Brother in the Land Read Online Free Page B

going to feed them all, everybody that comes?’
    ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Not everybody. Friends and neighbours, lad. Customers. It’ll only be for a day or two, anyway.’
    ‘We hope,’ I said. ‘But what if it isn’t? What if nobody comes?’
    He shrugged. ‘They will, Danny. Bound to. But if they didn’t, well, we’d just have to think again, wouldn’t we?’
    People started coming as soon as it was properly light. We gave them food and drink. Mrs Troy had four kids and no husband. One of the kids, Craig, was Ben’s best friend. Ben was up when they arrived, and he wanted to go off with Craig but Dad said no. ‘It’s not safe,’ he said. ‘Buildings ready to fall down and funny people wandering about. You can play with Craig in a day or two, when the soldiers come.’

Nine
    It sounds daft now, but we lived in hopes those first few days. We kept expecting somebody to come. Dad’s booklet said the dead would be collected and feeding-centres set up. It said to listen to the radio; there’d be news, and instructions.
    We knew there were people up at Kershaw Farm with fallout gear and weapons. People in authority. We assumed they were soldiers, and that they’d come down and start sorting things out like the soldiers in Turkey when there was that earthquake. In the meantime, we had to shift for ourselves.
    A lot of people went mad. Not raving mad, but wandering aimlessly about in the ruins, muttering; or sitting absolutely still, staring at the ground.
    You’d think people would’ve got together to organize tents and cooking and first-aid and that, but they didn’t. They were stunned, I suppose. They’d be outside and it’d start to rain and they’d just stand or sit getting wet with places all round they could shelter in.
    I think it was the ones who thought too much who went mad. I mean, if you went round thinking about how it was before and how you used to take it all for granted and that, I guess it could drive you daft. I think Dad realized that. He was always doing something, keeping himself busy so he hadn’t time to brood about Mum and the shop and that.
    What kept me going was Ben. You know how it is with little kids, some big change comes into their lives, a new school or moving house or something, and they’re upset for maybe a couple of days. After that, they pick up their lives and carry on and it’s like nothing’s happened. They adjust to new situations with fantastic speed.
    Ben was like that. I mean, one day he was this ordinary little lad, going off to school with his reading book and pencil case, coming home to watch telly and eat toffees and go to sleep in a warm bed; and the next he was a little survivor with no mum, living among ruins and sleeping on the floor. And he just did it. His mum wasn’t buried three days before he was racing about in the rubble, playing soldiers. It was incredible. It kept me sane, watching him.
    Nobody came, and there was only crackling on the radio, so Dad and me dug a hole in a garden opposite the shop and put Mum in it. It was raining. Dad said something he remembered from the Bible and rain ran down his face so you could only tell he was crying by his voice and you couldn’t tell about me at all. It was evening, and Ben was asleep. We’d have shown him where she was later, only he never asked.
    Water was a big problem. Tremors from Branford had fractured the mains and you saw bits of broken pipes sticking up out of the debris. A lot of people drank from puddles or collected rain in sheets of polythene, but we didn’t. It was bound to be contaminated and, unlike other people, we had a choice. There was beer and pop in the cellar, and sterilized milk too. We drank that. Then somebody uncovered an old well in the yard of the Dog and Gun, and it became one of my jobs to fetch water twice a day in a tin bucket. It was while I was doing that one day that I first met Kim.

Ten
    It was about three weeks after the bomb. A lot of the food and stuff