Playing the disaster game
PERSONAL COLUMN SIMON RAVEN
Whenever I must drive long distances alone, I have recourse to fantasy. Sometimes this is topical in kind. The other day I amused my- self from London to King's Lynn with devising regulations and procedure for the Olympic Copulatics, an event which was to be put on in much the same way as the Gymnastics and would include Standing Poses, Obligatory Figures and a Free Style Sequence. In other recent entertainment for the road, I have featured as a Trinity don converting Prince Charles to atheism and as a Minister of Edu- cation closing down Essex University.
Over the years, however, my great stand-by has been the Disaster Game. First, choose your disaster : an H-bomb on London, perhaps, effective over a sixty-mile radius; or a science fiction catastrophe, such as the sudden death of all crops or livestock; or, more plausibly, a bloody revolution (never mind of what precise political brand). For the purposes of the game, one hears about the disaster at Point X, where the car wireless blurts out a brief message of horror and then goes dead. The next step is Immediate Action. Luckily, there is sanctuary to be had at Point Y (one's actual destination, of course): so how to get from X to Y without encountering nuclear fall-out (where is the wind?), panic-stricken mobs, piles of dead cows, or road blocks manned by officious policemen or (worse) by screaming rebels?
Except in the case of SF agricultural disaster, which makes urban routes preferable, analysis of the known factors usually leads to my taking a long and pleasant diversion by '13' roads and even humbler ones. (Until you have actually tried this, you can have no idea how many passable and well-signed roads there are which do not appear in the AA book). It is, of course, impossible to avoid crossing important roads from time to time, but over this one must use one's tactical judgment: one's potential way- layers, whether police, insurgents or the local military, will only have limited manpower; which crossroads will they guard? My per- sonal convention is that if I have chosen an intersection which turns out to have a garage or an AA box on it, then I have chosen badly and will be stopped and examined. Which side are they on, these scruffy-looking soldiers? What story shall I tell? Is there an officer with them? Will he let me through . . .?
But as the drive continues, the immediate questions of tactics and evasion are often for- gotten, while I turn instead to the far more fascinating long-term problems which the situa- tion suggests. Whereas my immediate object is to reach safety at Point Y, my long-term object must be to survive, possibly for years, uncon- taminated, properly fed, decently entertained, and, I should add, undiscovered. For I'm afraid that this game, as I play it, is anti-social; in case of revolution, I must hide myself away because revolutionaries of whichever wing would instantly condemn me, either as a stink- ing reactionary or a filthy liberal; and in all other cases, I prefer a selfish independence to sharing the general lot and assisting in what- ever communal efforts might be made to mitigate calamity. In any case, my assumption is that chaos will be so extreme that for months at the least no such efforts will be possible. All
in all, then, three main questions are posed : 1) Where to find permanent and remote-sanc- tuary (as opposed to the temporary shelter for which I am now heading)?
2) How to move myself and copious supplies, including alcohol and books, unobtrusively into it?
3) How to gather up three friends for pur- poses of conversation and bridge?
One thing is very plain. None of this is pos- sible now. It would all have to have been arranged weeks beforehand, and my friends and myself, to be sure of getting there safely, would have to have arrived at Castle Omega (my fanciful name for the bolt-hole) certainly not later than the day before the disaster occurred. It will be seen at once that the main interest of my game has now shifted entirely... from mere ad hoc adventure to an elaborate exercise in anticipation and logistics.
But there is a limit to what one can anticipate. No man can provide against SF enormities, and even millionaires are hard to put to it to con- struct effective anti-H-bomb hide-outs. For the sake of likelihood, then, and to confine the game within manageable compass, let us assume that the disaster anticipated is political or economic, and that it will lead to civil war or similar social upheaval. We have sniffed the air, we have prophesied woe, and we have given ourselves three months (it is now 1 June) to prepare against it. Just one more convention: we have only £10,000 to spend; and the value of that is dropping daily, so that for every week which passes prices are deemed to rise by two per cent (compound).
First things first: the site of Castle Omega. If this should be remote, it should also enjoy natural resources. Or should it? An area rich in crops or cattle will attract marauding groups or even whole armies. No; an unfertile area will be much more secure; and to provide food beyond what we hoard away to start with we shall have to break in the land ourselves. Where then? I have it: there is (there really is) a small island, about half a mile off the coast of Wales, owned by a wealthy and eccentric schoolmaster who has built a large house on one end of it. The island's rocky perimeter is possible of access only in one place and there only during calm weather. There is a well. And apart from the house and the vegetable garden, the island consists solely of graking for sheep.
Posing as the organisers of a religious retreat, we are able to rent the house, at £100 a month payable in advance, for-June, July, August and September. Since D-day is around 1 September (we reckon), we shall be comfortably in posses-
sion at the important time . . . and need expect no further claims for rent however long we stay. Next step: to provision the stronghold. Since prices are rising as they are, we must buy fast and buy in bulk; but we must not arouse suspicion. Well, what could be more natural than that the -supervisors of an isolated religious community, which expects a strong influx of holiday penitents during August and September, should be buying preserved foods in large quantities? All right ... but what about all the caviar and such which this particular community will require? Someone will soon smell something fishy there.
So here is the plan. Ordinary supplies will be bought by the ton, transported up to Wales by the public services without secrecy, and ferried across to the island by local boatmen. Luxury goods, on the other hand, must be procured with discretion from many differ- ent sources, taken by car in small lots to Little Venice, moved up to Shropshire by canal (the system is still viable that far) in a privately purchased 'residential' barge, and then carried across Hereford and Wales in hired horse-boxes, vehicles which are common in the area even out of the National Hunt season. For the last leg—across to the island—we shall once again have to trust the local boatmen, which, given the garrulity of the Welsh, is a pity. However, a pretence on our part of near- lunatic fanaticism could do a great deal (given the Welsh love of morbid superptitions) to help our cause; so that we must also be zealous in shipping over loads of low-church equipment (yes, but surely the point about low churches is that they don't have any?), and it will be mandatory to interrupt operations every hour for a flood of extempore prayer and self-castigation.
At this stage, if we are playing the game seriously, we break off for some detailed ac- counting. To a great extent, of course, ex- penditure will be decided by individual tastes; but I do urge you to lay in a very large amount of whisky (perhaps up to half the entire bud- get), as this is more or less imperishable in any circumstance and should prove to be valuable as currency when things start getting back to normal. Or again, how much of the money to spend on books will make an agon- ising question for those who are both civilised and greedy; for myself, I regard the mini- mum Omega library as consisting of a com- plete set of Loeb Classics, a complete set of Everyman, and the complete Oxford edition of Trollope. This brings us on to a whole new branch of the game—what hundred records would you choose, etc. etc.? As you now see, I hope, one could go on playing for a very long time; but the most absorbing bit of all is the selec- tion of friends to accompany one—particularly if one is taking strict account of moral ob- ligation. Who has priority: a discarded mistress who plays a good game of backgammon, or an ageing mother-in-law who has a rancid tongue but also a proven knowledge of prac- tical medicine? One's old study fag, with whom one has kept it up for twenty years, a literary chum who writes sensitive but boring novels, or a female cousin who cooks like an angel and drinks like a cod? And all this is to say nothing of sexual arrangements; but that part of the game you can play without further assistance from me.
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