Your radio will be your only link with the outside world. So take a spare one with you if you can. Keep any aerial pushed in. You will need to listen for instructions about what to do after the attack and while you remain in your fall-out room.
Protect and Survive, 1980
I grew up with Vietnam as a myth in the making and the IRA bombing campaigns as a local reality. Nuclear war was palpable as people whispered about civil emergency plans, and the first guidelines were issued to local government and relevant others. As my father was a doctor, he was included in the local plans. The Home Office would later issue a pamphlet on how to build a domestic bomb shelter. By 1980, every household had received Protect and Survive.
Even the safest room in your home is not safe enough, however. You will need to block up windows in the room, and any other openings, and to make the outside walls thicker, and also to thicken the floor above you, to provide the strongest possible protection against the penetration of radiation. Thick, dense materials are the best, and bricks, concrete or building blocks, timber, boxes of earth, sand, books, and furniture might all be used.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament put out a counterblast, written by E. P. Thompson, called Protest and Survive, which my mother left by the telephone as anyone else might a vase of dried flowers. She voted Communist, sent telegrams for Amnesty and campaigned for Taxes for Peace. Clearly she believed we could each change the world, but what convinced me this was possible was music.
In August 1977, there was a rally in south London to prevent the National Front marching. After this, the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism brought together punk and reggae in protest events. In April 1978, Cara and I sneaked off to the Rock Against Racism carnival in London. It began with a march from Trafalgar Square to Brixton’s Victoria Park. We were there for the music but also to change the world, two among tens of thousands who were going to stamp out racism and the National Front.
Punk did not save any whales but it made itself a force for change. It believed in something after all. Singing along, we believed in it too. If we could come together, make this noise and take up this space then surely what we had to say would make something happen. There would be no more racism, no more police oppression, no arms escalation, no war. Music, with its pumped-up feelings, fooled us into this. We felt part of something powerful and, because we all knew the words, something fantastically simple too.
I could not really conceive of nuclear war any more than I believed that as we marched through London we were actually spreading love and peace.
If you are in the open and cannot get home within a couple of minutes, go immediately to the nearest building. If there is no building nearby and you cannot reach one within a couple of minutes, use any kind of cover, or lie flat (in a ditch) and cover the exposed skin of the head and hands.
Policemen lined the route as impassively as lamp-posts and behind them, behind barriers, old men in caps waved their fists or brandished copies of British Bulldog. There were reports of conspiracies and violence, but I saw nothing. I walked and shouted for hours and then squeezed my way into Victoria Park where I could just about see, but not really hear, the bands. I watched them anyway – The Clash, Tom Robinson, Steel Pulse and X-Ray Spex. They mouthed and grimaced and gesticulated, just like the old men in caps. We were all protesting. We would all survive.