THE H-BOMB GIRL by Stephen Baxter (beach books txt) 📕

can forget ration cards. They keep the fact that we get food secret, or everybody would want to be a nurse.

Also I’m hoping that Mum will turn up in the hospital. Where else could she go?

But she hasn’t shown up.

One mad woman tried to tell me a horror story, about a little boy she saw lying on his back in pale street. His little fingers were burning like candles. Fred shut her up.

*

Monday 24th December.

Over eight weeks since the bomb.

We’re burning the bodies. The doctors are getting worried about epidemics now. Typhoid, cholera. The priests make the Sign of the Cross over the big open graves. The scuffers have to stand around with guns to stop relatives trying to drag Mum or Dad or little Johnny back out again.

This greasy black smoke goes up from the pyres. You can smell it for miles.

Joel is working with one of the reconstruction squads. A hundred “volunteers” under a fireman. It’s awful work. Pulling down ruined buildings, by hand. Opening up cellars where people were baked under the firestorm. Flies buzzing. That sort of thing.

Joel hasn’t got much choice. If you work, if you’re strong enough, you get food. If you can’t work, you don’t get food. That’s the way it is.

Some people are still dying of the radiation sickness. It works itself out in all sorts of ways. For instance, you might lose the lining of your stomach so you can’t absorb liquids. You just dry out. You see all types in the hospital.

One doctor told me that a third of the population of Britain probably died when the bombs fell. Since then another third will have died from the radiation poisoning. And we, the last third, will have poison in the air and in the fields, in our blood and in our bones, for the rest of our lives.

Today, Fred and I drove into the city centre with an ambulance crew. One precious doctor. From Queens Drive we drove down Edge Lane. Army bulldozers had been down there before, to clear away the burned-out cars and rubble. We all wore masks and gloves. We carried buckets of paint to mark where the healthy people are, or where there are bodies, or where there is cholera or dysentery.

On the way in we saw a lot of people heading away from the city. All walking. Even if your car survived, there’s no petrol. Some have suitcases, wheelbarrows, supermarket trolleys piled up. The men carry weapons, like cricket bats. Nobody much younger than me, nobody much older than Fred. The doctors say the radiation sickness and the epidemics and the hunger and the cold are taking the babies and the old people first.

A mile or so inside Queens Drive you can start to see the effects of the firestorm, where the big fires all joined up. Even so, bits survive. Houses here and there, almost untouched. Spared by chance.

In the heart of the city, the catholic cathedral, Paddy’s wigwam, is a skeleton on its crypt, its big stained-glass funnel melted. Some of the big classical buildings, like Saint George’s Hall, are still standing. Roofs bashed in, columns fallen. They look like Roman ruins. In Whitechapel and Church Street the shops got shaken to pieces. Glass everywhere. Melted shop window dummies. NEMS is gutted, burned out, stacks of pop records turned to black sludge.

A lot of the telephone poles are still standing. They are all blackened on one side.

And the flash was hot enough to scorch brick and concrete. You can see shadows, outlines of cars or buses, caught in that second, burned into the walls. In one place I saw the shadow of a little boy with his leg outstretched, and you could see the football a yard in front of his toe. Of the boy and the ball, nothing is left.

The Pier Head is destroyed. The docks are rubble, miles of them. One Liver Building tower is still standing. The clock stopped at 11:34. It must have been a bit fast. Bern laughed at that when I told her.

I’m making a list, of people I haven’t heard about yet, dead or alive.

Nick O’Teen.

Mickey Poole. Bert Muldoon. Paul Gillespie.

Billy waddle. Bernadette cares about him. She has to. My teachers.

Little Jimmy.

The Queen. Winston Churchill. Harold Macmillan.

Roger Hunt. Joel’s hero. Plays for Liverpool.

Beatle John.

Mum.

Dad.

*

Tuesday 25th December 1962.

Christmas Day.

A priest tried to hold a Mass in the hospital car park. Hardly anybody went. No one’s got the heart. Half the priest’s face was burned away, and he could hardly say the prayers.

Fred gave me a bit of cake. Who knows where he got it from.

I shared the cake with Bernadette and Joel.

Joel is thinking of joining the army. Well, they’re recruiting. You can never have too many soldiers nowadays. That’s where the food is going to be, he says. That’s where the power will be, in the future. Joel has a brain. He might do well.

“Now we are all ‘hibakusha’,” he says. That’s what they called the survivors of the bombs the Americans dropped on Japan at the end of the war. He isn’t much like the CND-badge kid he was a couple of months ago.

Bern has had a miscarriage.

There’s a lot of that about. My periods have been funny too. Something to do with losing red blood cells because of the radiation.

“The bomb got my baby,” Bern says.

It was a week ago. She kept it to herself. Her face is hard as stone.

Now she’s leaving the city. “We’re all just starving to death. Maybe I can find something to eat out in the country. I’ll skin a sheep.”

Joel laughed. “And then what? Become a farmer? With those nails?”

She’s going, no matter what we say. She always was the hardest of us in some ways, the strongest. She faces things the way they are, then deals with them.

It will be hard, though. It’s been cold since the bomb.

We kissed Bern goodbye. She said that if I ever ran into Billy waddle