Proposed Entry for:
The Rising of the Waters: a call for submissions for Dark Mountain Book 6
Before the Floods Came.
Jim King [email protected]
~
Back in Great Granddad’s time people used to talk about the end of the world as some great thing. One event, one day and it was done.
They never thought about how it would come year by year because no one thinks like that, no one notices that.
Things are just a bit worse than last year, nothing to worry about. It will get better again.
But it never did.
~
The water came first. Back when Granddad was just a lad.
One year the floods came to the coast and villages by the rivers. The next year the floods came to the low lands and fields were covered.
Then the water came again and a few houses had water across the threshold and mud on the floors.
Granddad was 14 the year things started to get bad. When the floods came and the storms came and the water rose so high entire villages were lost.
The locals saw it and drove the livestock to higher fields, the villagers saw it and stacked the valuables on high shelves or upstairs. But outside of the summer lands no one cared, it was just some storms and the yokels getting wet.
Till the floods reached the big city and suddenly everyone was acting and talking. The men in rich suits came out and stood around making speeches. Granddad said his parents chased one of the suits away when he came to visit, the suit didn’t care for them, he just wanted people to take his picture so they chased him out.
The farmers lost their crops that spring, by the time the waters had gone the harvest was ruined so they tried planting in the summer for a winter harvest. That’s the thing with farmers, they keep trying till the end. Stubborn they are and none more so than the men of the summer lands.
Still the storms came again and the water rose again.
When I was young I didn’t understand how no one noticed. Granddad talks of the way things were and how they saw it happen again and again but each time it was just one thing and not the whole that was changing.
The farmers gave up on fields that flooded again and again, animals were moved to other higher pastures and they made do with less land to plant.
But the rains kept coming year after year.
The local council back then had power and money, not like now. They sent men to clean the rivers and waterways and to manage the land, but they never had enough to do everything.
The land the farmers had given up was left to turn back into bog and wetland, the council stopped working those areas, saved some money to protect land that was still being worked.
But the storms came every winter and the floods came and the waters rose. Without maintenance mud and silt blocked the rivers and the land the farmers still used became flooded and more crops were lost.
Year after year the farmers retreated, year after year it was always the same excuse, no money to do the work.
The government men made promises then spent the money on the city, just like they do now except they don’t make promises anymore. The men in expensive suits don’t visit this way either.
Acre by acre the farmers lost the battle. One man lost ten acres in a year, another lost five. Not so many, nothing to worry about. Till you counted a thousand farmers together who were all losing land.
But no one counted, no one noticed.
~
The coastal villages had it the worst. The storms hit them head on and they had nothing save the coastal walls left to them by their grandfathers. Old stone walls shattered and were repaired then shattered again.
The coastal railways were shut down, then repaired and then flooded again.
This was back when we had railways out here, back when people came to visit or to holiday or to trade, back when people had money or time or spare to trade.
It was the cost they said, Granddad was firm on that one, they always said it was the cost. They repaired once or twice but then there was no more money, more important places needed help.
The coastal railways went first, the inland lines were better sheltered and so they lasted longer, I remember seeing one of the steam engines passing through Taunton when I was no more than a youngster. I didn’t know at the time that it was the last, being moved up to Bristol where they could still make money with the railways.
The villages were cut off when the rails went, fewer people could get to them except by the roads and all too often they followed the coast and were flooded or ruined. People began to move out, the early ones sold up, the later ones with just what they could carry.
As the people left and the villages died there was less need for the railways, less people going there so the trains stopped less often, there wasn’t enough money to run the trains out to half empty villages they said.
Granddad said it was something called a self-fulfilling prophecy whatever that is but then he grew up while they still had proper schools.
He sometimes got wistful and talked about college and U-nee and going far away to learn. Mind he also talked about computers and the internet and broadband and everyone owning a car and houses and electrical goods and a lot of other stuff that we don’t see so much now.
So the coastal villages died and faded and with them the tourists, people with money and time to visit somewhere far away didn’t want to see falling down houses and empty streets, so they started going past, down to where they were still doing OK, down with the Cornish folk till the railways stopped and the roads became too bad and Cornwall became just a tale of far away.
I remember a few years ago we went down to the coast looking for shell fish, we followed one of the old ways, walking on the gravel and rotted old blocks of wood that were all that remains of the railways. The metal had long since been taken for the blacksmiths.
We went by one of the old villages, ruin and rubble covered in grass and weed. Bits of wall or chimney standing up like broken teeth. High up, above where the storm waves reached there were still some houses left, they say people still live there, just a few of them clinging to life and madness at the very edge of the world. They say to keep well clear of the coastal folk, the ones who live in the dead villages, amongst the ghosts.
~
But the storms didn’t just hit us down here, the Welsh and Irish started getting hit as well, up the great river the folk in the shire of Gloucester started to flood as well. They say there were great cities back then, not just London or the north. But proper cities in the south and west. Not like today where there are only villages beside the ruins and the lakes. Worcester is a nice enough place, years ago when we had a good enough harvest that we had spare to trade we would head up the rivers by boat. I remember a fine lass there, good company at night but sad during the day.
Still, living there would make anyone sad, what with the bones of thousands under the waters nearby and the ruins of a city standing above the waters.
They say at night when the storms have passed and it’s just the wind howling, then you can hear the voices of the dead, from the tidal wave when the last wall failed and ten feet of water rushed through the city like a wave. We don’t trade there anymore, what little we grow we need to feed our own.
The storms spread and so others had problems, bigger problems and more troubles. They say in the early days there were people who would take a little of your money all the time and in return would give you a lot of money if something bad happened. Insuring they called it. Trouble was when the floods started to happen all the time and the storms came every year they stopped paying out so people stopped paying them.
That meant people had to help themselves or their neighbours. Government men were useless, there was never enough money to help they said, but there were still stories, back when we had TV and instant news, the money went to London instead of us.
Repair what you could, strengthen what had survived against the next storm and don’t worry about what you couldn’t fix.
~
That was what happened to the roads back when they were everywhere. The storms damaged them and the rain got into them and they crumbled and cracked and became useless.
Back when I was a youngster the council still existed across the whole of the summer lands, you seldom saw them but they still charged taxes and claimed to be in control. I saw them once, repairing the great road. A great stinking truck spreading black liquid across the road surface and men with shovels spreading gravel and dust on top of the liquid. That was the last road to be repaired, you can still see the tar in places, patches in the middle or right at the edges where wheels don’t touch.
Before I had a wife and children, back when it was safe to wander across the countryside, I went with a group of friends across the hill land as far as the great old motorway. There were still people using it back them, some cars with those huge wheels they needed to handle the rough tracks, a few big lorries hauling something so valuable they could afford a lorry to move it.
We sat there on the hill side and watched for an hour or more, it was a good day, maybe a dozen cars and four lorries. In all my years since I have never seen that many Lorries again. As for cars aside from the jeep that comes down with the government men if they are sniffing around the only things with four wheels have horses or ponies pulling them.
Granddad said once that when he was young there were so many roads you needed to have a book of maps to remember them by. I remember a score or more when I was younger and we played all day across the fields. They are mostly gone now. It’s odd, I remember them being there but not what they looked like. Some must have still had black tar and lines, some would be little more than stones and mud.
These days we don’t travel much but I do see three road ways, north to what is left of Bridgewater after the high waters washed the town centre away, south to Exeter which is the biggest town now outside of us and then west up to the high lands where the farms are.
~
Year after year the farms were flooded and year after year grew less. By the time I was born they said we grew less than half of what we used to. Less food growing, less land to grow on, less to eat, less to sell.
A lot of the farmers ended up broken by debts, they couldn’t sell what they didn’t have.
People called banks came and took what was left of their farms and took their tools and tractors and animals because they couldn’t pay.
But how could they pay, more and more farmland lost to the water and what little they had to sell was all but stolen by the robber barons that ran the great supermarkets.
So they changed what they were growing, what would make more money, less to eat and more for coin. Some hung on till the bitter end, most left with empty pockets, driven out when they could resist no more.
Like I said, nothing as stubborn as a farmer.
Granddad said people thought it was just a farmer problem, he said no one was worried because it didn’t hurt them directly.
Of course the price of food was going up year after year so no one really noticed that it was going up a little bit more each year than it had the year before.
Less to go around, more money to buy it. A lot of merchants and traders found they could no longer do as much business, they couldn’t afford to stock goods people couldn’t afford to buy, the little shops started dying first. There were a few left when I was young but they are all gone now.
The big ones left all in a rush, that was abut thirty years ago, I remember granddad said he was in his forties when he watched them leave and I just about remember them leaving.
The big shops could afford to keep prices just that bit lower but they said they weren’t making enough money, it was costing them too much to stay open all the way out here, they were concentrating closer to the worthwhile markets. Places where they had money to spend. Places like London.
Places not down here.
I remember the farmers markets starting again, farmers selling directly, no shops, no super markets, just buying from the farmer’s wife or children too young to work on the farms.
Granddad talked about all sorts of stuff, fruits and vegetables that I have never seen. Back when they used to carry them by ship. Back when people had money to buy them.
Now we get what grows on the highlands and the hills. Apples and pears and berries when they are all in season. Potatoes if the blight isn’t too bad, lots of greens and if the hunting has been good rabbit or bird or on rare days wild pig.
We don’t do too badly, granddad was an engineer and dad learned most of the skills which he taught me. Houses, boats, the bridges that are needed everywhere. They need repairs and that is work for me. We can afford to eat well compared to most but we eat what is growing and being harvested.
Sometimes they say that folk in London have enough money to grow strawberries all year round, it’s hard to believe that one, but they say London is the land of riches and wonders.
~
Lots of animals left to fend for themselves after the farmers were driven out, the banks never cared, they took the land which was worthless and just left it, dairy cows and some pigs were taken by the villages and horses or ponies had value but a lot were just left to go wild.
Most never survived the first year but some did well, and now have become truly wild.
The wild pigs are the worst, a lot of sows survived long enough to breed with a handful of wild boar and twenty generations later there are huge and savage wild pigs out there.
That’s why we no longer allow the children to run wild or play in the woods. Wild boar, packs of feral dogs as savage as wolves, the strangest of animals turned lose when things called zoos shut down and the owners turned them out rather than kill them.
I have never seen one but I have heard the roars in the hills and seen full grown horses that had been pulled down and eaten by the giant cats.
People didn’t have enough to feed their own children, pets went hungry and then proved that a pet is just a wild animal that lives with people.
~
Money is something else we take care with. Good coin is hard to find these days, every penny we have is handed down apart from the handfuls of new coins that come in each year.
Granddad talked about money made out of paper, paper! Hard to believe that myself, I’ve never seen anything like it. Every coin we have is worth its weight, that’s what we use in the summer lands, good honest coins from the time of plenty.
They say that back then a penny or a tuppenny was a nothing coin and they were hardly used. Hard to understand that one when a tuppenny is a good wage for a half days work for many and a penny will feed you for a day, not well but still fresh or cooked food.
Every coin we have has been handed down from parent to child now, some like the five pennies are all but gone, so thin they fall apart. The old coppers are the best, almost black with age but still good solid coin. The tens and the rare fifties are seen less often, getting a bit thin these days but still mostly good. The least seen are the best, the big thick pound coins.
Even as engineer for most of the villages round here I don’t see more than half a dozen pound coins a year. They do say some of the merchants and lords up Bristol way have so many pound coins they need to keep them in a metal box with locks. Well they are richer in Bristol, at least the lords are. The common folk sometimes seem worse off than we are as I hear it, no way to grow enough food in what’s left of the city so it’s very expensive to buy.
Every so often we get the government types come to town counting heads or some such, they think it’s great fun that they can buy whatever they want for a handful of old coins.
Some of them sleep with the local girls for a handful of newish copper and silver, they treat the girls badly for being cheap, they don’t know or care that a girl can feed her family for a month on the coins a government man scatters in the dirt at her feet.
You can spot the new government men easily. I heard last year there was a new one walking round the market saying how quaint everything was. He said he was going to buy a gift for his woman and started waving some piece of plastic around. After a while he stopped that and then went in his pocket and pulled out a brightly coloured bit of paper. Finally he went off to find the others to get some coins.
~
About five years ago we had three jeeps arrive at once, some hard looking types on guard and a whole bunch of rich kids from the city, never did bother finding which city.
New made clothing, cotton, jeans, plastic and rubber and machine made buttons and even zippers.
They had little hand held devices and they were walking everywhere pointing them at people, taking pictures they said as if we didn’t know what a picture was. I have pictures on the walls of my house.
Bunch of stuck up city types out looking at the folk in the wilderness.
They called it a social logic something or other and said we had regressed to the dark ages, said we were a cargo cult and called us a classic case of post something collapse.
Old Mother Harper came out after that and chased them off shouting and swearing that it was the parents or grandparent of the city folk that had done this and saying that they should go back home and leave honest folk alone. She is the oldest woman in the summer lands and she knows more when it comes to swearing than any three river folk. She really hates the city folk as well. Not so much the Bristol ones but mention London where she can hear and she will bend your ears for an hour or more on how everything is their fault and how that city is a curse on the land for its greed and cruelty.
She can swear in foreign as well which makes some folk nervous, some people mutter about witch craft these days, fools that they are they don’t know better but there are more mutterings every year. Nothing to worry me since folk all know that engineering is good solid science and building, no one would ever start pointing fingers and saying old fashioned science is wrong.
~
My youngest broke a glass jar a few weeks ago, she was crying and hugging her mum and saying how sorry she was all that day. It was one of the pickle jars, the old ones with the metal tops that twist on and seal up tight.
We have a few of them left now, mostly the lids wear out and we seal them with clay or wax instead.
The women down by Norton have a pottery and they do some nice jars for pickles, we have several shelves full of them for the preserves and keeping foods for the winters.
It’s funny. It used to be glass was something that we didn’t think about much. As a youngster we had so much glass around there was never a shortage. Granddad said when he was young people used to throw glass bottles and jars away with the rubbish.
It used to be you bought something it came in a glass jar and you got the jar for free. Then it was that we went hunting for glass, sheets for windows, jars and bottles for the kitchens. It was everywhere, thrown away just like Granddad said.
I remember we made some coin as youngsters; there were empty houses and great piles of rubbish you could search and find good stuff. Till everything had been searched and taken already and there was nothing left to find.
We can still buy glass but it’s so expensive and it’s funny looking stuff, much thicker, not so flat and never as clear. They say London has proper glass, what we get is the way they used to make glass before the time of plenty, some places up in the midlands make it that way because it’s the only way they can do it that people can just about afford.
We are lucky here, most of our windows are old glass, some of the places down in town have nothing more than old plastic across the frames or just shutters.
~
That’s another thing. Plastic. Used to be it was everywhere, Granddad says his dad was dead set against plastic, it was rubbish and made a mess. Then suddenly it was gone. Something to do with Oil and money, it was always money blamed when things stopped.
Once we had plastic everywhere but when it was gone everyone had to switch to glass, which just made everything more expensive.
Then when things started getting bad we started using old plastic, bottles, cups, bowls, a thousand uses for the stuff. Thing was it wore out so quickly.
In Granddads time it was gone, cost too much money. In Dads time we all scavenged it and reused it whenever we could. Now in my time it’s mostly gone again.
~
Which reminds me, its radio night tonight so once I’ve done talking to you I need to check the lights in the hall and make sure the radio is working.
I better check the water wheel as well this afternoon, it’s all fine and the dynamo that generates what little electricity we use is about as tough as you can get, but I like to check the wheel and make sure there is nothing caught in it.
Friday night is the one hour weekly news review from Bristol radio, it's a bit crackly but it's still OK to listen to, Dad put us up a nice tall Aerial but the top was damaged last year and the only way to fix it is to take the whole thing down. It’s on my to do list when I have a spare few days and enough help to lower the whole thing safely.
There are a few of those wind up radios that still work but they don’t get anything worthwhile aside from some rare days when they can hear Bristol.
Aside from that it’s a big gathering every Friday. We have the council meeting to discuss business, then we listen to the radio news, then we have a drink or two and talk about things. It's our main social these days.
~
Granddad and dad spent a lot of time gathering stuff like cables and wires and we have plenty of timber set aside to age. I even have a spare dynamo but it's a small unit and will just about power the radio not the lights.
Still as we slowly run out of bulbs they will not be such a problem. The fancy stuff all died years ago, we had a few strip lights when I was young, now it’s some old fashioned glass bulbs and some of those funny LED things. We saved whatever we could and whenever the traders had some we tried to buy them so we have enough for a while yet.
It’s a funny thought though. Granddad talked about so much light when he was young, so much light you couldn’t see the night sky. I remember those long thin lights that buzzed. My girls will have children of their own who will probably never see light that’s not from the sun or an oil lamp.
~
About once a month we have a movie day, we still have a few working Tee-Vees, not the flat ones, they all stopped working years ago. But the big boxy ones that are as deep as they are wide.
We have a working deeveedee player and several more that are good for spares. Loads of those discs with films on. Lots of people threw them out as the players stopped working or when the electricity stopped for good and we grabbed loads for the hall. Though we have to be careful, they scratch and damage so easily and we will never get anymore.
That was a thing, for years as prices went up and money went down there were people about who could take old stuff and a bit from here and a bit from there and get something that worked. While we had steady power people could still watch a film when they wanted to.
Once the power started going and once it became hard to get things repaired folk forgot about movies.
I remember friends coming round to our house and we sat on the floor and watched a film or cartoon every Saturday. Now I see the excitement on the faces of the children as they come to the monthly film, we try to do something for the youngsters first then one for the adults later on.
Something else my grandchildren will never see I guess.
~
Power, yes, electricity. Used to be we had power all the time, just a switch on the wall and we had light or heat. But then I remember, I was a lad that first time, it was a bad storm and it came down from the north, tore up trees and bought down the power lines.
That first time it took weeks to get power back to the town. Not enough engineers they said.
A few years later we lost power for a month. Too much damage they said, not enough men to repair it.
I was twelve I reckon when the power went off for good. Storm damage but when we used the few working phone lines to ask they said they would get back to us, it was always they would get back to us but they never did. Then one of the travelers who came through told us he had seen them cutting the cables and taking them away. The towers are still there, black with age but still there, like skeletal giants on the skyline.
What with all the rain and the floods we have rivers and streams all over, places where they never used to be and places where water had not been for years and years.
Dad and Granddad found the dynamo and built the water wheel and we had power, the house and a few of the neighbours. Now we power just the house and the hall.
Dad built an extra room down the side and ran power into it, lots of power sockets that were for folk to use to recharge stuff.
No one uses it much anymore, no one has anything to recharge except a few torches and lamps that still work. All the phones and things were no good when the power went out, we have a barn out back which is packed full of old electrical stuff, sometimes I can find a spare and get something working. Mostly what breaks goes in the barn in case it can be used for spares.
A lot of the old houses that are still lived in still have light switches and wall sockets in them, the children have no idea what they were used for.
The last of the old timers that used to repair things is long dead now, I tinker a bit but there are no books about electricity. Something else that will be lost.
~
Speaking of power, used to be there was a big place that made electricity, north of here. Hinkley they called it. Something happened there one year though, they never said what. It was one of those years when the storms came down from the north and west, across the waters. I was too young to remember but for years afterwards folk talked about it.
There was something wrong with the water there, the fish made you sick. Some years they said the water along the coast was a strange colour, like rusting metal, they said that folk who went near that water got sick and died.
No one knows what happened, it’s under the water now, just a few tall buildings still standing above the waves but no one dares to go near, some brave fools have seen it from the hills inland but no one goes close.
Even the land is dead there, some say poisoned, some say cursed. But there are stories of what happened to a few who went down to Hinkley to see if they could scavenge anything.
No one goes there now. No one that doesn’t want to die anyway.
~
Truth be told it’s my two youngsters I fear for.
My oldest just turned eight and I am trying to teach her as much of engineering as I can but it’s hard when they are that young, my other daughter tries to help but at five she has trouble with a lot of it.
It’s the books to be honest, that and the coughing.
I came down with the flood sickness this winter, the warmer summer has me feeling a lot better but I can still feel it inside me, the sickness is still there. When I was a youngster we had medicines, Granddad used to say in his day they had places where there were doctors and nurses and everyone was treated whenever they were ill.
The doctor, bless her name, died some years ago. She was the most respected and loved of us all, not a man or woman would dream of lifting a hand against her. No one knows how many she saved over the years. She was the last doctor, the last who had learned how to heal in a school, the last with proper training.
There had been others but they mostly left decades ago, she said this was her home and she would stay here till she breathed her last.
It was the bloody lung fever that took her, near a hundred years old she claimed to be and still treating the sick and the injured to the last. It was that last outbreak, the one where we had no medicine left. Ten years before that we were able to trade for pills but that was back then, so we had hundreds coughing blood and she treated them all till she came down with it herself.
Biggest gathering I have ever seen, half the summer lands came out to bury her and to celebrate her deeds and all the lives she had saved.
She trained a lot of others to treat the sick or the injured but they were never as good as she was, they are training more but each new student seems to be less than the teacher.
Come this winter there will only be the nurses she trained, and the healers they trained left to treat the flood sickness, but I should be fine for years yet. I’m tough; the flood sickness takes a few years to get that bad.
~
No it’s the books I worry about. The engineering books.
I can teach the girls as much as I can but the books are old, the ink is faded almost away. The paper cracks and crumbles at the edges.
When I’m gone they will only have the books to learn from and then just for a few more years.
I don’t know what they will do after that, when the books are gone.
I asked one of the government men once, he thought the idea of printed books was funny. He showed me his book, a gadget that sat in his hand and held a thousand thousand pages. He laughed when I asked where he got it and talked about 6G and downloads and recharging and other such.
Nothing that we could ever get here so the books are all we have, for as long as they last.
A man should leave the world a better place for his children to grow up in, it’s hard to think that the best you can do isn’t enough. That your children will not even have the things that you have.
In a way I’m glad granddad is long gone. I’m sure my girls wouldn't have understood the things he said, I saw some of them so I know a lot of what he said was true once, but to them he would just be a crazy old man talking fairy tales.
But then when I was young I saw things left over from the age of plenty.
Before the floods came.
The Rising of the Waters: a call for submissions for Dark Mountain Book 6
Before the Floods Came.
Jim King [email protected]
~
Back in Great Granddad’s time people used to talk about the end of the world as some great thing. One event, one day and it was done.
They never thought about how it would come year by year because no one thinks like that, no one notices that.
Things are just a bit worse than last year, nothing to worry about. It will get better again.
But it never did.
~
The water came first. Back when Granddad was just a lad.
One year the floods came to the coast and villages by the rivers. The next year the floods came to the low lands and fields were covered.
Then the water came again and a few houses had water across the threshold and mud on the floors.
Granddad was 14 the year things started to get bad. When the floods came and the storms came and the water rose so high entire villages were lost.
The locals saw it and drove the livestock to higher fields, the villagers saw it and stacked the valuables on high shelves or upstairs. But outside of the summer lands no one cared, it was just some storms and the yokels getting wet.
Till the floods reached the big city and suddenly everyone was acting and talking. The men in rich suits came out and stood around making speeches. Granddad said his parents chased one of the suits away when he came to visit, the suit didn’t care for them, he just wanted people to take his picture so they chased him out.
The farmers lost their crops that spring, by the time the waters had gone the harvest was ruined so they tried planting in the summer for a winter harvest. That’s the thing with farmers, they keep trying till the end. Stubborn they are and none more so than the men of the summer lands.
Still the storms came again and the water rose again.
When I was young I didn’t understand how no one noticed. Granddad talks of the way things were and how they saw it happen again and again but each time it was just one thing and not the whole that was changing.
The farmers gave up on fields that flooded again and again, animals were moved to other higher pastures and they made do with less land to plant.
But the rains kept coming year after year.
The local council back then had power and money, not like now. They sent men to clean the rivers and waterways and to manage the land, but they never had enough to do everything.
The land the farmers had given up was left to turn back into bog and wetland, the council stopped working those areas, saved some money to protect land that was still being worked.
But the storms came every winter and the floods came and the waters rose. Without maintenance mud and silt blocked the rivers and the land the farmers still used became flooded and more crops were lost.
Year after year the farmers retreated, year after year it was always the same excuse, no money to do the work.
The government men made promises then spent the money on the city, just like they do now except they don’t make promises anymore. The men in expensive suits don’t visit this way either.
Acre by acre the farmers lost the battle. One man lost ten acres in a year, another lost five. Not so many, nothing to worry about. Till you counted a thousand farmers together who were all losing land.
But no one counted, no one noticed.
~
The coastal villages had it the worst. The storms hit them head on and they had nothing save the coastal walls left to them by their grandfathers. Old stone walls shattered and were repaired then shattered again.
The coastal railways were shut down, then repaired and then flooded again.
This was back when we had railways out here, back when people came to visit or to holiday or to trade, back when people had money or time or spare to trade.
It was the cost they said, Granddad was firm on that one, they always said it was the cost. They repaired once or twice but then there was no more money, more important places needed help.
The coastal railways went first, the inland lines were better sheltered and so they lasted longer, I remember seeing one of the steam engines passing through Taunton when I was no more than a youngster. I didn’t know at the time that it was the last, being moved up to Bristol where they could still make money with the railways.
The villages were cut off when the rails went, fewer people could get to them except by the roads and all too often they followed the coast and were flooded or ruined. People began to move out, the early ones sold up, the later ones with just what they could carry.
As the people left and the villages died there was less need for the railways, less people going there so the trains stopped less often, there wasn’t enough money to run the trains out to half empty villages they said.
Granddad said it was something called a self-fulfilling prophecy whatever that is but then he grew up while they still had proper schools.
He sometimes got wistful and talked about college and U-nee and going far away to learn. Mind he also talked about computers and the internet and broadband and everyone owning a car and houses and electrical goods and a lot of other stuff that we don’t see so much now.
So the coastal villages died and faded and with them the tourists, people with money and time to visit somewhere far away didn’t want to see falling down houses and empty streets, so they started going past, down to where they were still doing OK, down with the Cornish folk till the railways stopped and the roads became too bad and Cornwall became just a tale of far away.
I remember a few years ago we went down to the coast looking for shell fish, we followed one of the old ways, walking on the gravel and rotted old blocks of wood that were all that remains of the railways. The metal had long since been taken for the blacksmiths.
We went by one of the old villages, ruin and rubble covered in grass and weed. Bits of wall or chimney standing up like broken teeth. High up, above where the storm waves reached there were still some houses left, they say people still live there, just a few of them clinging to life and madness at the very edge of the world. They say to keep well clear of the coastal folk, the ones who live in the dead villages, amongst the ghosts.
~
But the storms didn’t just hit us down here, the Welsh and Irish started getting hit as well, up the great river the folk in the shire of Gloucester started to flood as well. They say there were great cities back then, not just London or the north. But proper cities in the south and west. Not like today where there are only villages beside the ruins and the lakes. Worcester is a nice enough place, years ago when we had a good enough harvest that we had spare to trade we would head up the rivers by boat. I remember a fine lass there, good company at night but sad during the day.
Still, living there would make anyone sad, what with the bones of thousands under the waters nearby and the ruins of a city standing above the waters.
They say at night when the storms have passed and it’s just the wind howling, then you can hear the voices of the dead, from the tidal wave when the last wall failed and ten feet of water rushed through the city like a wave. We don’t trade there anymore, what little we grow we need to feed our own.
The storms spread and so others had problems, bigger problems and more troubles. They say in the early days there were people who would take a little of your money all the time and in return would give you a lot of money if something bad happened. Insuring they called it. Trouble was when the floods started to happen all the time and the storms came every year they stopped paying out so people stopped paying them.
That meant people had to help themselves or their neighbours. Government men were useless, there was never enough money to help they said, but there were still stories, back when we had TV and instant news, the money went to London instead of us.
Repair what you could, strengthen what had survived against the next storm and don’t worry about what you couldn’t fix.
~
That was what happened to the roads back when they were everywhere. The storms damaged them and the rain got into them and they crumbled and cracked and became useless.
Back when I was a youngster the council still existed across the whole of the summer lands, you seldom saw them but they still charged taxes and claimed to be in control. I saw them once, repairing the great road. A great stinking truck spreading black liquid across the road surface and men with shovels spreading gravel and dust on top of the liquid. That was the last road to be repaired, you can still see the tar in places, patches in the middle or right at the edges where wheels don’t touch.
Before I had a wife and children, back when it was safe to wander across the countryside, I went with a group of friends across the hill land as far as the great old motorway. There were still people using it back them, some cars with those huge wheels they needed to handle the rough tracks, a few big lorries hauling something so valuable they could afford a lorry to move it.
We sat there on the hill side and watched for an hour or more, it was a good day, maybe a dozen cars and four lorries. In all my years since I have never seen that many Lorries again. As for cars aside from the jeep that comes down with the government men if they are sniffing around the only things with four wheels have horses or ponies pulling them.
Granddad said once that when he was young there were so many roads you needed to have a book of maps to remember them by. I remember a score or more when I was younger and we played all day across the fields. They are mostly gone now. It’s odd, I remember them being there but not what they looked like. Some must have still had black tar and lines, some would be little more than stones and mud.
These days we don’t travel much but I do see three road ways, north to what is left of Bridgewater after the high waters washed the town centre away, south to Exeter which is the biggest town now outside of us and then west up to the high lands where the farms are.
~
Year after year the farms were flooded and year after year grew less. By the time I was born they said we grew less than half of what we used to. Less food growing, less land to grow on, less to eat, less to sell.
A lot of the farmers ended up broken by debts, they couldn’t sell what they didn’t have.
People called banks came and took what was left of their farms and took their tools and tractors and animals because they couldn’t pay.
But how could they pay, more and more farmland lost to the water and what little they had to sell was all but stolen by the robber barons that ran the great supermarkets.
So they changed what they were growing, what would make more money, less to eat and more for coin. Some hung on till the bitter end, most left with empty pockets, driven out when they could resist no more.
Like I said, nothing as stubborn as a farmer.
Granddad said people thought it was just a farmer problem, he said no one was worried because it didn’t hurt them directly.
Of course the price of food was going up year after year so no one really noticed that it was going up a little bit more each year than it had the year before.
Less to go around, more money to buy it. A lot of merchants and traders found they could no longer do as much business, they couldn’t afford to stock goods people couldn’t afford to buy, the little shops started dying first. There were a few left when I was young but they are all gone now.
The big ones left all in a rush, that was abut thirty years ago, I remember granddad said he was in his forties when he watched them leave and I just about remember them leaving.
The big shops could afford to keep prices just that bit lower but they said they weren’t making enough money, it was costing them too much to stay open all the way out here, they were concentrating closer to the worthwhile markets. Places where they had money to spend. Places like London.
Places not down here.
I remember the farmers markets starting again, farmers selling directly, no shops, no super markets, just buying from the farmer’s wife or children too young to work on the farms.
Granddad talked about all sorts of stuff, fruits and vegetables that I have never seen. Back when they used to carry them by ship. Back when people had money to buy them.
Now we get what grows on the highlands and the hills. Apples and pears and berries when they are all in season. Potatoes if the blight isn’t too bad, lots of greens and if the hunting has been good rabbit or bird or on rare days wild pig.
We don’t do too badly, granddad was an engineer and dad learned most of the skills which he taught me. Houses, boats, the bridges that are needed everywhere. They need repairs and that is work for me. We can afford to eat well compared to most but we eat what is growing and being harvested.
Sometimes they say that folk in London have enough money to grow strawberries all year round, it’s hard to believe that one, but they say London is the land of riches and wonders.
~
Lots of animals left to fend for themselves after the farmers were driven out, the banks never cared, they took the land which was worthless and just left it, dairy cows and some pigs were taken by the villages and horses or ponies had value but a lot were just left to go wild.
Most never survived the first year but some did well, and now have become truly wild.
The wild pigs are the worst, a lot of sows survived long enough to breed with a handful of wild boar and twenty generations later there are huge and savage wild pigs out there.
That’s why we no longer allow the children to run wild or play in the woods. Wild boar, packs of feral dogs as savage as wolves, the strangest of animals turned lose when things called zoos shut down and the owners turned them out rather than kill them.
I have never seen one but I have heard the roars in the hills and seen full grown horses that had been pulled down and eaten by the giant cats.
People didn’t have enough to feed their own children, pets went hungry and then proved that a pet is just a wild animal that lives with people.
~
Money is something else we take care with. Good coin is hard to find these days, every penny we have is handed down apart from the handfuls of new coins that come in each year.
Granddad talked about money made out of paper, paper! Hard to believe that myself, I’ve never seen anything like it. Every coin we have is worth its weight, that’s what we use in the summer lands, good honest coins from the time of plenty.
They say that back then a penny or a tuppenny was a nothing coin and they were hardly used. Hard to understand that one when a tuppenny is a good wage for a half days work for many and a penny will feed you for a day, not well but still fresh or cooked food.
Every coin we have has been handed down from parent to child now, some like the five pennies are all but gone, so thin they fall apart. The old coppers are the best, almost black with age but still good solid coin. The tens and the rare fifties are seen less often, getting a bit thin these days but still mostly good. The least seen are the best, the big thick pound coins.
Even as engineer for most of the villages round here I don’t see more than half a dozen pound coins a year. They do say some of the merchants and lords up Bristol way have so many pound coins they need to keep them in a metal box with locks. Well they are richer in Bristol, at least the lords are. The common folk sometimes seem worse off than we are as I hear it, no way to grow enough food in what’s left of the city so it’s very expensive to buy.
Every so often we get the government types come to town counting heads or some such, they think it’s great fun that they can buy whatever they want for a handful of old coins.
Some of them sleep with the local girls for a handful of newish copper and silver, they treat the girls badly for being cheap, they don’t know or care that a girl can feed her family for a month on the coins a government man scatters in the dirt at her feet.
You can spot the new government men easily. I heard last year there was a new one walking round the market saying how quaint everything was. He said he was going to buy a gift for his woman and started waving some piece of plastic around. After a while he stopped that and then went in his pocket and pulled out a brightly coloured bit of paper. Finally he went off to find the others to get some coins.
~
About five years ago we had three jeeps arrive at once, some hard looking types on guard and a whole bunch of rich kids from the city, never did bother finding which city.
New made clothing, cotton, jeans, plastic and rubber and machine made buttons and even zippers.
They had little hand held devices and they were walking everywhere pointing them at people, taking pictures they said as if we didn’t know what a picture was. I have pictures on the walls of my house.
Bunch of stuck up city types out looking at the folk in the wilderness.
They called it a social logic something or other and said we had regressed to the dark ages, said we were a cargo cult and called us a classic case of post something collapse.
Old Mother Harper came out after that and chased them off shouting and swearing that it was the parents or grandparent of the city folk that had done this and saying that they should go back home and leave honest folk alone. She is the oldest woman in the summer lands and she knows more when it comes to swearing than any three river folk. She really hates the city folk as well. Not so much the Bristol ones but mention London where she can hear and she will bend your ears for an hour or more on how everything is their fault and how that city is a curse on the land for its greed and cruelty.
She can swear in foreign as well which makes some folk nervous, some people mutter about witch craft these days, fools that they are they don’t know better but there are more mutterings every year. Nothing to worry me since folk all know that engineering is good solid science and building, no one would ever start pointing fingers and saying old fashioned science is wrong.
~
My youngest broke a glass jar a few weeks ago, she was crying and hugging her mum and saying how sorry she was all that day. It was one of the pickle jars, the old ones with the metal tops that twist on and seal up tight.
We have a few of them left now, mostly the lids wear out and we seal them with clay or wax instead.
The women down by Norton have a pottery and they do some nice jars for pickles, we have several shelves full of them for the preserves and keeping foods for the winters.
It’s funny. It used to be glass was something that we didn’t think about much. As a youngster we had so much glass around there was never a shortage. Granddad said when he was young people used to throw glass bottles and jars away with the rubbish.
It used to be you bought something it came in a glass jar and you got the jar for free. Then it was that we went hunting for glass, sheets for windows, jars and bottles for the kitchens. It was everywhere, thrown away just like Granddad said.
I remember we made some coin as youngsters; there were empty houses and great piles of rubbish you could search and find good stuff. Till everything had been searched and taken already and there was nothing left to find.
We can still buy glass but it’s so expensive and it’s funny looking stuff, much thicker, not so flat and never as clear. They say London has proper glass, what we get is the way they used to make glass before the time of plenty, some places up in the midlands make it that way because it’s the only way they can do it that people can just about afford.
We are lucky here, most of our windows are old glass, some of the places down in town have nothing more than old plastic across the frames or just shutters.
~
That’s another thing. Plastic. Used to be it was everywhere, Granddad says his dad was dead set against plastic, it was rubbish and made a mess. Then suddenly it was gone. Something to do with Oil and money, it was always money blamed when things stopped.
Once we had plastic everywhere but when it was gone everyone had to switch to glass, which just made everything more expensive.
Then when things started getting bad we started using old plastic, bottles, cups, bowls, a thousand uses for the stuff. Thing was it wore out so quickly.
In Granddads time it was gone, cost too much money. In Dads time we all scavenged it and reused it whenever we could. Now in my time it’s mostly gone again.
~
Which reminds me, its radio night tonight so once I’ve done talking to you I need to check the lights in the hall and make sure the radio is working.
I better check the water wheel as well this afternoon, it’s all fine and the dynamo that generates what little electricity we use is about as tough as you can get, but I like to check the wheel and make sure there is nothing caught in it.
Friday night is the one hour weekly news review from Bristol radio, it's a bit crackly but it's still OK to listen to, Dad put us up a nice tall Aerial but the top was damaged last year and the only way to fix it is to take the whole thing down. It’s on my to do list when I have a spare few days and enough help to lower the whole thing safely.
There are a few of those wind up radios that still work but they don’t get anything worthwhile aside from some rare days when they can hear Bristol.
Aside from that it’s a big gathering every Friday. We have the council meeting to discuss business, then we listen to the radio news, then we have a drink or two and talk about things. It's our main social these days.
~
Granddad and dad spent a lot of time gathering stuff like cables and wires and we have plenty of timber set aside to age. I even have a spare dynamo but it's a small unit and will just about power the radio not the lights.
Still as we slowly run out of bulbs they will not be such a problem. The fancy stuff all died years ago, we had a few strip lights when I was young, now it’s some old fashioned glass bulbs and some of those funny LED things. We saved whatever we could and whenever the traders had some we tried to buy them so we have enough for a while yet.
It’s a funny thought though. Granddad talked about so much light when he was young, so much light you couldn’t see the night sky. I remember those long thin lights that buzzed. My girls will have children of their own who will probably never see light that’s not from the sun or an oil lamp.
~
About once a month we have a movie day, we still have a few working Tee-Vees, not the flat ones, they all stopped working years ago. But the big boxy ones that are as deep as they are wide.
We have a working deeveedee player and several more that are good for spares. Loads of those discs with films on. Lots of people threw them out as the players stopped working or when the electricity stopped for good and we grabbed loads for the hall. Though we have to be careful, they scratch and damage so easily and we will never get anymore.
That was a thing, for years as prices went up and money went down there were people about who could take old stuff and a bit from here and a bit from there and get something that worked. While we had steady power people could still watch a film when they wanted to.
Once the power started going and once it became hard to get things repaired folk forgot about movies.
I remember friends coming round to our house and we sat on the floor and watched a film or cartoon every Saturday. Now I see the excitement on the faces of the children as they come to the monthly film, we try to do something for the youngsters first then one for the adults later on.
Something else my grandchildren will never see I guess.
~
Power, yes, electricity. Used to be we had power all the time, just a switch on the wall and we had light or heat. But then I remember, I was a lad that first time, it was a bad storm and it came down from the north, tore up trees and bought down the power lines.
That first time it took weeks to get power back to the town. Not enough engineers they said.
A few years later we lost power for a month. Too much damage they said, not enough men to repair it.
I was twelve I reckon when the power went off for good. Storm damage but when we used the few working phone lines to ask they said they would get back to us, it was always they would get back to us but they never did. Then one of the travelers who came through told us he had seen them cutting the cables and taking them away. The towers are still there, black with age but still there, like skeletal giants on the skyline.
What with all the rain and the floods we have rivers and streams all over, places where they never used to be and places where water had not been for years and years.
Dad and Granddad found the dynamo and built the water wheel and we had power, the house and a few of the neighbours. Now we power just the house and the hall.
Dad built an extra room down the side and ran power into it, lots of power sockets that were for folk to use to recharge stuff.
No one uses it much anymore, no one has anything to recharge except a few torches and lamps that still work. All the phones and things were no good when the power went out, we have a barn out back which is packed full of old electrical stuff, sometimes I can find a spare and get something working. Mostly what breaks goes in the barn in case it can be used for spares.
A lot of the old houses that are still lived in still have light switches and wall sockets in them, the children have no idea what they were used for.
The last of the old timers that used to repair things is long dead now, I tinker a bit but there are no books about electricity. Something else that will be lost.
~
Speaking of power, used to be there was a big place that made electricity, north of here. Hinkley they called it. Something happened there one year though, they never said what. It was one of those years when the storms came down from the north and west, across the waters. I was too young to remember but for years afterwards folk talked about it.
There was something wrong with the water there, the fish made you sick. Some years they said the water along the coast was a strange colour, like rusting metal, they said that folk who went near that water got sick and died.
No one knows what happened, it’s under the water now, just a few tall buildings still standing above the waves but no one dares to go near, some brave fools have seen it from the hills inland but no one goes close.
Even the land is dead there, some say poisoned, some say cursed. But there are stories of what happened to a few who went down to Hinkley to see if they could scavenge anything.
No one goes there now. No one that doesn’t want to die anyway.
~
Truth be told it’s my two youngsters I fear for.
My oldest just turned eight and I am trying to teach her as much of engineering as I can but it’s hard when they are that young, my other daughter tries to help but at five she has trouble with a lot of it.
It’s the books to be honest, that and the coughing.
I came down with the flood sickness this winter, the warmer summer has me feeling a lot better but I can still feel it inside me, the sickness is still there. When I was a youngster we had medicines, Granddad used to say in his day they had places where there were doctors and nurses and everyone was treated whenever they were ill.
The doctor, bless her name, died some years ago. She was the most respected and loved of us all, not a man or woman would dream of lifting a hand against her. No one knows how many she saved over the years. She was the last doctor, the last who had learned how to heal in a school, the last with proper training.
There had been others but they mostly left decades ago, she said this was her home and she would stay here till she breathed her last.
It was the bloody lung fever that took her, near a hundred years old she claimed to be and still treating the sick and the injured to the last. It was that last outbreak, the one where we had no medicine left. Ten years before that we were able to trade for pills but that was back then, so we had hundreds coughing blood and she treated them all till she came down with it herself.
Biggest gathering I have ever seen, half the summer lands came out to bury her and to celebrate her deeds and all the lives she had saved.
She trained a lot of others to treat the sick or the injured but they were never as good as she was, they are training more but each new student seems to be less than the teacher.
Come this winter there will only be the nurses she trained, and the healers they trained left to treat the flood sickness, but I should be fine for years yet. I’m tough; the flood sickness takes a few years to get that bad.
~
No it’s the books I worry about. The engineering books.
I can teach the girls as much as I can but the books are old, the ink is faded almost away. The paper cracks and crumbles at the edges.
When I’m gone they will only have the books to learn from and then just for a few more years.
I don’t know what they will do after that, when the books are gone.
I asked one of the government men once, he thought the idea of printed books was funny. He showed me his book, a gadget that sat in his hand and held a thousand thousand pages. He laughed when I asked where he got it and talked about 6G and downloads and recharging and other such.
Nothing that we could ever get here so the books are all we have, for as long as they last.
A man should leave the world a better place for his children to grow up in, it’s hard to think that the best you can do isn’t enough. That your children will not even have the things that you have.
In a way I’m glad granddad is long gone. I’m sure my girls wouldn't have understood the things he said, I saw some of them so I know a lot of what he said was true once, but to them he would just be a crazy old man talking fairy tales.
But then when I was young I saw things left over from the age of plenty.
Before the floods came.