Introduction

Bulge babies – the generation of lucky gits

The political and social background to the decade which gave rise to the plethora of what might be termed modern pressure and splinter groups began, for most of those involved, in the post-war years of the 50s and 60s. To this day, I find it hard to believe that when I was born in 1946, Europe was still in ruins, Hitler had only been dead for little more than a year and the task of rebuilding Britain, let alone the rest of Europe and the far-flung reaches of the world, had not even begun. The radioactive fall-out from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was still circling the planet in the jet-stream.

But something else had begun even before minds were turned to regeneration: the arms race. The bomb which has been credited with forcing Japan to capitulate became the prize which transformed one-time allies, embracing each other across the battlefield, into post-war belligerents, hungry for the ability to annihilate each other and the rest of the world in the process.

‘Babyboomers’ as we’re called – reflecting the boom there was in births within a year of the second world war ending and the troops coming home to welcoming wives – have lived, and do live, with war; from Suez to Iraq, from Afghanistan to Libya and we continue to pursue foreign policies which invite an Anglophobia, surely be the most burdensome legacy we leave our children’s children. But ‘boomers’, while rightly envied for living lives in which most never donned a uniform or took up arms in anger, were nonetheless subjected to a form of psychological terror from the belief that WW3 was inevitable.

I can’t recall a day between the ages of 12 and 25 that I did not spend at least some time thinking about, talking about or fretting about the prevailing political situation which we had inherited at the end of the war and which had festered over 15 years or so, to a point where we all lived with the possibility of being fried to death at any point of the day or night. Every news bulletin was heavy with threat, every international incident riven with anxiety. This culminated in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when the world held its collective breath as Soviet ships laden with missiles headed for Cuba and what seemed to be an unavoidable and cataclysmic confrontation with the USA which would surely trigger Armageddon.

As the radioactive fallout from the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 was still settling over that fated country, project scientist Kenneth Tomkins Bainbridge’s words to Robert Oppenheimer, often referred to as the ‘father of the bomb’, on seeing the El Alamo test a few months before were already prophetic. As he watched the mushroom cloud billow a mile into the sky over the test site in the Nevada desert minutes after the flash of nuclear fusion that was ‘brighter than a thousand suns’, he reportedly said, ‘Now we’re all sonsofbitches’. We had opened Pandora’s nuclear box and within five years of the bomb dropping, 40% of the Hiroshima population, around 350,000 at the time of the blast – mostly women and children – were dead: either incinerated on the spot to a point where only a dark smudge on the pavement recorded their existence, buried under rubble of the buildings literally blown down in the nuclear blast, asphyxiated by the absence of air the blast created or dying more slowly – some within minutes, some within weeks, months of even years – from the radiation exposure from the bomb.

Not content with these horrific results and eager to ‘test’ the impact of a plutonium bomb, especially in an area where the effects of reflected blast could be assessed, the American authorities dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, nestling in the bowl of a group of hills, with equally devastating effects. Twenty-five percent of the 270,000 people in Nagasaki on that fateful morning were dead within a year. Articles I have read suggest that the Japanese were suing for peace from as early as 1943, two years before the bombs were dropped, yet the justification for dropping these bombs in order to ‘hasten the end of the war’ and saving the lives of thousands of US and allied troops, remains.

In the decade that followed, the UK, the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and China all developed the nuclear bomb. In order to test these weapons, the UK, with limited and crowded land space, relied, until the 1991 ban on the US test ranges in the Nevada Desert, having previously detonated more than twenty devices in the atmosphere over Australian territory and Pacific islands, sometimes removing voiceless and helpless indigenous peoples in advance of the tests which have left an uncertain radiological legacy in these areas. The Soviets tested at Novaya Zemlya and soon China joined the nuclear club. It is estimated that something approaching 2,000 nuclear weapons tests have been conducted globally since 1945. Key to the nuclear arms race which dominated and menaced life in the 60s and 70s was a plant with which I was to become intimately familiar in later years – Windscale – which produced the plutonium required for the nuclear weapons, either directly from the original Windscale ‘piles’ or, subsequently, from the chemical treatment of the waste nuclear fuel from the first generation of nuclear plants the UK built called ‘Magnox’, a name taken from the fuel which was clad in magnesium oxide.

The nuclear age was with us in all its force and within 20 years of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, France, India, Pakistan and others, with varying degrees of success, used the ‘peaceful development of nuclear technology’ umbrella to hide the unseemly race towards nuclear arms. Over 500 nuclear tests were conducted in the atmosphere: we still register the radioactive fallout they created to this day.

This was the political and environmental backdrop which characterised my life and the lives of my contemporaries. As a teenager in the early 60s, the world was an infinitely dangerous and nightmarish place of unworldly contradictions. On the one hand, London was the ‘swinging capital city’ where all the barriers and stiff attitudes of the 40s and 50s were being dismantled in a sea of liberalism and hedonism. Music was revolutionary, style and fashion outlandish, cultural shackles were enthusiastically thrown aside. At the same time we were four minutes away from violent immolation, a contradiction which was utterly and implausibly bizarre. Perhaps the latter drove the former – perhaps we were so close to the edge that we really did believe, subconsciously or not – that anything went.

This book, then, is an attempt to recall events in my early childhood which capture the mood of the 50s, through adolescence and into the ‘never had it so good’ times and the ‘free love’, music and pill-popping days of the Wilson Labour government; my working life and how it was in the 60s and how I ‘found’ the embryonic environmental movement and began to learn the language of ‘ecology’

(US early billboard – ‘Ecology? Look it up. You’re in it.’)

My journey is one that took a working class boy from Deptford, through a series of chance meetings, helping hands and circumstances often beyond his control, to a life of derring-do as one of the first practitioners of peaceful direct action in defence of the natural world, culminating in seven unforgettable voyages to the Antarctic. As if that was not enough, I then found my true love in Gaye Jerrom and started a family, being blessed with two wonderful daughters, Emily May and Amy Rose, at an age when I really thought such joy from a family had passed me by, and I went on to rediscover my campaigning flair and verve as the nuclear industry once again threatened to re-establish itself. And throughout, my desire to bring together commercial viability and environmental sustainability, an aspiration seared into my head through the sheer delight, romanticism and peace I found from being at sea, never left me. Attempts to realise that desire led me into all sorts of adventures. I am still living that life as I attempt to complete my life’s journey which has taken me from Deptford to Antarctica, the long, sometimes lonely but never dull, way home.