Children finding their way

Many apologies for such a long absence - that old friend of mine, LIFE, came to stay and rather like those house guests in the old days of Jane Austin and Dickens just stayed and stayed:) LIFE is going to visit someone else , I hope, any day now but is going through that stupid ritual of just getting out of the door then remembering one last thing it forgot to mention. However, we are by the front door:)

So back to words, to writing and to this long and torturous process of The Children’s Tale, the first three were so easy to write in comparison.

Why the difficulty?

It wasn’t helped by the discovery that I was combining two stories in the one, two stories that didn’t really mesh very well. Stupid me!

That was last year, I had to untangle the two stories and reassemble them. I had been trying to write The Ancestor’s Tale but obviously my subconscious was telling me, or trying to, that the most obvious follow up to the three previous was a tale about how the children of our companions were going to manage in this world of want and war.

I have spent most of my working life with children, both privileged and not. In my travels around the world it is the children I have been watching. Mainly because the growth of baby to adult is so fascinating, the connections and conclusions they make so endlessly varied. And although I worry for all caught up in events beyond their controlling it is the children I worry for more.

So the children of my tale?

The Feral’s children would appear to be the privileged children, secure and fed. However, their fathers are at war and their responsibilities in the absence too high for their years. They are also, neither Feral nor Human, where do they belong? Where is their allegiance?

The mined-in settlements are fearful of the world outside and lacking knowledge, they have their own cultures formed over the 50 years of their confinement and with some troubling and disturbing history to absorb.How will they manage to assimilate with others.

The rag-tags are displaced,terrorized, many orphaned and alone.How will they find the trust so badly needed.

All have to find not only their place in this environment but, also need to help create a world they would wish to inherit, if they ever reach adulthood.

There is time for their ancestors to explain why and how all were in this predicament. Time enough for them to present their reasons and excuses. Their stories lie in a different volume.

So the weather is going crazy-what's the worst that can happen?

So the weather is going crazy

So the weather is going crazy-what's the worst that can happen?

It seems to many, this year, that the weather is going crazy. Abnormal events keep recurring as a tumble of dominoes.  Droughts, floods, gales and hurricanes. Of course we have always had them, but are they growing worse, more erratic?

 Life behind the mines would have been bearable for a while for those who started off with an agricultural or horticultural background, such as Blaisemill and Belacot, the first a communal self sufficient holding and the second a small farming community. For those without this knowledge a good supply of books and reasonable intelligence would maybe be enough to see a small community through a few years. There were many small communities who survived in The Sefuty Chronicles.

However, life, real life, has a habit of stacking bad fortune against a good. We are mostly, in the Western world, fortified against natural disasters; if there’s a bad growing season we have to spend more on food as prices rise, in a few words we can summon food across the globe to fill our empty shelves. If some particularly nasty bug, disease, or blight attacks our crops we have an endless array of chemical solutions to aid us, if we over graze our agricultural land we have an endless supply of chemical fertilizers to help us boost the yields

If these solutions run out?

What happens then behind those mines, when the sun doesn’t shine day after day after day, as happened here in the UK in the summer of 2012. Our farmers were brought to their knees and spiraling costs sent many out of business. 

How does the livestock cope when cold winds howl from the north and the east, when snow drifts into sold coffins for animals on the hillsides , when a whole generation of new lambs freeze hardly before they have drawn their first breath, as has happened in recent winters?

What happens to our hard working and intrepid farmers in the wet years, when rivers overflow and wash away the topsoil, or, as is happening this year in Somerset, the floods remain so long, all vegetation dies and there is no grazing, no crops for the next couple of year?

 The year your livestock succumb to disease such a foot and mouth or swine diseas?. Can you afford to keep livestock, if the food supplies are low? But, if you don’t have livestock and you can’t leave your area, because of land mines, what happens when the crops fail? The continuing effects of selling livestock in a famine can be seen year after year in those countries who already struggle on the edge.

In 2012 when it rained all summer I tried to sow seeds in the garden, they rotted before they could come up, the crop yield was low, miserable, I tried to gather what few crops there were, a matter of going out in sou'wester and gumboots. It was frustrating, irritating, but not actually catastrophic because the greengrocers in the village could fill in the gaps for me.

How long can we continue to rely on the artificial to keep the natural alive and thriving.?  We may be painting ourselves into a corner.

Behind the mines, a bad harvest, at the very least, means you’re lacking nutritionally, your energy levels will dip dangerously low and at worst means famine and eventual death from starvation. It is not hard to see how despair and desperation could lead to suicide or a complete giving up on any hope, or faith that rescue would eventually come.

When does one, in fact, give up on the rescue? When do you look around you and start to look for the components of an equation for life? When do you look at your available land, your available manpower, and begin to calculate just how large a population can be sustained on through the bad years.

When do you start putting a value on each person in the community?

Next week: How my character's dealt with the problem of population v food supply