Chapter 1: Gramps of Bow Farm

Gramps had lived at Bow Farm ever since I've known him. To me, the post-war bungalow near the road was the farm. But I was assured that in his youth he lived in The Glade, where the old farmhouse had centred around the Victorian barns and animal buildings that were now out of sight behind a row of overgrown bushes in the next field. The traditional mixed farm had been allowed to fall into disrepair as Gramps had given up the labour intensive dairy herd and concentrate on buying and selling beef livestock.

He no longer raised the variety of crops he assured me had he had done in his youth. He 'played' at farming now, spending more time at the livestock markets than repairing fences.

I've respected Gramps all my life and even as a student in his final year at uni I can never have the character Gramps has.

I suppose he helped to make me what I am though he had hard uphill fight with a young lad, frightened to get out of his depth socialising. Being an only child doesn't give you much confidence.

I look up to my gramps. I'd never have the foresight he had or made the preparations he had.

The writing was on the wall for all of us. All the pundits had told us for three years there were biological weapons flying around. Some said modern Chinese contraceptive drugs for mass population control had been stolen and were being were being manipulated in the Middle East. Then in September reports emerged of wholesale annihilation of man and beast in the remote Naybandan wildlife refuge in Yazd province of Iran.

Reports received little verification until late October when rumours from various investigative journalists started to announce that medics who had responded to initial enquiries, AND their families were no longer anywhere available and neighbours reported them dead.

Of course we all took no notice except Gramps. I took no notice. I was studying hard, very hard.

That's me, Abba, Abba Shaw.

Don't ask!

Mum chose the name in memory of her Mum who had just died; it was her favourite pop group. Ever heard of them? No! They are or were, a hundred years ago, Swedish in case you don't know! And no, I've never listened to them, a matter of principal, well not purposefully though I have caught the odd refrain on the radio by mistake. My name, that's the only thing I have of Mum's family. And, in truth, I could have done without it a few times. It was not the first time they thought I was a girl with the name Abby. When I was sixteen and went into a new school, a sixth form college and even when I went to uni, my moniker* ended up in the list of girlies! Guess what that does for your self esteem!

How can a boy have a name like Abba?

And no, that name didn't help with girls either. Music goes in waves and theirs hit a trough when I was fifteen and kept on sinking. OK, I can't blame something else for my social inadequacies. Lets face, by nature, I'm rather shy and don't mind immersing myself in study.

I was aware of my shortcomings as young as ten and I thought joining a martial arts class would improve my rep. I insisted Mum take me to a local class. She had done her homework and selected Tai chi.

Typical!

Tai chi had such a peaceful intro and the many daily exercises were so slow and beautiful that even I forgot the defensive and aggressive aspects of the discipline until they started being introduced a few years later. That was after I moved up a couple of classes. I was about fifteen.

I've been doing that for the last seven years. Even so, my reputation took a nosedive when a few people in the university sports hall came in early and caught sight of me doing my graceful daily exercises. I always start off slowly.

That's enough of me, what I really want to tell you about is my Gramps and Bow Farm.

Over this last summer vacation it was no hardship to respond to Gramm's request to come and give Gramps a hand.

I did it every year. I'd done it last year too. Secretly, I hoped that he had the same group of Poles over to work for him as he had the previous year. He had had them renovating all the Victorian pigsties and barns, stables and byres in The Glade.

From something I overheard, Gramm had put him up to it and he was getting a larger crew this year but they weren't coming until I had gone back to uni.

There was one of them I really fancied the year before but having just bought Marcie an engagement ring, I was out of circulation.

That's the story of my life! Marcie leaving me in the lurch AND taking her ring and my hopes to meet up with Rzeka dashed because they were helping with the harvest in Poland this year.

Anyhow, I resigned myself to the fact she always hung around the leader of the group, Aleksandr, a great Polish lad. He had brought a larger work party over each year.

In all honesty I'm not boasting when I say that I think I'd disappointed Rzeka when she learned I had already got a girlfriend. And it wasn't until Gramm told me later told she liked me a lot that I knew she had even noticed me.

She must have been mistaken, Gramm that is. No-one as pretty as Rzeka would ever be interested in me. I used to tease her that she was too old for me with her hair almost gone white! She was a natural blonde bleached by the sun and I guess she was couple of years younger than I was.

Gramps would hire cheap eastern Europeans for working in The Glade for two or three months at a time. He'd pick them up at an airport and put them in the back of his van. Then, always at night, he'd bring them to The Glade where he'd have a whole team working. He'd work them hard, cash in hand, twelve hours a day, seven days week and at the end of their contract, he'd make sure he'd take them out again in the dark.

That way, no one local ever knew about the existence of The Glade, a secret-minded man was Old Gramps.

But this year, with all the trucks he had acoming and going, he'd delayed their contract until we'd stopped in September so there was neither Rzeka to tease nor Marcie's relationship to look to on my return to uni.

I tried to forget my selfish ex, Marcie. And the hard work Gramps insisted on did just that in making her relationship mean nothing to me.

After Marcie, I was determined to return to my final year at unvi and make an all-out effort to immerse myself in studies and prove I could get the First Class Masters my university offered. To get a better degree than Marcie, would satisfy myself that she was the fool for breaking off the engagement to better herself. Leaving to better herself, that's what she said, as if I was a dumbo!

In the meantime I was grateful for Gramps for being a slave driver. He helped me forget the whole lot!

We worked well together, Gramps and I.

Ostensibly, Gramps was a farmer but though he rented fields over the road and ran some beef cattle, his real true love was wheeler dealing*, always had been, always would be. I'm sure he wanted me to follow in his footsteps. The only trouble was; I was brought up by Mum to be law-abiding and a bit strait-laced. She would have been shocked if she knew what her father-in-law was teaching me. I was enjoying it, all the same.

Each day I drove a truckload or two of goods into The Glade and either left the whole trailer there or unloaded it with a fork lift.

"What are you doing with forty tonnes at a time of non-perishables we're hiding away?"

"I can see the way the wind's blowing." He'd reminisce about past good deals he'd made. "These shoes, I'll sell for three times their purchase price within the year, you see if I don't."

"Gramps, the days of war profiteering and the black market have passed. That was over sixty years ago."

"History always repeats itself," he quoted with a wry grin. There was rationing for everything the last war, clothing beds, furniture..."

And then as the economy deteriorated throughout the summer, I saw him make ready to make another killing. I was just a ruminating on this fact as we were waved on.

Concentrating on the road ahead, I drew away from the checkpoint. Slowly, I moved up the gears after we left the police behind, "Gramps, why did that policemen wave me on when he saw you?"

"Emergency, last Christmas Eve," he spoke succinctly, "Police toy collection, their store burnt up."

"And?

"Tammee O'Brien owed me one."

I was puzzled.

"The CEO of Toys on Earth."

Even I had heard of the multinational.

It was all in keeping with his philosophy; 'Don't collect on all your outstanding debts too vigorously, leave some in the pot.'

"That sergeant knew that if he noticed you had no HGV* licence he'd have a very upset Chief Constable for the rest of his career."

"But they were checking every other Heavy Goods Vehicle?"

"Forget it," he said. "Concentrate."

I drove carefully then, particularly around the narrow lanes near his home. Then into Bungalow field through his barn and up the steep incline out the other side. Here, in The Glade, the far side, was an enclave of a dozen fields, the lot surrounded by fierce, thick, thorny hedges. As I eased in, on the left lay the old stone farmhouse that backed onto the farmyard over beyond the building.

Stretching across in front of me, at right-angles to the farmhouse was that new stack of box-shaped straw bales. They were arrayed in a long half-rounded construction like an enormous prehistoric barrow* as high as the house. I had to make a hard right turn front of me to avoid it.

For the fifth time, I enquired as to the peculiar design of the stack of straw bales and he imparted the enticing rejoinder, "You'll know when the time's ready."

I did consider that the base was very much like another that had been laid in the front bungalow field. He'd said something like, "The trucks won't get stuck there will they?"

He directed me instead to the large lorry park and instructed, "Now, you reverse right next to the bottom trailer. I want you to use all your mirrors and set it no further than an inch away, there's no reason why you cannot do that."

Later he shrugged and said satisfyingly, "That's as good a bit of backing as I'll ever see."

I left my granddad in the cab as I put the trailer on its dolly wheels and uncoupled the electric cables and air brakes when it struck me that I was parking all these here because Gramps really was not up to it.

I knew the reason why we were doing it. He always had his finger in more then one pie. The deteriorating political situation had him stockpiling goods that he thought would be in short supply. I knew there were large underground diesel tanks that he had excavated, installed and covered up years earlier. I was also aware that he had leased the old service station on Temporring Road and I'd made a few night visits with hired tankers to top up all the storage tanks after he'd had a Manchester surveyor out to check on them. He was set to make a load on black market fuel if the suggested rationing ever did materialise. And it looked like such a decrepit unwanted place that nobody would expect it to have a gallon of fuel there.

I looked over the large lorry park and reversed this trailer full of canned tomatoes and tinned imported exotic fruits.

We were next to pick up cans of fish, sardines, mackerel, salmon, tuna; they would last for years.

How the heck was he going to drive all these trucks out? Was he going to wait until I had finished university? There were now over thirty stored in The Glade. Where I had parked up, right at the back of a new line, I saw the containers for the first time. They were on the other side of another, smaller, stack of straw bales. "Those containers. Are they empty?"

He laughed, "Nothing's empty here. You know me by now."

"How did you get them three high?"

He tapped his finger to the side of his nose as if all would be revealed in due time.

I never did find out. It was an intriguing problem which I never cracked.