Free How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff Page A

local people because all the real hospitals had been taken over to fix up people who'd been bombed, poisoned or gassed in London. They got shipped out here when the city hospitals ran out of room.
    She said that since most of the people out in the country were only dying of appendicitis, childbirth and ordinary Preexisting Conditions the field hospital was supposed to take care of them while the more Colorful Cases of War Injury got hospitals with proper walls and beds.
    At the beginning, she said, I went to the hospital every day. I read to the patients and played with those poor injured children and tried to make myself useful. But now they'll only let military personnel inside due to the security risk. She looked kind of outraged at this and said As if I'm some kind of danger to those people! and Piper and I exchanged a quick glance and we were both thinking the same thing namely, Only if being unhinged is contagious.
    Later Major M told us you'd be amazed at the number of things that can go wrong for civilians in a war. For instance, he said, let's say a kid gets appendicitis or breaks his leg, there was no telephone to tell someone that the bone was sticking out of his thigh, no petrol to drive a car to the field hospital, if you happened to know where it was in the first place, and a big shortage of antibiotics if you did manage to get the kid to a surgeon somehow and wanted to make sure he or she didn't die of infection a week or so later.
    He also told us about people with cancer who needed expensive drugs and a pregnant woman he knew with RH-negative blood whose baby would probably die pretty much no matter what, and old people, some of whom would die sooner or later of strokes and heart attacks or lack of drugs, and some who already had.
    Another time Major McEvoy started telling us about the farm problems in the area that he was trying to control and they mostly involved cows who couldn't be milked by electric milking machines once the emergency generators stopped working and had to be milked by hand or they could get mastitis and die. Now there's a side effect of war I bet you never considered.
    Once you start thinking about all that stuff that wasn't working it's kind of hard to know where it all ends. Like the incubators for baby chicks not to mention baby humans and electric fences and hospital monitors and those things you use to shock people back to life when their hearts stop and computer systems and trains and airplanes. Even the gas supplies for heat and cooking are regulated by electricity, said Major McEvoy, and how do you think you pump water out of a well?
    I felt a science report coming on titled Electricity, Our Helpful Friend.
    Then there was the problem of burying all the cows and baby chicks and people who died and apparently there were lots of dead things and they were well on their way to becoming a big stinking rotten health problem, but that might have been too much information for me just then, and I thought I wasn't going to eat another hamburger or chicken leg again in a hurry.
    The Good Major was also trying to distribute things like milk and eggs and other farm food so all the occupied people wouldn't die of starvation and one or two other tiny details like that so you could say he had his hands full and then some.
    I guess by a combination of politeness and osmosis I learned more about farming in the few weeks we lived with the McEvoys than I was ever likely to find out in a lifetime on the tenth floor of an Eighty-sixth Street apartment building where the closest you ever got to Agricultural Produce was a corned beef sandwich from Zabar's with a half-sour pickle which I knew perfectly well used to be a cucumber but how it got to be a Pickle on a Plate was anyone's guess.
    Anyway, all this stuff was happening under the rules of The Occupation which never struck me as being entirely clear but as far as I could tell meant you could go ahead and do whatever you liked as long as no one told