For school, I recently had to do a piece of writing in 20 minutes that was both handwritten and typed on two different subjects. For my typed piece, I thought I might do a British take on the big nuclear war that happened between Russia and America. It's short, but for twenty minutes writing I'm actually rather pleased with it.

Enjoy.

The Longest Apocalypse

When bombs come, all you can do is hide. When the explosions come, all you can do is pray. The soldier in the trenches of the Somme praying that an artillery shell would not strike his position, the father praying that the German bombs would not level his house and kill his family, and us, praying against all prayers that the atomic bombs would not land on top of our shelter. The government told us that the Vaults, as they were called, were impenetrable, but no-one believed them. Even as the massive doors closed themselves shut we didn’t believe them. It was especially hard to believe them when you heard the explosions powerful enough to level cities.

Within hours it was over, the nuclear arsenals of Russia and America expending themselves in impotent anger and with Europe and the rest of the world caught in the crossfire, sitting tight and praying that they didn’t get hit too hard.

Of course we got hit-everyone did. London, Edinburgh, Dublin, all of Britain’s cities were levelled in the few hours of the war. Thousands of years of history, culture and learning were gone, just obliterated in a cyclone of nuclear power and stupidity.

And then we emerged. Cooped up inside our vaults for two whole generations as the radiation subsided, humankind’s tattered remnants cautiously shuffled out of the darkness of our homes and into the longest, slowest apocalypse ever to befall us.

We set up camp in a massive stone building, an old church. According to an old sign, it was called Aul’s Cathedral. No one knows quite how it survived the nuclear bombardment, especially seeing as the area around it is wasteland, flattened by the sheer power of the weapons deployed against our country.

So there we were, in the middle of what used to be London with a slag trail for a river and a ruin for a home, with no knowledge about the rest of the human race. Occasionally animals came sniffing around-strange things with too many eyes and teeth, but someone in the vault had had the foresight to bring weapons-old rifles which we droved them off with. We found seeds, and planted a few crops with them-wheat and barely and even a few carrots. The plants grew surprisingly well in the radiation soaked soil-even if they did try to bite you occasionally.

We found other humans eventually, when a caravan of traders passed us by. We bartered what little goods we had in exchange for more seeds and food, as well as ammunition for our weapons. We even managed to get some fuel and an old battered generator-our cathedral now had light and even warmth.

So here we are-the last survivors of the greatest catastrophe to befall London. We manage. We grow and plant seeds, harvest and rear some livestock. We trade with the caravans whenever they pass through and hear rumours about the rest of the country through them. It’s not an easy living, but it could be worse.

After all, as the old saying goes, chin up, there’s an apocalypse on.