All
to fate a weight of pains and dollars.
Their
spirits wear our silver collars.
Review,
friends - troops long past review:
Each
a dot of time without pretense or guile.
With
them passes the lure of fortune.
Review,
friends - troops long past review.
When
our time ends on its rictus smile,
We'll
pass the lure of fortune.
By
Frank Herbert": https://war-poetry.livejournal.com/291049.html
furthermore, we will not have confronted the lies which made us the people we are! One thing I learned from our "cellar dweller" was that we are so often deceived! The truth is that on top of the 210 megatons (total), estimated to be likely to have been dropped on the U.K by the Russians during a full nuclear exchange by the "Threads" drama-documentary of the mid-1980s and the concomitant horrible carnage envisioned in the United States on the similar "The Day After" one must factor in the inevitable effect of (even relatively low-yield), strikes on nuclear reactors themselves. It has taken me decades (and I have an intense interest in the subject having been visiting & eventually living in Sheffield -Cowlishaw Rd. S11 and later outside the huge 19c cemetery on the opposite side of the River Don-, during the mid 1980s):
to realise that this vital understanding has proven to be completely absent from the vast majority of both the public and (so called), academic discourse regarding the true effects of a full nuclear exchange between most (if not all),of the world's nuclear armed states.
By extension—cf., below, quotation 4—the expression Noddy suit also denotes a suit of protective clothing for use by agricultural employees working with chemical sprays.
The first element of this expression, Noddy, is of uncertain origin. Perhaps, with allusion to the comical appearance of the wearer in the clothing, this first element is Noddy, the name of a toy figure of a boy whose head is fixed in such a way that he nods when he speaks*, the central character in a series of stories for young children by the English author Enid Blyton (1897-1968).": https://wordhistories.net/2022/02/04/noddy-suit/
*Italics mine.
My brother's best friend (at the time), and daughter's godfather had been in the Royal Marines and (illegally), gifted me a full "Noddy", sans the respirator, which I "installed" in our old coal cellar in our house in Park Lane, Wallington. I could sit on the ledge of my bedroom window at night and see over what was visible of London from a hill on the southern border of Greater London and try not to imagine the size of nuclear blast I might witness if they ever finally "did it!" Thus the "cellar dweller" came not to be (as it were).
It took me a long-time to come to terms with the fact that my "toy" suit lacked an occupant, however (somewhere between the ages of 16-18 -I should have recorded the date but I wasn't that "cute", or anal-), I eventually and very deliberately consigned "Noddy" to the trash (an act my mother witnessed -although not directly-, silently and it remained something we never discussed), this despite the fact that, as I have just stated, I was not at that time in full possession of the facts regarding the effects of a full nuclear exchange:
Neither, as I have also stated, did anyone else appear to be. The reason for this is now painfully obvious because the military would have known, for they understand better than anyone else the nature of the relationship between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. There is not a snowball's chance in Hades' place that any nuclear armed state would not target the reactors which supply the enriched uranium and the plutonium, with which to build nuclear weapons, to those states considered a threat. Our militaries and concomitant secret states saw it as their duties (no-less), to keep this truth from the public, although a worse betrayal has been (in my opinion), perpetrated by those "liberals" who failed to see-the-wood-for-the-trees because they were too timid to fully embrace a non-nuclear future and have been happy to live a lie, to this very day of publication, entangled in an indulgent web of such wish-fulfillments, false-economies and bad-practices that includes the; WiFi, Particle Beam Redemption, Crypto Currency, Fusion Reaction delusions and other such "technological" quick-fix solutions and have found it impossible to articulate any other public discourse : https://www.arafel.co.uk/2023/03/depleted-uranium-use-is-nuclear-war.html, arafel.co.uk/2023/05/depleted-uranium-use-is-nuclear-war.html & https://www.arafel.co.uk/2023/08/depleted-uranium-use-is-nuclear-war.html
Thus the question of whether or not a nuclear power facility could be made A or (even more ridiculously), H bomb proof was never aired, the military/industrial complex knew how ludicrous it was to suggest that nuclear power stations would a) be in any way proof against any nuclear weapons & b) that similarly armed hostile states would not immediately target the facilities of their opponents. What a grim farce we have lived through.
.jpeg) |
| "Mr. Miyagi how come you Fukusima?".."Ah..no-body prefecture!" |
We have a local Burma Star recipient (now in a wheel-chair), who lays a wreath at the West End War Memorial every year and he is one of the very, very last of those who actually served (although they do who only stand and wait), and we are losing their discourse, all of the Battle of Britain pilots are now dead (my grandfather knew many of them, at least those who flew from Biggin Hill -he was an engineer-).
The collation of war stories from those who participated by the subsequent generations needs must always be a desperate rear-guard action, I have felt like a drowning man clutching at straws myself whilst trying to hold on to a public discourse with the living rather than the dead. Both my parents experienced WW2 and that intimately (they were both nearly killed from the sky), and my mother had me at a later age than most (esp. for the mid 60s), so I'm one of the last children of the generation who were cognisant during the war and, therefore, experienced it in any meaningful way. I remember the "walking wounded" and the remaining bomb sites (Wilson School's cross country course is/was one -Wilson's is built on much of the old Croydon Airport site and at a time in the not too distant past both a Hurricane that flew there during the Battle of Britain and the man who flew it were still with us-).
Walking Wounded
These are they who are like shadows you can hear clearly though the living flesh has no voice; "You have no voice! What are you deaf....?" These people, their psyches, their spirits/souls if you will are aware, aware that their spoken language is inadequate to convey their experience/s and that only by seeing "the dead walk" may others come to understand the trauma such wounded have suffered. Quote; "It is a beautiful, autumnal, late-afternoon outside a church hall on the side of a mountain in south-central Italy in 1944. An American colonel and a female adjutant (not his), from staff headquarters arrive in a jeep and they are looking for a British officer. Through the open door the pair can see shadows and movement, they also perceive faint and unusual sounds emanating from within. With the sun gleaming off both his cap and the adjutant the colonel steps into the hallway and begins to make out a group of British Officers and NCOs wobbling, shuffling and occasionally jerking around as if electrocuted by a cattle-prod (or even lightning), and they are making strange sounds something like this; "awwooogleugglllleoggle, iwwwigglyyoggwall, hehehigwooblewoblewooble" and so forth. The Yank Colonel looks on incredulously, finally he manages to catch the eye of one of the British officers, who regards him with scant interest. The American asks; "What are you Limey's doing?!" The officer he has addressed straightens himself slightly, as he would if challenged whilst carefully making his way home from the local public house, on an early New Year's morning, by a young police officer and seeming to vibrate with only slightly less intensity than before, replies; "Voting for f**king Christmas old-man! What does it look like we're doing?!": https://www.arafel.co.uk/2022/12/wobblin-tommies-pt2-dead-men-tell-no.html
As they finish their discourse with the living we lose the testimonies of those who were actually there, by whom and for whom blood was spilt.
"All ze Leetle von Brauns!"
Now, where I am going with this is to suggest that those of us who went through the Cold War (including those who remember the Cuban Missile Crisis as I know my friend the minister emeritus Edmund Kell, Unitarian Church -RIP- Rev. John Knopf did), should make it our business to collate our nightmares for posterity.
Make it a serious collaborative effort and it will be worth doing, make it film/s make it a t.v series but make any money made over cost available to; causes fostering peace, environmental bioremediation, compensating victims of testing (for we would of-course include their testimony and that of the Hibakusha -after all there's a good argument for saying that it was when America dropped the A-Bomb that the Cold War truly began-), and so forth. Make it a world-wide effort to collate these testimonies, both military and civilian, before we are dead guys make that terror mean something, furthermore, bring it home that neither these weapons nor the industry that enables their production can be ignored or their dangers underestimated. I am particularly interested in the nightmares of ordinary people, civilians of all ages (as we were), and any peculiar, serendipitous, "entangled" tales from that time which referenced the bomb or the nuclear industry (a true "military-industrial complex").
 |
| "and...a true horror show!" |
Other film-makers were available.
Emergence
I would expect any Cold War Diary project of the kind I am suggesting to be an "open-ended", "open-sourced" project (perhaps leading to charitable or foundation status), capable of documenting all of the consequences of exploiting aggressive nuclear physics (incl. socio-politically esp. as intrinsic to the theory of creation).
 |
| I had this on my wall during my peripatetic years after leaving Essex Uni. |
Trauma
No, it's no game, in order to heal one must first recognise that one needs to! My generation are now (many of them), grandparents, what trauma did they pass from generation to generation because it went unrecognised? How did the Children of the Shoah come to perpetrate genocide in Gaza? Our responsibility (as the victims of the MAD-ness), to future generations to tell the truth is abrogated if we remain silent. Untreated trauma victims become a danger to themselves, others or both!
Open Mic?
To this end one night at the Art House Cafe (as was now situated : https://thearthousesouthampton.org/about-us-2/ & https://thearthousesouthampton.org/bitterne-station-hub/
 |
"A
bearing few can match turns, wheels, |
: https://www.arafel.co.uk/2017/10/mares-kiss.html I loved "working" there, and was even offered a "spot" elsewhere in town following my first night of stand-up after performing at an "Open Mic." at the Art House)
...I sat down and addressed the audience one night stating (paraphr.); "On previous occasions, I have sung, recited poetry (my own and other's), or told jokes but tonight I am going to do none of those things. Tonight I am going to tell you a story, the remarkable thing about which is that it is, as far as I am able both to recall and recount accurately, true."
Background
The major part of my pre-adult education took place in/around Wallington SM6 in Surrey, I attended Wilson's School, Mollison Dr, Surrey (Non Sibi Sed Omnibus) for seven years from 1977-1984 ("Class of '84" I'll never forget that!) and became a "valedictorian"; in the cadets (I'm a first class shot -at least I was when I used to shoot-), academically, in the arts and athletically (although I was never "first among equals" in the pool and was by no means the fastest on the track either I was a good "alternate" swimmer and extremely competitive as both a distance and cross-country runner -I was also a prize winning Scout-).
Wilson's school is built on much of what remains of the old Croydon Airport site, the playing fields bordering on an industrial estate on which the works for the print firm by whom my father had previously been employed (my parents divorced when I was 11 -only-child too, sh*t*bags!-) is/was situated. My father (he won't mind me telling you now he has passed on), was very clairvoyant for most of his life and recounted the tale to me (to his dying day), of what happened one night when, as last to leave the works of which he was manager, he had been looking down at the print shop floor (massive printing machines), from the gantry when he saw a slightly disembodied torso, of which he could only clearly see the head and upper torso, float across the floor towards him clad in a flying jacket, leather flying helmet and goggles! Anyhoo, I digress (although not really).
As one might imagine the general historical vibe, the presence of a combined cadet force (of which I was a sometime member), and the provision of an underground .22 calibre shooting range (incl. of course the necessary small arms), added, as far as we were concerned especially during this time, to the general anxiety being experienced by the population as a whole. I'm very sure that we were all having "Bomb Nightmares" yet such anxieties were rarely discussed and if so the concern was often generalised to reference our more communal and/or social experience. Surely we were participating in a form of the behaviour I mentioned before, common to trauma sufferers, of being; "aware, aware that/spoken language is inadequate to convey/experience/s and that only by seeing "the dead walk" may others come to understand the trauma such wounded have suffered". I do indeed believe that most of the inhabitants of what would have become "the bubbling lagoon in the N.Atlantic" had "It" happened were (needs must), indulging such as a denial, because, unlike the experience of the walking wounded of previous wars, this one was laid on the cold stone in order to allow us to betray ourselves as ours was a future that would never achieve posterity. Thereby hang many tales of which this is only one.
So we were used to keeping our mouths shut, yet I hadn't understood quite how so until one night as I tried to get to sleep. I can't remember when I began to notice the awareness seeping into my consciousness (when it did I seem to have -indeed-, become aware that it had already been inhabiting my subconscious, a component of its rise to recognition being the slow and stealthy way it revealed itself as it rose from the unconscious), that I was performing a vital task.
Chrome Dome
Quote; "In this book, Cold War aviation historian Peter E. Davies explains how for eight years, Chrome Dome required 12 B-52 Stratofortress's to maintain a ceaseless airborne alert within striking distance of Soviet targets, orbiting over the Mediterranean and north of Alaska. Each bomber stayed aloft for 24 hours, flying for around 10,000 miles until relieved by another. In each cockpit a top-secret Combat Mission Folder contained details of the routes and procedures for a nuclear attack on a pre-determined Soviet target.": https://www.ospreypublishing.com/uk/chrome-dome-196068-9781472860545/
Although "The Dome", that had been up between 1960-68 (I was born in 1966), was not anymore active (certainly officially and nuclear delivery systems had massively swung toward the use of missiles by the mid 1980s), the feeling that "constant vigilance" was an existential necessity in the cause of freedom and that such vigilance must indeed be wakeful was still pervasive.
This vigilance was not necessarily the vigilance of the soldier either. U Thant is supposed to have said (source; "Sharing the Quest" Muz Murray, Element Books) paraphr; "It is those who pray/meditate for peace who have prevented Global War!": https://passblue.com/2026/01/01/the-buddhist-un-boss-who-excelled-at-mediation/
As I have intimated the feeling was magnified for me by my environment and culture and I felt it, as I am certain did my school-mates, as a keen sting on a daily basis.
This night though I did not wish to sleep for somehow I was aware of what awaited me should I do so. That subconscious experiences leaking into our conscious ones should have been a component of our Cold War will come as little surprise to many who were alive at the time and whilst seeming to us outlandish in terms of our lives was not so in the terms of wider human experience (esp. re: of that of our species), over a longer timescale.
My awareness sometimes inhabited a liminal "zone" which had its own narrative coherence and bestrode the border between conscious and subconscious. It seems this awareness was (indeed), a vital part of my ability to cope with the terrible stress of living under the threat of nuclear annihilation.
This night though this repressed awareness (for such it surely was), rose to the surface and I began to exhibit the symptoms of a type of traumatic stress one might term "pre-nuclear shell-shock". As I told the audience at the Art House things unfolded something like this; "I'm not going up again!" "Yes you are!" "I'm not going up again!" "Yes you are!" I was starting to panic now "I'm not going!" I felt powerful hands descend upon my body (which I somehow felt to now be thrashing around as I became hysterical), "YES YOU ARE!" Now, bless 'em (esp. so for they were very much my friends in other circumstances -which hopefully I will be able to recount at a later date-), my larger class mates were (many of them), British Team swimmers and/or army/airforce cadets and there was no way I was going anywhere; "It's your turn!" This was the clincher for it bl**dy well was too and in those, may I say perhaps, less cynical times we took out school moto seriously ("not for one but for many"), I was, therefore, "going down".
Plunging backward into a vast dark ocean I was finally engulfed and became unconscious.
When I became conscious of my surroundings again I was in-fact dreaming but I knew d**n well where I was because I'd been there before. I found myself In the lower crew compartment of a large nuclear bomber, I was sort of huddled in a corner and I may have been whimpering slightly. There were one or two crew in the area I was in and they were clearly aware of my parlous state, one of them disappeared up the internal stairs to the cockpit and I heard a muffled conversation. After a while another crew member who I knew to be the pilot (in fact I knew who it was before I saw him), came down the stairs and made his way over to me.
No it wasn't "Clarence" it was James Stewart (who was very much still with us at the time*), quote; "James Maitland Stewart was born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, to Elizabeth Ruth (Johnson) and Alexander Maitland Stewart, who owned a hardware store. He was of Scottish, Ulster-Scots, and some English descent. Stewart was educated at a local prep school, Mercersburg Academy, where he was a keen athlete (football and track), musician (singing and accordion playing), and sometime actor."..."Having learned to fly in 1935, he was drafted into the United States Army in 1940 as a private (after twice failing the medical for being underweight). During the course of World War II, he rose to the rank of colonel, first as an instructor at home in the United States, and later on combat missions in Europe. He remained involved with the United States Air Force Reserve after the war and officially retired in 1968. In 1959, he was promoted to brigadier general, becoming the highest-ranking actor in U.S. military history." : https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000071/bio/?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
*He died in 1997.
Now I can't recount to you exactly what passed between us but its general nature and tenor were clear; "I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened."..."So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides the will of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring. In which case, you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.”: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120737/quotes/ Furthermore Stewart clearly (or so it seemed to me), understood the nature of my crisis and was able to reiterate the necessity for me to "do my duty".
I wasn't there to bomb people ("Chrome Dome" was no longer in operation in any case), I was there to be aware, to ensure a continuous conscious vigilance and to share the burden being bourne by the rest of the community (despite the fact that I was not as yet 16 years old), and such was a vital service. I can't say I was happy to hear this (also knowing what he would say before he said it), but he was calm and earnest and after he returned to the cockpit I managed to regain enough composure to finish both that night's mission and all the subsequent missions associated with my attendance at Wilson's (although, thankfully, I don't recall the others in any of the same detail I still felt the emotional and psychological pain associated with the experience which swam below me as a hidden menace in the deep waters of both my sub- and un-conscious).
I did not discuss this experience with anyone until a good while after I left school, have only recounted it occasionally and do not know what any of those who I perceived to be involved (incl. Mr. Stewart), might make of it.
Clearly the story is a metaphor for how we were coping as children with the terrifying prospect of nuclear annihilation, the conscious component seeming to be instructive as I was clearly experiencing a form of vivid and rather specific "hypnagogia": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10078162/
Consequences
All this had consequences, as one might expect, as I suffered two near fatal injuries in my teens, quote; "...fluoride is a "whole system" disruptor and can be responsible for ailments as diverse as; fracturing, kidney failure/dysfunction, behavioural problems/brain damage, depression and suicide."
What I have not seen however (or been able to find so far on-line), are the statistics, the epidemiological evidence which will prove (I now have no doubt), that many of the "victims" of clinical fluoride treatment are no longer with us. For one thing the behavioural changes induced by clinical fluoride treatment are of such an uncontrollable and self-destructive nature that the patient may perish due to some apparently "self-induced" accident superficially unrelated to any dental treatment they may have received (even decades), before. Therefore it is necessary to examine the medical records of all of those patients who received clinical fluoride treatment as children and compare the statistics for the incidences of accidental "premature" deaths (esp. "self-induced" -not necessarily suicide at all but the suicide statistics MUST be examined as-well-), and serious injuries within the treated group with those for the same demographic within the wider population. I call here on The International Society of Doctors for the Environment and The World Health Organisation to "pull their fingers out" and examine the evidence and make their findings known as quickly as humanly possible (not to do so is tantamount to colluding in mass murder)!" Go to: Arafel: "Children have died after swallowing fluoride topically applied on their teeth" & "The Epidemiology of Deaths"": http://gkhales.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/children-have-died-after-swallowing.html
Thus my Cold War stress was a contributory factor (as were my parents' divorce and my "ultra"-sensitivity -I have a high sensitivity to ultra-violet light-), whilst the root physical cause of the emotional dysfunctionality and cognitive difficulty that led to my accidents was undoubtedly clinical fluoride treatment. I maintain that one major reason I am not dead is that I complained so much to my mother about how much I disliked the (gum-shield application,) procedure that she agreed not to make me undergo anymore treatment (like the mother's of Thalidomide victims she had trusted the medical-industrial complex and was evangelised to its exploitative paradigm, so much so that she never allowed for the possibility either that my physical condition had been caused by bad medicine or that my condition was as bad as it -still-, is).
It was a window in an inner door to an outside toilet annex, made of "bubble-glass", that I broke with my left hand, severing the brachial artery completely as I withdrew my arm in shock.
Quote; "To don the robes of Torquemada, resurrect the inquisition
In
that tortured subtle manner inflict questions within
questions
Looking in shades of green through shades of blue
I
trust you trust in me to mistrust you
Through the Silk Cut
haze to the smeared mascara
A 40 watt sun on a courtroom
drama
And the coffee stains gather till the pale kimono
Set
the wedding rings dancing on the cold linoleum": From "Emerald
Lies" off the album "Fugazi" by Marillion.
I ended up in St.Helier Hospital that day having had my life saved by a nurse and hospital porter, from that very hospital, who stopped in their Mini, applied a tourniquet and tended to me whilst the ambulance my friends had called arrived (we had been messing around whilst my mother was at work locally as a nursing auxiliary), I had been running around in the street outside my home spouting blood from my (completely), severed artery at every hear-beat! I was only 15 but had a true Near Death Experience on the path to our front door that day.
During my stay at St. Helier (which stands on the top of a Rose Hill in South London -a spot that would have been scoured from the face of the earth should they have dropped the bomb-), I spent sometime with my wound open (sometimes walking about the hospital carrying a blood-drain -I walked down to the hospital radio "shack" at one point-), waiting for the graft from my femoral vein to "take" then later had a considerable "stitch-job" to care for both of which were very painful, I, therefore, began to use every ruse in order to convince my nurses to prescribe me some morphine.
and #TatchburyMount playlist esp:
