Twilight World

“Mam,” said Wendy, “Tony's got all the candle wax on his bread.”
“Light another candle, dear,” said Mrs. Smith.
“We haven't got one,” said Mr. Smith.
“And he's taken all the salt as well.”
“Tony,” said Mrs. Smith, “give your sister the salt cellar.”
“Well, there's plenty to go around.”
“Tony, that salt has got to last us all week.”

“Has anybody got a battery for that radio? It sounds horribly distorted,” said Mr. Smith.
“Why don't you use my little radio?” asked Wendy.
“Because your little radio is rubbish,” said Tony.
“I like your sister's radio,” said Mr. Smith. “It may only be little but the batteries only cost £25 and they last for a whole month.” Wendy went and got her little radio. They were listening to the news.

“The government said today that unemployment was down to seventeen million, its lowest level for seven years,” said the announcer.
“How do they manage to pay our benefits when unemployment's so high?” asked Mr. Smith.
“I'll tell you how,” said Mrs. Smith. “There's a shop selling yesterday's bread for £5, so I stood in the queue all yesterday lunchtime. When I got there, they had sold out. So I came back this morning and queued for an hour. They said that yesterday's bread isn't £5 anymore, it's £10. And the woman laughed at me for having a £5 note and said, 'This is a supermarket, what do you expect to buy for that?' That's what drives the economy, profit. Businesses make huge profits and pay lots of tax.”
“Go back tomorrow.,” said Mr. Smith. “I'll give you £20. You never know what they'll charge tomorrow.”

The next day, Mrs. Smith went to the university careers office.
“I want to be a teacher,” she said.
“We have loads of people wanting to be teachers,” said the receptionist. “You need a recent degree.”
“I graduated five years ago.”
“You must be joking. If your degree's more than one year old they won't look at you. What did you get for your A' levels?”
“Two Cs and a D.”
“No good. They want three A grades. Any experience of working with young people? Guides and Scouts, Youth Work, anything like that?”
“What's that got to do with it?”
“You must have experience of working with young people. They're not going to take you if you don't.”
“There's a national shortage of teachers.”
“No there isn't. There was once, but there are too many teachers now. None of them want to leave the profession. They won't even take early retirement. Every university graduate wants to be a teacher. None of them can get a job anywhere else. It costs £100 to apply.”
“Does it?”
“It's a Central Clearance House. You apply in September and you won't get your place until the September after that. I'd advise you not to waste your money.”

Mrs. Smith queued up at the shop that sold yesterday's bread. She got to the end of the queue, desperate now, she had no food left in the house.
“Yesterday's bread is £20,” said the girl behind the counter. “Bread from the day before is £15. When we have any bread that's three days old it'll be £10, and when we have have any bread that's four days old it'll be £5.”
“I'll have a loaf of two day old bread,” she said, “and a candle.”
“That'll be £19 please.”

Mr. Smith phoned up about a job for a long distance van driver.
“Hello, about the job as a long distance van driver. Do I need an HGV?”
“What's one of those?”
“Sorry, I mean a licence, a Heavy Goods Vehicle licence. Is it a van or a lorry?”
“Nobody drives those eighty ton lorries down the motorway anymore. There's not as much money in the country. They've all got little mini vans.”
“I have an ordinary car licence, is that all you need?”
“Yes, if you're a very experienced driver. You have 250,000 miles driving experience and you've only ever had one accident.”
“How do you know all this?”
“When you filled in your application form, you put down all your car registration numbers. I went to the DVLA website on my phone and typed them all in. It tells me how many miles the car did when you owned it, how many claims you've had on your insurance, what for, all sorts of things. Was the accident your fault?”
“No. The car was parked outside the house and someone crashed into it.”
“You've worked in jobs that require a lot of driving.”
“Yes, I've been a company rep and I used to deliver pizzas.”
“I'm quite confident I could send you out in my van and you wouldn't crash it and you wouldn't get lost. I'd like to meet you. Could you come here tomorrow morning at ten o' clock?”

Mr. Smith arrived at the shop to see the manager. It was a small shop and sold mainly food. Tins of beans and vegetables that would at one time have been very cheap were now very expensive. Mushy peas were £25.
“I've come about the job as a driver.”
“Oh, hello Mr. Smith. It's to deliver all our supplies from the warehouse, which is next to the docks in Hull. It's about a two hour drive. The warehouse load the stuff on the trolley for you, and you pick it off and put it in the back of the van. It's not every day we get stock, it's a couple of times a week.”
“Is the van fitted with a limiter so it can only do 50?”
“Yes, but if it actually does 50 you'll be going downhill. Most of the time it does 45. It's a 750cc diesel.” They went around the back of the shop and looked at the van. It looked like a BMW mini with a shorter bonnet and an elongated back for holding large amounts of cargo. “Can you take it down tomorrow?”

The next day Mr. Smith drove the van from the shop to the motorway. He turned the headlights on. The days were dark now. That's why food was so expensive. Farming could only be carried out near the equator. The entire South American rain forest had been chopped down to plant hundreds of miles of oats, rye and barley that were now used for bread. The old Canadian hard wheat would not grow in a world where an equatorial climate was more like Scotland had been in the twentieth century. He could tell that the tiny engine had been fitted with a limiter to stop the driver pressing the accelerator right down and revving the engine too hard. This conserved fuel even more than limiting the van to fifty miles per hour, but the van was sluggish and slow. Mr. Smith thought it was a good job he didn't have to accelerate out in front of anything else. That would have been dangerous in such a slow vehicle. The fact is the roads were deserted, there was no harm in waiting for a large gap in the traffic. There was just the occasional bus, or another mini van. Very occasionally there was a moped or a motorbike, or even more rarely, a car. Mr. Smith came to the motorway. He slowly accelerated to forty five miles per hour, keeping the van in fourth gear because of the slight hill. The sun came out. Mr. Smith's grandmother had told him of the old saying, red sky at night, shepherds' delight. Now it was red sky all the time. It was a little bit brighter now. He turned the headlights off. Oh no. Mr. Smith had forgotten to put the factor 25 on his face. The sun hurt. It was going to be a long drive to Hull with no sun tan lotion. What should he do? He could call in at the motorway service station and buy some factor 25, but that would cost more money than he was actually being paid to do this job. A little bit of sunburn wouldn't hurt, he decided. He would put up with it.

Mr. Smith drove into the warehouse at Hull. He got out of the van and took out his mobile phone. The shopkeeper had sent him a text message containing a list of all the things he had to pick up.
“I'm Mr. Smith,” he said to one of the warehouse assistants. “I'm a driver. I've come to collect my order.”
“Where are you from?”
“Chadwick Village, Yorkshire.”
“It's on the trolley.” The assistant led him to where the trolley had been put. “One item isn't on there. The shopkeeper wanted 25 tins of corned beef. The corned beef hasn't arrived yet.”
“The bloke delivering the corned beef says he'll be reaching Hull docks in five minutes,” interrupted the manager, waving another mobile phone. “And can we send the van down now? If you would like to wait.”
“Yes, I'll wait.”

A driver from the warehouse drove down to the docks. It wasn't more than a couple of miles. Here, food for the entire population of Yorkshire was delivered in rickety wooden motor boats. Gone were the days of the huge steel ships. There just wasn't that much of anything to be bought or sold anymore. Every half hour, something would arrive to be delivered to the warehouse in the mini van, which was painted with the warehouse logo. A battered looking cabin cruiser arrived. The van driver tooted his horn. The man in the cabin cruiser came closer to him, maneuvered the boat to the side and tied it with a rope to a steel bollard. The van driver climbed on board the boat.
“I used to smuggle drugs,” said the boat owner. “Food is more expensive than drugs now. Who can afford to buy this? It's a hundred pounds a tin. It'll be somebody's birthday, if they get one of those.”
“A big birthday, their eighteenth or their twenty first,” said the van driver. “It'll be somebody's wedding present, a tin of corned beef. The kind of thing you share at a wedding reception. Instead of a honeymoon in Ibiza, now they open a tin of corned beef. Two hundred tins.” Together the boat owner and the van driver counted the tins and put them in the van. They had to be counted when they went onto the van, they had to be counted when they were taken off. No one wanted to risk someone stealing a tin of corned beef.

A few hours later Mr. Smith arrived back at the shop. The shopkeeper came to help him unload the stock from the van.
“We'll put it in the store room,” said the shopkeeper. “I'll stack it on to the shelves tomorrow.”
Everything had to be counted. There were 200 bags of flour. There were 25 tins of corned beef. There were 40 tins of mushy peas and 40 tins of carrots. Most things now were tinned. The power cuts had made refrigeration impossible.
“Do you want some bread?” asked the shopkeeper, picking up a small loaf of bread. “The benefit people will be down on you like a ton of bricks if they find out you're working and claiming benefit at the same time.”
“They'd fine me.”
“If you're lucky. Some people go to prison. This bread's worth £25. A loaf of bread for a day's wages. Like it says in the good old book.”
“What good old book?”
“I'll email you one.”

Mr. Smith sat down around the candle lit pocket radio with his wife and family.
“How's that four day old bread?” he asked.
“It's moldy,” said Tony.
“There's not much mold on it,” said Mrs. Smith. “Just pick the mold off the edges.”
“I've got some new bread,” said Mr. Smith.
“Ooh,” said Mrs. Smith. “Where did you get that?”
“My new job.” He took out a plate. Mr. Smith cut some slices from the bread carefully and applied a good layer of candle wax and salt. “Tasty,” he said, biting into a piece himself and handing it around. His attention returned to the radio.
“Prime Minister, is this the end of the world as we know it?” the interviewer asked.
“That's a rather funny thing to say.”
“A quarter of children are under nourished, petrol's £8 a litre, there's no electricity, come on Prime Minister, what do you expect me to say?”
“The big volcanic eruption at Yellowstone Park in America has put solar power out of action, not very important in this country but very important on a world scale, production of biofuels has stopped due to the food shortages, every spare bit of agricultural ground must be used to grow food.”
“That doesn't stop the rich having their corned beef sandwiches, does it Prime Minister?”
“Only a small amount of land is used to produce corned beef. Oil production is down to 10% of what it was a hundred years ago.”
“What about nuclear power?”
“With the shortage of uranium, nuclear power stations are no longer economically viable.”
“What about hydrogen fusion?”
“We are building hydrogen fusion power stations but they're very expensive. We can't build very many.”
“What about coal?”
“Most of the cheap coal in the world has been used up.”
“Oh, come on, there's supposed to be enough coal in the ground to last four hundred years.”
“Yes, but at what depth? We're mining coal at greater depth than we ever have before, it's very expensive.”
“The South Africans make coal into oil. Why can't we?”
“It's very difficult to make coal into oil.”
“South Africa have done it for a hundred years.”
“The South Africans have a very rich supply of coal and they can only produce a small amount of oil for their own needs, South Africa is still short of oil. They're not producing enough to solve the present crisis.”

Mr. Smith turned on his mobile phone and began reading the file that he had been sent by the shopkeeper. It was a collection of verses from the Bible about the second coming of Christ.
“It's amazing what it says in here. 'The Sun will be red and the moon will not give it's light. A loaf of bread for a day's wages.' ''
“What's that then?” asked Mrs. Smith.
“It's a book the guy from work emailed me. It's definitely prophetic. There's Jesus talking in it as well.”
“That's interpretation,” said Mrs. Smith. The news continued on the radio.
“Siberia said they would not remove their warships and submarines from the polar region until they are given two more oil wells. An outbreak of influenza has claimed the lives of a further 50,000 soldiers stationed in Greenland. The Siberian government denied that the virus was genetically engineered.”
“War, famine and plague, that's what it says here,” said Mr. Smith, still looking at the mobile phone.
“There's always been war, famine and plague,” said Mrs. Smith.
“What, really?" asked Mr. Smith. "Do you think the sky's always been that colour?”