How I Live Now

17

Piper and I lived with the McEvoys like people living someone else’s life.

Because we were part of an army family we got a much clearer idea of what was happening in England, though a fair amount of it we could have done without knowing due to its not-entirely-cheerful nature.

We spent a couple of days gathering information from Jane McEvoy who liked to talk and was pretty lonely especially since her son was away at school in the North and hadn’t been heard of since the first bombs went off and she was desperately worried that something bad had happened to him which seemed fairly likely to me.

I went down to get some water late at night and heard her in the kitchen with Major Mac and he was saying he was certain the boy was safe and We’ll all be together again just as soon as this bloody mess is sorted. He sounded amazingly calm and reassuring but I could hear an occasional hoarse gasping kind of cry like an animal choking to death in a noose and when I looked through the door I could see Mrs. M shaking all over and him with his arms around her looking exhausted and patting her over and over saying Now now, love, and I decided to live without a glass of water that night.

The next day her eyes were red but otherwise she seemed OK, and to make conversation she started telling us how proud she was of her husband and that one of Major McEvoy’s big jobs was organizing a field hospital for local people because all the real hospitals had been taken over to fix up people who’d been bombed, poisoned or gassed in London. They got shipped out here when the city hospitals ran out of room.

She said that since most of the people out in the country were only dying of appendicitis, childbirth and ordinary Preexisting Conditions the field hospital was supposed to take care of them while the more Colorful Cases of War Injury got hospitals with proper walls and beds.

At the beginning, she said, I went to the hospital every day. I read to the patients and played with those poor injured children and tried to make myself useful. But now they’ll only let military personnel inside due to the security risk. She looked kind of outraged at this and said As if I’m some kind of danger to those people! and Piper and I exchanged a quick glance and we were both thinking the same thing namely, Only if being unhinged is contagious.

Later Major M told us you’d be amazed at the number of things that can go wrong for civilians in a war. For instance, he said, let’s say a kid gets appendicitis or breaks his leg, there was no telephone to tell someone that the bone was sticking out of his thigh, no petrol to drive a car to the field hospital, if you happened to know where it was in the first place, and a big shortage of antibiotics if you did manage to get the kid to a surgeon somehow and wanted to make sure he or she didn’t die of infection a week or so later.

He also told us about people with cancer who needed expensive drugs and a pregnant woman he knew with RH-negative blood whose baby would probably die pretty much no matter what, and old people, some of whom would die sooner or later of strokes and heart attacks or lack of drugs, and some who already had.

Another time Major McEvoy started telling us about the farm problems in the area that he was trying to control and they mostly involved cows who couldn’t be milked by electric milking machines once the emergency generators stopped working and had to be milked by hand or they could get mastitis and die. Now there’s a side effect of war I bet you never considered.

Once you start thinking about all that stuff that wasn’t working it’s kind of hard to know where it all ends. Like the incubators for baby chicks not to mention baby humans and electric fences and hospital monitors and those things you use to shock people back to life when their hearts stop and computer systems and trains and airplanes. Even the gas supplies for heat and cooking are regulated by electricity, said Major McEvoy, and how do you think you pump water out of a well?

I felt a science report coming on titled Electricity, Our Helpful Friend.

Then there was the problem of burying all the cows and baby chicks and people who died and apparently there were lots of dead things and they were well on their way to becoming a big stinking rotten health problem, but that might have been too much information for me just then, and I thought I wasn’t going to eat another hamburger or chicken leg again in a hurry.

The Good Major was also trying to distribute things like milk and eggs and other farm food so all the occupied people wouldn’t die of starvation and one or two other tiny details like that so you could say he had his hands full and then some.

I guess by a combination of politeness and osmosis I learned more about farming in the few weeks we lived with the McEvoys than I was ever likely to find out in a lifetime on the tenth floor of an Eighty-sixth Street apartment building where the closest you ever got to Agricultural Produce was a corned beef sandwich from Zabar’s with a half-sour pickle which I knew perfectly well used to be a cucumber but how it got to be a Pickle on a Plate was anyone’s guess.

Anyway, all this stuff was happening under the rules of The Occupation which never struck me as being entirely clear but as far as I could tell meant you could go ahead and do whatever you liked as long as no one told you not to. I didn’t really understand The Occupation because it didn’t seem like the kind of War we all knew and loved from your average made-for-TV miniseries.

When I heard how it happened I was pretty impressed by the cleverness of the guys who planned it, who as far as I understood, basically waited for most of the British Army to be lured into crises on the other side of the world and then waltzed in and cut off all the transportation and communications and stuff so basically they were DEFENDING Britain against its own returning armed forces rather than attacking it.

Major McEvoy said Think about it as a Hostage Situation with Sixty Million Hostages so I did.

I’ve probably missed some important parts of the explanation but that seemed to be the gist of it and whenever anyone went into more detail I found my brain wandering to things like I wonder if he dyes his hair and Whatever possessed them to choose that color wallpaper?

There were obviously a few military types still left in England, mostly part of the Territorial Army, which sounds pretty impressive until you realize they’re a bunch of moonlighting guys who spend a few weekends a year doing basic training and wishing they were one of the Dirty Dozen. Major McEvoy said it was more or less a Known Fact that the whole situation was temporary and by the time the British Forces could get organized again it would all be over and the Occupiers would be History i.e. dead, but I guess the invaders were trying to Make a Point and had never really expected it to turn out happily ever after for them.

What impressed me was how simple it seemed to be to throw a whole country into chaos by dumping a bunch of poison into some of the water supplies and making sure no one could get electricity or phone connections and setting off a few big bombs here and there in tunnels and government buildings and airports.

We also found out that The Enemy was one reason there was no gas for anyone, since Major McEvoy told Piper and me that Petrol was one of the first things they took over when all the trouble started. The other reason was that you needed Guess What to pump it out of the ground and into the tank of your car.

Eleven letters, starts with E.

I guess it shows the importance of having your own army, even a small leftover piece of an army, because although the Bad Guys snatched up everything they could get their hands on, at least the Good Guys seemed genuinely dedicated to distributing what was left around the place so as few people as possible died from neglect or outright stupidity.

All in all I felt a little guilty about the fact that while us kids had been living the Life of Riley, a whole bunch of other people had been scurrying around like lunatics trying to keep the Social Fabric from Unraveling and my personal belief was there were too many problems to think about and not enough people to sort them out.

In other words, they were desperately short of people to get things done and that gave us a chance to GET OUT and eventually get back to where we belonged. This was obviously our goal, but in the meantime we figured that actually doing something might stop us from dying of boredom, which I was starting to realize was a major killer in a modern war.

So for all our making fun of Osbert and his passion to join the War Effort I could see now that this was our ticket to getting back home.

Or at least that was the plan.