getting overcrowded.’

‘So we’re slaves, basically.’

‘Looks that way, for the present, anyway. All we can do is hope our masters are benevolent.’

‘That’d be a first.’

‘Pessimist.’ But she’s right, really.

Ellie found us, and we agreed to share a hut – three adults and three small children. The hut seemed plenty big enough for us. No wonder they don’t want anyone to have one to themselves. Even a couple would be being a bit greedy.

Sharon wondered whether all three groups from the shelter would be in our camp, or whether there were other camps in the area. ‘I’m not sure I fancy the combination of Will, Irene and Harry together again.’

‘We’ve got armed guards here though, not just a couple of unarmed security guards.’

‘A couple? I thought there was only one.’

Then I had to explain how Will and I had tried to change groups, and discovered the two suspected guards, one of whom was subsequently confirmed.

At breakfast, we were given cards with our timetables on them, all different – or at least, quite a variety of different ones. Sharon asked to be given one that was the same as mine, but was told, ‘They’re from the same batch, so there’s a lot of common timing. But yours is a lady’s card, and his is a gent’s card. There’s bound to be a few differences.’

Rolls and butter, slices of ham and cheese, and a cup of coffee.

Over breakfast we studied our timetables. There was indeed a lot of common timing – we were together for farming training, and most of our leisure time coincided – but Sharon had kitchen and creche duties, which I didn’t, and I had more time doing ‘labouring as detailed’.

‘So. Not just slaves, but gender-stereotyped slaves. I suppose it was to be expected.’

‘Even in Sweden?’

‘Hmm. Apparently.’

We were encouraged to leave the hall as soon as we’d eaten, to let another group use our table, and on our way out we were told, ‘The timetable doesn’t start until tomorrow. Please use today to familiarize yourselves with the camp, and make sure you know where each of the locations mentioned on your timetable is.’

So they call it a camp, too.

We did as we were told. Familiarizing ourselves with the camp was unexceptionable, and we agreed that the timetable was probably a good idea too, really. ‘Obviously everyone has to pull their weight, the whole situation would be hopeless otherwise.’

We weren’t happy, but so far everything seemed to be reasonable, and as fair as could be expected.

‘But I bet the senior officers don’t do their fair share of the less pleasant duties!’

‘No, I don’t suppose they will.’

‘Not so different from normal life, really – except that we’re all semi-employed, rather than half of us overworked and the other half left on the scrapheap. All play and no work is as bad as all work and no play – maybe worse, when you’ve barely enough money to keep body and soul together.’

‘You sound as though you speak from experience.’

Sharon got in before I’d worked out what to say, ‘He does. He told me all about it.’

‘At least in normal life people get a choice of how they earn their living.’

‘You think so? Not a lot, in most cases. Most folks just get any job they can, if they can.’

‘I suppose that’s true. Geoff didn’t really want to be a soldier, but what else is there for a man with no qualifications and a pregnant wife who’d rather like to have somewhere to live?’

‘That’s pretty much what Bernie said. He’s got decent A levels, but where’s that get you without a degree? Trainee shop manager? Draughtsman? For the lucky few, and he wasn’t one of them. Anyway, the pay’s lousy. We weren’t badly off in the army – not great pay, but at least we got decent quarters at a sensible price.’

She’s talking past tense. Which is probably the sensible way to see things. Oh, Cathie, where are you? What’s really going on in the rest of the world?

Donna was riding on my shoulders. Maybe she sensed my momentary detachment. However that may be, she decided to put her hands over my eyes, ‘Who is it?’

‘I don’t know. Sharon? Billy? Tom? Ellie? I know! It’s Donna!’

I swung Donna round off my shoulders and into my arms. She was giggling like a loon.

Sharon laughed. She was carrying Tom in a makeshift sling, and Billy was riding on Ellie’s shoulders.

We explored the middle of the camp first.

The hall where we’d had our briefing and our breakfast seemed to be a converted barn – and not very much converted. There were two coaches under the canopy, which had perhaps been designed to shelter farm trailers while they were loaded or unloaded.

Just two coaches? There must have been fifteen or twenty to bring us here, we weren’t brought in shifts. Well, our group wasn’t. The other groups presumably didn’t come at the same time as us. In fact, have all three groups arrived yet at all?

There was a large farmhouse, which was apparently occupied by senior army officers and their families. Several outbuildings had been labelled up so we could match them with locations on our timetables. There was a large, apparently new, prefabricated block that seemed to house ordinary soldiers and their families, and there were rows and rows of huts very like ours.

The huts seemed to be new, kit-built, and as far as we could see identical apart from their numbers and the colour of their roofs and paintwork. Ours was K3, quite close to the old farm buildings, with a light green roof and blue and white paintwork. Like all the others, it stood on four wooden legs on concrete slabs on bare, levelled, gravelly ground.

We didn’t bother to wander all up and down the rows of huts, but decided to set off across the rough, tussocky grass up a hill that overlooked the farm. There was a rocky outcrop on the top of the hill, but it was easily climbed. Even Billy and Donna, who were walking at that point, managed to scramble up onto the top.

We seemed to be the only people who’d taken it into their heads to go up there – for the time being, at least.

From the top, we could see almost the whole extent of the camp. As far as we could see, the perimeter fence formed a rough circle, perhaps a couple of miles or a little more in diameter, centred on the old farm.

The hill we were on wasn’t far from the fence at the northern edge. Between us and the fence was a steep slope down to a boggy area, then the ground rose again before the fence. Beyond the fence the ground continued to rise, a couple of hundred yards of rough grass and then dense conifer forest.

Around us, the land appeared to be rough pasture, but we couldn’t see any animals grazing. Generally, it sloped fairly steeply down to a wide, more-or-less level band running across the middle of the camp, then in the far south of the camp the ground fell away below our line of sight, and we couldn’t see the southern edge at all. Much further away to the south we could see what seemed to be more farmland, with wooded hills beyond.

The huts occupied a rectangular area maybe half a mile by a quarter, to the east of the farm buildings. I thought I could count eighteen rows of them, and about forty huts in each row, but it was difficult from that distance and at that angle.

By the time we got down to the buildings again, it was almost the beginning of lunch time. We went back to our hut for a wash and to change Tom’s nappy, and then went and had lunch. Then Ellie went back to the hut again to wash out the wet nappy, and Sharon and I took all three children for another walk. With the two toddlers walking, we were pretty slow, but we had the whole afternoon. We wandered along the gravel track to the gates, and had a look through the fence at the decontamination unit. I noticed that the drain from it ran into a ditch only just outside the fence, and then parallel with the fence for quite a way.

I hope nothing they’re washing off the coaches ends up blowing about and into the camp. They actually seem quite blasé about it. Surely it’s not all just theatre?

We followed a well-trodden path just inside the fence, that was probably originally made by the soldiers who constructed the fence.

‘The fence is newish, but it doesn’t look as though it went up in just the last couple of days. They kept us underground at least two or three weeks longer than the soldiers, so the camp could be ready when we came out. I wonder whether they were in one of our three groups, or whether they were in a different shelter somewhere else?’

‘I reckon they must have been in our shelter. Thinking about the number of huts and the number of people, I reckon there were two groups of civilians, and one rather smaller group of soldiers and their families, and so far there’s one group of civilians – us – and probably all the soldiers.’

‘I’ve not seen Harry. You think he’s in the other civilian group?’

‘Probably. Unless he was held with the soldiers, and he’s still under arrest.

‘Another thing exercising my mind is this: they just asked us to find huts for ourselves, implying there were plenty. Well, with just one group of us here there’s more than plenty – but surely they wouldn’t have put up so many that there’d still be more than plenty when everyone else arrives. As far as I know, none of them were locked, and they didn’t say any of them were out of bounds, so when everyone else arrives, will we find some of us have to take in extra housemates?’

‘Hmm. I think we’re safe enough from that, with six of us in there, even if three of them are rather little. But I can see some clever psychology there – trying to force the two groups to mix a bit. Of course that could backfire horribly.’

‘Especially if the other group is locals who got bussed in from the nearest town, wherever that is. All Swedes in Sweden, while we’re nearly all foreigners from all over the place.’

‘Large contingent of Brits, in fact. I think our plane had about a hundred and eighty, and Will said practically a third of the timber conference people were English.’

Ellie caught up with us. ‘I hope to God I can dry nappies faster than he uses them. I’ve only got five – seven if I tear one of the towels in half.’

‘I suppose it’s quite impressive that they’ve got water in all the huts, and sewers. No electricity, but that’s not surprising. They must have a generator at the farm, but it couldn’t supply all the huts, not even for lighting. And I’m sure as hell there’ll be no other electricity supply. Not sure what we’ll do for drying come winter.’

‘Perish the thought. I can see those huts getting pretty damn cold, too.’

‘So can I. Judging by the thickness of the walls and floors, they’ve got loads of insulation, but with no heating at all they’ll still get bloody cold.’

‘Maybe they’re hoping to get more power before winter. And get some wiring done.’

‘There must be all kinds of equipment and materials lying around unused now, if everyone from the locality who wasn’t in the shelter is dead and gone. It’s only a matter of going and fetching it. There’s plenty of soldiers – and civilians, for that matter – to do the actual work.’

‘It’s probably not really just a matter of going and fetching it. A lot of it must be contaminated, if everyone’s dead. Decontaminating the outside of a coach is one thing, decontaminating random bits of equipment is quite another.’

‘I wonder what really happened? If the contamination is radioactive, most of it might have decayed away by now, and any that hasn’t can be detected with radiation meters, so you know what needs decontaminating, and you know whether you’ve succeeded or not. If it’s biological or chemical, it’s much harder to know what’s contaminated and what isn’t – but the biological stuff is reckoned to have a very limited life in the general environment. It’s no use killing all your enemy’s population if you leave their country permanently uninhabitable.’

‘That’s the official story, Sharon. I wish my friend Tony was here though. He’s very sceptical of the official story, and knows enough about stuff to back his scepticism up. In particular, I remember him saying that it’s actually very hard to detect modest levels of radioactive contamination with some particular long half-life isotopes. If there’s enough of them to be an immediate threat, they’re detectable all right – but there can be enough to cause a lingering death months or years later without them being detectable at all with anything you’d find outside a nuclear research lab.

‘And biological agents that are designed to self-destruct after one or two generations are all very well, but when you’re dealing with the kind of massive quantities you’d need to kill whole populations, there’s a big risk that some of them somewhere will mutate so as not to self-destruct, and then spread; or that some of the stuff will be contaminated with non-self-destructing bugs during manufacture. And biological contamination, particularly novel stuff, is even harder to detect than radioactive contamination.’

‘Cor. If that’s your layman’s simplified version, I don’t think I want to meet your friend.’

You never will. I doubt if he’s even still alive. Unless Sweden got hit a lot harder than England, and I can’t imagine why that would be. Oh, Cathie!

‘Pete – you okay?’

‘Oh – yes, well, no, but yes, I’m okay. Just thinking about England, that’s all, and whether my friends have any chance at all of still being alive.’

Or my family, for that matter. London and Sheffield? Surely not, big cities like that haven’t a hope if rural Sweden is dangerously contaminated. Funny how it’s Mike and Jill and June – and especially Cathie – that I think of first, not my family. Even Tony, that I avoid half the time.

‘Pete. Come here. I’m here. Donna’s here. You’re Donna’s New Daddy, remember? You can’t keep living in the past. Maybe your friends are okay, maybe they’re not, but it’ll be a long, long time before you see them again even if they are. Give us a cuddle, we need it as much as you do.’

We all ended up in a group cuddle, because Billy wanted to get involved as well, and then Ellie joined in too. Then we were all crying and laughing together.

With three adults and the two bigger children riding shoulders again, we made better time, and completed the circuit of the southern half of the fence, then trudged back across unkempt fields to the far end of the rectangle of huts.

The fields inside the fence look just like the fields outside, which isn’t surprising. In fact, the fence must go right across the middles of the old fields. In a year’s time it’ll be growing crops in here, and bigger and bigger weeds out there. Forests, before long.

It was nearly time for dinner. Tom’s nappy was wet again, and the last one wasn’t dry yet.

‘At least the weather’s dry. I want a line outside, though. It’s all very well leaving the door and window open with stuff on a drying horse, but an outside line would be better in this weather.’

‘At least there is a drying horse. They’ve done pretty well, considering, I reckon.’

‘True enough. I wonder whether things will get better, or worse, as time goes on?’

‘Better in some ways, and worse in others, I expect. That’s pretty much inevitable, I think.’

‘But you wouldn’t care to guess what’ll get better, and what’ll get worse, I don’t suppose!’

Laughter.

‘Not in general, no. A few specifics, possibly.’

‘Don’t bother. We’ll find out soon enough.’

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