The Last Bike Ride - Part 2 Chapter 10/15

Part 2
Part 2

Chapter 10

Harriet Warman was clearing out the kitchen cupboards of their new home, while her husband Rob was upstairs fitting a towel rack in the bathroom.
She came across an old copy of the Bournemouth Echo, nearly ten years old. It was time for a coffee she thought, so she took Rob’s favourite mug up to him and then sat down and flicked through the old paper. There was a big section in the middle, devoted to the 10th anniversary of the Bomb, as the nuclear attack on London had become known.
Her first husband had died on that day and she had ignored any articles about it for the first few years after, but gradually she began to read about the horror of it and the way other families had been affected. She glanced over some of these local stories and then started to read one:
Steve Martin, 56, father-of-four, was found dead on the morning after the Bomb, just a short distance from home.
His wife, Juliette, told the Echo that he had attempted to ride 80 miles back to his family on the West Cliff. She told of him making a call to her to say he had witnessed the mushroom cloud and had assumed it was a nuclear attack.
‘That’s creepy,’ Harriet thought to herself, but decided to keep the paper anyway, ‘and it can’t have been far from here.’
They had just moved down to Alum Chine from near Basingstoke. Rob had got a new job at the big JDG bank in Bournemouth and they had managed to get their 13 year-old sons, Peter, into Bournemouth Academy, and their 9 year-old Sam, into the local St Michael’s primary school. Harriet had enjoyed being a primary school mum again and was hoping to get involved with the school in some way. She had been particularly impressed with the Head, Bob Reagan.
He had been offered more senior posts at other, bigger, schools, but had decided long ago to dedicate himself to this school.
There had been a huge influx of people into the town in the immediate aftermath of the Bomb. Bob Reagan helped accommodate as many children as possible, of all school years, from those families.
Five years later, he was ahead of the game in preparing for the baby boom caused by couples comforting each other on the night of the Bomb. There was huge pressure on the Reception year, but Bob Reagan had set up a PortaKabin Reception campus in the school grounds, and had arranged deals with some of the local hotels to use their facilities as temporary overflow class-rooms. He had recruited plenty of staff in advance, and by the time of the boom, St Michael’s was the best prepared primary school in the area.
The house the Warmans had just moved from was on an estate in Newbury, with houses as their front view and houses at the back on the other side of the garden fence. Harriet hadn’t particularly liked living there and when Bob got the chance of a new job in Bournemouth she encouraged him to take it so that they could make a fresh start in a new area. She would miss their friends, especially those she knew from her first marriage who had helped during her first months of widow-hood.
She looked out at their new view, across the bay with the Needles to the left and Old Harry’s Rock to the right, and knew that they had made the right move – it was certainly better view than the mundane views from their last house! This was a fresh start for all the family.
They were going to have a great summer, she hoped, before the boys started at their new schools in September. She also hoped that her older daughters, both in Canada now, would be able to make it over during the summer.

***
All around the world there were changes, and outlooks were what changed the most.
Religion never recovered after the attack on London. Previously, people would have turned to religion after disasters, but churches emptied. Agnostics became atheists.
The religion to be most affected was that of Islam. Of the fifteen million people killed by the London Bomb, almost two million of them had been Muslim. All around the world Muslims turned against the fundamentalists. They either turned in every jihadist unit to the authorities, or had taken their own retribution. Mosques were left with only the dedicated believers, madrassas were closed down, and a new order evolved.
This time, the new world order would be more than a theoretical change.
Within months of the Bomb, agreement had been reached to destroy every nuclear device in existence. Even North Korea and Israel were made to see that there was another way. A Palestinian state was formed and peace spread throughout the Middle East.
Relations improved between India and Pakistan. Even after the devastation in England, there were still many in the Indian government willing to take revenge in the form of an atomic strike on Pakistan. Even without being attacked directly with an atomic device, many Pakistanis had died as the atomic cloud from their strike on the Indian troops had spread over the border regions.
Public pressure finally brought sense to the politicians, and both sides were the first to declare their intent to decommission their nuclear arsenals.
Defence budgets were globally slashed. The vast amount of money that had gone into defence had been diverted to projects to save and educate people, rather than kill them.
Europe’s attitude against GM crops had changed allowing research, and then, distribution of drought-resistant seeds to the areas of the world most prone to drought. Famines in those parts of the world began to be alleviated.
With the health of people there being improved, it was predicted that population growth would slow. Before, rural families in drought- and poverty-stricken regions would have had several children in the knowledge that some would die. With enough food from regular crops, they would be able to have much smaller and more efficient families, and be able to rely on their cash-rich farms to fund their children’s education. Those children were more likely to go on to lead urban lives with smaller families.
The giant oil companies knew that they couldn’t fight the world’s need for other fuel sources and so helped research into new fuels such as beryllium oxide that had been proven to be safe and efficient.
Those companies also directed their expertise into other growing markets, especially the development of the new industrial materials which had been discovered in the years before the Bomb.
In America, three friends from university had eschewed following in the military footsteps of previous generations of each of their families, and had instead developed an idea they had as students. With financial help from one of the more enlightened oil companies, they had managed to produce a viable electric-vehicle battery. Their battery had the capacity to power a car at speeds which normally-powered vehicles could reach, but was small and light enough to take up only the space of an internal-combustion engine.
The business they formed together grew rapidly, giving them the foundation to crack another long-standing vehicle-propulsion dilemna. The lightweight battery had been a great innovation, but they really wanted to solve the problem of storing hydrogen safely within a steam-powered car. When they did, it was such a simple solution that they couldn’t believe how the formula they used hadn’t been found in the past. Steam offered plenty of instant, and more importantly, clean power. Their discovery made their company, Custer Cleaver Krunt, a household name worldwide, and its fame ensured that not even BBC radio presenters could mispronounce its name.
In Britain, an even bigger transformation took place. Initially, the after-math of the Bomb had to be dealt with. With the loss of central government guidance, local governments and councils worked together to keep the nation moving.
A wide exclusion zone was created around the devastated area which was once London. The M25, the London Orbital motorway, soon became overgrown with weeds, dotted with the rusting wrecks of cars, vans, lorries and coaches left from the night of the Bomb. Animals from the fields alongside the road gradually occupied the empty hulks of the larger vehicles for shelter.
The motorways feeding into the M25 were truncated at junctions near the exclusion zone perimeter, and if anyone had viewed the zone from the air they would have seen just a lifeless spiders-web of grey-green concrete.
To the west of the zone there were other road systems to cope with the displaced traffic, but to the east there were no River Thames crossings.
A plan was soon devised to build a new crossing, the biggest river-crossing that the country had seen, across the Thames between Kent and Canvey Island in Essex. While it was being built a huge ferry operation was put in place.

***
The strong southerly winds, forecast for the day of the Bomb, hit with a vengeance the following day and moved the atomic cloud north and out over the North Sea.
In the path of that cloud would have been Steve’s sister, Susan, and her partner, Ray, but they had been away in Yorkshire. They had each driven a coach from their company, taking a group of pensioners on a tour of the Moors.
It was clear that they wouldn’t be able to return to their home in Suffolk so they remained in the North. When they heard about the exodus back to Poland and other eastern European countries, of the many thousands of migrants who now wanted to return home to safety, they realised that they could have a share of this opportunity.
Susan and Ray set up a new home in Newcastle and had a steady business, using the two remaining coaches from their fleet, transporting those emigrants back to their home countries. Ray was upset that he wouldn’t see his beloved vintage coach ever again. He enjoyed the work it gave him when it was used for weddings and films – it seemed more like a relaxing hobby than work.
It wasn’t long before he found an even older vintage coach, in even better condition, and he was soon driving newly-weds from church to reception again, with Susan organising the trips.
Before the Bomb, most people would have been glad to have seen the back of the east Europeans, but there was now plenty of work for everyone, including foreign construction workers, as a huge programme of building began.
The fall-out took years to deal with, but after the immediate effects had been controlled, something emerged from the ashes.
Not many missed the politicians of before the Bomb. There was no desire to see a new group of the same.
There was no desire for another monarchy, either. The Queen had died shortly after the Bomb, while still up in Scotland, and her sole survivor, the Duke of York, met a grizzly end in Saudi Arabia.
Princess Fellatia’s father had offered him his hospitality for as long as he wanted and the Duke settled in to life with the princess. His comfortable exile lasted until he was caught in bed with one of the princess’s maids.
Fellatia had ordered two of her father’s guards up to their room who both grabbed the Duke from behind while she spoke to her maid.
“What do you think you were doing, Mina?” she demanded, speaking in their local Arabic language.
“I’m sorry, your highness, he forced me to do it. I thought the room was empty, but he just came out from the shower and threw me on to the bed. I’m so sorry,” she sobbed.
“OK, don’t worry, Mina, I believe you,” said Fellatia, now speaking in English so the Duke could understand.
“So, you think you can go behind my back, did you, and rape one of my maids?”
“You’re going to believe that servant’s word against mine?”
She took a huge sword from one of the guards, and said,
“Yes, she’s been loyal to me for many years. Do you have any last words?” she asked, as she touched the sharp blade on the back of his neck.
“Giving head, and taking head. You’ve got class, I’ll give you that,” said the Duke, maintaining his Royal dignity, but with the weakest of smiles.
“Oh, cocky to the end, eh?” replied Fellatia, “well, let’s see what we can do about that.”
Speaking again in her own language, she turned to the guards and said,
“OK, one of you hold him up near the end of the bed, and I want the other one of you to grab his foreskin and pull that little thing over the bed-rail.”
There was just enough of the Prince’s rapidly-shrivelling member to grab hold of and with it stretched across the brass rail the princess, with an expert swish of the sword, cut it off. She let him scream in agony for a full minute, as blood spurted from his shortened organ.
This was clearly not the first time she had dealt with an unfaithful lover. With the guard still firmly grabbing hold of the Prince from behind, the other guard, following a signal from the princess, kneed him in what was left of his genitalia and, as he doubled up, Fellatia, with another swish of the sword, this time clean through the Prince’s neck, brought the House of Windsor dynasty to an end.
She then calmly reached for her phone to call her furniture suppliers and ordered a new bed.
Back in Britain, a group of young innovators had been pulled together – not by anyone in particular, but by the common good acting as some sort of magnet, attracting this group together. These were all leaders in their fields, who were now dedicated to re-building not only the hole in the economy left behind by the destruction of London, but also the spirit of the nation which had also taken a battering. They had met several times over the two years following the Bomb to form a revolutionary plan.
In the meantime they had encouraged a new outlook for the nation. People started to wake up to the fact that they had been left behind by other countries.
Funds were poured into education, with the money going to fund teaching staff and buildings, and not getting wasted on the expensive management consultants and focus-groups as it had pre-Bomb. Education became ‘cool’ and something to be proud of, instead of being fashionably shy of as it had been before. There was a wave of enthusiasm to get the country back on its feet.
Plans were put in place to put the utilities of the nation back into the hands of the people. Private companies were banned from controlling the essentials that the population needed – water, gas, electricity, transport and other supplies were to be controlled centrally, but without the waste of previous nationalised industries.
Those who worked hard were allowed to benefit financially, according to their worth. There would be no more reward for failure which was beginning to destabilise the country in the years just before the Bomb.
The unrelenting divisive capitalism of those years was replaced by a more realistic and socially-just form of society, which anyone could benefit from if they were willing to contribute their skills and effort.
The Martin girls had certainly embraced the new energy sweeping the country. Feeling unshackled, following the death of their father, they, and many others of their generation, switched away from their television- and celebrity-obsessed world and developed a thirst for knowledge.
As these youngsters started having their eyes and minds opened, they realised just how they had been duped over the years, being made to believe that the only way to succeed was to be a celebrity.
Nikki Martin was the first of them to see the opportunities and told her Mum and sisters one mealtime.
“Look, the world is there for the taking. We can be whatever we want. And you Mum, you’ve seen what’s going on down here. You can take advantage of the boom down here.”
Florence graduated as sports psychologist graduate amongst the best in her year and was in demand from all over the sports industry. She chose football, and was soon working with the best players in the country. Her own game, mediocre before the Bomb, blossomed as she dedicated more of her spare time to it, and the potential she showed as a girl was fulfilled as she reached her mid-twenties.
But she could see the writing was on the wall for the game and the pampered, over-paid stars she was trying to help. They didn’t want help to prepare; they were above that, they thought. But their results proved they weren’t. Florence left the game she had loved since a child; disillusioned with what it had become and what it would likely turn into.
She found out there was a position with the country’s exciting bunch of possible leaders to work on a project they were fine-tuning before its launch.
Sophie changed track at school and made her way through Art college before progressing her career as an art critic. She started a business organising art exhibitions and worked hard to establish her company at the top of the industry.
Her own work could have given her a very comfortable life, but she was happy just having it as a hobby. She travelled the world and met and loved some of the most desirable men, but she was drawn back home eventually and married her friend from school days, Rhys, himself a leading expert in the new engineering materials that had been developed since the Bomb.
Michelle worked hard with her drama and dance but, just like her Aunt Susan, many years before, snapped her Achilles tendon at dance college. There was no future in dance for her after that, but she shifted her target to the world of theatre and screen writing. Having ignored the library of books at home for so long, she became a bookworm after the Bomb and studied hard for English at school. After her injury, she switched to university and studied English there. She became one of her generation’s leading screenwriters.
Her spare time wasn’t wasted getting wasted either. She became one of the country’s best sailors and a skilled pilot. She moved in with her flying instructor, Greg, and had two boys with him, Tim and Billy. She split her time between their house in Yeovil, her flat at home in Bournemouth, where she could write in peace, and wherever around the world that the film studios needed her. With Michelle’s help, Greg developed the flying business at Yeovilton, and had two executive jets which were always in demand. Life was good for them.
And Nikki. She dropped out of Business college to help Juliette build up a property portfolio. Bournemouth became even more desirable as the JDG bank expanded rapidly to cope after its London offices were destroyed.
She sat her Mum down one day and said,
“Right Mum, you’ve got that money from Grandma and Grandad’s wills and I’m going to help you make it work for you. We’re all going to make some money and then I’m going to train as a teacher.
This is what you’ve always wanted to do, but Dad was holding you back. He was nervous about investing, and he was the world’s worst procrastinator, but he had some great plans, which you probably don’t know about.”
“You know he kept everything to himself, Nikki. I only ever found out about things from you. If only he had talked to me we could have all got along much better.”
“But Mum, you wouldn’t listen to him. You weren’t interested, and you didn’t trust him, either. You were always suspicious, and thought that every woman he spoke to, even the ones in call-centres in India, were a threat to you.”
“He didn’t go astray Mum, he told me. I don’t even think he knew how to. Do you remember Tilly from school? Well, her Mum managed to get Dad to give him a lift home and she couldn’t of made it more obvious that she wanted him. He either didn’t want to or was just too stupid to not notice the signs.”
“And that driving job he had with the bank. He was just managing to pay the bills, but it didn’t have to have been like that. We could have had such a good life when we moved down here, but he didn’t know how money worked. That’s why he was like he was in those last years.”
“Look Mum, this is what I thought we could do.”
Nikki convinced Juliette that her plan would work, and it did. In just a couple of years they had built up a very profitable property company and were making a fortune.
They also developed their family house, number 27 as it came to be known, in the way Steve had planned. They had found his drawings, which Nikki had seen some years before. Juliette had been against creating a huge ground floor flat, but the plans were very convincing, and it proved to be a great place for her to live, with plenty of room for her grandchildren to play.

***
Florence settled in to her new position, surrounded by some of the most vibrant minds around. There was feverish excitement on the day of the new project. The launch was in the conference centre in Birmingham.
No one knew who was going to be presenting the launch; it had even been kept secret from those closely involved. People like Florence would soon learn what they would be working with over the following months, or maybe, years.
It was time. The background music stopped, as did all the chatting – there was silence. The curtains opened, and there before them was a rotating head on a plinth. As it rotated it appeared to change from race to race, and from male to female, child to teenager, and through the ages until very elderly.
Then a voice spoke:
“Good afternoon everyone. This is probably not what you’ve been expecting. You were probably waiting to see your new leaders in person, maybe looking like the politicians we have known for centuries.
We’re in a different world now. The Bomb was the catalyst for something new and very different. Do we really want another posturing Prime Minister who promises a land of honey for everyone, but who only produces one for himself and his like-minded friends? I don’t think so. Someone who feels that starting wars is the only way that they will be remembered? Not any more, we’ve had enough of wars, I think.
Around the world, good people have come together to listen to what the people want, really listen, and we’re seeing the results already. Some of those leaders are here with us today and I’d like to thank them for coming to see how Britain is going to be run from now on.
In this age of the Internet we are able to communicate all around the world together. Here, in Britain, we’re going to take that a step, a very big step, further. From now on, the country will be governing itself by creating, and voting for, policies on-line.
For example, there is a big debate about where our new capital should be. Many think it should be here in Birmingham; just as many would like it to turn back history and return to Winchester. We will soon be able to find out what the people want, and you might even decide that we don’t even need a capital!
Who will be our leader, you might well be asking. Well, it’s me. This rotating head before you, representing everyone in the country as it turns, will be the country’s figurehead. And I’m just a computer-generated voice speaking the majority view of our people. From now on, there won’t be an expensive Prime Minister with a retinue of government officials flying all around the world. The world can talk to me right here, as I can to them. It’s you, the people, who will be talking; you’re the ones who count. So, vote for me! Thank you.”
The applause went on for several minutes, with people, complete strangers, crying and hugging each other.
Florence sat down again. She was sure that this was what her Dad had thought of many years before. She went outside to call Nikki, who was bound to remember.
Nikki said,
“Yes, he did come up with a crazy plan like that, but it made a lot of sense when I thought about it more. Why did you ask about that?”
“I’ll tell you later, just keep it to yourself for now. Bye, Nikki.”
Florence’s skills were in demand as the new plan was implemented, and she made her base in Birmingham. She also bought a flat overlooking Fistral Bay in Newquay, in Cornwall, where she tried to spend most weekends surfing. She didn’t even have to get out of bed to look at the state of the surf in the morning, and she could look across to the Headland hotel where her love of the sea first started during some of her childhood holidays.
It was here in the bay that she met her first true boyfriend. She kept Jake a secret from her friends away from Newquay and even from her family. As far as she was concerned it just kept things smooth, and they enjoyed a great life down there.
Whenever she needed peace, to work on a project for example, she came back to her flat at number 27 and was happy to talk with everyone there about every other aspect of her life other than Jake.

***
And so, the country emerged from the Bomb a lot stronger and better in so many ways.