My Name is Stab

Chapter Three - The Cottage

They arrived in the early afternoon and the girls slept for a couple of hours, exhausted from their trip. When they woke, their Daddy was waiting for them and he sat them down at the kitchen table and talked to them in his firmest voice - the one that told them that he expected to be listened to.

"OK, girls, I've been really proud of you over the last couple of days. You've shown me that you understand that things are going to be difficult but I don't think you really understand yet just how difficult they're going to be."

He paused for a moment and let this sink in.

"If this was just a local thing, we'd have seen help coming in from outside by now: the army and planes and things. We haven't seen anything like that so I'm fairly sure the whole country is in the same boat. If this is really the case and no help is coming from the outside then three quarters of the people are going to be dead before the end of the year - mostly from starvation, illness and fighting over food."

His girls gasped and he allowed them a couple of seconds for that to sink in. They looked at each other then looked to their Mummy who confirmed his words with a sad nod.

"What we haven't told you, because you haven't needed to know it up until now, is that we have been keeping a fair bit of food squirrelled away here in the cottage for just this kind of emergency. That's what's down in the cellar." They had always been forbidden to go down there which, of course, made it mysterious and exciting.

"It was mostly your Mummy's idea," he went on, "and I just went along with it to keep her happy!" He smiled across at her. "A sort of insurance policy, if you like. It looks like that insurance policy is about to start paying out in a big way. Are you with me so far?"

They looked at each other then nodded back at him. They were too stunned to speak but they understood what he was saying.

"The first thing to think about, though, is that anybody who knows we have food here is going to try to take it off us. Remember, everybody is going to be starving. Our only chance of keeping hold of our food is if people don't know we're here. That means we have to be very careful in everything we do not to draw attention to ourselves. This means things like noise: quiet voices only, particularly if you're outside; light, only if all the curtains are carefully closed; fire: only at night when nobody will see the smoke. Everything we do, we have to think about it. We will keep reminding you and you must tell us if you notice anything that we are doing wrong."

He flashed them a quick smile.

"The other thing is that the food we have is not going to last forever - about three months - so anything we can do to stretch this out is good. Keep your eyes open for anything we might be able to eat - no matter how yucky..." another smile. "It's going to be better than starving to death."

Through the summer, they were OK. It turned out that Mummy and Daddy had deliberately chosen this out-of-the-way cottage with this sort of thing at the back of their minds. It had fresh water from a spring and there were half a dozen big gas cylinders, all full, for cooking and a little bit of heat.

Through the summer they didn't see anyone, except a couple of people down on the road a few miles away who wouldn't have been able to see them because they were hidden by the woods. It probably helped that Daddy had used a rope and pulleys to pull a fallen-down tree across the track and then they had moved prickly bushes - blackberries and things - to hide it even better.

It's quite surprising how much food you can find in the countryside if you look. Mummy had always been interested in plants and she had a couple of books on edible ones. There were fish in the stream and they learnt how to make fish traps - not as sporting as 'drowning worms' but it gets you to the food more easily. There were nettles (yuk) and dandelions and a dozen different sorts of salady things. There were blackberries and bilberries (yum), there were even hazelnuts and beech mast - but they had to be really careful about collecting those because it meant straying away from the cottage.

And, on one day, they found a sheep caught in some bushes near the top of the property. "You might not want to watch, girls," Daddy warned them as he collected a large knife from the kitchen then walked up the garden towards the sheep.

But Theodora forced herself to help. "I might need to do this myself one day," she explained. There was a lot of blood when Daddy had cut the creature's throat but it stopped struggling quite quickly. Presumably it was dead. She wanted to run away but she managed to make herself stay and keep watching.

The next problem was cutting it up into lumps they could cook.

It was a mess.

Daddy knew they had to hang it up and he was even ready for the horrible flow of inside bits when he cut it open but it was just terribly difficult to slice through the meat and bones and everything. He had axes and saws and knives and things but it just all became an impossible mess.

Eventually Theodora had to leave. She was going to be sick. By then she was sure that she would never, ever be able to do it herself.

But it didn't stop her from eating the mutton stew that night. They were, by then, all much too hungry to even think about refusing food when it was offered.

So they stretched the three month's of food into nearly six but eventually it started to run out. It was at dinner one evening - a very small dinner and the girls had noticed that Mummy was hardly eating anything - when Daddy announced that he would be making the journey down into town the next day to see if there was any food for sale.

"Will money be any use?" Jennifer asked. Theodora gave her a puzzled look but then she gradually started to understand the problem. Jennifer had always been the cleverer of the two.

"I've got some gold and silver coins," Daddy explained. "Hopefully they will still be worth something."

He gave the rest of the family an extra warm hug before setting off the next morning. Nobody said anything but Theodora could tell that he wasn't all that sure that he was ever going to make it back again.

So they were all very relieved to see him return late that afternoon. "I got a little bit," he told them with a sigh, "but nothing like as much as I'd hoped. I don't know what we're going to do." It was the first time that Theodora had ever seen him look really worried.

The problem was, he was nothing like worried enough.

Theodora's Mummy and Daddy loved her and her sister dearly. They had tried to prepare and did their best when things went wrong.

It's just that they didn't have the faintest clue about how terribly wrong things were going to go.