Mars Evacuees

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When the polar ice advanced as far as Nottingham, my school was closed and I was evacuated to Mars.

Miss Clatworthy called me into her office to tell me about it. I’d had in the back of my mind that she might be going to say the aliens had finally shot down my mother’s spacefighter, so on the whole I took the actual news fairly well. And that’s even though I knew Mars wasn’t really ready for normal people to live on yet. They’d been terraforming it for years and years, but even after everything they’d squirted or sprayed or puffed at it, and all the money they’d spent on toasting it gently like a gigantic scone, you could still only sort of breathe the air and sort of not get sunburned to death. So you can see that the fact someone had decided I would be safer there than say, Surrey, was not a sign that the war with the aliens was going fantastically well.

Still, after eight months of Muckling Abbot School for Girls, I thought I could probably cope. It was one of those huge old posh schools that are practically castles, and must have been pretty draughty even before the Morrors came along in their invisible ships and said, ‘Oh we’re going to settle on your planet! We only need the poles, which are more suitable for our needs! Don’t worry; you will hardly know we’re here! And as a sweetener we will reverse global warming!’ (Because that was a bad thing back then, apparently.) And of course, it turned out ‘the poles’ meant rather more of Earth than we were entirely happy about, and that they could reverse global warming rather more thoroughly than we liked.

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