She’d figured that he didn’t know what he was doing and they were all going to die, after she’d read Protect & Survive properly one summer afternoon ages ago. Her dad had already kicked in the wall between the downstairs toilet and the understairs cupboard, he’d already piled it with toilet roll and buckets. Her mum had already lost her temper about the chair and gone off to church and come back saying, All right love whatever you want, as if God had given her the green light to listen to her husband. Weekends had become a stocktake, and that summer morning, Bridget had come down to find him using the trampoline like a table to count things. He was counting piles of string and batteries and marking buckets with the poster paint that he’d been going to use on the windows only her mum had said if he touched her windows she’d throw his tea in the bin.
Paul was building a pyramid out of plastic water containers, with the sun glinting off them they looked see-through cloudy like her dad’s eye. She’d held one up to her own eye, imagining how he saw, and then she’d lain on her mum’s sun lounger and the cat had jumped on her stomach and curled up and gone to sleep and she’d picked up her dad’s copy of Protect & Survive and read it. Before that moment, she’d only looked at the cover and taken her dad’s word for it, but the sun was shining and Paul was making pyramids and her mum was cooking eggs and bacon, and so she’d lain there in the sunshine with her legs outstretched and read about how survival depended on being at home, that if you were at work and had to make a run for it, if the fallout dust got you, you’d be dead, and that was if you hadn’t been killed by the nuclear explosion itself.
She read that everything within a five-mile radius of the bomb would be gone, and everything beyond that would be damaged by heat and blast, and that fallout dust could not be seen or felt, had no smell, could only be detected by special instruments, and any exposure to it would cause sickness and death. That you couldn’t let it touch you, not ever, not one speck, that it could penetrate any material and would last, invisible in the air, for many days after the explosion. The booklet said there’d be, A few minutes before the dust began to fall but it took her ten minutes to walk home from school. And her dad’s work was a ten-minute drive from home at least. Also it was obvious, now she was reading it, that her dad had got the fallout room wrong; the downstairs toilet would be their inner refuge, and the hall or whatever was left of the house would have to be the fallout room because it said very clearly that you couldn’t risk getting dust on you, and that meant there was no way they could be running back and forth to the shed every time they needed another blanket or ran out of tinned spaghetti.
But her mum had said she wasn’t having the hall cluttered up which is why his shed had become WW3 HQ and that meant after two days squashed like sardines and shitting in a bucket, if they survived that, one of them would have to run through invisible killer dust to get more supplies. And what about the cat? It didn’t say anything about family pets. It had pictures of a man piling up bags of clothes against a door as if he had all the time in the world. As if there wouldn’t be screaming.
She’d shouted to Paul, “Kit can’t come you know. Just saying,” and Paul had run up and punched her in the leg, and Kit had leapt off and skedaddled up a tree. Her dad had paused his counting to drink the cup of tea her mum had brought him. Bridget had said, “How are you going to have time to paint the windows and block up all the doors if we’ve only got four minutes and you’re at work and we’re at school and a bomb’s just gone off?”
From the back door her mum had said, “That’s why your father’s getting us ready,” and gone back inside as if that answered everything.
When he'd punched a hole in one of the kitchen chairs and put a bucket under it with a plastic bag, Paul had pretended to do a number two and their dad had shouted, It’s not a game, Pauly but it looked like a game to Bridget. It looked like the game of, Bridget’s dad goes mad in Surbiton.
She’d watched him counting dishcloths and her brother kicking empty water containers in the sunshine and she’d known, suddenly and completely, that the people who’d written the booklet were lying to them, that no one would survive if a bomb came down. The booklet said, in the space of time between the bomb falling and the radioactive dust coming down, to check for damage and fix it before getting into the inner refuge. It was a joke. That’s when she knew he didn’t understand anything, her dad with his funny eye and trying so hard and loving them so much, he didn’t understand that the people on the news, Heseltine with his hair and Thatcher with her handbag and Reagan with his looks didn’t know men like him existed, and if they did, they didn’t care.
Ever since that summer’s day, when he told them to shush when the news came on, she’d go up to her room and put her latest mix tape on, shout the lyrics to, Town Called Malice, and hope when the end came, it would come quickly, that the Russians would aim their bomb at Hampton Close, and they’d all be disappeared in a blinding flash of light, and her dad would never know that the people he looked up to were laughing at him.
So she’d stood in the playground for ages with Miss Jenkins at going home time when Miss Jenkins had shouted, “Wait!” And got her pinned against the wall with the Charles and Di mural on it, all excited and red in the nose. Further down the wall was Peggy Hilperton. She had one boot against Lady Diana’s engagement ring and her head in a book.
“Will your parents let you go on a school trip?”
When Bridget was little she used to have to find her mum in the school kitchens at going home time, wait for her there surrounded by the stench of custard and cabbage, the deafening rumble of the potato peeler, the bang and smash of metal trays. It had put her off being inside for the rest of her life, that’s how it felt. Only in the art room, with its high ceiling and windows open and those plants that waved, did the heavy lid of being inside feel lifted. How was she going to survive squashed into the downstairs toilet with her mum and dad, and Paul squeezed into the bit below the stairs and all that toilet roll and sacks of clothes and the chair with the seat punched out? How was she going to breath for three days. And what if her dad broke his glasses?
Miss Jenkins held her corduroy skirt to stop it blowing in the wind. “If I say it’s for your O-level project, would that be okay, do you think?”
Peggy’s mum came shooting in through the gate at a run. Peggy hitched her satchel up and threw a glance at Bridget. Miss Jenkins was already halfway across the playground, waving the leaflet. She brought Mrs Hilperton over. Peggy looked at the ground and so did Bridget.
“It’s the best education they can have, said Kate Hilperton.
This is so charming, Eleanor. (I know it’s serious, too.)
😀