dedication and disclaimer
Dedicated to the most patient man I know, my partner Gifford, and to the memory of my mother, Frances, with all my love.
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This is a work of fiction. The only things in it that are true are the bunker, Brexit and climate change. Any similarity to people or places is entirely coincidental. Any factual inaccuracies are entirely my fault.
prologue
I blame the Queen. If she hadn’t died, if she’d clung on and outlived her son, or bypassed him in the succession and passed the crown to the more tractable William, Charles wouldn’t have been crowned King. He wouldn’t have confirmed himself as an autocratic and eccentric despot in the minds of the British public, and the old-school farmers of Devon wouldn’t have rebelled against him using his status – as both monarch and landowner – to push Parliament towards converting all agriculture to organic standards. He might as well have been trying to enforce Satanic Masses for the uproar it caused among a farming community still reeling from the trauma and divisions of Brexit.
I also blame UKIP, declaring they spoke for all despite imploding as a national political party once the odious Farago departed. If they hadn’t stoked up trouble from their HQ in Torbay, whispering rebellion in the ears of our County and District Councillors – a lot of them farmers struggling to adapt to climate change and a public persuaded away from the mainstays of Devon agriculture, meat and dairy – it could all have blown over and reached a compromise that would have benefitted everyone. But no, both sides in the argument dug in and became increasingly entrenched and bitter.
What sounded like a joke, co-opting local passport and ‘Republic of Devon’ campaigns begun by Remainers, became an actual thing – Devolution for Devon, Take Back Our Land, Make Devon Great Again – with a referendum bought and paid for by UKIP and modelled on the secession of Cataluña from Spain. Cornwall and Scotland had been talking the talk for decades but stood back and watched as we went and took the plunge.
Despite the confident rhetoric of the campaign claims, and the warnings of recent history, it turned out the Devolvers had no plan for how to structure our governanace once we had seceded. We continued to be run by elected Councils, so one could argue we are effectively a Republic, but scratch any one of the Councillors, or our successive Mayors, and I think you’d find a Royalist not far beneath the surface. That is our abiding problem – there was no real shifting of power to the people. I wouldn’t be surprised if our latest incumbent saw himself as a defacto King rather than a civic dignitary. He certainly likes to wear his chains of office at every opportunity; if a crown and sceptre were to be proposed, I do not think he would refuse them.
It was hard to see the difference at first, once Devolution was ‘won’. The real changes came after Westminster pulled the army and navy bases out, and we lost the jobs and supply chains they sustained. Militia were called up from the local populace – and I mean local, because thousands of the people who had flocked here to live in our ugly new housing developments left before the ink was dry on Devon’s Declaration of Independence and Secession – but there was no money to pay them. The unemployed were drafted – and there were many of those, myself included, because there were very few jobs left with fewer retirees to service. Any that stayed were too skint to leave and therefore too skint to pay for lattes, colonics and home care. There was a mass die-off within the first three years because public services fell apart.
Militia – armed with weapons traded illegally by the more enterprising of the departing army personnel – began patrolling our borders, looking for people entering or leaving without paying the tolls. Identifiable by their black uniforms, with a patch on the chest denoting the Devon flag (a black-bordered white cross on a green field the colour of mould), tales of abuses of power, both within their ranks and towards the populace, were rife but whispered.
I managed to escape the draft, being a lesbian and thus undesirable in public service; sexual freedoms were one of the first things to go. My wife and I had to stop expressing affection in public, had to pretend just to be housemates and hide our wedding bands.
Roads were blocked and began to deteriorate without central funding. Train services were axed, because we couldn’t afford to maintain the tracks, or come to an agreement with the national network. Electricity supplies became erratic, because the National Grid wasn’t allowed to maintain our part of the network without paying outrageous fees for the privilege. Solar panels were raided from solar farms and abandoned homes, by organised gangs from Somerset, or stolen from houses as their occupants slept. Everything broke, and stayed broken, because most of the expertise had left and there were no spare parts.
Our water and sewage systems broke down, abandoned by private companies with an eye on their bottom line rather than ours.
After that life became – literally – shit.
From the memoirs of Mrs Prendaghast
in case the sun
For almost an hour, nothing passed him but the high summer sun, angling its beams through the laurel but casting little heat in this dark recess of overgrown woodland. Then two women walked by on foot, and ten minutes later a man with a heavily laden donkey, all pedlars headed away from the village’s weekly market, picking their way carefully across deep ruts, crusts of manure and lumps of old asphalt. By then the high humidity had soaked Will’s clothing, his knees were aching, and sharp bramble barbs were digging into his skin even through the tough weave of his trousers. He was shifting position, taking care to keep his head low, when he heard the approach of an engine, hacking and coughing its way up the steep incline. Aches forgotten, he hunched back down and drew a battered notebook and a stubby pencil out of the rucksack by his side.
Finding a blank space at the end of his notes, he peered through a screen of laurel and watched the car, a beat-up old Audi, come around the corner below his hiding place. Will scribbled the model of car in his notebook and squinted at the number plate, struggling to make it out through the mud; he could only note the first three digits. It would be below him any moment, the engine straining as the driver changed gears.
The driver’s face was hidden by smears of mud and bird shit on the windscreen; it was a wonder they could see well enough to steer. Will picked up a handful of dirt and threw it over the edge of the bank so it scattered across the car’s bonnet. The car lurched as the driver reacted, the pale blur behind the glass twitching towards Will's hiding place just long enough to be recognised.
Mayor Spight himself. Will wrote down the name in his careful print. No passengers. The Audi continued its way up the hill, vomiting black smoke out of the rattling exhaust pipe. It stank of burned bacon.
Will relaxed and settled back against a tree stump, preparing to wait and log Spight’s return. A sharp pain on his neck told him a horsefly had found a way through his protective scarf and was feasting on his blood. He slapped at it and the small body fell into his lap. He checked to be sure he had killed it.
A robin alighted nearby and cocked its head, watching him through a black and beady eye. Will threw the small corpse towards it and the robin accepted the offering, snatching it up and flying away. The sun disappeared behind thick grey cloud and rain began to fall, drops finding their way through the dense canopy and splashing on to his head. Will pulled his jacket tight around his skinny frame. It promised to be a long and chilly afternoon.
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