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so happy,
sitting on the sand in the golden light of the sunset. It makes me
smile, but I always end up in floods of tears.
    Morgan had gone off somewhere, rather
to my relief, so I ate breakfast alone, feeling glum. It was lucky I
was meeting the others for the group forage mid-morning; it would
take my mind off David. I’ve never told them about him, not
even Claire. I couldn’t bear their sympathy.

    When Morgan reappeared just before it
was time to go he was stripped down to jeans and a tee shirt with
dark patches of sweat on it. He’d found the gym in the basement
and been working out with weights by candlelight. Ten minutes later
after he’d changed we set off in a light snowfall, me wearing
my old black ski suit and holding the rope of my roof box trailer,
which slid along behind like a faithful hound. I told him about the
excavation on the way. He listened, pacing beside me without saying
much, scanning the area as watchful as a commando on patrol expecting
trouble.
    Nearly a year ago, we’d
researched and discussed the best place to dig. Old Street west of
the roundabout won, as it has a chemist, a clothes shop, Argos and a
supermarket. Nowhere else nearby had as useful a mix close together.
Even Nina agreed without arguing. Then we started digging. We kept at
it for two days of gruelling slog before we came to our senses. Paul
turned up on day three with a piece of paper covered in figures and
diagrams. He’d worked out we would need a trench two metres
wide and over twenty metres long to accommodate stairs reaching to
ground level. Approximately 420 cubic metres of snow would need to be
removed, meaning that if seven of us shifted two cubic metres each
per day, it would take sixty days. But he doubted we could move that
much; just getting the snow out of the excavation would get more and
more laborious the deeper we went. We’d spend most of our time
hauling buckets of snow up the stairs.
    We stood around, crestfallen. Paul
diffidently suggested a better idea would be to break into the block
of flats above the shops, at the western edge of the building where a
sort of tower sticks out of the surface, find a way down to the
ground floor, and from there, work from shop to shop, making a short
tunnel through the snow where necessary. There was a long thoughtful
pause while each of us wondered why we hadn’t come up with this
two days ago. When we investigated, we found a door leading to stairs
which ran right the way down to another emergency door at pavement
level, next to the Co-operative supermarket.
    Still, once the plan had been put into
action, we entered a new era of comparative luxury. Before, we relied
on supplies from homes we broke into, which was a lot more hit and
miss. Now, I explained to Morgan, we just do that independently, as
an extra, and to give us stuff to trade.
    “So who’s in charge? Who
makes the decisions?”
    “We all do. We decide things
together.”
    “And you reckon that works?”
    “Mostly. Especially if Nina’s
not there. Archie, that’s her husband, is fine on his own, but
if she’s there he generally feels he has to support her.”
    One of the few times he hadn’t
supported her was when she got everyone to a meeting without Greg,
and said he shouldn’t have a vote. None of us agreed to this.
Archie said gently that he could understand her viewpoint, but felt
one person, one vote was fair; we were all in this together. And
honestly, Greg’s views are generally as sensible as anyone
else’s.
    We’d arrived at the entrance.
Before we went down the stairs, I pointed out the flat roof of the
block of flats above the shops we were about to visit, which sticks
out less than a metre above snow level. We cleared this of snow, and
painted a huge sign, white on the black surface, saying HELP PLEASE
RESCUE US. This was one of the first things we did as a group. The
idea is to attract the attention of any aircraft flying overhead,
though it seems obvious to me things are in a