Honestly, I thought we were in a pretty good place for this.
We had the chickens and the ducks. I’d been growing veg for nearly ten years on and off; in the allotment when we still lived in the city before we moved out here. We had fed ourselves mainly from the garden for months at a time, saving my tech salary and Jen’s local government salary for taxes and bills and electronics and fun things for the kids.
It’s not the same. When we were doing this for fun with extra benefits in saving us cash and keeping the kids happily occupied when we were working, it really, genuinely, was fun. My Instagram was full of cute pictures.
I wish I’d printed more of them out.
It’s not the same when suddenly there’s no internet to buy feed and medical supplies for the animals, or veggie seeds and plugs from. When you realise you’re not just harvesting to eat now but for what you’ve got to plant again, or there will be no more for the kids to eat. When there’s no chicken nuggets for when they’re sick of potatoes for the hundredth dinner in a row and the supermarket in the village is a ravaged and crumbling husk.
It’s not just us now, of course; it’s Amina and Sanjay and their baby, and Ellie and Bjorn and Ben, and little Bemmy, who we found shivering and white-eyed in our shed last autumn. God knows what her real name is, or if she talked in the Before Times, or who or what she was running from then.
We had this house with the garden and the extra bedrooms; how could we have turned them away?
More hands in the garden, and the field behind the house now; I don’t think we could have fenced it in or rigged up the alarms without Sanjay and Ellie, let alone done that garden centre raid and got the extra seeds and tools back here without everyone. But it’s more people to feed too. More people that were strangers last year; now I wake up sweating in the night at the thought of them starving.
A fox getting a hen used to be something I cried about with the kids and we did little funerals to help them learn to grieve healthily. Now it’s losing all those eggs and even the meat, which could mean the difference between a tough spring and one where we don’t eat, and on top of that I still cried when we lost Princess Layer, our scrappy white hen I raised from an egg.
A family turned up last month and I had to turn them away with the pitchfork. I let them fill up all their bottles from the rainwater cistern, but no more. If I’d let them sleep here even one night; if I’d learned their names, I’d have ended up letting them stay. And we can’t feed any more right now.
I can’t stop dreaming about their faces. They were so damn tired. The kids had eyes like little old people.
Comments