The Carhullan Army

asked.
    Jackie and Veronique were given plenty of titles, called plenty of things by different people in the years of Carhullan’s publicity. But as they had it they were simply libertarians. As they had it, theirs was a culture moulded from necessity, formed, as Jackie described, to spean the lambs before they became sheep.
    And Carhullan was Jackie’s idea, that much was apparent. Her family were from the area, so she knew it like none of the other women ever would, though they worked the land every day, moving sheep and cows, panting across the rough terrain to break the eight-mile hour. This was her home turf. Her territory. She had either bought the place outright or taken it over because it was lying empty. Already by then people were heading into the town, driven out of rural habitations by the transport problems and the steepening fuel prices. Farming was considered a dying industry.
    The buildings sat in total isolation, far from any conceivable thoroughfare. I knew I had hiked near there in the past, but I had never seen it. It was the highest farm in England, almost inaccessible, impervious to the flooding that would come in the years to follow, and the shifting of the water tables. It had a massive Westmorland kitchen, a cast-iron range, and any number of ramshackle outbuildings that would become dormitories. Until they wired it up, there was no electricity. It could be reached only on foot or by four-wheel drive via a convoluted upland route.
    The land belonging to Carhullan covered hundreds of acres and took in moors, woods and fields. No one knew who originally enclosed it, but it had always been a private steading, not a tenanted farm belonging to the local lord. It was a vast, self-contained, workable place. Jackie had grown up in the valley below, and she must have wondered about its history, maybe trekking up the mountain and climbing in through the windows as a girl, lighting fires on the iron grill and sleeping there overnight. Finding the bones of martins and swifts buried in the soft floors of the byres.
    Years later, looking at the photographs of her under the phosphorous Mag-lamp of our quarter, I imagined that she was visionary, that she had foreseen the troubles and the exodus from the villages and hamlets long before it became reality. She had sidestepped the collapse, and the harsh regime of the Civil Reorganisation. Every time I opened a tin and transferred the gelatinous contents into a bowl I thought of the farm’s bright vegetables on the market stalls the decade before. I imagined the taste of Carhullan’s crisp peppers and yellow lentils, the delicate flavour of the lavender ice cream the women made and sold.
    At work in the New Fuel factory, with the noise of the conveyor deafening me, I had often imagined the benefits of being up there with Jackie and Veronique. The tedium of my job was excruciating: eight hours of standing on the concrete factory floor watching metal bolts roll past, knowing that the turbines were not being installed offshore, they were just being stored in the warehouse, cylinder upon cylinder, their blades fixed and static. There was a dead comb of them now built against the walls. I could get inside each grey shell, take out the lock-pin and turn the rotors smoothly with my hands. There were enough units to power the whole of the Northern region if they had been installed in the estuaries.
    But for reasons unknown to us, there had been no green light for the operation, no deployment of the technology yet. Authority agents arrived at the factory and took inventories from time to time, as if about to ship the turbines out to the sea platforms constructed years before above the brown tides. The evening news bulletins broadcast still-reels of the New Fuel products, as if proving the recovery’s protocol was working. But it was all a bad joke. Every day the pieces were manufactured and assembled, then left defunct. And like drones we added to the vast metal hive.
    At first I had been glad of the placement. Work at the refinery was much worse; the manual labour was filthy and jeopardous. Those at the vats quickly developed breathing problems, shadows on their lungs. There were complaints from them that the credits earned were not as high as they should be. But they were higher than anywhere else. And the products were being used – the unconventional oil, and the bios – if only by the government.
    I had quickly realised our efforts at the factory were for