When you hear the air attack warning …
From Warhead Assembly, Transport & Storage, a report on the Scottish CND site:
“On 17th September 1988 on the A303 Ilminster bypass, an MG sports car crossed the road and collided head on with a Mammoth Major nuclear weapon transporter. The driver of the MG was killed and petrol from the car spilled around the Mammoth Major but did not ignite. The carrier ended up inches from a steep embankment.”
Ilminster, the town referred to in the above quote, was where I grew up. The accident occurred about a year before I left Somerset and moved to London. Fortunately, it took place on the A303 bypass, outside the town. If the incident had happened a couple of years earlier, there is an outside chance that I might have witnessed it at close quarters — because Ilminster was one of the last towns on the A303 trunk road to get a bypass. Prior to that, the busy road (which is a major route from Cornwall to London) ran through the north of the town, and the house I lived in was no more than a few feet from the kerb. As a child, my bedroom was at the front of the house, and I clearly remember that on a number of occasions the noise of huge transporter lorries would wake me in the middle of the night. To this day, I’m not sure what they were carrying. Naturally, however, I have my suspicions.
This might explain why, nearly twenty years on, I retain a slight fascination with the Cold War era at the beginning of the 1980s. The precarious political situation between the two superpowers was almost a constant reference point in my early teenage years. From an early age, I learnt that the area of Somerset in which I lived might become an important military target in any nuclear war — the Royal Naval Air station at Yeovilton and Westland Helicopters (where my father worked as an engineer) were both based nearby. Army vehicles were frequently sighted on the roads. CND became very active in the local towns and villages, holding meetings and rallies — although the latter more closely resembled fetes or coffee mornings. This was the heart of genteel rural Somerset, after all.
Finally, after having been persuaded to read some CND literature by various friends, my parents got heavily involved too. It seems strange to think that the threat of nuclear armageddon brought them together, but it was certainly one of the few things they were both passionate about. How romantic — just one happy couple united under the shared thought of a looming mushroom cloud.
My parents took their commitment seriously — although I think this might have been part of their last-ditch attempt at living up to some of the hippy ideals that they had tried to espouse on previous occasions (after which they discovered that they didn’t really have the right mindset for kaftans and beads). My mother and father both subscribed to the idea that children, no matter how young they were, should not be spared from the reality of the situation. I clearly remember my mother handing me a thick book all about the effects and aftermath of a nuclear attack, and being encouraged to read a chapter each evening. I was ten years old at the time. A couple of years later, my sister and I were allowed to stay up late one night to watch a horrifying new BBC drama called Threads, being shown as part of a particularly cheery season of programmes all about nuclear holocaust. It was not pleasant stuff, although I don’t recall having nightmares. (Strangely enough, I picked up a copy of the drama a couple of years ago, and watched it one bright, sunny afternoon. That night, I did have absolutely terrifying nightmares. Go figure).
However, the most extreme example of how seriously my parents took the nuclear threat in those dark days came in mid-1981. From what I’ve learned since, it appears that the talk in local CND circles had turned to what action families could realistically take to avoid nuclear war, if it really did start looking like America and Russia were going to press their respective red buttons. My family has few memorable stories, but this one has certainly entered into folklore.
My parents had thought long and hard about what they could do. They had done their research, and investigated outlying parts of the world that might be safe from global nuclear obliteration. They were — rarely — completely united and in agreement on this plan of action. And so it was that my sister and I were earnestly informed that, if things did get really bad, we would pack up a few belongings and travel to a deserted spot called the Falkland Islands.
Oops.
Even if you have only a rudimentary grasp of recent history, you will be aware that — less than one year later — this suddenly began to look like one of the World’s Worst Ideas.
In subsequent years, when my sister and I began to realise the utterly ridiculous nature of the plan suggested by our parents, we couldn’t help giggling about it. Yet to even suggest such a scheme proves how genuinely afraid they were, even if the whole thing was just a little naive.
There are other reasons why this era lingers in my memory. The Protect and Survive manual was everywhere. To my parents and their friends it was a travesty — a completely useless waste of paper offering pathetic suggestions on how to protect yourself from the blast and the fallout. Yet voices of authority in local youth clubs and on television were encouraging us to read the booklet thoroughly. Because, like most children at that age, I believed anyone except my parents, I was constantly hoping that my father would ask me to help him build our Fallout Room and Inner Refuge. Yet for some strange reason that I simply couldn’t comprehend, he was distinctly unwilling to start unscrewing the doors from their hinges.
Still, up to this point, the genuine concerns of my parents hadn’t really got through to me. It was partly a game, and partly some dull issue that grown-ups talked about. By the time I was 13 years old, the roles began to swap. My parents began the long and painful road towards divorce — not even marching against the bomb could keep them together, it seemed — while I suddenly woke up to what was going on around me. And once I’d woken up, I got bloody scared.
The twin causes of this sudden political awakening were a book and a pop record, although history is obviously playing tricks by making me think that both were released at about the same time.
The book was Raymond Briggs’ tragi-comic cartoon strip When the Wind Blows, given to me as a Christmas present by my grandfather. I seem to recall spending the afternoon of Christmas Day reading it, and becoming upset when I couldn’t help but equate the elderly couple with my grandparents. With beautifully-drawn pictures of the two central characters slowly wasting away in their ‘authorised’ fallout shelter, the macabre nature of ‘government-speak’ about nuclear war was suddenly brought to life in a devastating way.
The pop record, perhaps all too predictably, was the monumental Two Tribes by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. The first time I heard it, I was transfixed — the elegaic opening, the calm measured tones of the BBC-style announcer from the Protect and Survive public information film (“If any member of the family should die whilst in the shelter, put them outside — but remember to tag them first for identification purposes”), and then the sheer overwhelming barrage of noise coupled with Holly Johnson almost relishing the war in his lyrics. I bought every 12-inch mix of the single that was available, and played them endlessly on the useless radiogram that comprised my state of the art hi-fi at the time. While the song was certainly exhilarating, once again it made me feel very nervous about the escalating nuclear arms race.
Today, when I occasionally hear Two Tribes, it sounds like so much pompous, overblown 80s trash. Yet it still has the ability to send a shiver down my spine.
Within a couple of years, the Cold War began to thaw — I remember dashing out of classes to find the nearest television, so I could watch the historic handshake between Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik. I felt a slight twinge of disappointment that this event had deprived me of the chance to go on my first CND demo, or tie myself to the fence of a nuclear base somewhere. I was all ready to make my own vital personal contribution towards banning the bomb, and suddenly that nice Mr Gorbachev had brought my crusade to a premature end. Being a teenager, I was only temporarily down-hearted. It wasn’t long before I was concentrating my efforts on repairing the hole in the ozone layer and freeing Nelson Mandela. I was very adaptable when it came to my favourite causes.
So excuse my occasional obsession with Protect and Survive, or my desire to visit the nuclear bunkers now open to the public. For a few years, nuclear missiles seemed to be a big part of growing up. After all, I have a feeling that they may have travelled past my bedroom window on some dark winter nights, which is enough to make anyone a little concerned.