Give me a missile crisis any day
The
Present
Tense I
Kenneth Roy on a long day’s journey into night
As a boy, I remember being convinced one day that the world was about to end. The fear was not some juvenile hysteria, but rational in basis. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was unfolding and, at its height, nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States seemed almost inevitable. Neither of the great powers was blinking; the missiles continued their deadly progress. I remember walking one lunchtime through the streets of the town in which I then lived and thinking: well, this lot will be gone by the morning – the terraced rows, the dog stadium, the football park, the corner shops – all obliterated; and, needless to say, we’ll be gone too, just like that, including the girl in the sheriff clerk’s office for whom I had a wee fancy.
But the next morning, she was still alive and so was I; and the dog meeting went ahead as usual. The missiles had turned back. The crisis was over as abruptly as it had begun. The world was saved.
Some years later I had a similar experience, a more personal one. I was on a light aircraft (a Piper Cherokee, for the benefit of aficionados of this hazard sport), flying from Glasgow to the south of England, which overshot the runway at Biggin Hill in thick fog. The pilot, who had negotiated the Battle of Britain without a scratch, had to make a quick decision – risk the lives of many by landing in a housing estate or head for a tree. Crying ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday’, he chose the tree.
On impact, the wrecked aircraft should have burst into flames, killing all three of its crew. But, rather like the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, it unexpectedly failed to ignite. Instead, we clambered out into a field and found ourselves up to our knees in mud. A cow mooed, as it was entitled to do in the circumstances, and we began laughing uncontrollably. We had run out of fuel. Silly us.
If you have to have a crisis, either of these was the right sort of crisis: it didn’t last long, there would be a clear outcome (life or death) and, if you survived, you could simply get on with your life and thank your lucky stars or your guardian angel (I’ve always been a firm believer in the latter). The trouble with the present crisis – well, part of the trouble – is that no such swift determination is possible. Oh, that the economic woes of Britain could be turned back as easily as a threatening nuclear warhead. Oh, that we had a choice, navigating our fuel-less engine to its boggy destiny, where best to land. There is no choice. We are all in this together – and we are in it for the duration. From present tense we move to future tense – very tense. Every decent play deserves an interval and a dash to the bar. Britain’s tragi-comedy looks like being enacted without a break: it promises to be a long night in a sweaty, derelict theatre.
All sorts of grim arithmetical parlour games are now possible. One I heard yesterday was that, if you’d won the Lottery at an average pot of £3m every week since Julius Caesar was a lad, and if you were philanthropically so minded, you could have single-handedly paid off half the national debt by now. Hey, that’s interesting.
But relief is at hand. We’re all going to die of swine flu anyway. Though if you read the small print of the pandemic experts, it seems likely that, if it happens at all, the virus will attack young people between the ages of 25 and 45, that section of the population mostly at work, productive and wealth-generating, leaving the aged and dependent to queue dutifully at the nearest soup kitchen, assuming we run to soup kitchens in the post-pandemic world of economic meltdown. It makes me nostalgic for the good old days of missile crisis and cold war. What sort of displeasure is this that the gods are prepared to visit upon us? We must have been extremely wicked to deserve such a fate.
Yet I do not remember much wickedness. After 1962, things perked up considerably. The following year, Philip Larkin famously announced the invention of sex. Despite this life-changing discovery, Kenneth Tynan, a married man, had to smuggle his girlfriend Kathleen up the back stairs of the George Hotel, Edinburgh, for fear of eviction and public scandal: morality changed but slowly. When it did, it was enormous fun, decade after decade of endless celebration of one sort or another: credit cards took ‘the waiting out of wanting’ (one of the great slogans of our time, surely); for the price of a packet of fags (plus airport taxes), we could fly to new and exciting foreign destinations; Ikea on a Sunday morning became the new church; dreary council house doors were taken down and replaced with customised ones by the new property-owning democracy.
It seems a pity it all had to end like this. I must admit that even I enjoyed it occasionally.
What happens next? Oh heck, I’ll leave that for another day.
THE
FUTURE
TENSE
What happens next?
I.
A prophetic vision on a Scottish high street
KENNETH ROY
[click here]
II.
Sticks and stones
SHEILA HETHERINGTON
on David Starkey
[click here]
III.
Karzai goes for it
ALAN FISHER
[click here]
The Scottish Review
is published on
Tuesday and Thursday
Missed the
last edition?
[click here]
The Scottish Review is proud
to be associated with the
Young
Thinker
of the
Year
This award is given annually to the author of the winning paper in the Young UK and Ireland Programme
Scottish-born Mairi Clare Rodgers, winner of the title last year, is now Director of Media Relations at the civil liberties charity, Liberty
