A different type of remembrance day

Today is April 31

Or at least I believe it to be. I’ve done my best to keep track of each day since ‘the change’ began. Ironically this all began on November the 11th and I’ve tried to count or mark every day since that date.

170 days. It’s strange to write that number. Long enough for habits to look like life again, but not long enough to feel displaced and nostalgic for everything and everybody who once was.

We’d been living in the library for 2 months now. Finding it had been a relief and a reprieve, I still don’t know how I had survived long enough to find a safe place. London had been full of rubble and dust still when I had ventured out for the first time.No doubt my forward planning was what had saved me.

I had paid heed to the increasing dangers and begun storing tins and food that wouldn’t spoil for a long time before ‘the change’. Having an old WW2 bomb shelter in my garden had been the blessing that had saved me.On the day it all happened at 1pm, I had been working from home. Tragically my wife had been at the school where she worked. I still didn’t know what had happened to her, but there were barely any other survivors.

Miraculously the library had somehow remained standing, half its roof torn open, its foundations holding. A lone sanctuary in a street of rubble.

I guess that’s how the others found it too. There were three of us: Cal, Mara, and me.

Cal was skilled with his hands and had worked in the building trade mostly, although he was somebody who could fix anything. He had the kind of mind that made broken things seem temporary. Give him scrap metal, wire, and an idea that sounded impossible, and he would start making it real. It was miracle to have his skills to work with, but it was his brilliance that had meant he had survived this long. He also had planned for the worst case scenario.

What had happened had been worse that that.

Recently, Cal had been trying to create a way of filtering water. We weren’t far from a river, at present the waters were full of toxic chemicals and sludge.

Mara was the scientist. A quantum physicist academically, but she had worked in environmental research for a leading University. Again, she had recognised the risks and the patterns of what was about to happen and had made clever plan to protect herself. Like me she had had a family, unlike me she had also had two children.

I couldn’t imagine the pain she must feel outliving her children. I don’t think she could imagine it either, I suspected that her life force was based entirely on her belief that they were still alive… somewhere…somehow.

She had spent months piecing together scraps of data from books, old devices, and her own calculations, trying to work out what parts of the city were still safe, what water might still be clean, and what signs meant the world was beginning to recover.Desperately trying to back up her theory that there were many pockets of other survivors.

I wanted to believe she was right, but I dared not hope too much. For me the hope hurt more than the realism.

My talent was actually food, I was a chef by trade and had an interest in the science behind food also.

I had started off working 50% of my working hours in a busy kitchen, but had managed to be recognised for my innovative skills, which is how I had been fortunate enough to be working from home when ‘the change’ occurred. I was on my 4th book now, or I had been.

What a strange unnatural thought to consider now. The simplicity of writing a book, going on a book signing tour…. I can’t believe I used to complain about having to do those events. The thought of that now was like a utopian dream.

Mara and Cal had already been in the library when I found it and had managed to make a cosy space in the basement. By great fortune there was also a supermarket just about 150 yards away. It was dangerous out there, there were still live electrical cables starting fires, and who knew how many other survivors there were. So far though, I had only seen a shadow in one of the tumbled supermarket aisles.

I didn’t know if it was reassuring to witness life, or terrifying, knowing the madness desperation could cause. We’d been living off the bottled water and tins.

I’d managed to make a mulch out of old newspapers and was starting to get some seeds and mushrooms sprouting now. Nothing substantial had grown so far, but it was encouraging.

Between the three of us, we were starting to make some breakthroughs.

Why did we want to survive you may ask? Sometimes I would ask myself the same question. It was no kind of a life really, but there was something about the human survival instinct that overcame any kind of logic.

I wanted to survive because I couldn’t help myself from trying.

Mara wanted to survive to find her children, even if it was only their bodies, she was determined to get to them. We all knew that we had to wait a few more months before we could spend more than a couple of minutes outside though. Even a visit to the supermarket would leave us wheezing and coughing. So we took it in turns, hoping to give our bodies time to recover from the fumes.

Cal wanted to survive because he believed there was nothing he couldn’t fix and no puzzle he couldn’t solve. He was worried about people like us, of course, but he didn’t focus on loss, but on what he could achieve. I’m sure it was his spirit alone that encouraged myself and Mara to keep trying on the dark days.

And so on April 30 it started to feel like we were on the brink of a breakthrough. We may just find a way through all this.

The answer was hidden in the lead-up, in all the small choices we had made without knowing they were leading somewhere. Cal’s endless repairs. Mara’s maps. My experiments with food and moisture and the strange logic of growth. The library itself, with its shelves of knowledge and its broken skylight letting in a grey, uncertain morning. Everything we had done had been preparing for one day, even if we had not seen it then.

The first breakthrough came before noon.

Cal had been working in the supermarket basement, where the old pipework ran behind cracked reservoirs and abandoned storage cages. The bottled water was nearly gone, and the condensation system he’d built from salvaged conduits had been producing only a trickle. He came back up with mud on his hands and a look I had not seen on his face in weeks.

“There’s a flow,” he said. “Not much. But there’s something else under there.”

We followed him back down.

Behind the lower archive storage, where the library met the collapsed service corridor, he’d heard running water. At first it sounded like a leak, but when he cleared the debris, the sound became clearer — a faint, steady trickle moving through old masonry. We widened the opening enough to reach in and test the flow. The water wasn’t perfect, but it was real. It came from beneath the city, cold and mineral-heavy, with only slight contamination. Drinkable after boiling. Sustainable if we were careful.

Mara tested it twice, then a third time, her usual calm giving way to something close to relief.

“This changes the equation,” she said.

Cal just grinned. “We’ve got a source.”

That was the first crack in the wall we’d been living behind.

The second came in the afternoon.

Mara had been revising her maps for days, tracing old drainage routes, underground channels, and places where the soil might still be viable. She had always believed the city would reveal itself if we followed the right signs, and now she was staring at a pattern she’d missed before. The stream below us wasn’t isolated. It connected to a wider underground system, one that seemed to run west and upward toward old surface channels that might eventually reach cleaner ground.

“If the flow is stable,” she said, tapping the page with her pen, “then we don’t just have water here. We have a path.”

Cal looked at the map. “To where?”

“Not yet,” Mara said. “But somewhere better.”

We all stood over the paper in silence.

For months, we had treated survival as a matter of holding still. Now the world was offering movement again.

The third breakthrough came from the shelves.

I had been experimenting with shredded paper, trying to find ways to hold moisture in the seed crates. We had already learned that useless books — the ones no one would miss — made surprisingly good mulch. Self-help paperbacks had become our usual sacrifice, their pages soaked, pressed, and layered around the soil mix in the storeroom crates. That morning, I’d been sorting through a box of damaged volumes when I found a children’s atlas with a bright blue ocean on the cover.

I almost shredded it, then didn’t.

Instead, I set it aside and began to wonder whether not every book should be treated the same way. Some of the technical manuals, sure. Some of the guides. The rest — maps, histories, illustrations, textbooks — carried more than paper. They carried instruction. Memory. Possibility.

So I changed the method.

I spent the rest of the morning cataloguing the shelves with Mara, separating books by usefulness in a way we had not done before. Engineering, chemistry, farming, water systems, preservation. We marked them carefully and used only what we truly needed as mulch. That simple change gave us enough material to improve the seed trays without wasting knowledge we might still need.

By early afternoon, the mushrooms in the crate planters had matured properly at last — round caps, fuller stems, more weight than before. I cooked them with the last of the salt, and they tasted richer than anything we’d had in weeks.

We ate together at the central table, and for the first time in a long while, none of us spoke with the tightness of people trying not to hope.

Cal pushed his bowl aside and said, “We might actually make it.”

Mara looked at him, then at me. “Not by luck.”

“No,” I said. “By learning.”

That was the shape of the day: each breakthrough built on what came before. The water mattered because Cal had kept fixing what failed. The route mattered because Mara had kept mapping the invisible structure beneath the ruins. The food mattered because I had kept testing and adjusting and refusing to waste what little we had. None of it was sudden. All of it had been arriving for weeks, just too quietly to notice.

In the late afternoon, the radio gave us a fourth sign.

It had been sitting on the table near Mara’s maps, pulsing with weak light and a static rhythm we had started to recognise. Most days it sounded like a loop — tone, pause, static, repeat. We had argued over whether it was human, mechanical, or simply a machine echoing after its makers were gone.

That day, the pattern changed.

Cal had been adjusting the generator when the signal sharpened. Mara looked up first. I heard it a second later: a break in the rhythm, then a sequence that didn’t repeat exactly, as though something on the other end had answered.

Mara was already listening, head tilted, pen still in hand.

“Not random,” she said. “It’s structured.”

Cal reached to increase the gain. “Can you decode it?”

“Maybe not yet,” she said, but her voice had changed. “But it’s not nothing.”

We listened for ten minutes without moving.

Then Mara pointed to the sheet beside her, where she’d been tracking safe zones and possible routes. “If the signal is coming from farther north, and if it’s following consistent intervals, we may be able to triangulate a rough direction by evening.”

Cal stared at her. “You think it’s survivors.”

“I think,” she said carefully, “that it’s either survivors or a system built by survivors.”

That distinction mattered less than the result.

By sunset, we had another answer.

Cal had managed to reinforce the filtration lines with melted resin and copper tubing scavenged from the supermarket’s back storage. It was a crude fix, but it worked better than anything he’d built before. The water from the underground stream now passed through charcoal, mesh, and condensation catchments in a clean, steady cycle. He filled three bottles without stopping.

“Daily supply,” he said. “Stable, if the flow holds.”

Mara checked the readings. “It will, if the weather doesn’t shift drastically.”

I took one of the bottles and held it up to the weak light. It was such a small thing, clear water in a cracked city, but it felt like the first proof of a future.

We kept working through the evening.

Mara refined the map with fresh notes, marking the likely course of the underground channel and the direction of the radio signal. Cal moved between the basement and the hall, improving the catchment system and checking for leaks. I re-planted the seedlings, adjusted the moisture levels, and made a new rotation plan so the food would last longer.

Nothing miraculous happened in a flash. That was the truth of it. The day did not save us all at once. It simply gave us enough proof to stop living as though every action was only temporary.

By nightfall, the library felt different.

Not safer exactly, but more alive. The stream sang under the floor. The radio still pulsed. The mushrooms sat cooling on the table. The seed trays lined the walls beneath the cracked skylight. The books around us were no longer just shelter; they were part of the system that kept us going.

We sat together before sleep, the three of us, and finally said what none of us had wanted to say too early.

“We can build from here,” Mara said.

Cal nodded. “We’ve got water now.”

“And food,” I said.

“And direction,” she added.

We looked at the maps, the bottles, the planters, the books, the radio.

The lead-up had led us here, to this one day where the pieces finally connected. Not because the world had healed, but because we had learned how to read its damage. The stream beneath the city, the signal in the static, the books we had chosen to keep — all of it pointed forward.

We didn’t call it hope yet. Hope was still too fragile a word.

But by the time the candles burned low, we knew this much: we were no longer only surviving the ruins. We were learning how to use them.

And that, on a day like this, was enough to count as a beginning.