Stantonica 4

London Airport was the only airport in the country.  It had one runway.    I sat in the wooden hut cafe where I bought a cup of coffee.  A flight departed every half hour.  The announcement was made over the loudspeakers.
"The aircraft now approaching the runway will be the 8.30 UTC flight to Castrola, calling at Montreal, New York, Mexico City, Brasilia and Buenos Aries."  The air bus went from one end of Castrola to the other, an enormous distance.  How did a single airport, with one aircraft every half hour, manage to be the link between the English Republic and the rest of the world?  By having aircraft that landed at so many different places.
"I'm on business," said the man in a suit who was sitting next to me.  He was drinking a cappuccino from a big porcelain mug.  "I'm going to catch the next plane and I'll arrive at Mexico City late tonight.  I'll spend the night at a hotel in Mexico City and fly to Hawaii the next day."
"That must take such a long time."
"Three days, actually, if you consider that I travelled yesterday from Middlesbrough to London."
"Poor you."
"Oh no, it's a perk of the job.  I get a two week holiday in Hawaii - I can stay for eight days with nothing to do except attend one meeting.  Who wouldn't want to be the manager of a big international company?  Where are you going?"
"I'm flying to the Czech Republic."
"Family?"  Family visits and work were the only two reasons that anyone was allowed to travel by air.
"No, my new job."
"What do you do?"
"I'm an Electronics Engineer."  Not a complete lie.  I was being sent there for having built a radio, among other things.
"Good luck in your new job," he said, put down his big mug and walked away.  I sat reading a book.  It was a commentary on the book of Revelation.  When the nuclear war had happened in the sixties, that had been the fall of Babylon.  The strong man had been tied up.  The church had plundered all of the world's wealth.  Now there was no poverty and everything was evenly distributed.  I was getting deep into the book and lost all track of time.  The sound of the loudspeaker disturbed my sense of deep thought.
"The aircraft now approaching the runway will be the 9 hundred hours UTC flight to Leonida calling at Paris, Rome, Cairo, Tehran, New Dehli, Bangkok, Singapore and finally Sydney in Leonida."  President Brezhnev's full name was Leonid Brezhnev.  Australia had been renamed after him, just as America had renamed after Fidel Castro.  I continued with my reading.  This was the millennium.  Jesus was reigning on Earth for a thousand years and the world had been set to rights.  Everything was wonderful.  I put the book down and ordered a cappuccino.  As I finished drinking it, I heard the loudspeaker announce again,
"The aircraft now approaching the runway will be the 9.30 UTC flight to Moscow, calling at Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Kiev and Moscow." 

 

I walked down to the departure lounge with my one large suitcase.
"I haven't been on a plane before," I said to the man in the uniform.  He laughed.
"I bet you haven't."
"What do I do?"
"Show me your passport, Sir, and I'll take your suitcase."  He wasn't too bothered by my ignorance.  He was probably asked the same question several times a day.  I was on the aeroplane for a very long time.  It was a diesel plane with propellers, travelling at the speed of a high speed train.  It would have taken 5 hours for this plane to get from London to Prague in a direct flight.  It didn't travel in a straight line and there were 5 additional stops on the way.  I had lunch and a light tea on the plane, saving my dinner for the railway station in Prague.  I would need to catch a train from Prague to the Czech village where I would be staying in a community house, fifteen miles from the uranium mine at Rozna. 

 

When I arrived at the Czech village a car was waiting for me at the railway station.
"Hello Matthew," said the driver, and got out of the car.  He took my suitcase and put it in the back.  He opened the passenger door and I sat down.  He drove away.  "I'm Leonid.  I don't work in the mine, I've retired.  I look after the young men who work there and I look after the community house.  Don't believe everything you're told about uranium mines," he said.  "You'll be mining pitchblende.  Pitchblende is uranium ore, not uranium.  It's not nearly as concentrated.  You're also on a 3 month contract, all the miners are.  The government wouldn't want uranium miners to die.  Too much compensation to pay out.  Apart from that, they don't need very much uranium.  There are only six nuclear power stations in the whole world.  Only four run on uranium.  The Republic of South Asia have a Thorium Reactor, the French Republic have an experimental hydrogen fusion power station.  The four uranium fuelled power stations are our grandparents' attempts to realise nuclear energy.  The government want as many different types of power station as possible, they want all the research to be available in case there is ever a shortage of fossil fuel.  You know the big advantage of nuclear power stations?  They don't use much fuel.  When you've had your 3 months here they'll send you somewhere a long way from where you lived before, far away from anyone who knows you.  They like to perpetuate the urban myth that people who go to the uranium mine actually die.  But don't worry.  It's safer than smoking." 

 

The uranium mine was close to the surface of the ground and you could walk straight into it, as if you were walking into a deep cave.  We all had hats with electric lamps on them, silver radiation suits and gas masks. 
"The radiation suits are just tinfoil," said the manager.  "They're no use against gamma radiation.  All they really do is stop the pitchblende getting into your clothes and getting into your hair.  Quite honestly, it's probably more dangerous to work in a coal mine.  People get cancer and other diseases from inhaling coal dust."  We dug the uranium ore out of the wall of rock in front of us with pneumatic drills.  You could see lumps of uranium in it, but it didn't seem dangerous.  It didn't even glow in the dark. 

 

The three months ended.  Back at the community house we had our evening meal and Leonid announced my departure.
"Tomorrow we'll be sending Matthew to a farm in Scotland."  Everybody cheered.  The next day I took a two hour train journey to Prague and a ten hour flight to London.  I stayed at a hotel in London overnight.  Then I took a coach journey from London to Glasgow, which was just as much of an ordeal as the journey on the plane.  From Glasgow I phoned the farmhouse.  Could they come and give me a lift from the railway station at Pitlochry at half past ten?  It would take two and half hours for the train to get there.  The farm itself was located 5 miles away, right out in the Scottish Highlands.  This was a remote part of the Scottish Republic that no one would ever visit.  Easy for the rest of the world to pretend that I was dead. 

 

I sat down next to the driver of the car that would take me to the farm.
"I'm Sam," he said.  "What brings you to Scotland?"
"I wanted to work on a farm.  I love nature and animals."  I was trying to look on the bright side.  Maybe this wouldn't be so bad.
"I thought you'd done something really awful," he said.
"I was rather argumentative when I was at Bible College."
"That'll be why you're here.  Not many people come here by choice, and the ones who do usually live in Scotland.  You're from somewhere else."
"I'm from Sheffield," I said.
"Sheffield?  That's hundreds of miles away.  You came here to hide, or you came here because the government want to hide you."
"I worked in a uranium mine."
"I didn't think anyone could survive working in a uranium mine."
"Neither does anyone else.  That's why they sent me here, to perpetuate the myth that no one survives a uranium mine.  I only worked there for 3 months." 

 

We arrived at the farm.  Sam took my suitcase to my bedroom and showed me where I would be sleeping, in the bed next to his.  We came back down the stairs to the kitchen.  An older woman with long hair described what we would be eating.
"I'm Kathryn," she said.
"Hello.  I'm Matthew."
"We have meat for Sunday dinner, which might be chicken, lamb, beef, liver or pork, depending on how many Sundays there are in the month.  We have bacon and haggis for Saturday breakfast.  The rest of the time, it's broth for lunch and tea and Scotch porridge for breakfast."
"What's the difference between Scotch porridge and any other sort?" I asked.
"Made with water instead of milk," said Sam.  "Extremely thick and usually eaten with salt."
"Is that healthy?"
"We're a subsistence farm," said Kathryn.  "This is a tough life.  We do have milking animals."
"Not just cows, then?"
"No, nothing wrong with milk from sheep and goats," said Kathryn.
"I can have milk in my coffee and tea, can I?"
"You can," said Sam.  "We do have enough milk for things like that, and for butter.  I think you'll find that with all the vegetables we eat, the diet isn't deficient in iron or calcium."
"Sounds all right, then," I said.  Sam laughed.
"You have to milk the animals, you have to grow the vegetables, you have to grow the oats for the porridge and the wheat for the bread.  What food actually doesn't come from the farm?  Salt, sugar, coffee, tea and flour to bake bread."
"Do you grow your own sugar beet?" I asked.
"We do, but we don't grind it here.  We take that down to the wholesaler's and buy refined sugar.  We take the barley and rye down to the wholesaler's and buy flour for baking.  Local flour is no good for that." 

 

Getting up at 4.30 AM to milk the cows, goats and sheep was a harsh life but a rewarding one.  The Cairngorms are beautiful and there is something good about growing your own food, as much as possible.  I became a more peaceful person, forgetting my ideas of samizdat.  In the afternoons I began to read more, contented with the philosophy of the church state that we lived in and wondering why I had ever doubted it.  I would finish the washing up after dinner and go straight to bed, exhausted but contented.  I had been conformed.