The Seeds Of Time:

I was checking out the vegetables when the latest plane flew over.  Time was, I used to grow flowers.  I mean, flowers are easy.  You put them out, water them occasionally, and then cut them and place them in a central position in your house.  Easy as.  Vegetables are tricky little buggers.  That constant earthing you do with potatoes seems pointless, somehow.  The winding of branches together to make a wigwam for runner beans.  Keeping one eye keen, one eye watchful on the green, slender leaves of sweetcorn, waiting it for to curl into a cone.  All that, takes care, water, luck and time.

Back to the plane.    I live on a hill, facing Dartmoor.  You get used to the planes and helicopters, fast, low, noisy, occasionally leaving a dirty trail across the sky.  This one, absolutely no chance.  A roar, a rising whistling as it loops back and then, a collapsing wall of noise. I don’t think we’re at war.  In a way, that would be somewhat comforting.  There would be a pantomime villain to boo, a square-jawed hero to cheer.  No such luck. 

If you want to know what things went wrong, to play the whole car crash in slow motion; wind it back a few years.  That’s when the stockpiling of food started.  I started noticing the price of it rising steadily and certain medication becoming a rarity.  There were reports of people dying for a lack of Insulin or the occasional suicide from a box of Prozac that wasn’t behind the counter, but not in this village. When things go South, you sort of come to terms with it. You make friends with the slow, creeping horror of the ice becoming thinner beneath your feet.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

The news didn’t help.  Subjectivity is the nature of reporting and it was left to the experts.  The Experts.  Eyes like coins, cowards in linen suits or expensive dresses. Calm, polysyllabic words of reassurance.  Hush, my child.  It’ll all be OK in the morning.  Where are they now, these experts?  Did they close the drawbridge; catch the first plane out as they saw the smoke rising? No idea.  Not a learned mind to be found, in the smoking remains of England. 

Time for tea.  The most English thing you can do, the ameliorative balm of these isles.  My wife, like myself was a tea drinker.  Every time we went on holiday, we took the hotel tea bags from the room.  At the time, you think of hotel tea as some kind of Shenzhen version of the real thing.  When the real thing can’t be found, you go to the back of the drawer, beyond the masking tape and the pizza cutter and the real thing becomes the best thing in the world.  I leaf through them.  Ten teabags left.  If there’s a definition of an English crisis, this is it. 

My wife was the gardener. All my skills are her skills.  If I can close my eyes, gain enough stillness, I can conjure up the essence of who she was.  Kind, beautiful, honest, practical.  It was her who suggested stockpiling seeds as much as tinned food.  I’m leafing through the biscuit tin that is their home and can recall the lineage of each one. The smiling face on the magazine it came with, the certain day in the particular day in the garden centre when we bought it.  She left me, when my affairs became too complicated to conceal.  A bag was packed; a taxi was booked at particular expense.  It was cause and effect on a personal scale.  Perhaps loneliness is the best option at this time.  Romance is dripping and bleeding out of everyday life.  I might as well be the same as everyone else.

I turn on the portable gas stove that Cheesy Carl sold me.  The purveyor of all things illegal, unobtainable, useful in a crisis. His notoriety faded as the lights went down. He became, in a matter of months ‘the go to guy’.  The stove was twenty quid, no questions asked. I didn’t have twenty quid.  I offered him a bag of courgettes, runner beans and tomatoes.  A deal made, he offered me several other things: a DAB Radio, an electric shaver, a shotgun.  Christ knows where he gets them from.  I could make an educated guess, but I don’t want to know.  The DAB is borderline useless, even though I have enough batteries (another thing we stockpiled).  Shaving is pure vanity.  And why should I want to kill anyone? The people I would want to, should I wished; are not in the line of fire.

 More is the pity. 

The kettle is boiling slowly; it reminds me that technically, I am camping. The electricity has been non-existent for a few weeks. The water sputters and spits out brown muck occasionally, but it’s still drinkable once boiled.  No internet or phone line. Another reason I didn’t need the DAB: a clockwork radio. One station broadcasts, in 15m loops. CGA (Central Government Authority).  All the other stations; broadcasting thought-provoking drama, football, jazz and all the other minutiae of civilisation have long since gone off the air.  No classical music, which can only be a good thing.

You couldn’t call it news.  More a constant, infinite, stultifying loop of advice and tips.  It even tells you to turn the radio off to preserve power.  As friendships go, it’s pretty much perfect. Each loop ends with God Save The King.  Irony overload.

The gas is still roaring through the stove.  I could murder a cuppa. 

I wouldn’t call Cheesy Carl a friend, but he has his uses.  Occasionally we go, what he calls ‘foraging’.  He knocks on the door, asks me if I’m interested.  We walk down the hill.  Last time we did, he talked about the latest rumours.  God knows where he gets them from.  I think sometimes, that he’s a time traveller or a psychic.  A nuclear reactor in Cumbria has suffered a power failure (unlikely, I’ve still got a full set of teeth and I’m not vomiting).  Civil War in America (it was always a matter of time).  We’ve re-joined the EU and things are about to get better (your guess is as good as mine).

‘Foraging’ is a euphemism for what is commonly termed as ‘looting’. We don’t do houses, even though I suspect we are the last two left in the village.  Unless you count pets, which we still see wandering round occasionally. It’s only a matter of time before the cats and dogs lose interest and head up to Dartmoor for the corpses of sheep and cows.  I doubt that we are on the menu. 

Give it time. 

Time was, when a walk to the garage would take over twenty minutes, I’d move into towards the edge of the road as cars, trucks, tractors and a bus drove past.  You’d wave at the driver, a country courtesy.  Now, this can be done in ten minutes.  It’s that point of the year when you can feel sunshine dripping down it’s drain.  The leaves are getting brown and dying.  This is not nuclear, but nature.  We face winter, which will be a challenge to say the least. 

The garage has been shut a number of months.  The petrol pumps stand sentinel, silent, useless. We forced the door open a few months ago, a two minute job that became an act of sheer survival.  Crowbar, into the doorframe.  No power for the alarm.  The perfect, victimless crime.  No power for the fridges too, the smell of meat, ice cream, milk turning sour, rancid, liquid.  We’re prepared for this, but every time could be the last time.  There’s still quite a bit of ‘stock’ for us, but there will come a time when the last shelf shall be rinsed and the smell becomes too much.

The roaring of the gas is getting louder.  I take a metal mug from the cupboard.  Open a teabag, lay the string reverently along the edge. 

Cheesy Carl moves along the aisles at speed, eyes darting for his usual purchases.  He’s like he’s on a supermarket dash. Maybe, in the old times he was a shoplifter of some sort.  There is no-one round to arrest us.  I haven’t heard a police siren for weeks. He’s stacking a red basket with noodles, tinned food, toilet rolls, and toothpaste. I’m over the other side of the shop, ignoring the pile of mouldy bread (reduced to 20p a few months ago).  It’s like a still-life picture, a time-lapse reminder that nature will always win.

There is a small gardening section, adjacent to the cleaning products and the beer.  There are a few bottles of liquid feed left.  I’m down the dregs of the last one, the pale brown liquid I add to the watering can every other day.  It promotes healthy stems and more succulent fruit and vegetables.  Cheesy Carl thinks I’m nuts.  However, we always agree to split the spoils.  He benefits from the fruit and veg that I barter him every few weeks. We leave the petrol station, close the door, and stand outside the racks of rotten flowers. He hands me two tubs of noodles, a pack of toilet rolls, and a tube of toothpaste.  We walk back uphill, knowing that nothing or no-one will challenge us. We are Kings Of Infinite Space.

In the corner of my eye, I notice spirals of smoke coming from the direction of Exeter.  Could be someone keeping warm, could be a fire, could be the wrath of some kind of god coming down.  They all seem to be curiously absent, at the moment.  I’m not at the stage where I’m reading any sort of holy book just yet.  I’ve read a lot of books over the last couple of months.  Re-read old favourites, got round to ones that were gifted to me by relatives, some poetry, a few biographies. I re-read some Wells, some Wyndham. 

The genre’s called sunlit horror.  Horrific things happening in the daytime, usually in English villages.  Martian tripods laying waste to Surrey.  Plants taking over the Earth, due to mass blindness.  In a way, that would be easier.  A full stop, instead of these endless parentheses.  This way of life, of tending plants and shoplifting will go on for a while.  And then what?

Nature will go on.  She will expand and grow a million times, die a billion more.  The Orwellian concept what is British life (hopefully, this isn’t going on elsewhere) will fade. Anything we, as a nation have created of worth will collapse in on itself. Buildings, literature, art.  There will be no evidence for the unborn archaeologists to sift through.  We will be regarded as civilisation of cannibals, who ate our own legs and then decided to run a marathon.

The rumbling is getting louder. It’s not the stove. I turn it off.

 I step into the garden, look west.  A plane is coming down the valley, low.  Not a fighter, something big, bloated. It’s a C-17.  A transport plane, low altitude camouflage.  It banks slightly, levels.  A crate, the size of a car is ejected from the back.  It continues, low over the garden.  It’s in the middle of this noise and gray thunder; I’m running to the shed.  Pliers and the crowbar.  I cut a hole in the fence; put the pliers on the slabs of the garden wall.  I’m running down the valley with a crowbar.  I notice Cheesy Carl is coming from the opposite direction with an axe handle.  It’s like we’ve arranged a fight, a straightener he would call it.  Some beef, or turf war to be settled with blows.

The crate is marked, in dirty stencil: CGA.  This word is surrounded by a ring of golden stars. 

It takes a moment to prise open the crate, perhaps it was designed to break during the fall.  Inside: MRE’s, medical kits, water purification tablets. The full panoply of survival.  Stuck down to each one, a note to say that Central Government has been restored.  To sit tight and await further instructions. 

We take as much as we can over the next few hours.  We leave the bodybags.

It’s only later, as I finally have my cuppa in the garden that I realise I’ve survived a major, historical event.  It’s not for me to call it a mistake, the lies stuffed in the mouths of the disenfranchised; for the gain of the rich.  It’s also not for me to say what happens next, which way the ship of state sails.

There is no happy ending for me; my wife is not coming home.  I will carry on, I will tend my garden.  Prune, deadhead, water, plant, harvest. 

The sun is going down and a new day is in the shadows.  The work of a gardener is never, ever done.