Just as every child now thinks he’s going to die of global warming, so those of us who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties all thought we were going to die of nuclear war. We knew this because trusted authorities told us so: not just the government and our teachers but even the author of Fungus the Bogeyman.
When the Wind Blows (1982) was the downer of a graphic novel which Raymond Briggs wrote as our punishment for having enjoyed Fungus. It was about a nice, retired couple called Jim and Hilda Bloggs who somehow survive the first Soviet nuclear strike, unwittingly smell the burned corpses of their neighbours, and end the book praying in their miserable fallout shelter as they vomit, lose their hair and their teeth fall out.
There was another book, too, that we all read around that time. It was by General Sir John ‘Shan’ Hackett and it was called The Third World War. ‘Shan’ obviously knew what he was talking about, a) because he’d fought at Arnhem and b) because he had commanded the British Army of the Rhine. So when he showed Birmingham — which was where I lived then — being nuked by the Soviets, I abandoned all hopes of having children on my knee asking: ‘Deddy, what did you do in the great war against the Red Terror?’
One result of all this brainwashing was that none of my career plans involved surviving much beyond my thirties, which may explain why I’m in such a hopeless mess now. Another is that I’ve ever since been hugely sceptical of anything the authorities tell us about anything, from Aids to the Millennium Bug to the possibility that we’re going to be allowed to escape from the EU, hence my trademark contrarianism.
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