Alright, a few hours until the Turtledove polls and TTL's coming a respectable 3/4th. Thanks to the dozens of you who've already voted, and for those who haven't, voting link here https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=382275
There Is No Depression: Protect and Survive New Zealand
- Thread starter Tsar of New Zealand
- Start date
Just caught up. Brilliant updates.
From memory, Te Aroha had a fantastic fish and chip shop back in the 80s.
Wow. your stories are amazing! I love the adventures of Grace and Mel. Would like to read more stories about them! I think I would be similar to Grace in her situation. Find a big sister Mel which would look after me.
What is life like for families in your story? Is there separate refugee camps for families with younger children, and orphaned children?
I think the story could be set in any time. To me protect and survive are stories about people's survival after a horrible global catastrophe!
I was not born in the times your stories are set! I was born in 2000. So I guess I wont be born in your timeline. My mom was 11 and my aunt 8 in 1984 tho. They lived near Tel Aviv! In this situation I think my grandma would invite a similar sized refugee family to her home. If they were living in your timeline. Maybe families in New Zealand would be encouraged to allow similar refugee families to live with them? Or maybe adopt orphaned children?
How is the situation in Israel and the middle east? I found other protect and survive time lines on the forum. Set in UK and USA. So I am reading those atm too! You guys kind of got me hooked on them now.
Has anybody written a protect and survive Israel? I would love to write one if you guys are ok with it. Would that be ok? I can find out about life in the 1980s from my mom and grandma. I would write from the point of view of a family trying to survive in whats left of Israel. Maybe on a kibbutz. I think kibbutzim would be a large surviving group. My grandma retired to a kibbutz near Kyriat Shmona. I could set my story there!
I guess Tel Aviv, Haifa and Dmona would get bombed by the Russians tho. ;-;
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What is life like for families in your story? Is there separate refugee camps for families with younger children, and orphaned children?
I think the story could be set in any time. To me protect and survive are stories about people's survival after a horrible global catastrophe!
I was not born in the times your stories are set! I was born in 2000. So I guess I wont be born in your timeline. My mom was 11 and my aunt 8 in 1984 tho. They lived near Tel Aviv! In this situation I think my grandma would invite a similar sized refugee family to her home. If they were living in your timeline. Maybe families in New Zealand would be encouraged to allow similar refugee families to live with them? Or maybe adopt orphaned children?
How is the situation in Israel and the middle east? I found other protect and survive time lines on the forum. Set in UK and USA. So I am reading those atm too! You guys kind of got me hooked on them now.
Has anybody written a protect and survive Israel? I would love to write one if you guys are ok with it. Would that be ok? I can find out about life in the 1980s from my mom and grandma. I would write from the point of view of a family trying to survive in whats left of Israel. Maybe on a kibbutz. I think kibbutzim would be a large surviving group. My grandma retired to a kibbutz near Kyriat Shmona. I could set my story there!
I guess Tel Aviv, Haifa and Dmona would get bombed by the Russians tho.
;-;.
Is this dead?
No, I've just started my Master's study since the last update. Combine that with a touch of writer's block and you've got no updates.
I've got one in the workshop at the moment, call it, oh, 60% done? I've got semester finals this week, then my 21st, then I move flat, then I head down south to see the whanau - so if I can't get it done this week, it'll be with you all by late June. Apologies for the delays.
Good things are worth waiting for .....good luck with the finals and enjoy your time with the whanau
I discovered this story completely by accident, and had to sign up here just to say that your writing grabbed me by the bollocks and did not let go for an instant. It's why I was up all night last night. Reading about my home town taking a 340kt groundburst (groundburst! You utter bastard!) is pants-shittingly disturbing. If this had happened for real, I'd have been nine years old (the Stanislav Petrov incident happened on my ninth birthday. While he was deciding what to do about the alarms going off, I was arriving at school showing off my new digital watch!) and at home in Crofton Downs. I expect if the device had airburst as intended, I'd have been incinerated fairly quickly, but I'm not sure what a 340kt groundburst in the Kelburn area would have done to Crofton Downs. That question has been on my mind for a good many hours now. You utter, utter bastard!
Seriously, though, this is stunning, I'm hooked, write more, and if you're wand'ring around Wellington of an evening, and you happen upon a black clad gentleman playing a flute, that'll be me. Do stop by and say hallo.
Seriously, though, this is stunning, I'm hooked, write more, and if you're wand'ring around Wellington of an evening, and you happen upon a black clad gentleman playing a flute, that'll be me. Do stop by and say hallo.
It's looking increasingly certain I won't be able to get a full update out before my holiday starts, so here's a taste of the next chapter to make it seem like I'm at least half-heartedly trying to keep writing
Now carparks make me jumpy
And I’ve never stopped the dreams…
Off Santiago, Cape Verde
May 23, 1984
Three hundred thousand had lived on these islands before the war, more than half on the island of Santiago, and they had all been very hungry since the collapse of the countries on the mainland put a stop to trade. Portuguese fishermen picking their way south had helped to feed a few for a time, but when the fuel ran out – which it did, in very short order – the inhabitants of these dry little rocks had been forced to scratch a living from the parched land.
By the time the convoy had come within hailing distance, it had become apparent that something had finally given since their last visit six weeks ago.
Ross Bailey (Captain, Royal Australian Navy, Commanding Officer His Majesty’s Australian Ship Perth) stood just outside the bridge, big red hands gripping the railing tightly as he watched the glow from the fires on the eastern horizon. It wasn’t as bad as what they’d glimpsed off the Cape of Good Hope – and wouldn’t it be interesting to get a closer look at that on the way back, just? – but they could yank another card out of Hawkie’s diplomatic Rolodex in Melbourne.
The dull thud of feet approached, barely perceptible over the sound of a ship on a mission at the close of the day, and the Captain’s back straightened as the Royal Navy Commander – Hardwick, his name was – made his way out.
“We’ve notified the rest of the convoy, sir; course change has been logged and we’ll loop around the rest of the islands to make straight for Portsmouth.”
“Right. Good.” Bailey had remained terse around the Poms, and so the silence dragged on awkwardly as Hardwick stood in the doorway, until the Captain drew another breath and pressed on with “Anyone waiting for you when you get back home, Commander?”, the sudden personal question taking him quite by surprise.
“Ah, y-yes, sir. My wife and children.”
Bailey nodded. “Same here. The missus was in Albany with her auntie when Perth copped it. Thank Christ she wasn’t on base. The kids thought it was great fun, I’m told.” A quirk of the lip which might have been a smile or indigestion. “You gotta wonder how much they understand of all this.” His eyes never moved from the pinkish-orange streak on the horizon.
Feeling that this sudden loquacity (this was the longest the Captain had ever gone on about life off the ship) demanded a response, Hardwick ventured to reply.
“My eldest, John, was at school when the TTW - the Transition To War – began. His mother refused to pull him out before the shooting started, though; she’s a great believer in education.” A brief smile. “I did insist that she get the other two, David and Celia, out of kindergarten, though.”
“Yeah, Shannon’s like that with ours, too. Darla’s not unhappy to find out school’s out for the duration, I’m told.”
Hardwick gave a sage nod in reply, and the conversation lapsed back into silence.
The glow to the east was a paltry nothing compared to the furious beauty of the sunset to the west, where regal purple warred with violent red and angry orange, sickly yellow and eerie green melding on the fringes and bleeding into the deep mauve of an early evening sky. Turner would have given his left arm to have seen this, let alone to have had the chance to paint it, thought Hardwick, before the sound of the Captain’s harsh drawl snapped him out of his Romantic reverie.
“Well, you wanna see ‘em?”
“Pardon, sir?”
“Me kids. I mean, if you’re interested,” he added hastily in a tone which hinted at nagging doubts that this conversation had been a mistake, “otherwise I’m sure you’re needed elsewhere…”
Bailey was awkwardly deferential to the Commander, and not just, suspected Hardwick, because he’d been his equal on the pay chart only a few weeks ago. His recommendation and reports of treatment would go a long way towards making sure none of the Aussies enjoying an extended stay in Portsmouth or Corsham would fail to make it back Down Under once the time came for them to be on the boat back home; no harm done, then, in being at least tepid towards him. This seemed more…honest, though. After all, they were two fathers five thousand miles from their wives and children. A little reminiscence helped sometimes, reminded you both that there was someone back there to go home to and for whom you kept on struggling. So it was with no guile whatsoever that Hardwick ventured a faint smile and gave a quiet affirmative, whereupon Bailey gave a surprised grin in response. Clearly expecting me to tell him to bog off.
“Well…ah…bugger, reckon they’re in my cabin. Come on with, Commander; I’ve got a bottle of something in there, too.”
“After you, sir.”
“So there’s Shannon, with the kids: that’s Darla, here – she’s a bit taller since, you know what they’re like at her age; won’t be surprised to get back and find out she’s taller’n I am – and this is Greg.” Bailey handed over the photograph to Hardwick, an Oxo tin full of Polaroids clutched between his knees like the Ark of the Covenant.
“Big lad, isn’t he?”
“Too right. He was a ruckman in the A team at his college last year, and he would’ve been there again if the war hadn’t got in the way.”
“Damn shame, that,” responded the Englishman as he took a pensive sip of the grog the Captain kept hidden for “special occasions”.
“You know, I swear he looks up to Peter Moore more than he does me – ah, footy player,” explained the Australian as he saw the abject incomprehension on the other man’s face. “But, ah, Darla there, she’s a sharp one, takes after her mum.”
“The old adage, eh?”
“Yeah, yeah – but look, I’m yammering on; howzabout yours?”
“Well,” said Hardwick as he handed back Bailey’s photo and fished about in his shirt pocket before pulling out his own snapshots “this one’s a little older, taken…oh, it’d be about eighty-one; I hadn’t been to the Falklands yet, because the Rover’s still in this picture here, so it’s missing David – he was with his mother at the hospital that day, you know – but there’s Celia” a smiling girl with blonde ringlets who didn’t look too different from Darla “and John” a boy of maybe eight or nine in a school uniform. “And this” he continued, shuffling the photos to one of a much younger boy “is David here.”
“Cheeky-looking little bugger, eh?”
A fatherly cluck of pride and amusement. “You don’t know the half of it; let me tell you, the stories Susan’s given me from his kindergarten…”
“Ah, terrible twos?”
“Terrible everythings, from what I hear.”
“Too true,” began Bailey as the sound of feet clumped down the passageway, the two instinctively squirrelling away their photos like schoolboys hiding dirty postcards; there was just enough time for Bailey to slide the Oxo tin back under his bed before a head popped around the doorframe.
“Sir? Sirs?” A salute attached to a sub-lieutenant. “You’re wanted on the bridge. The Kiwis and Indians want to discuss the parade once we arrive and the ROE as we get closer to Europe. They’re, ah, a bit jumpy about Russian boomers.”
“Right,” Bailey replied, standing and nodding briskly to Hardwick, “Let’s get back to it, then.”
About the long-forgotten dockside guarantees…
Interlude III: Nothin' To It, Leaky Boat
Now carparks make me jumpy
And I’ve never stopped the dreams…
.- .-.. .-.. / .- .-. --- ..- -. -.. / - .... .. ... / -.-. .... .- --- ... / .- -. -.. / -- .- -.. -. . ... ...
North Atlantic Ocean
Off Santiago, Cape Verde
May 23, 1984
Three hundred thousand had lived on these islands before the war, more than half on the island of Santiago, and they had all been very hungry since the collapse of the countries on the mainland put a stop to trade. Portuguese fishermen picking their way south had helped to feed a few for a time, but when the fuel ran out – which it did, in very short order – the inhabitants of these dry little rocks had been forced to scratch a living from the parched land.
By the time the convoy had come within hailing distance, it had become apparent that something had finally given since their last visit six weeks ago.
Ross Bailey (Captain, Royal Australian Navy, Commanding Officer His Majesty’s Australian Ship Perth) stood just outside the bridge, big red hands gripping the railing tightly as he watched the glow from the fires on the eastern horizon. It wasn’t as bad as what they’d glimpsed off the Cape of Good Hope – and wouldn’t it be interesting to get a closer look at that on the way back, just? – but they could yank another card out of Hawkie’s diplomatic Rolodex in Melbourne.
The dull thud of feet approached, barely perceptible over the sound of a ship on a mission at the close of the day, and the Captain’s back straightened as the Royal Navy Commander – Hardwick, his name was – made his way out.
“We’ve notified the rest of the convoy, sir; course change has been logged and we’ll loop around the rest of the islands to make straight for Portsmouth.”
“Right. Good.” Bailey had remained terse around the Poms, and so the silence dragged on awkwardly as Hardwick stood in the doorway, until the Captain drew another breath and pressed on with “Anyone waiting for you when you get back home, Commander?”, the sudden personal question taking him quite by surprise.
“Ah, y-yes, sir. My wife and children.”
Bailey nodded. “Same here. The missus was in Albany with her auntie when Perth copped it. Thank Christ she wasn’t on base. The kids thought it was great fun, I’m told.” A quirk of the lip which might have been a smile or indigestion. “You gotta wonder how much they understand of all this.” His eyes never moved from the pinkish-orange streak on the horizon.
Feeling that this sudden loquacity (this was the longest the Captain had ever gone on about life off the ship) demanded a response, Hardwick ventured to reply.
“My eldest, John, was at school when the TTW - the Transition To War – began. His mother refused to pull him out before the shooting started, though; she’s a great believer in education.” A brief smile. “I did insist that she get the other two, David and Celia, out of kindergarten, though.”
“Yeah, Shannon’s like that with ours, too. Darla’s not unhappy to find out school’s out for the duration, I’m told.”
Hardwick gave a sage nod in reply, and the conversation lapsed back into silence.
The glow to the east was a paltry nothing compared to the furious beauty of the sunset to the west, where regal purple warred with violent red and angry orange, sickly yellow and eerie green melding on the fringes and bleeding into the deep mauve of an early evening sky. Turner would have given his left arm to have seen this, let alone to have had the chance to paint it, thought Hardwick, before the sound of the Captain’s harsh drawl snapped him out of his Romantic reverie.
“Well, you wanna see ‘em?”
“Pardon, sir?”
“Me kids. I mean, if you’re interested,” he added hastily in a tone which hinted at nagging doubts that this conversation had been a mistake, “otherwise I’m sure you’re needed elsewhere…”
Bailey was awkwardly deferential to the Commander, and not just, suspected Hardwick, because he’d been his equal on the pay chart only a few weeks ago. His recommendation and reports of treatment would go a long way towards making sure none of the Aussies enjoying an extended stay in Portsmouth or Corsham would fail to make it back Down Under once the time came for them to be on the boat back home; no harm done, then, in being at least tepid towards him. This seemed more…honest, though. After all, they were two fathers five thousand miles from their wives and children. A little reminiscence helped sometimes, reminded you both that there was someone back there to go home to and for whom you kept on struggling. So it was with no guile whatsoever that Hardwick ventured a faint smile and gave a quiet affirmative, whereupon Bailey gave a surprised grin in response. Clearly expecting me to tell him to bog off.
“Well…ah…bugger, reckon they’re in my cabin. Come on with, Commander; I’ve got a bottle of something in there, too.”
“After you, sir.”
“So there’s Shannon, with the kids: that’s Darla, here – she’s a bit taller since, you know what they’re like at her age; won’t be surprised to get back and find out she’s taller’n I am – and this is Greg.” Bailey handed over the photograph to Hardwick, an Oxo tin full of Polaroids clutched between his knees like the Ark of the Covenant.
“Big lad, isn’t he?”
“Too right. He was a ruckman in the A team at his college last year, and he would’ve been there again if the war hadn’t got in the way.”
“Damn shame, that,” responded the Englishman as he took a pensive sip of the grog the Captain kept hidden for “special occasions”.
“You know, I swear he looks up to Peter Moore more than he does me – ah, footy player,” explained the Australian as he saw the abject incomprehension on the other man’s face. “But, ah, Darla there, she’s a sharp one, takes after her mum.”
“The old adage, eh?”
“Yeah, yeah – but look, I’m yammering on; howzabout yours?”
“Well,” said Hardwick as he handed back Bailey’s photo and fished about in his shirt pocket before pulling out his own snapshots “this one’s a little older, taken…oh, it’d be about eighty-one; I hadn’t been to the Falklands yet, because the Rover’s still in this picture here, so it’s missing David – he was with his mother at the hospital that day, you know – but there’s Celia” a smiling girl with blonde ringlets who didn’t look too different from Darla “and John” a boy of maybe eight or nine in a school uniform. “And this” he continued, shuffling the photos to one of a much younger boy “is David here.”
“Cheeky-looking little bugger, eh?”
A fatherly cluck of pride and amusement. “You don’t know the half of it; let me tell you, the stories Susan’s given me from his kindergarten…”
“Ah, terrible twos?”
“Terrible everythings, from what I hear.”
“Too true,” began Bailey as the sound of feet clumped down the passageway, the two instinctively squirrelling away their photos like schoolboys hiding dirty postcards; there was just enough time for Bailey to slide the Oxo tin back under his bed before a head popped around the doorframe.
“Sir? Sirs?” A salute attached to a sub-lieutenant. “You’re wanted on the bridge. The Kiwis and Indians want to discuss the parade once we arrive and the ROE as we get closer to Europe. They’re, ah, a bit jumpy about Russian boomers.”
“Right,” Bailey replied, standing and nodding briskly to Hardwick, “Let’s get back to it, then.”
-.-. .- -. .----. - / .... . .-.. .--. / ..-. . . .-.. .. -. --. / -. --- - .... .. -. --. / -- --- .-. . / - .... .- -. / ... .- -.. -. . ... ...
And it’s only other vets could understand
About the long-forgotten dockside guarantees…
Eh, don't be. Any Boomer of Ivan's probably heading to shore ASAP to get the hell off before supplies run out.
I know that and you know that (Whitby sub, etc.), but the Indians are very much of the opinion that it's better to be safe than sorry, as are the Aussies - and given that they still don't know what happened to Hobart, it's hard to blame them.
True, still, makes for a hilarious image of an Akula pulling up onto some random bit of shore, every hatch flinging itself open, and a mob of Russians come storming out, only to realize they came ashore near Norfolk, VA.
Or worse yet, Myrtle Beach.
"Comrade Captain, what the hell did we do to this place? The neutron bomb?"
I think I just figured out what would have happened to me. Crofton Downs is in a valley. I lived on the side of the valley that faced away from Kelburn, so the house I lived in would have been spared from the blast wave, tho' it likely would have shaken like twenty eight sons of bitches. Also, since Crofton Downs is north of Kelburn, and you've got the wind blowing the fallout towards Blenheim, I'd have been mostly safe from radioactive unpleasantness.
My parents wouldn't have known shit about fallout, though. What the New Zealand public knew about nuclear fallout in the 80s was (a) there is such a thing, and (b) it is bad. So I think it's likely that we'd have had a chance to escape fairly safely, but missed that chance due to overestimating the fallout danger where we lived.
My parents wouldn't have known shit about fallout, though. What the New Zealand public knew about nuclear fallout in the 80s was (a) there is such a thing, and (b) it is bad. So I think it's likely that we'd have had a chance to escape fairly safely, but missed that chance due to overestimating the fallout danger where we lived.
Oh, one more thing - regarding chapter 5 - I have speculated on the identity of the chopper pilot. I reckon his first name is indeed Peter, but his last name isn't Jackson.
Nice update, Tsar!
Regarding Cape Verde, it has a tradition of artisanal fishing that can supply some food without the use of fuel.
Some of the islands have a more benign climate.
http://caboverdesite.com
However the risk of the return of the famines of the old days is extremely high.
Regarding Cape Verde, it has a tradition of artisanal fishing that can supply some food without the use of fuel.
Some of the islands have a more benign climate.
http://caboverdesite.com
However the risk of the return of the famines of the old days is extremely high.