Brother in the Land Quotes

“They used to say we had nukes to protect our way of life but where was it now?”
― Robert Swindells, Brother in the Land

“Soldiers always step in where there's a disaster.”
― Robert Swindells, Brother in the Land

“It's not true what they say, that there's some good in all of us. Not after nukes, it isn't. Still, there must have been something in old Booth. It goes to show you never can tell.”
― Robert Swindells, Brother in the Land

“That's the worst thing - you get so that you'll send your own folk off to die, thinking, sooner them than us.”
― Robert Swindells, Brother in the Land

“I don't think I'd ever known real quiet before, I mean, when you live in a town there's always noise, even in the middle of the night. You don't notice it but it's there. Real silence feels like something's pressing in on you, and so does darkness. It's never dark in town.”
― Robert Swindells, Brother in the Land

“Looking back it was a weird time, that first three weeks after the bomb. It was unreal. At least, it felt unreal to me and I suppose it was the same for everybody. One life had ended and the next hadn't begun. We tried to cling to the old life but it slipped away and we drifted in limbo, waiting. That day, the day after I met Kim, was the end of waiting and first day of the new life.”
― Robert Swindells, Brother in the Land

“Would you come down into this lot if you were sitting up there on the moor in your protective gear on top of a bunkerful of clean grub?' She laughed. 'They're only people, you know, like you and me. They want to survive, just like us. You don't think they're about to get all that uncontaminated grub out and start dishing it up to us, do you?”
― Robert Swindells, Brother in the Land

“I thought about what Branwell had said last night-that we'd have to fight eventually. I wondered why people fight. I mean, there was the Commissioner sitting up on Kershaw Farm, and here we were. We weren't bothering each other so far as I could see. Why couldn't they
live the way they wanted to live, and let us live our way?
I thought about this for a bit as the pile of sticks grew beside the stump, and I saw that it was just like countries before the nukes. Some lived one way, some another. Only instead of leaving it like that they argued and threatened and built horrific weapons, and finally they launched these weapons at each other, and now we weren't living like we used to, and it's a fair bet they weren't living like they used to either. Millions of people dead, and everything worse for those who were left. Crazy”
― Robert Swindells, Brother in the Land

“East and West, the sirens wailed. Emergency procedures began, hampered here and there by understandable panic Helpful leaflets were distributed and roads sealed off. VIPs went to their bunkers and volunteers stood at their posts. Suddenly, nobody wanted to be an engine-driver any more or a model or a rock-star. Everybody wanted to be one thing, a survivor. But it was an overcrowded profession.”
― Robert Swindells, Brother in the Land