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spellbound, all of them born after the crash, all of them used to nothing more than campfires, candles, oil lamps and, only recently, the miracle of flickering strings of light-bulbs. The only music they heard were nursery rhymes and Bob Dylan songs strummed rather badly by an old Buddhist earth-mother called Hamarra.
    ‘It’s not good for them, Leona. You can’t fill their heads with things as they were. They’re never going to see any of those things. This is all they’ll have.’
    Leona sighed. ‘It’s hard not to want to tell them, Mum.’
    ‘But it’s kinder not to. You have to let go. That world’s really not coming back any time soon.’
    Leona said nothing. This was an old conversation, one they’d had too many times before.
    ‘We’ve witnessed enough to know that,’ added Jenny, ‘haven’t we?’
    Witnessed enough . She was right about that. They’d seen that world collapse up close, living in London - the worst possible place to have been during that first week. After the dust settled on the riots, there was a hope that order would somehow be restored. But it was soon clear things had gone too far. Too much damage done, too many people killed. The food that had been in the stores on the Monday was cleaned out by the Wednesday; stolen, spoiled, eaten, hidden. And with no power there was no clean water. People were very quickly dying of cholera, or killing each other for bottled water.
    There’d been many small communities outside the cities that were better prepared; foresightful people with beards and chunky-knit jumpers who’d been rattling on about Peak Oil for years and preparing for the inevitable end. The sort of scruffy new-age weirdy-beardies that Leona had once turned her nose up at; that reminded her a bit of her dad. They had their freshwater wells, their vegetable plots, their chickens and pigs.
    The one thing they didn’t have, though, was guns. So many of them were overrun and picked clean by the starving thousands flooding out of London, Birmingham, Manchester. Picked clean . . . and in many cases, since there was no sign of the police or the army or any sense that law and order was going to return, the women raped and the men killed. Years of foreknowledge and preparation accounted for nothing. It had simply made them a target.
    Survival through those first few weeks and months turned everyone into a brutal caricature of themselves. Everyone had done something they weren’t proud of to stay alive. For a while it was nothing more than a twisted form of Darwinism at work; it was the most selfish who managed to survive: the takers.
    Hordes of people emerging from the cities - running from the rioting and the gangs making the most of the anarchy, they choked the roads, endless rivers of people on foot, all of them hungry. At first it was begging, when they came across the well-tended vegetable gardens and allotments and chicken runs out beyond the urban sprawl. Soon it became a matter of stealing after dark. Finally the migrating hordes just picked clean anything they found, and if a person was stupid enough to try and explain they’d been preparing for this for years and tried to stop them stripping his garden clean, then it turned even nastier.
    Leona remembered the day their small settlement had been raided by a gang of about thirty men, several years after the crash. By then, they’d assumed roving bands of scroungers were a thing of the past, died out, killed by others or starved long ago. Then one cold winter morning they turned up, armed with guns, some of them wearing ragged police and army uniforms, emerging from the trees, drawn by the smell of woodsmoke.
    She shuddered at the memory of what followed and forced her attention back on the playing children. But her mind wasn’t done yet.
    They were always men, though, weren’t they? The ‘takers’. Groups of men with guns.
    Her mind played flashes of that winter morning; the raping in the barn. The ensuing struggle.