Chapter 5

Green Grass of Home

Betty

2037

Betty wasn't a naturist. That was a crappy thing to be. That was just like being a member of the National Trust or a Civil War re-enactment society. But she did make a point of wearing clothes as rarely as possible. She was proud and unashamed to assert herself as both Vegetarian and Green. And these were words that were definitely written with capital letters.

In this respect she was very much as one with everyone else who lived in the Broad Oak Grove commune.

Of course, when the builders of Ashton Lovelock named the street there was no grove and certainly no oaks, however broad. Like all names in this town, it was chosen to invoke a rustic memory that bore no relation to a reality either living or dead. The squat in which Betty lived was one of many houses that had failed to find a buyer in the uncertain housing market. It was now unsold and, were it not for the tender loving care of Betty and her friends, it would have already decayed to the state of nature from which it had emerged just over twenty years earlier.

Betty was obliged to wear clothes whenever she left home to shop at Cost Cutters, but she was under no moral imperative to be nude. It was more an eco-awareness thing. The clothes industry was just as bad as every other exploitative multinational industry. It despoiled the environment and oppressed the poor simply to supply consumers in wealthy countries with clothes that were both cheap and cheerful.

In truth, it wasn't that clothes were especially cheap these days. Neither, for that matter, was food, fuel or very much else. Betty was no more able to afford much in the way of luxury than anyone else in the commune. The benefits system was like a points system nowadays. Only those who could clearly demonstrate that they couldn't find work would get any state subsidy for the luxury of not working, while at the same time there was a rapidly shrinking pool of employment opportunities. The only way that anyone in the Broad Oak Grove commune could make money was by selling stuff at rock and dance festivals. Otherwise, their survival was dependent on second-hand clothes, food parcels and soup kitchens.

The supermarket shelves were heaving under the weight of prohibitively expensive goods. The last oil crisis had made fuel more expensive and energy conservation more necessary, but the media was portraying it more as an economic rather than as an environmental issue. Nevertheless, those cut-price supermarkets that made cheapness their principal virtue—and Cost Cutters was about as cheap as you got—were now championing their Green credentials. But Betty wasn't taken in. Why should ordinary people have to suffer when the rich could still fly across the oceans just to get from one major city to another? What did that do for the world's sharply declining reserves of oil? What was so green about genetically modified potatoes that never rotted? Or gene-spliced pigs that could barely waddle with all that surplus blubber? Or those Frankenstein varieties of fruit and vegetables being generated in the laboratory? What about the obscene commercials that urged everyone to spend spend spend while the sea-levels rose, the hurricanes got worse and drought gripped so much of Africa?

Betty's conscience was clear. Well, almost. She did have a weakness for chocolate bars—especially those new brands coming from China. They tasted so good, despite the lethal array of chemicals they contained and the likelihood that the confectionery's ultimate origin was a gene-spliced mutation in a vast agricultural warehouse on the banks of what little flowing water was left in the Yangzi River.

The walk back from the supermarket to Betty's commune was over a stream whose name was obscured by graffiti and whose flow, like all rivers and streams these days, was held back behind a wall that was designed to act as a flood defence. These days, when England wasn't suffering from drought it was under a deluge of heavy rain.

It was the flood defences that were the most worrying signs of irreversible climate change. The water level generally subsided a few days after a heavy downpour, but it would leave homes in low-lying areas like Broad Oak Grove in a very sorry state. It was for this practical reason that the houses on Broad Oak Grove were uninsured and uninsurable and now only fit for squatting.

Betty's grandparents lived by the sea in Sussex, so Betty actually knew a lot about coastal defences. Not that you could see the sea these days. The view was obscured behind a three metre high sea-wall that had been erected to protect the South Coast from the rising sea level and the occasional storm surge. Nowadays almost all Britain's seaside resorts and other vulnerable points on the coast were protected like that. Even London might soon be similarly protected, especially since the failure of the Greenwich Flood Barrier a couple of years ago that had admitted flood water into the heart of the City of London.