Children of the Dust Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Sarah

  Ophelia

  Simon

  About the Author

  Also available in Definitions

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Everyone thought, when the alarm bell rang, that it was just another fire practice. But the first bombs had fallen on Hamburg and Leningrad, the headmaster said, and a full-scale nuclear attack was imminent . . .

  It’s a real-life nightmare. Sarah and her family have to stay cooped up in the tightly-sealed kitchen for days on end, dreading the inevitable radioactive fall-out and the subsequent slow, torturous death, which seems almost preferable to surviving in a grey, dead world, choked by dust.

  But then, from out of the dust and the ruins and the desolation, comes new life, a new future, and a whole brave new world . . .

  Children

  of the

  Dust

  LOUISE LAWRENCE

  FOR THE CHILDREN

  THAT THEY MAY NEVER

  KNOW THE DUST

  SARAH

  It was such a perfect day, a promise of summer with cloudless blue skies. Swallows were nesting below the eaves of the caretaker’s cottage and out on the sports field Year Nine were playing cricket and tennis. Everyone thought, when the alarm bell rang, that it was just another fire practice. But the first bombs had fallen on Hamburg and Leningrad, the headmaster said, and a full-scale nuclear attack was imminent. Those within walking distance of the school must go home immediately. The rest should return to the main assembly hall and stay there.

  Sarah ran through a town gone mad with panic. The traffic had stopped . . . cars and lorries parked all along the narrow high street. Men and women, crazy with fear, looted the shops for supplies. Police sirens sounded and on the housing estate they were tearing doors from their hinges to board up the windows. Sarah’s school shoes pounded along the pavements, up the hill past the District Hospital, leaving the town behind. A stitch in her side and her lungs heaving for breath made her stop and look back.

  She saw the streets spread out beneath her, the river estuary shining silver in the distance, white piles of the nuclear power station on the opposite bank, and the Cotswold hills beyond. She had to remember it . . . Gloucestershire green in the sunlight, a blackbird singing and the wind blowing warm through her hair. With all her senses she had to remember it, all the scents and sights and sounds of a world she might never see again. The roadside was lacy with cow-parsley and May had covered the hedges with sweet white blossoms. Cattle grazed in the fields. A kestrel hovered and the woods were dreamy with bluebells. She heard a cuckoo calling through the silence. She heard the others running along the roadway ahead. Their voices called to her.

  ‘Hurry up! You haven’t time to stop!’

  Sarah covered two miles in twenty minutes.

  Scattered houses marked the village outskirts, with Monday washing billowing in the gardens. And over the hill the church bell tolled. Sarah’s home was in a hollow, two renovated cottages made into one. There were lawns in front and borders bright with flowers and an orchard at the back. She entered through the kitchen. Buster barked and wagged his tail in greeting but she paid him no heed. She went into the living room where her stepmother was nailing a blanket over the window.

  ‘Is it true?’ Sarah gasped.

  ‘Don’t ask stupid questions!’ Veronica snapped.

  But the nuclear war was a thousand miles away. Hamburg was in Germany, Sarah said, and this was England. She could not believe that anyone would drop atomic bombs on England. They already had, Veronica informed her. The BBC had stopped transmitting a few minutes ago, and Radio Bristol reported London had been hit.

  ‘Stay in your houses,’ the announcer said.

  ‘Give me a hand,’ Veronica said grimly.

  Sarah helped her hump the mattress from the double bed and drag it downstairs. They took the spare one from the guest room and wedged both against the window, shifted the sideboard to hold them in place and stacked the bookcase on top. It was what the radio announcer told them to do as protection against flying glass. Daylight came in through the open doors but the room was dark and Sarah switched on the light.

  ‘Will Daddy be home?’ she asked.

  ‘Use your head!’ Veronica retorted.

  Sarah bit her lip.

  Her father was teaching at Bristol University and would not have time to drive home. And Veronica did not mean to be unkind. She was doing everything she could to keep herself and the children alive and she did not have time to think of Sarah’s father.

  ‘Gather all necessary belongings into one room,’ instructed the radio announcer. ‘Seal the doors against nuclear fall-out.’

  The door to the kitchen still remained open but Veronica sealed the door to the hall with sticky tape. There was nothing left for Sarah to do. In the gloomy light she saw tinned food piled in a corner, bowls and buckets filled with water, the camping stove and gas cylinder brought in from the garage, half a sack of potatoes and Grandma’s commode. The settee was piled with clothes and bedclothes, pillows and cushions, books and cups and saucepans, polythene garbage bags, Catherine’s Barbie doll and William’s Tonka truck.

  William and Catherine, who had returned from the village school long before Sarah came home, had made a camp under the dining table, draped with blankets and boxed in with mattresses from their own and Sarah’s beds. They laughed and giggled and thought it was fun. And Buster was under there with them, yelping and barking in some rough-and-tumble game.

  ‘Get that dog out of here!’ Veronica told Sarah.

  It was a terrible thing to do. William screamed and clung to him. He was only five and did not understand . . . they might have to stay indoors for weeks, everyone shut inside the living room and never going out. They could not have Buster with them. They would probably have to eat his dog food and they might even have to eat Buster himself. On her hands and knees Sarah crawled beneath the table and dragged the dog from William’s arms.

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ she said consolingly. ‘He can catch rabbits and it might only be for a little while. Mummy doesn’t want him to wee on the carpet, that’s all.’

  She carried Buster outside and set him down, watched him frisk across the orchard. She had to remember . . . a fat cocker spaniel in the last bright moments of life . . . sunlight among apple leaves, a scent of wallflowers and the massed colours of polyanthus. She had to remember the larch plantation beyond the orchard wall, sheep bleating on the common, and the church bell tolling . . . dong . . . dong . . . dong.

  Sarah looked up at the blue heavenly sky. In the end people turned to God. But the death that would come was nothing to do with Him. He, and the world, and the whole of creation were about to be destroyed. Away to the north she heard a rumble of thunder, or maybe a nuclear explosion. It did not matter which. Nothing mattered any more. All art, all knowledge, all civilization, evolution and aeons of time were meaningless now. Up from the river the seagulls drifted like scraps of blown paper. Their bird voices screamed as she wanted to scream . . . scream out her anger and despair, the single word, the one almighty question . . . why?

  Catherine came running from the house.

  ‘Birmingham! Birmingham!’ Catherine shouted. ‘Mummy says Birmingham has been hit and you’re to come inside!’ She stopped and touched Sarah’s arm. ‘Oh look, there’s a butterfly,’ she said.

  It was a small tortoiseshell sunning its wings on a clump of purple aubrietia. It was the last thing Sarah saw . . . a butterfly among flowers and Buster’s brown doggy eyes laughing at her from the shadows of the apple orchard, before s
he went inside and closed the door.

  When Sarah closed the kitchen door the last of the daylight was shut out and Veronica went to work with the sticky tape. Already the room felt like a prison. The electric light seemed gloomy and unreal, the atmosphere hot and stuffy. Veronica pushed newspaper into the keyhole and the voice of the radio announcer droned on.

  ‘Stay where you are. Remain in your houses. Close all doors and windows. Secure one room against fall-out and flying glass. Do not go outside until you are told it is safe to do so.’

  Sarah stopped listening. She sat on a dining chair, chewing her finger nails, and wishing her father would come home.

  ‘Stop doing that!’ Veronica said angrily.

  Guiltily Sarah stopped.

  ‘Remain in your houses,’ said the radio announcer.

  ‘This is my house,’ Catherine said from beneath the table. ‘I’m going to live in it for ever and ever. And you can, William.’

  ‘What about my tea?’ said William.

  ‘We can have tea here,’ said Catherine. ‘And dinner and supper. The man says we mustn’t go out at all.’

  ‘Suppose I want to go to the toilet?’ said William.

  ‘Mummy says we have to go on the commode.’

  ‘And Sarah?’

  Sarah felt sick at the thought of it. They would have to live with the stink, all of them together in the closed-in room. A few flies buzzed around the lampshade and Veronica’s lips twisted in distaste. Like Sarah she realized their sanitary arrangements were totally inadequate but it was too late now to fetch the disinfectant from the bathroom.

  ‘Remain in your houses,’ the radio announcer repeated. ‘Do not go outside until you are told it is safe to do so.’

  Then, quite suddenly, his monotonous voice stopped talking. And a few moments later the lights went out.

  ‘This is it,’ Veronica said grimly.

  ‘Bristol?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘It’s all dark!’ Catherine shrieked. ‘I don’t like it! I want to be with you, Mummy!’

  ‘Stay where you are!’ Veronica said urgently. ‘Sarah and I are right here in the room and the dark won’t hurt you. You must stay under the table and look after William.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of the dark,’ William said scornfully.

  ‘Then you look after Catherine,’ Veronica said.

  Sarah’s whole body was tense and listening. It was very dark in the room but a faint line of sunlight showed through the weave of the blanket at the top of the window. She heard a rumble in the distance, a great wave of sound that came sweeping towards her, engulfing everything in its path, drowning Catherine’s cries. Sarah blundered towards the fragile edge of light as the blast struck the house.

  Roof tiles smashed and the windows were blown inward. Books and ornaments and light fittings crashed and fell in the upstairs rooms. In the howling darkness the mattress sagged and the bookcase started to topple. The black human shape that was Veronica screamed at her to help. But Sarah was already there, moved by her instinct, exerting force against force. The blanket tore at its nails, came loose at one corner. Heat screamed through the crack. Sarah had one brief glimpse of devastation, a hurricane of tearing trees and whirling leaves, the sky gone dark and lurid with fire, before the wind passed over them and things sank back into stillness.

  Catherine was sobbing beneath the table.

  Fragments of glass slipped and fell.

  The air was stifling.

  ‘Is it over?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘That was just the beginning,’ Veronica said brutally.

  ‘We don’t stand a chance!’ Sarah cried.

  ‘There’s a torch on the mantelpiece!’ Veronica told her. ‘And the hammer is beside it. I’ll need some nails too. Hurry up!’

  Veronica removed the bookcase and nailed the blanket back into place. They had to have something heavier, she said, and between them they managed to lift the settee on top of the sideboard. It was made of leather and horsehair and its carved legs hooked over the back. Sheets and blankets were jammed into the space along the top as the next wave of sound came screaming towards them.

  They applied their shoulders, all the strength they had, to hold the settee in place as the bombs fell over Bristol and Cardiff, Cheltenham and Gloucester, and the great winds followed, a roaring tide of heat and darkness that smashed like a gigantic fist against the house. Even through the thickness of the walls Sarah seemed to see it . . . hell-bright hues, impressions of colours that flashed and pulsed, rose and gold and red-vermilion, impaled on her eyes as the wind screamed through the broken upstairs windows and the barricade shuddered. Wave after wave of thundering sound beat at the doors and walls of their sanctuary, until it faded away into silence.

  They listened and waited. Buster was howling outside and in the hall the grandfather clock struck four, a silly incongruous sound. It had been a very short war, and they heard nothing more.

  ‘I guess it’s over,’ Veronica said.

  ‘Bristol?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Everything,’ Veronica replied.

  Sarah let go. She was weak and shaking. There was a pain in her shoulder where the wooden frame of the settee had cut into her flesh, and her hands hurt so much she could hardly bear it. She sat in the dark on the dining chair, biting her lip.

  Veronica switched on the torch.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Sarah wanted to cry, weep like a small child, pretend Veronica was her mother, cling to her for comfort like William and Catherine always did. But she and Veronica had never been close. She was just the woman her father had married, mother of William and Catherine, but nothing to do with Sarah.

  ‘Do you think Daddy’s still alive?’ she asked.

  ‘If he is,’ said Veronica, ‘he won’t be able to come to us. There’s no point in hoping, Sarah. We’re on our own.’

  ‘We don’t even like each other very much,’ Sarah mourned.

  ‘Then I suggest we start,’ Veronica said crisply. ‘Because all we have is each other.’

  Sarah bent her head.

  Slow tears trickled down her cheeks.

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ she said.

  ‘I want my tea,’ said William.

  ‘What about Buster?’ Catherine sobbed.

  ‘And this is the way the world ends,’ Veronica murmured. ‘Not with a bang, but a whimper.’

  *

  That first evening was strange and special, as if it was someone’s birthday, a change from the usual household routine. They ate by candlelight . . . fish fingers, crinkle cut chips and green beans, with thawing ice-cream for pudding . . . food which Veronica had taken from the freezer and had to be used up quickly. Water was precious and could not be used for washing up, so they wiped their plates clean with paper tissues which they threw in the empty fireplace. Milk also would not keep for long. Veronica made custard, filled a thermos of cocoa for later to save on the gas, and stood the remaining two pints in a bowl of water to prevent it going sour overnight.

  Afterwards they played guessing games and Sarah read fairy stories by Hans Andersen. They tried not to listen to Buster whining outside the window, his claws scratching at the woodwork, begging to come in. Veronica said he had to stay out there, so they all sang songs to help William forget, their voices drowning the pitiful doggy sounds he made. But always, in the background, Buster remained. And the candle lasted only four hours.

  It was half past eight by Sarah’s digital watch, green luminous time ticking away the seconds as Buster scrabbled and whined. They must all go to bed, Veronica said, because there were only twelve candles in the packet and they could not use more than one a day. In the yellow beam of the torch they made up beds on the floor . . . William and Catherine on a mattress under the table, and Sarah in the space by the hall door. They heaved the settee from the sideboard for Veronica to sleep on and the room snapped back into darkness.

  ‘We haven’t washed,’ said Catherine. ‘Or cleaned our teeth.’

&nb
sp; ‘You can be excused for tonight,’ Veronica said.

  ‘Can we be excused tomorrow as well?’ Catherine asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Veronica. ‘Now go to sleep.’

  It was a hot still night, windless and quiet: nine o’clock by Sarah’s watch and probably still light outside. Unless it were dark, she thought, like Good Friday when Christ was crucified and the skies turned black reflecting the evil of mankind. She imagined the darkness covering the earth, a world where the sun ceased to rise and nothing lived, or grew, or flowered. She imagined the dust of fall-out blowing across the ruins of their civilization, burying buildings and people. It was a terrible punishment for a fifteen-year-old girl who had done nothing wrong.

  Catherine and William whispered and giggled beneath the table, but then Buster returned to whine under the window again. He wanted his supper, William said, and demanded he be let in. Veronica tried to explain. One night without supper would not hurt him. He was too fat anyway. Maybe tomorrow they would let him in. But William went on asking, his small boy’s voice growing querulous and tearful in the darkness. Finally Veronica shouted at Buster, loudly and angrily, told him to go and lie down. Her tone must have reached him for they heard nothing more . . . only William muttering and crying, saying how cruel and horrible Veronica was. He was going to report her to the RSPCA, but after a while he too fell silent.

  ‘William’s asleep,’ Catherine announced.

  ‘So why aren’t you?’ Veronica asked her.

  She wanted to use the commode. Veronica put a large saucepan lid over it but the smell was still there, strong and obnoxious, lingering in the room. They would not be able to live with it, Sarah thought. They would not be able to live in the stinking perpetual dark with nothing to do and only a few hours of candlelight a day, four people trapped in one room and two of them children. William and Catherine would not be content with sitting still for the next two weeks, just thinking and talking and playing games with their minds. They would more likely drive each other mad.

  ‘Veronica?’ Sarah said quietly. ‘What are we going to do?’