The United Colony of Bennettown

By Joey Beret

The world has now all but run dry of petrol and whilst the search goes on for the new superfuel, communities are having to adapt to new ways of living. Should we all come together in large communities? Is small beautiful? There are those who chose to live beyond the law and those who go into hiding with their hordes. Set in the mid 21st century on the English/Welsh border we find out what happens when the new superfuel is discovered, and whether indeed we are happier without it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joey Beret
• Release date: Sep 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005570842

Joey Beret

Joey, aka me, is now a bit older than the young man in that picture, i am now happily hitting middle age having battled my way through an eventful and often challenging life. Writing is an important part of my person, as are the books that surround me in my countryside home in West Wales. I am no longer a man of great ambition as i have had a stab at most things that i wanted to explore:music, politics, women, the usual things. I am a happy man with many wonderful friends that i have tagged onto along the way and a scattering of fantastic offspring, as well as a wife with whom i will be honoured to grow old. I would like to think that my written work contains some moments of quality, observation and honesty that will provide some moments of pleasure to the reader and perhaps even capture in words some thoughts that we may share.

Book preview

Chapter One

Stop what you’re doing. Stop what you’re doing. Stop what you’re doing. The sound of the coffee break siren sends its coded message through the aisles of ‘goods inwards’, at leading out-of-town supermarket ‘Your Store’, whose location at the heart of the River Retail Park has been as financially fruitful as are the green and fertile plains of the rich and winding Wye Valley that embraces it. The tone of the siren has been pitched, at the Siren Consultants recommendation, to be sure to penetrate even the thoughts of the deepest shelf-stacking dreamer who may be lurking between wall height rows of wee, and consequently sound-proof, disposable nappies. Stop what you're doing!

Will McWerter is ‘goods inwards’ manager, and when he reaches the coffee and smoking corner, he is entitled to assume that his mug will be emanating the sweet and bitter fumes of instant powdered over-sugared coffee. With pink and squidgy fingers on the end of a long and purposeless arm he raises the mug and slurps. His slobbering lips now wetted and pursed, he accepts the ‘whatever’s going’ cigarette that is pushed into the hole, and with gunfighter dexterity produces his mock Dunhill lighter from somewhere in the region of his expanding girth, and lights up. This flaming and angular man-making accessory is one of an ever growing list that ensures that Will falls just short of the mark; he is five foot eleven and a half; has square but unfilled shoulders; a patchy stick-on stubble born of irregular electric shaving; long undefined legs that reach his waist without stopping to identify buttocks. His reptilian nature has awarded him an expandable and rounded centre that bears years of non-CAMRA beer like a snake that has swallowed an egg. The hairless and unwarriorlike forearms still possess the tacky visible traces of poison from pinned in Indian ink that marked his right of passage. They remain on his body as a stamp on sub-standard goods. The matt finish ‘grow it and cut it hair’ hangs as a proscenium about his face, with the opening title in view – I am a sad and worthless fuck.

In insolence, self-boredom and fear of what silence may force him to think he addresses another inane question to his mentally stretched line manager who has joined his workers for this social occasion in a demonstration of company unity, When do you think we can expect another food truck then Mr Harding? You know we only had two in yesterday, and one of them were full of toys.

Don't worry Will, it's gardening centre day today, so you can get yourself a few more packets of carrot seed, just count it as a bonus – but don’t tell anyone I said so, alright? Fair play to Harding, he always started off by showing his jovial human side, but when one has been brushing off flies for so long it eventually becomes easier just to swat them.

But as one unwanted fly replaces another, so do Will’s cryptic and septic comments, Yeah great, and I can have them with the seed potatoes that arrived last week.

That's the boy Will, this being offered by another fisherman like employee by the name of Pearce who is happy to see Will, the bottom-feeding tench once again choking on the bait.

Winding Will up never took much, but these days with him being even more strung out it was like fighting over who put the first match to a bonfire. Poor sod, people were queuing up for it.

No, I'm serious fellas, when are we gonna get some decent food ‘round here? We work our guts out for this company and we don't even...

Yeah, yeah Will. As you know tomorrow is our usual food delivery day so let's wait and see, shall we? As I've said, customer demand is at a low at the moment, so we don't need as much stock. Already Harding’s’ patience is wearing thin as the fun has long since vanished from the sport of Will McWerter baiting

Yes, but what about us Mr Harding, we haven't even got enough for ourselves, so what are we supposed to put on the shelves?

Pearce however is still game for playing with the fat and insolent creature, Carrot seed Will.

Shut it will you Pearce. Now Mr Harding, we were promised that if we moved into this Supermarket Village that we were gonna be looked after. This number of lorries just isn't gonna do it, is it?

Harding remains silent as he knows that Will is going to deliver his moan whatever, so just get on with it.

Now when I was talking to one of the drivers yesterday, he said that there were more and more of these New Bandit groups attacking the lorries, and at one point he thought he mightn’t even get through. This sort of thing is bound to happen again Mr Harding and we could well reach the point where none of our lorries are reaching us.

Just exactly what is your point Will?

Come on now Mr Harding, I’m just telling you what we think. Now, me and the boys here have staked everything on your idea that if we all came together to one place, like the River Retail Park here, then we would get all we needed to get by from the supermarket ‘Your Store’ that is. Well, we depend on those trucks Mr Harding. Now at the time, granted it sounded like the best way to get through these hard times, but I must say I'm beginning to have my doubts, and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Isn’t that right boys?

Worryingly for Harding, the boys seem somewhat interested in this latest doomsday outburst from our overly smug companion as he stubs out his cigarette butt with what he perceives as an intellectual visually metaphorical action undertaken with a self-gratifying and suffocating air. Harding decides to meet force with force but is unconvincing in his delivery of an awkward and macho retort, Well if the lorries are being threatened Will, we'll just have to get out there and teach those thieves a lesson, won’t we?

Will senses the advantage and in an uncontainable pornographic dribble, he serves for the match, Yeah you're right Mr Harding, the only thing is we've got to find them first, and with all the vehicles having been impounded, that isn't gonna to be easy, is it?

Harding is forced to concede the set, Look Will, stop being such a bloody pessimist, it's not the Wild West you know. Well not yet anyway.

Chapter Two

During the day that passed, garden centre delivery day, ‘Your Store’ received a congested truck full of gardening implements, two large crates of hand held power tools and too many packets of tiny seed for the wind to blow away when you finally manage to tear the things open and spill them like dead soldiers all over the lip of your manicured dirty nailed seed trench.

Harding had spent the evening that followed, reading his management manuals for policy on the treatment of deserters. He was a worried man, who should have worried more, but having reached the safety of his perch, he daren’t look at the floor. He hadn't got where he was the easy way, he'd done his graft and to all intense and purposes he still did, though now he did it in a suit, an ageing ready to wear suit that clung and hung in all the places that a good suit didn't. He had joined ‘Your Store’ as an ambitious fast track graduate Assistant Manager eight years ago come next week. He'd worked the long unsociable hours for the obligatory lowly wage and dug his way out of the rut he was in having failed to utilise his degree in Modern Social History combined with Vietnamese. He wasn't a ‘Your Store’ man, unlike his Armani clad Directors, his suit didn't come with a smile, but the man was a worker and that couldn't be denied, so they gave our chipper chap this store to manage and pushed him to the side.

It was now Wednesday, and Wednesday is the busiest food delivery day, and on this day more than ever before, Harding needed a break, a bit of luck. At precisely 11.00a.m., coffee time, the company name, ‘Your Store’, in a forty-foot-long logo sailed by his window and into the loading bay. He felt his boat had floated.

What the hell is going on, half the workforce was in the bay cheering the lorry in. They never used to be so enthralled at the prospect of unloading a long vehicle. One small upset in the deliveries and everybody is in a panic. That's exactly why we're in this mess to begin with - panic buying, the great British housewife strikes again. Harding hastens out of his office and across to the bay to restore order, as he knows it.

In a tone that has become uncontrollably cynical he offers in no more than an amplified mutter for those who want to hear, What are you going to do, form a human chain? You may not have noticed but the forklift has been invented for a number of years now.

Still the workers throng to the back of the lorry, which if they hadn’t would have caused a re-write of the dialogue in his mind.

It's empty. It's fucking empty, we are informed of the barren state of the vehicle as Will, wearing his town crier disguise, rushes around to the cab to hang the driver,

Sorry Will, there was nothing I could do. Ed, the driver was too fed up to be harassed by this McWerter geezer and so he offers a ‘see for yourself’ explanation and points to the roof of his cab where a hole resembling that of a crudely exposed tin of baked beans, has been cut out. Seeing the vacant anger in Will he attempts to clarify the obvious. When I stopped at the lights just outside town, these three fellas jumped on the roof of the cab, next thing I knew they'd cut this hole and were in here with a lump of Sheffield trying to drill through my temple. A couple of minutes later, they’ve unloaded the lot into these vans and just disappeared.

What, they took everything?

They even emptied the fuel tanks. All they left me was enough fuel to get here. I suppose they think I'm gonna load up and drive back so we can all play again, well not me mate. I tell you I've had enough, this lorry can stay here, and you can do what you bloody well want with it. Until we start getting some kind of protection, this game has got too dangerous. Pretty soon people are gonna start getting badly hurt, and when that happens, I don't wanna be here,

Jesus Ed, you can't give up, how are we gonna survive without you guys, if you stop delivering? our tench is not yet ready to make the transition to pike, but it is a veiled plea for a predator to make himself known from amongst the angry crowd.

Ed isn’t that man, I don't know Will, you'd better see Mr Harding about that, 'cause I think this has all gone too far.

There is a very vocal consensus that the bastards should be strung up, and let's teach them a lesson 'cause it's them or us. Harding, who had in the meantime disappeared to his office, returns from the phone and once again is forced to do his inadequate best to convince his workers that he is us, and not them.

"Okay everybody, calm down, I've called the police and they'll be here in half an hour, we'll get