If you were a reader in the '80's, you'd know that the threat of nuclear war was the pandemic of our age. At school we studied 'Adam's Ark', a play about a group of children who go on a schooltrip and are caught in a bunker as the bomb goes off. The harrowing film made from Raymond Brigg's comic book 'Where the Wind Blows' details a bickering older couple who take shelter as the nuclear fallout settles and radiation takes it's toll on the naive and unprepared pair. I took Wyndam's 'The Chrysalids' off my parent's shelves and read it over and over. Set far, far into the future post nuclear fallout, the survivors have devolved to an Amish like community that eschews any kind of deformity in their crops and children, killing it to maintain purity - only they miss the telepathy of a band of children who must escape into the Badlands, where all manner of deformed - or perhaps in a more 'woke' post nuclear world would be differently bodied people only just survive on the fringes.
Naive Ethel and Ernest don't do so well in the nuclear fallout.
And then, my favourite - Z for Zacariah. Don't bother with the movie, please - it'll ruin the terrific tension that captivated me as I read about Ann's survival in a valley after her entire family never come back from market due to nuclear war. One day a man in a radiation suit sickly stumbles across her valley - the last man, she believes, and although you'd think that two people would be capable of eking out an existance in this blessed valley, Mr Loomis's intentions are horrifying. I'll never forget Ann sheltering in a cave, wondering his next move.
"I have climbed the hills on all sides of this valley, and at the top I have climbed a tree. When I look beyond, I see that all the trees are dead, and there is no sign of anything moving. I don't go out there." - Robert O'Brien, Z for Zachariah
Later, there would be, of course, 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale, but also hundreds of others with a world in various states of disarray, chaos, disintegration, and general whimpering. I use this verb because TS Eliot wrote that the world would end with a whimper:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
TS Elliot Hollow Men
It's the whimper which inspired shows like 'The Walking Dead' - what happens after the bang of a zombie apocalypse, a nuclear war - or a pandemic? These speculations investigate not the event per se, but how humans react, interact, and survive in the face of disaster. Reading about it made me visualise the horrors - and the beauty, thinking of Arden Bell's 'The Reapers Are the Angels', where the protagonist sees the world as beautiful too, even the zombies, as they are God's creatures also.
“The world, it treats you kind enough so long as you're not fightin against it.”
― Alden Bell, The Reapers are the Angels
These books fascinated me because I imagined how I would respond in an event like that. Like the viewer watching the woman enter the dark room, those young adult apocalyptic books would have me internally screaming - don't do that or wow, look at you GO!. I think my early interest in herbalism started back then - the knowledge of medicinal plants would sometimes enter these worlds because of the lack of drugs post apocalypse. Certainly, a natural bent towards resourcefulness learnt from my mother (who, incidentally, had handed me these books like an apocalpyse pusher) and a healthy distrust of governments and mainstream systems had me lean towards growing my own food and learning how to preserve, forage and generally do things for myself. I always wonder if I chose my husband as a life partner because he was worthy of being on my apocalypse team - he knows his way around any kind of engine and can solve most practical problems with thought and a tool or two.
Three years ago the pandemic seemed the worst of it, but it seems that any sense of preparedness those books had taught me - be resilient, hide well, know how to feed yourself, and don't trust men in radiation suits - pales into insignifiance to the what ifs that are appearing in real time as we speak - the collapse of the financial system, world war, starvation due to extreme weather events impacting farming, the threat to agriculture from - well, agriculture, and of course, viruses. Do I think this will happen? Well, this morning my husband said: 'I've never thought I'd see a world war in my life time, but it's looking more and more likely'. Needless to say, I told him to stop reading the news.
In Australia, lettuce has been priced at nearly ten dollars in some stores. Floods and fire are threatening many agricultural crops globally - forget zombies! Rick and his son are here sitting on a gold mine.
However, in the corner of our kitchen is two big blue tubs that we are gradually filling with non perishable food items - white rice, sugar, lentils, beans, dehydrated coconut milk, pasta, quinoa, salt, apple cider vinegar, stock cubes and so on - including the ever so important chilli powder, . I mean come on guys, I can't live without chilli in an apocalypse. There's also space for matches in vaccuum sealed bags, knives, reading glasses (seriously - old people need to read fine print when bugging out), tea tree oil, panadol, antibiotics, ventolin, and so on. Once filled, they'll be stacked in the corner of our walk in robe. We might never need them. But we might. Worse comes to worse, we can grab the barrels, throw them in the car, and go. Given the petrol prices at the moment, I don't think we'll get far - so here's hoping, right?
Our barrels look a bit like this.
In many ways, this small amount of prepping is an OCD response to the anxiety of the current world. Like, a tidy house is a tidy mind - except a prepper's barrel or two calms the mind, right? Perhaps it's all an exercise in futility - very likely. But if the world is ending with a whimper and not a bang, I'm going to have chilli on my pasta, y'all.
And none of the characters in my apocalyptic fiction got that.