Unexpected news:
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January, 1940
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Stuart Hopps was a buck of many words. Over the years, this had made him many friends and had even been the reason for a few former friends to distance themselves from him over the years; not for any sour reasons, but rather because they simply got a bit weary of it after a while. He spoke up about this and that and all sorts, and usually kept at it for half the night. 'The Crops will be good this year,' or 'we're digging down a new level of the burrow' were the regulars, as they were with most bunnies. It was the kind of gentle talk over a ploughman's and a Saturday afternoons drink that all the other farmers would do. The Thumpers, the Lops, the Whitefoots and pretty much every other Bunny family would have the same thing on their tongues at that stage. Indeed, after a long day of overseeing their respective burrows, there was nothing more that each one's patriarch enjoyed more than nursing an imperial ouncer of beer and hearing how their colleagues were engaged in similar, but not quite the same, challenges. Naturally, however much they could talk about said subject, Stuart could talk ten-fold about it.
When it came to the war, he could talk twenty-fold about it.
Mentions of tactic ideas, crazy new weapons or plans so brilliantly obvious that the high brass was nuts for not thinking about it sooner abounded. Today it was time to talk about bombing defences for the major cities. "I mean, why don't we just make barrage balloons with mile high cables or something?" he asked. "A whole fence of them, and the bombers will have to go a crazy way around, and run out of fuel, or so high they lose all their fuel on the way up!"
"Calm down Stu," one of the fellow farmers, a certain Richard Warren, warned. "I'm sure there's a very good reason."
"Which is…?" Stuart asked, opening his arms out as he invited an answer. He looked left and right at his friends, all sitting up on the nobbly wooden bar stools and drinking their beer from the local bar (and enjoying the perky young bunny barmaid as they did so).
"The cable," another buck suggested.
"What about it Bill?" Stuart asked.
William 'Bill' Cottontail, another of Stuart's close friends, rolled his eyes before explaining. "The longer the cable, the heavier it is. Too heavy and the thing won't get anywhere near as high as you want it to!"
Stuart chuckled slightly before countering. "You put one balloon on top of each other. Problem solved!"
"…No, I can't think of a repose to that," agreed a third, chuckling, voice. It appeared that Paul Skipson had had a little too much to drink.
"Anyway, I'm afraid that brilliant insights like that will be coming to an end in a short while," Stu proudly said.
"How come?" Richard asked, smiling. "Finally started brewing your own beer? It'll be a happy day for you then, though for the pub not so much I think."
"Oh no," Stuart sadly said. "Still trying to sort out the plumbing. It seems to be a thing us Hopps' are cursed with, a lack of plumbing skills."
"And pride!" Paul joked, as he took another deep mouthful of his drink.
"Well, I'll be giving us Hopps' a bit of a reason to be proud, if I don't say so myself," Stuart boasted.
"And why's that?" Bill asked.
"I'm enlisting."
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SMASH…
The silence was shattered as Paul's glass broke on the tile floor.
The barmaid groaned and wandered off to grab a dustpan and brush. All the other farmers just gaped at him, up until Paul began laughing.
"HA… HA … HA… Good one Hopps! You almost had me convinced, didn't you?"
"I did," he agreed, "though that just means I'll have to put a bit more effort in. Then again, telling you when you're in this state was probably not the best idea."
Paul's jaw dropped down as the realization set in. Richard, meanwhile, had finally found his voice. "You're enlisting…?"
"Yes."
"In… the army?"
"Well I'm scared of heights and can't swim for the life of me," he said, "so army it'll be."
Richard was unconvinced. "You…"
"Yes."
"Army…."
"Yes.
"In a war…"
Stuart shrugged. "Well, there is one going on. It's not as if I haven't seen a paper in the last four months or listened to the news is it? Heck, I remember listening to the declaration of war on the radio."
"But… but…" Paul began to slur. "The last time I had a team of pine martens and such from the city to pick the apples in my orchard, or a team of elephants to help with a barn, you locked yourself in your burrow and didn't come out till they'd left."
"I didn't lock my doors either time. I merely wished to maintain a respectful distance," Stuart clarified.
"The edge of my orchard is half a mile from your burrow! Pine martens have little itty-bitty claws…"
"But an elephant not looking where he's going can easily finish me off before I know what's happening," the portly brown bunny pointed out.
Paul blinked a few times, before carrying on. "That's an accident! Knitler actively wants to kill us, and the Cud Reich has artillery! Dive-bombers! Bombs! Tanks! Guns and bullets!"
"And lets face it Hopps," Bill cut in, "you're not the bravest in the world, are you? I mean, if you weren't so timid around predators then your father in law wouldn't have chosen you for your wife. I mean, Otto Hopps…"
"Tuppence in the swear-jar," the barmaid called out, with Bill grumbling under his breath and complying. Few had been sad when Otto Hopps had passed. Like Stuart he was not someone of few words, and most of his words were very unsavoury, particularly towards predators. He had often made the pub a place of bitterness and anger, hence why uttering his name was treated as a far greater crime than your standard swear word.
"I get that he mistook my general caution towards our fine Zootopian predators as a rancid hatred, or at least as close as he could find in this more enlightened day and age," Stuart said. "I also get that he likely ignored my equally general caution to any big mammal that might pose a stomp risk, in doing so perpetuating this myth that we're pred haters, which is nonsense. I mean, I play cribbage with a weasel don't you know! But you know what? Given what a lovely Bunny I was getting, even if he made me give up my name, I was fine with those small sacrifices."
"You're trying to avoid talking about the war, and how you're now going to be in it," Paul slurred.
"I was getting to that," Stuart replied. "The way I see it, anyone in the right age bracket is likely to be called up. I've still got four years to go until I'm over the big four-zero and out. The way I see it, you can join up early and get a nice safe position, riding the war out behind the front line before getting your discharge and all the benefits."
"And where is this cushy little safe position?" Bill asked.
"Logistics," Stuart explained. "I've got experience running a giant farm, and the recruiting officer agreed that I'd be an ideal helper in logistics. Sending rations and munitions from warehouses to the relevant places on the front. It's in solid writing, I'll be away from the front and doing office work. I'll be leaving for basic training in a week, and should be out in Furance by the end of April. As for the Reich, well the Mareginot line will easily keep them out."
Bill blinked a little, before a smile grew across his face. Richard and Paul both had ones as well. They all descended into chuckles, patting Stuart on the back while ordering more beer for him. Jokes about how he shouldn't worry them like that in the future abounded, and as they progressively got merrier, a glowing pride took over. By the end of the night, the three Bucks had all told Stuart how proud they were that he'd almost got a little bored and a tad bit annoyed of it. Sadly, he was too inebriated to realise that this was very similar to what he subjected his friends to on the lion's share of nights at the pub.
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June, 1940.
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Henry Hopps, the oldest son of Bonnie and Stuart Hopps, came home to find his mother holding a letter in front of her.
She'd been crying.
A wave of fear came over him too, a feeling so dark and mirthful that nothing he could ever remember came close. The whole house had been dangerously silent for several weeks now, desperate for news.
He knew that it had come, and the fate of his father with it.
But then his sudden pang of dread vanished as he saw the faintest of smiles on her face. A little slimmer of hope against the general despair.
"Mum," he said slowly, as he walked over to comfort her. "What's happened?"
"They've tracked down Stuart," she said. "Well, more the enemy did. He… he was captured. But he's safe. He's safe."
He felt relief flood through him. Ever since the distribution centre his father had worked at had been cut off from the rest of the Zootopian army by the Reich's panzer divisions, his fate had been unknown.
Not anymore.
Henry walked forward and held his mother tight, hugging her as she cried into him. Through her sobs, Bonnie never felt the soft embrace of her son. She just wanted to cry out her stress and tears, before getting on with the day to day business of helping to run the farm. He though, wanted to make her feel safe and warm just like she'd done to him when he was a kit.
It felt a bit awkward, but it seemed to do the job.
Her shakes slowed down, her sniffles became a slow breathing and she began to stand up.
Henry interrupted her. "I have some news," he announced.
"Go on?" Bonnie asked tentatively.
"Given the fall of Furance, the ministry of war is stepping up the evacuations," Henry began, only to be cut off as a gentle paw was placed over his mouth.
"I know what to do then," Bonnie said with a warm smile. She stood up firmly, before brushing herself down. "Looking after a new little one will certainly put my mind at rest, for a while at least."
"That sounds good," Henry agreed. "Apparently there'll be several trains coming over the next few weeks, the first arriving tomorrow, and, given the size of the farm, the ministry expects us to have at least half a dozen children under our care once the last one has come."
The young buck looked on as his mother smiled and nodded. "I say we pick up one or two tomorrow, given that it's short notice, and then do about the same for each new train. Gives us a chance to settle them in. In any case, I'll be hard pressed in getting a room for one ready by tomorrow."
"Need a paw?" Henry asked.
"I'll be fine," Bonnie replied. "You help out with the farm. Doing this myself will help clear my mind."
"Are you sure, I…"
"How about you tell everyone the news about father," the doe suggested.
Henry nodded, before pulling his mother into a quick hug before leaving. She thumped her foot a few times before looking around a bit. "Right," she told herself. "Work to be done."
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AN: Those who've read the dark version of this will know that it was originally Otto, not Stu, in the pub scenes. Otto is dead in this fic, and even when alive was likely only half as bad as the monster in the Halloween version. By and large here, he was the 'embarrassing relative' of the Hopps family, with the current generation likely being at the same kind of predisposition as they were in the feature film.
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The bit about Stu giving up his name is a reference to how in the film, when Judy is wrapping some carrots in a newspaper, the text mentions Bonnie being Otto Hopp's youngest daughter.
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A ploughman's lunch tends to be made of bread, British cheeses (Cheddar, Stilton, Gloucester, Red Leicester, Cheshire etc.) and beer (usually an ale) at the very least, often with some onions added. However a variety of salad materials, along with cold meats (maybe replaced by dried and smoked fish for preds), fruits, eggs and pickled foodstuffs (pickles, pickled eggs, picked beetroot and pickle mixes) are also often added in. In the dark version of this story, there's a mention of 'Ramston pickle', a pun on (delicious) Branston pickle which is a pickled chutney of various vegetables, first sold in 1922. Interestingly, while the basic ploughman's has been recorded at least as far back as the 14th century, the name was only coined in the 1950's as part of an advertisement push.
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While the above were being talked about in peacetime, by 1940 rationing of sugar, meats and butter had been enacted, though this likely wouldn't affect the Bunnies. Indeed, most fresh fruits and vegetables, along with potatoes, fish and bread (though bakers could only make hardy wholegrain loaves) didn't get rationed during the war, though fish prices did rise. Ironically, bread and potatoes did get rationed after the war by the Atlee government after bad weather damaged harvests and stores respectively. It's hard to say how rationing would work in Zootopia, given the huge variety of mammals and diets. For instance dairy products and eggs, if only consumed by preds (10% of the pop), may not have required rationing.
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The Mareginot line is, of course, a reference to the Maginot line in France, built along the German border to keep them out. Quite famously, the Germans solution to this formidable obstacle was to go around it, charging their panzer divisions in a blitzkrieg attack straight through the Ardennes forest. The British expeditionary force were surrounded and evacuated from Dunkirk, though many (including Stu here) were lost in the fighting and captured.
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I'm afraid that this, even for this fic's standards, was a short chapter. Hopefully the authors notes made it up a bit. However things will get moving in the next one when we're introduced to Nick. Hope you're enjoying it all, and tune in next week!