Father and I went outside the city, to the mountain surrounding it, and saw the other cities that were next to ours, beyond the city walls, from the summit. Passers by would help us identify those cities it was not easy because it was in the night and the see behind them was as dark as the cities and the only the light from the stars could help us see.
Some times a star would cross the sky and help us see better in the night. Then some stars would actually fall on the cities. Then we realised they were not stars but bombs. Some war had started.
Father an I went back to our house and hid. But it was not long before we realised we had to flee, like the rest of the neighbours. We started to pack the indispensables, just grab however little we could carry, knowing that we would have to carry our things on our backs as we walked. It was summer, so what we were wearing at the time was light and did not cover the whole of our bodies. Half way through the packing we remembered that we would probably need winter stuff too, because it didn’t look like we would ever again be able to come back, let alone before the winter. So we packed a few warm underwear. Then it was time to pack items that were not clothes. And we also needed money. We gathered all the money we could find in the house. Old money, new money. We did not find any coins, perhaps we were not looking. We gathered mainly twenty pound notes, the occasional fifty. We found money in places we had almost forgotten.
As we were on our way out, the neighbour’s little son came to visit. He was about three years old. His mother came to fetch him. She apologised but it was perfectly ok with us. We realised she was also packing. There was a suggestion to flee the house together but eventually she left before us with her son while we remembered at the last second about things we wanted to bring with us.
We fitted it all in comfortable bags that we could easily carry on our backs and left the building. We only walked a few metres when we were arrested. But by this time I was no longer with my father. My companion now was my girlfriend.
One of the arresting officers was the local vicious bastard. It all looked like taken out of a film about the nazi occupation in France. We were not manhandled at this stage but it probably was the end of our adventure. We were guided to the local nick, or maybe it was a random cell in the middle of a jungle. It was not a police or any complex. It was a single room in a single building with no buildings next to it. As we arrived, there was jungle outside it, but when we tried to escape there were streets surrounding it.
The officer gave us a lecture on why we should not have tried to escape the country. He then informed us that we would be confined to their custody for the duration of the war. Then he left us alone in this cell and left.
After a few hours we realised that the cell was not even closed. One of the walls was missing, or maybe it was a huge door on that wall and it had been left open. Then there was a small door on the opposite wall, and that too was open.
We thought of just gathering our things and run. My girlfriend was not too happy about the idea. Neither was I, but it was worth taking our chances before they would separate us and maybe even terminate our lives.
The logical or at least the first impulse was to just jump the huge door. We kind of figured that there would be some kind of trick, some kind of impediment that we were not seeing presently. I approached the open door in order to jump outside. Suddenly a voice came out of the walls of the cell, a robotised voice that reminded us that we were not allowed to leave. The voice said ‘this cell does not face the jungle lane, it faces the traffic lane’. It sounded like a reminder of the address of the place. What the voice was saying was that the valid entry to the cell was the small door, which was the entry facing the traffic street.
So we both went out of that door. Surely enough, the police headquarters were right opposite and the whole system had been designed so that our presence at the door was detected immediately. We had not walked twenty metres when lots of police, the vicious officer with them, ran towards us. We ran as well. My girlfriend, only then I realised, had been sedated and she could hardly walk. I knew that this was the time to leave her behind, or none of us would be saved. The officer got my girlfriend, lifted her almost inert body, and with it on his back, continued to run towards me. For some unknown reason he was exceptionally fast. He was faster than even the riot police behind him. And he got me soon enough. I would have to walk back to the cell, with him and my girlfriend, probably to face some punishment. It was clear that we would not go abroad at all now, or ever.