Stantonica 1

We all worked in an old warehouse that had been converted into a large office and did as little as possible. I worked a 40 hour week but spent about half that time actually working. I was one of the more industrious ones. Some people on the team spent only a quarter of their time doing any actual work. We were paid £4 an hour. The company could afford our limited enthusiasm. Julia, the manager, had assured us of that. Our wages were equivalent to what it cost us to live in a shared bedroom in a shared house.

 

We were architects.  We designed community houses.  I had spent the morning trying to calculate how I could get 3 beds into a very small room.  I had positioned the 3 beds inside the room on my computer screen.  I was proud of myself.  "You need some room for furniture as well," said Julia.  I felt like an idiot.  I took the exact measurements of 3 chests of drawers and a large wardrobe and positioned them in the room.  I had designed a tiny bedroom that could accommodate 3 people.  I would be famous.  It was against the law to have your own bedroom unless you had a medical exemption certificate.  This might be issued if you had a medical condition that made you impossible to live with, perhaps if you were old and incontinent or if you had a medical condition that made you snore loudly.  The universities were doing research to develop a new generation of earplugs that were more efficient and could block out the sound of coughing and loud snoring, so fewer medical exemption certificates would be issued.  Some of the community houses had a terrible problem.  What do you do if you don't have an even number of people living in your house?  You can hardly behave in the conventional manner and put 2 in each room.  I had come up with a system that allowed you to position 3 beds in a small bedroom.  "Does the door open?" asked Julia.  That shattered my confidence.  I'd never become a Household Deacon unless I could come up with really good ways of saving money.  I now had the bed in such a position that the door would never open.  I could make the door open the other way but how would you get around the bed?  I then moved the chest of drawers to the side and moved the headboard of the bed right up against the wall.  Having your head next to the window would feel less crowded in a small room, good not to have the bed the other way round, with the sleeper's head near the door.  Now you could open the door and have a good 800 mm between each bed so that each occupant could get to the toilet during the night.  Perfect.  Next year I'd be Household Deacon.  I'd be directly responsible for my household's finances. 

 

My work was interrupted by the Two Minutes Love.  The cheap internet download we had adapted for architectural drawings disappeared.  A picture of Noel Stanton, complete with 1976 tweed jacket and trilby hat, filled the whole screen. 

"Has anybody got anything nice to say about Noel Stanton?" asked Julia. 

"He was captured by the Cuban Army during The War to End All Wars," said a voice from the other end of the warehouse.  "God used this for the good of those who trust in him.  Noel Stanton taught Fidel Castro and Leonid Breshnev everything he knew about modern socialism."  We all chanted in unison, "God is good, the prophet is good, the economy is good."

 

Noel Stanton had become the leader of the world even though he had died in 2009.   A war between the United States and Russia had begun in 1962.  This had happened when an American plane had bombed a Russian submarine off the coast of Cuba, not knowing that the submarine was armed with nuclear warheads.  The sailors on the submarine had panicked.  Stranded in their damaged submarine, they believed that nuclear war had broken out around them.  In their confusion, they fired a nuclear warhead which wiped out the area of Florida Keys. The Americans did not believe this was an accident.  It wasn't the end of the world, although it could have been that.  Our politicians were more careful.  They began a conventional war with strategic use of nuclear weapons.  Knowing that exploding 100 hydrogen bombs would cause a nuclear winter, they decided to use only a few at a time.  Russia and the USA destroyed eachother's nuclear bases.  By that time there had been 11 nuclear explosions, including the Florida Keys accident.  The main targets from then on had been the shipyards.  The use of a low power nuclear weapon in the right place could seriously disrupt ship building, leading to a shortage of food and the inability to build aircraft carriers, battleships or ships for transporting large numbers of soldiers.  The Russians and Cubans had won the war.  It had been named The War to End All Wars in 1992 when we celebrated 25 years of world peace.  I was born in 1966.  I knew nothing of the war except what I had read in Encyclopedia Stantonica and  my parents' accounts of the bombing of the shipyards in Wallsend, 10 miles from where they lived in Newcastle.  Mother remembered the attack in the early hours of a winter morning.  There was a sound like a rushing wind, the electric lights began flashing, even though they were turned off at the switch, the windows shattered and the roof tiles landed in the garden.  Her family were left in a badly damaged house, with water, gas and electricity cut off but considered themselves lucky to have had a house at all.  Newcastle was soon flooded with refugees from the areas closer to the bomb, where the houses were completely destroyed.  Some of the refugees had radiation burns and didn't live very long.  My parents married the next year and I was born 2 years later.

 

Fidel Castro believed that Jesus was the first communist.  Noel Stanton was a British soldier in Cuba.  The story is that he did not want to kill the enemy soldiers because they would go to a lost eternity.  He put his gun on the ground and put his hands in the air.  He surrendered and became a prisoner of war.  During his time in a communist re-education camp, his captors were impressed by his socialist interpretation of the Bible and his belief that people should live together in a large house and share one bank account.  He became a friend of President Fidel Castro, was given an honorary degree and spent the rest of his life as a professor in the university of Havana.  He produced socialist films about Cuba that were shown all over the world.  The People's Republic of Stantonica stretches all the way from former China to the British Isles.  The rest of the world is very much under its influence.

 

One of my other money saving ideas was to build a cheap radio.  Sheffield's pirate radio stations existed in Halaam, Highfield, Grenoside, Chapel Town and Meadow Hall.  They didn't have one in Broomhall, where the city centre community houses were located.  Pirate radio usually consisted of a long wire aerial hidden in somebody's loft and a 1 KW amplifier attached to a small transmitter.  Radios were not sold openly but could be constructed from spare electrical parts.  Most crystal sets could work within a quarter of a mile of the transmitter.  I had built an amplifier which extended the range of a crystal set several miles.  I was able to hear the Halaam and Highfield transmitters in my bedroom in Broomhall, using only a standard 2 metre wire aerial.  This was considerably better than most people's radios.  I was trying to build a radio for less than £5.  If I succeeded, I would provide radios to the FDC (Food Distribution Centre.)  Community houses would order them and they would arrive with the weekly goods delivered by a large van which was known as the food order but which usually included lots of other things as well.  I wrote a letter to the FDC advising them of my experiments.  Julia summoned me into her office.  "Do you have a radio?" she asked.  I informed her that I had spent several years developing it.  It was considerably more powerful than an ordinary radio.  Some of the stations I could hear were an hour's walk from where we lived.  "Are there any other radios like this?"  I said that there weren't, but that if people wanted them there could be.  "It is a criminal offence to operate a pirate radio station.  I am surprised that you listen to such things.  The songs they broadcast encourage criminal activity and sexual immorality.  Do you listen to the news?  It's so depressing."  I said that I did listen to the news and it kept me informed of all the important things that were happening in the world.  "If something important has happened in the world, it will one day be written down in a book.  One hardly needs to hear daily news."

 

I created a web page on the company server.  I put an email address on it - not my work email address, but one from a public email website - and asked, "Is anything interesting happening around the world?  Email it to me."  No newspapers had existed since before the war.  This page would be easily found on an internet that consisted of only business websites, public email websites and Encyclopedia Stantonica, of which there were a million pages.  I gave the website an imaginitive address that would be very difficult to trace to me or to the company.  Over the next few months I was posting pictures and accounts of hurricanes, earthquakes, accidents, scientific discoveries, all coming from around the world.  Julia called me into her office.
"Somebody in this company is producing an internet newspaper," she said.
"How did you know it was me?"  She looked shocked.
"Was it you?  Peter just did a back up copy of everything on the server.  He was going to repair it.  He found some unusual files that take up rather a lot of room.  I was asking everybody.  This is a criminal offence, Matthew.  It's called Samizdat.  Russian for unauthorised publication.  I'll have to report you to the magistrates."

 

I got my court summons.  It was simply a letter through the post giving directions to the magistrate's court and advising me to attend at a certain time.  It seemed no more formal than a doctor's appointment.  I arrived at the court.  I saw the person in the court who had an appointment 5 minutes before me.  He was a middle aged man in a suit.
"You are charged with the crime of employing a married woman," said the magistrate.
"It is not against the law to employ a woman."
"No it is not.  So many jobs a man could never do.  Who would teach girls' PE lessons?  Who would deliver babies?  Who would nurse sick children?  Who would work in a launderette or bake cakes to be sold in a bakery?  It is not economically viable that all women should stay at home and look after the house.  But we have a law that states that married women must do this.  If a man comes home from work at half past six, eats his dinner, and goes out to lead a Bible study at seven o' clock, how can he possibly do this unless his wife cooks his evening meal?"
"A woman might like to lead a Bible study as well."
"Nonsense.  She must be in submission as the law says.  Adam was formed first and then Eve."
"You are quoting those verses out of context."  The magistrate slammed his hands on the desk.
"How dare you?  You are saying that Noel Stanton quoted those verses out of context."
"Noel Stanton was a very good Christian and a very brilliant economist but he was also narrow minded.  He couldn't think outside his trilby hat."  The magistrate leapt off his chair.
"To say that Noel Stanton is narrow minded is blasphemy.  I have no choice but to pass the maximum sentence for this crime.  You will go to Bible College for five years."  The man left the court.  The papers inviting him to go to Bible College would be posted to his home later.  The magistrate looked at me and said my name.  "Matthew Ellis.  You are charged with Samizdat."
"I wanted to make an internet newspaper.  I reported major disasters around the world.  People would be able to help.  I reported major scientific discoveries."
"If a major disaster happens on the other side of the world, it will be dealt with, quite adequately, by churches on the other side of the world.  If a scientific discovery is important, it will find its way into a book.  One hardly needs to read daily news.  I understand that you also build radios.  Tell us where the pirate radio stations are."
"I don't know where they are.  They just have names like Radio Kevin, Radio David or Radio Susan."
"There are women who broadcast on the radio?"
"Yes."
"Shouldn't they be doing the housework?  You said that one station was located in the Highfield region of the city.  How do you know this?"
"The signal is stronger in Highfield.  The station can be heard without an amplifier in Highfield.  It can only be narrowed down to a quarter of a mile.  I could not tell you where it is in Highfield."
"Matthew Ellis, your household leader says that you are a person of exemplary character.  You are bound over for a year."  If you give the authorities useful information, the punishment is a lot less severe.  That is what the magistrate had actually done.  The household leader did speak highly of me, but that was an excuse.  I had reported someone else, or told them what little about them I knew.  I would not be punished.

 

I never realised that Sonia was a Special Constable.  She had never told anybody in the company.  She was actually an undercover cop.  That was why she asked me for a radio.
"I'd like to be able to use it while I'm walking down the street."  I said reception on a six inch piece of wire might depend very much on where you were.  Probably within a quarter of a mile of the transmitter but not much further.  "Can you put a loudspeaker on it?"  I said that you might get the loudspeaker to work if you were standing in the same street as the radio transmitter.  "That would be good.  Just find a park bench within 50 yards of the transmitter, and you can sit down there, pull the headphones out and listen through the speaker.  Could you put a volume control on it?"  I said that that was not at all difficult.  Sonia paid me £20 for this radio, which was slightly more than the parts actually cost.  Unknowingly, I had given the police access to a portable piece of equipment that could pin point the exact location of any pirate radio station.  With the loudspeaker playing loudly, they would know they were within 50 yards of the transmitter.  With the volume turned right down, if the speaker was at all loud, they would be standing in the front garden of the house where the transmitter was located.

 

Sonia was walking with the sergeant and a corporal with her radio in her hand.  "I'm getting a very strong signal here," she said, as the sound came out of the speaker.  She turned the volume down.  The 3 police officers walked a bit further.  The music from the speaker became much louder.  They were outside the house the signal was coming from.  "And it'll be all right, dancing on a Saturday night," the singer sang.  Sonia began to shake the box up and down to the beatty music.  The corporal smiled and began to nod his head.  "Stop enjoying this music," said the sergeant.  "It is the noise of infidels."  The sergeant snatched the radio from Sonia and led the other 2 officers to the door of the house.  He rang the doorbell and a woman opened the door.  "You have a pirate radio station in your building," said the sergeant. 
"I don't know anything about a radio station," she said. 
"What's this then?"
"Is it a recording?"  The 3 police officers walked into the house and searched the rooms.  When they reached the attic, they saw a young woman with headphones on sitting next to big desk which was full of electronic equipment.
"What are you doing here?" barked the sergeant.
"This is Radio Karen."
"Shouldn't you be doing the laundry?"  Sonia spoke to the woman.
"Karen, we won't prosecute if you tell us where you get your music from."
"It's all sent by email."
"Karen, I need your email address."
"Don't you need the password as well?"
"I know it already.  We're the police."  Karen gave Sonia a card with her name written in big letters and the email address underneath it.