Neighbours from the Maldives

Sunday August 5th 2035

Azaan Hassan, his wife Zeena and their two girls Ainy and Niha, were settled in our village exactly a year ago by the local authority, in a house requisitioned from an absentee landlord, in the same street as me. They lived in the Maldives until the islands were lost to rising waters. Their journey here involved boats, lorries, and selling the few possessions they had left, chiefly Zeena’s jewellery and Azaan’s gold watch, a family heirloom. The government did not want to let any of them in, but they had no home, no country to be sent back to. The London government, which long opposed all attempts to devolve foreign policy to the UK’s nations, just said ‘No Entry’ but the Wales Government set up a resettlement scheme for 5,000 families and one of them came to our village. They have lost touch with so many of their relatives and friends, who may or may not be alive. Azaan is a make-do and mend mechanic and keeps our petrol and diesel vehicles operating, important because we don’t have timetabled public transport anymore, and there was a backlash against electric cars when it became clear just how polluting they are to make, how difficult to recycle, and how they propelled demand for electricity way above the capacity of the National Grid. So we plan journeys with great care and travel as little as possible. It limits our world view, but we do have an electric community minibus (reluctantly, because it’s not cheap to keep it on the road), and we have learnt a lot from the Hassans. Zeena makes clothes from recycled materials, Ainy does this too, and Niha grows vegetables on the school playing field. The school was closed in 2015, when the local authority decided to bus the children to town 10 miles away, at huge cost, on the basis that large schools are better. The education authority let a not-for-profit group have the school on a 30-year lease, I joined in and we opened a local history centre. Then the buses stopped three years ago and we opened a little general shop, a craft skills centre – and once again, a school.

The largest building on the school site is stone with high ceilings and a slate roof, so it is bearable in our hot summers, but heavy rains test the roof too much. We can’t afford to replace it completely so it’s buckets and patch-ups.  Earlier this century the costs of constantly rebuilding weather-damaged homes, roads, railways, power lines, whole villages and towns, were ignored, partly because the reconstruction works counted towards the economic growth that our government, most governments, still desired. It looked as though we had a supercharged economy, but all we were doing was to use up resources quicker and quicker and pump more carbon dioxide and noxious gases into the heating atmosphere. People were still reluctant to say ‘Stop’. They didn’t think their lifestyles would change so dramatically, so fast. I think it’s called ‘optimism bias’. The Hassans are not optimistic any longer, I’m not, my late cousin Pat was not, but I still meet people who think the worst has already happened and that this is just a temporary blip.

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