Matches, candles
Radio, batteries
Paper and pencils
Generator, torch
Water bottles
Toothpaste
Kettle, pots
Pans, rope, and string
Cotton, needles
Steel and flint
Sand
Toilet paper, disinfectant
Bucket with a lid
The lists read like poetry, even though the handwriting was a boyish version of my father’s later frantic scribblings. Often the words strayed over each other where he had written them in the dark, or they were packed together as though tussling for space in his night-time head. Other lists sloped off the page where he had fallen asleep mid-thought. The lists were all for the fallout shelter: essential items to keep his family alive under the ground for days or maybe even weeks.
At some point during his time in the garden with Oliver Hannington, my father decided to fit out the cellar for four people. He started to include his friend in the calculations for the quantity of knives and forks, tin cups, bedding, soap, food, even the number of toilet-paper rolls. I sat on the stairs, listening to him and Ute in the kitchen as he worked on his plans.
“If you must make this mess it should be for just the three of us,” she complained. There was the noise of papers being gathered. “I am uncomfortable that Oliver should be included. He is not one of the family.”
“One more person doesn’t make any difference. Anyway, bunk beds don’t come in threes,” said my father. I could hear him drawing while he spoke.
“I don’t want him down there. I don’t want him in the house,” Ute said. The scratch of pencil on paper stopped. “He is witching this family—it gives me the creepers.”
“Bewitching and creeps,” said my father, laughing.
“Creeps! OK, creeps!” Ute didn’t like to be corrected. “I would prefer that this man is not in my house.”
“That’s what it always comes down to, doesn’t it? Your house.” My father’s voice was raised now.
“My money has paid for it.” From my position on the stairs I heard a chair scrape against the floor.
“Ah yes, let us pray to the Bischoff family money that funds the famous pianist. And dear Lord, let us not forget how hard she works,” said my father. I could imagine him bowing, his palms pressed together.
“At least I am a professional. What do you do, James? Lie across the garden all day with your dangerous American friend.”
“There’s nothing dangerous about Oliver.”
“There is something not right with him, but you will not see it. He is only here to make trouble.” Ute stomped from the kitchen and went into the sitting room. I shuffled my bottom up a step, wary of discovery.
“What use will playing the piano be when the world ends?” my father called after her.
“What use will twenty tins of Spam be, tell me that?” Ute yelled back. There was a wooden clunk as she lifted the key lid, and she played one low minor chord with both hands. The notes died away and she shouted, “Peggy, she will not ever be eating the Spam,” and even though there was no one to see me, I hid my mouth behind my hand as I smiled. Then she played Prokofiev’s Sonata no. 7—fast and furious. I imagined her fingers sliding on the ivory like talons.
“It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark,” my father bellowed.
Later, when I had crept back to bed, the arguments and the piano playing ended, but I heard other sounds, ones that sounded almost like pain, although, even aged eight, I knew they meant something else.
There was a list that mentioned Spam. It was on the one titled “5. Food etc.” Under the heading my father wrote, “15 calories per body pound, ½ gallon of water per day, ½ tube of toothpaste per month,” then:
14 gallons water
10 tubes toothpaste
20 tins condensed chicken soup
35 tins baked beans
20 tins Spam
Powdered eggs
Flour
Yeast
Salt
Sugar
Coffee
Crackers
Jam
Lentils
Dried beans
Rice
The items meander, as if my father played the “I went to the shops and bought . . .” game by himself—Spam reminded him of ham, which made him think of eggs, which took him to pancakes and on to flour.
In our cellar he laid a new concrete floor, reinforced the walls with steel, and installed batteries that could be recharged by pedalling a static bicycle for two hours a day. He fitted two cooking rings, running off bottled gas, and built alcoves for the bunk beds—all made up with mattresses, pillows, sheets, and blankets. A white melamine-topped table was placed in the centre of the room, with four matching chairs. The walls were lined with shelves, which my father stacked with food and jerrycans of water, cooking utensils, games, and books.
Ute refused to help. When I came home from school, she would say she had spent her day practising the piano, while “your father has been playing in the cellar.” She complained her fingers were stiff with neglect and her wrists ached, and that bending down to look after me had affected her posture at the keyboard. I didn’t question why she was playing more often than she used to. When my father emerged from underneath the kitchen, his face red and his bare back shiny, he looked as though he might faint. He glugged water at the kitchen sink, put his whole head under the tap, then shook his hair like a dog, trying to make me and Ute laugh. But she only rolled her eyes and returned to her piano.
Each time my father invited members of the North London Retreaters to our house for meetings, I was allowed to open the front door and show the half-dozen hairy and earnest men into Ute’s sitting room. I liked it when our house was full of people and conversation, and until I was sent up to bed, I lingered, trying to follow their discussions of the statistical chances, causes, and outcomes of a thing they called “bloody Armageddon.” If it wasn’t “the Russkies” dropping a nuclear bomb and obliterating London with just a few minutes’ warning, it would be the water supply polluted by pesticides, or the world economy collapsing and the streets being overrun with hungry marauders. Although Oliver joked that the British were so far behind the Americans that when disaster came we would still be in our pyjamas while they would have been up for hours protecting their homes and families, my father was proud that his group was one of the first—perhaps the first—to meet in England to discuss survivalism. But Ute was petulant about not being able to practise the piano with them lounging around, drinking and chain-smoking late into the night. My father loved to argue and he knew his subject well. When the alcohol had flowed for a few hours and all agenda items had been covered, the meetings would dissolve from well-ordered discussion to argument, and my father’s voice would rise above the others.
The noise would make me throw off my bedsheet and sneak downstairs in my bare feet to peep around the sitting-room door, where the odours of warm bodies, whisky, and cigarettes drifted toward me. In my memory, my father is leaning forward and thumping his knee, or stubbing out his cigarette so burning tobacco flies out of the ashtray and melts crusty holes in the rug or scorches the wooden floor. Then he is standing with his hands clenched and his arms held tight to his sides as if he is battling with the impulse to let his fists fly at the first man who stands up to disagree with him.