This idea has been rattling around my head for years. Like in many of my stories there's an element of autobiography.
The story is named after a track by Mogwai from their 'Young Team' album. I thought the title was appropriate yet suitably enigmatic.
--
I eventually finished clearing out my late father's house last month. The final room to be cleared was my old bedroom. At the back of the walk-in closet, amongst the comics, school exercise books and forgotten toys, I found a familiar green Clarks shoebox.
Inside was my teenage diary. I had kept it for three years while at secondary school, initially in a series of blue Challenge notebooks and then on an assortment of TDK D90 and D120 cassette tapes. Beside the shoebox was my old tape recorder. Despite languishing in a cupboard for a few decades, I was delighted to discover that the tape recorder still worked and the cassettes remained playable.
My diary had started as a field record for school trip to Lundy Island, just off the Devon coast. My biology teacher had expected jottings about petrels, kittiwakes and puffins; instead I produced a pastiche of Sue Townsend's 'The Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4'. The teenage me was convinced that the future me would want to know all about the minutiae of his life. Well yes, he was right, but more out of morbid curiosity than any desire for nostalgic genuflection. Even so I was pleasantly surprised by this diary; it was funny, embarrassing and occasionally quite poignant.
The last two tapes were labelled "June 1987 (1)" and "June 1987 (2)", the sticky labels written in tiny yet meticulously precise capital letters using a black biro.
The first of the two tapes was the expected mix of ephemera about the music I loved, the television shows I had seen and news about my family and friends. I noticed that two things were uppermost in my mind. Firstly I would pass my exams, do my 'A' Levels and then study either physics or chemistry at university. Secondly I believed that my mother would make a full recovery after her upcoming operation. Hearing my optimism about her prognosis was heart-breaking.
Actually, there were three things. I made quite a few references to an unsettled international situation. I mentioned Libya, Iran and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It surprised me just how interested I had been in current affairs.
--
Several times I had reminisced about childhood events, things I'd long forgotten. In one diary entry, I had described a school visit to the Police Station in my home town of Basingstoke. The last stop on the tour had been a tiny room in the basement of the station containing a communications desk. At this point the previously ebullient duty sergeant had become very subdued. He had lifted a telephone receiver and allowed each of us to listen in turn. There was a plaintive and familiar noise with a rising and falling tone; to me it had sounded like an entrapped banshee pleading to be released.
This was the Air Attack Warning.
--
A couple of entries later I had described a realisation from when I was eleven. Basingstoke was surrounded by military and civilian defence establishments. To the west was the Greenham Common airbase where US Cruise missiles were installed. To the north - the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston. To the east - Farnborough with its military airfield, the headquarters of British Aerospace and the officer training camp at Sandhurst. On the coast to the south were several naval bases.
I was an avid reader of comics at the time, in particular the science fiction anthology comic 2000AD. One story described the effects of a nuclear blast in gruesome detail. Using a map, a ruler and the knowledge about blast radii I had gleaned from this comic, I had discovered that just a single ICBM armed with a ten megaton warhead aimed at Basingstoke would obliterate or at least incapacitate all of the defence establishments surrounding the town.
My family were living at Ground Zero. That realisation had led to many sleepless nights.
--
By the second tape, my diary entries had outlined a rapidly deepening international crisis.
Relations between the US and the USSR had been tense again. In Moscow, half a dozen US embassy staff were accused of spying and had been deported. This had been followed by a tit-for-tat expulsion of Soviet diplomats from the US. Several explosive devices had been discovered within Camp David, just before a meeting between President Reagan and the UN Secretary General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. A Saudia passenger jet flying between Paris and Islamabad had been hijacked by a Mujahedeen cell. This had been shot down in Afghani airspace by Soviet fighter planes. Amongst the casualties had been several members of the French World Cup squad and a minor Saudi Royal.
During a live address from the White House President Reagan had criticised the Soviet Politburo, echoing his 'Evil Empire' speech from four years earlier. General Secretary Gorbachev had accused Reagan of 'inappropriate sabre rattling'.
A large number of Soviet tanks had assembled on the Iranian-Afghan border. There had been reports of a NATO task force in the Gulf of Oman, poised to counter a potential incursion.
--
I was puzzled by these diary entries. They were from 1987; the era of Glasnost and Perestroika. I could have sworn that the Cold War had begun to thaw by then.
--
In the 22nd June entry, I had said that my family had received their national emergency information leaflet. It had re-iterated the information found in those bleakly matter-of-fact 'Protect And Survive' public information films, which were now repeated every night after the Watershed. As instructed my family had created a fallout room and an inner refuge then stock-piled water, tinned food and other essentials within it.
I had read the leaflet out loud in the diary. Initially the advice seemed sensible. After a short while this advice became chilling and oddly futile.
I had described a fraught visit to an over-crowded supermarket. Armed police in riot gear had been stationed there. Angry, desperate people had begun fighting over tins of baked beans and packs of toilet roll. The police had quickly broken things up using tear gas and rubber bullets. The supermarket was then closed and boarded up.
There had been a special evening news bulletin on BBC1, half way through EastEnders. The news reader, Sue Lawley, had explained that the UK was now in a state of national emergency.
I had sounded so scared - so resigned - on the recording.
--
My diary entry for the 24th June had consisted of a deep sigh followed by:
"They've bombed Tehran. It's gone."
--
In the 25th June entry I had talked for a good ten minutes about a girl I fancied, someone I had known from school. We had obtained summer jobs at the hospital together and I was hoping that our friendship would develop into something else. I had sounded almost optimistic, a relief after the previous few entries.
Then... A distant background noise, plaintive and familiar; a rising and falling tone. Immediately accompanied by panicked shouting, car horns, police sirens, doors slamming and the sound of frightened children.
The muffled crackle of a microphone brushing against clothing.
Now I had sounded confused and hysterical, asking again and again about the whereabouts of my family.
Then I had begun to cry, to howl, to scream.
About everything I had wanted to achieve, now denied.
About my imminent demise.
--
The recording stopped abruptly.
I had spooled on and pressed play a few times. The rest of the cassette tape had been blank.
--
Those last few diary entries... They didn't match my recollection of that time at all.
The summer of 1987 had been particularly memorable for me. I can clearly remember the holiday job and flirting with that girl. I can remember walking back home with her in the warm sunshine and kissing outside her parents' house. I can remember celebrating our exam results together with two wine glasses and a bottle of Lambrusco in the Memorial Park. I can remember losing my virginity to her while camping in the New Forest. And I can remember the longing and regret I felt when her family moved away and we lost touch.
So I've forced myself to listen to the recording again.
This version of me - the one on the cassette tape - had experienced something profound and terrifying.
Something real.
Something final.
