"Hawke, Simon - The Wizard of Camelot 1 - The Wizard of Camelot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

things considered. I saw a great deal of action in my time with the Loo, as we
called it, during the International Pacification Campaigns. The word "loo" is
British slang for toilet or, as the Americans might say, the "crapper." And
that, too, was appropriate, in its own way.

I'd put in over twenty years with the service and I was approaching my fortieth
birthday. I had a wife, Jenny, and two small children; Christine, aged eleven,
and Michelle, aged nine, and I wanted nothing quite so much as to find a safe
and reasonably peaceful haven for them. In those dark days of the Collapse,
"reasonably peaceful" was about as much as anyone could hope for. And, for many
people, it was a hope never to be realized.

London was a war zone that erupted into full-scale mass street riots on the
average of several times a year The army was frequently called in to quell them.
These domestic police actions, taking place in various large British cities,
became known as the Internal Pacification Campaigns. They occurred with such
frequency that the major ones were simply referred to by number, in a rather
Yank-like military shorthand, such as In-Pac 9, which erupted in London, In-Pac
10, which broke out in Coventry, and so forth. The minor campaigns occurred so
often that no one even bothered counting them.

I had seen a good number of my mates go down in those campaigns and I'd had
about enough.

I wanted out.

I moved my family to Loughborough, in the Midlands, approximately one hundred
miles north of London, near Nottingham. It was not exactly a small town, but it
was a fair distance from London, which was the point of the whole thing. The
level of crime and violence in London had become intolerable and I feared for my
family's safety.

I purchased a house, a small cottage, really, on the outskirts of the town, but
nevertheless, it came quite dearly and wiped out all my savings. There was, of
course, no possibility of financing the purchase with a mortgage. No one was
taking any flyers on such things back then. Businesses were failing left and
right, banks and underwriting firms among them, and credit was a nonexistent
thing. One paid with cash or one simply didn't buy at all, and with the economy
collapsing, prices fluctuated wildly, not only from day to day, but from hour to
hour

Things grew worse with each passing week, nor was the madness confined to
British soil. The Collapse was a worldwide phenomenon, as everyone knows now,
though few people living today have any firsthand knowledge of what it was
really like. That period has since been greatly romanticized in films, novels,
and on television, but it's one thing to see the Collapse fancifully depicted in
a film or television series and quite another to have actually lived through it.
Modern generations seem to have a great feeling of nostalgia for the past,
somehow perceiving that period as a time of great adventure and derring-do, but
at the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, I must say frankly that young