Fear is the prison of the heart.

Anonymous

Prologue: Greenham Common High School, 1982

Nucleomituphobia – Fear of Nuclear Weapons

This is how fear feels.

            ‘…now, the theory of fight or flight originates from studies of animal behaviour.’

            I don’t mean the fizzy fear you get from things that go bump in the night, or watching Halloween II and Friday the 13^th. Or even the moment in a dream when your feet turn to lead and the flame-throwing monster is catching up.

No, this is a nightmare I can’t wake up from, because everything familiar in this world – from Biology lessons to Adam Ant and pregnant Giant pandas – is under threat. One day, maybe today even, it’ll happen. And it’ll kill anyone who hasn’t prepared, and change life for ever for the lucky few who make it. And the really nightmarish bit? No one else seems to care.

            ‘The term describes the physiological response to extreme stress, priming the body to attack or to run away, both responses which reflect the ultimate instinct for self-preservation.’

            Lorraine has drawn a picture of a willy in the back of her exercise book, and is folding up the sheet of paper to pass to Steven Chubb. I suppose there are worse things to draw in a biology lesson. She’s added pubic hairs with curly pen strokes. The only willy I’ve seen is my little brother’s but Lorraine has seen a real one (‘OK, one in a dirty magazine, but it was on a real man. It was ginormous.’) so her picture must be pretty accurate.

            The probability that I’ll die before seeing an erect penis is high, but it’s not top of my worry list. I’d like to have kissed a boy, maybe, but I’m not too bothered about missing out on intercourse. It sounds like the most embarrassing thing in the world.

            The second most embarrassing thing in the world will be having to use the toilet in front of my parents, but that’s the price of survival. At least it’ll be dark in the shelter.

            ‘The body responds to stress by stopping non-essential functions. A human being may experience a dry mouth as salivation ceases, along with sudden evacuation of the bowels or bladder as gastro-intestinal function shuts down …’ 

            Something hard hits the back of my head, like an air pellet. I reach under the wooden bench, and discover Steven’s reply to Lorraine, screwed into a tight ball.

            ‘…and the inability to sustain an erection.’ Mr Jones, our biology teacher, is careful not to meet anyone’s eye when he says ‘erection’. ‘These changes prepare the body for fight or flight.’

Lorraine unravels Steven’s note. It says SUCK ON MINE.

            ‘As if I would,’ she whispers to me.

            ‘The body instinctively prioritises muscle function to allow a rapid…’

            And then it happens. A sound that would chill the blood even if you didn’t know what it meant. But I do. That wavy wail is saying take cover, the bomb’s on its way.

            Mr Jones flinches, then begins wave his arms around. His mouth is moving but all I can hear is rushing noise, like the sound of a thousand seashells held against your ear. More urgent, my stomach contents feel like they’re on a one-way trip out of my body.

            This can’t be happening. I should be at home, where the stockpile is hidden under my bed. Sixteen weeks’ worth of pocket money spent on baked beans and evaporated milk and plasters and Dettol.

            It’ll take twelve minutes to run home. We only have four.

            Mr Jones is lining everyone up by the door. I still hear nothing except whooshing but sweat has chilled my skin, and it feels like a huge fist is squeezing my heart.

            There’s meant to be a build-up, a two-week ‘escalation of hostilities’.

            I cast around the room, trying to remember the guidelines from Protect and Survive. You’re safest in a downstairs room, with no outside walls.

            Lorraine is pulling at my arm but I can’t move. Or breathe. The science department is on the ground floor but there are draughty metal windows from floor to ceiling in place of two walls. They’ll shatter in the first few seconds of the blast wave.

            Oh my God. We’re going to die. I told Dad we should have moved to Wales or New Zealand. I’ve survived a near-death experience involving a poncho and a slide, and a hundred childhood illnesses, only to be split into a million atoms and turned into a mushroom cloud.

            Keep calm, Jo, remember to breathe. I stare ahead, try to think straight. And then I spot it.

Yes! The science prep room. The dizziness stops, though I’m still not at all confident I can hang on to the contents of my bowels. I let Lorraine pull me from behind the bench – we’re the last to leave the classroom – and at the very last moment, I grab her blazer sleeve and drag her into the prep room. I take the key from outside the lock and then pull the door shut behind us, locking it from the inside. The cramped space stinks of iodine and mouse feed.

            I grope for the light switch on the wall. ‘Lorrie, put the plug in the sink and run the water. We don’t have much time.’

            My hearing is returning now: the siren’s still sounding and Lorraine shouts above it, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing, Joey? If there is a fire, we’ll be burned to death in here, you nut-job.’ 

            ‘It’s not the fire bell. It’s a siren. An air attack siren. There’s a bomb on its way.’

            Now her face is less certain. If anyone in school is an expert on the bomb it’s me. And our fire bell has a reassuring ring, like a phone in a public call box. Not like this. 

            I hide the key in my pocket – I won’t let her out, she’s my best friend. I’m not going to think about Mum or Dad or Timmy or Misty. ‘The water, quickly.’ I spot a grey metal bin. Oh God, that’s going to have to be our loo. On the bare brick wall, dog-eared posters show photosynthesis, native trees  and the inner workings of the human body: maybe all three will be history, not biology, once the nuclear winter comes, and our organs mutate thanks to radiation. The open wooden shelves are stacked with Pyrex flasks and disposable gloves and plastic bags big enough for corpses. The first aid kit is serious and satchel-sized. It’s not a bad shelter, under the circumstances.

            ‘You’re wrong. You have to be.’ But she begins to fill the sink. I push stacks of green paper towels against the bottom of the door and into the lock, to keep out fall-out. What will we eat? Lab mice? Humans can survive for weeks, so long as they have water.

            The sink is almost full now. ‘How long, Lorrie? Since the alarm started?’

            ‘Buggered if I know.’ She always swears when she wants to seem cockier than she’s actually feeling. Her eyes are dark and wide, as if her Miners Special Effects black kohl has run. ‘Three or four minutes.’

            The fist tightens around my heart. ‘Right. Switch off the tap. I’m going to have to put out the light.’ My finger hovers over the switch. What if the gas supply for the Bunsen burners causes a fire? Shouldn’t I have released the mice? I cut the light, and reach out for Lorraine. ‘Shut your eyes and put your fingers in your ears.’

            Oh God, I hope this isn’t going to hurt. If we’re going to die, let it be quick…

            It begins, not with a flash, but with a rumble, and I wonder if the first missile has fallen somewhere far away, London or Oxford. Lorraine wriggles and I try to hold her still until she pulls my hands away from my ears and I realise that someone’s pummelling on the door.

            ‘JOANNA MORGAN! UNLOCK THAT DOOR THIS INSTANT!’ It’s Mr Jones.

            ‘We can’t let him in, Lorrie. There’s no room and the bomb could be about to-’

            ‘I SAID, open the door.’ The banging continues. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re playing at but you’re holding up the entire fire drill and the whole school will have to stay outside in the freezing cold until you come out. And you’re not going to be very popular.’

            ‘Fire drill?’ Lorraine finds the light switch. ‘You wally. You complete and utter Joey. I knew it wasn’t a bomb. We’ll be in detention for a month now. Or on litter duty.’

            She fumbles in my blazer pocket for the key and unlocks the door. Mr Jones stands on the other side, his left eye twitching in fury. ‘What the hell were you thinking?’

            My hands are shaking as I emerge into daylight, and I feel colder than ever, the sweat gluing my skin to my nylon blouse. I’m desperate for the toilet, because my insides seem to be made of water, but instead Mr Jones marches us down the corridor.

            ‘I’m flabbergasted at this behaviour from you, Joanna. What was that about?’

‘The siren…’ I say. ‘It wasn’t a fire alarm. It was an air raid siren.’

He stops. ‘No, Joanna. The alarm was upgraded this weekend. This is a test.’

‘But Mr Blake says…’

‘But nothing.’ He sighs. ’So you’re in Mr Blake’s class, are you? Bloody English teachers. There is such a thing as too vivid an imagination.’

And then we walk out of the main entrance to the field where 700 kids and sixty teachers are standing in shivering lines. My knees bend like Olive Oyl’s as I stumble down the steps. Some fifth-formers start jeering and within seconds everyone is laughing and pointing, and I want to run for it, but Lorraine grabs my hand and we walk towards our tutor group.

As I pass Steven Chubb, he begins to whisper,  ‘Chicken, cowardy custard, scaredy-cat. Chicken, cowardy custard, scaredy-cat!’

            And I know that I’ve just earned a nickname that I’ll never shake off. But at least I’m still alive. Until the bomb drops for real.

Chapter 1

Tyrannophobia - Fear of Tyrants

‘Of course, the Tudors had it easy.’

            The dead eyes of Anne Boleyn stare at me from behind the velvet rope as Dennis, my soul mate, warms to his theme.

            ‘Think about it. No electricity, therefore no ineptly wired sockets capable of delivering hundreds of fatal volts. No gas, therefore no danger of leaks which could blow your house…or, in this case, your castle, to smithereens.’

            He’s only half-joking.

            Soggy families gather around us, forced indoors by a January downpour. They jostle for position alongside seen-better-days mannequins dressed as Henry the Eighth and his unfortunate wives. They clearly think Dennis is an official tour guide.

            He looks the part. He took his anorak off before entering the Great Hall (‘wouldn’t want the rainwater to damage the historic tapestries, would I, Jo?’). Underneath, he’s wearing a check shirt and chinos, as sported by younger Oxford dons in TV documentaries, an artfully casual uniform that proves they have weightier matters on their enormous brains than mere fashion. Quantum physics, maybe, or the preservation of relics of ancient civilisations.

            Or, in Dennis’s case, the preservation of civilisation in the small corner of southern England we call home.

            Dennis couldn’t care less about colour or pattern (unless the patterns are on the side of a lorry, warning of corrosive or explosive chemicals). But I do care, and I buy his clothes, so I chose a blue check that matches his eyes, and chinos the same sandy brown as his curly hair. He reminds me of an ageing cherub, the curls shot with grey, and the eyes wrinkled by forty years of trying to save people from themselves. A kind of suburban Superman. 

            He smiles at me. ‘And no motor cars, so therefore no speeding accidents, no road pollution and no greenhouse effect. Those were the days, eh, Jo?’

            ‘Utter bollocks!’

            Disapproving eyes focus on the impertinent member of the tour party. Except it’s not a member of any tour party. It’s my dad.

            ‘What about the dangers of bloody horses and carts?’ my father says, delighted to have a captive audience. ‘Toxic manure fumes. Crazed carriage drivers with road rage. Dick Turpin and his Merry Men lurking behind every tree to rob your gold bullion. Not to mention Jack the Ripper and the bubonic plague.’ What he lacks in historical accuracy, he makes up for in enthusiasm.

            Women are meant to fancy men who remind them of their dads, aren’t they? No danger of that with me. My father thinks he’s Michael Caine, but while his hero has grown old gracefully, Dad has not. He sports a year round golf-club tan, and would rather die than countenance casual clothes. So apart from the security staff, he’s the only man here in a navy blazer, but because it’s a Sunday his bright white shirt is unbuttoned to reveal a wisp of chest hair, suspiciously dark for a man in his sixties

What Dennis and my dad do have in common is a conviction that they’re always right. In my boyfriend’s case, that’s true. He’s incredibly well read, and shares my love of statistics: in a dangerous world, statistics keep you safe.

            Whereas my dad is a dinosaur. Albeit quite a charming one.

            ‘No drug-induced soaring crime rates,’ Dennis counters. ‘No hoodies. No crackheads. No nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction.’

            ‘What about those cannon things that propelled great balls of fire across the battlements? They were pretty destructive.’

            Anne Boleyn holds out her tiny plastic hands, which are peeling as if she’s contracted some nasty Tudor skin disease. Alongside her, Anne of Cleves stares into the middle distance. Her wary expression seems familiar and it’s only when I turn around that I realise why: my mother’s face is composed in the same mask of careful neutrality.

Whenever life gets awkward, her eyes glaze over, as if she’s teleported herself back home to her ‘babies’, the three Maine Coon cats that are Mum’s reason for living. But she doesn’t fool me. Every time Dad says something daft (i.e. pretty much every time he speaks), her pale lips purse, fleetingly, a dozen new lines of disappointment appearing like tiny needles around her mouth. Then they’re gone: no one notices but me.

            ‘A few cannons are nothing compared to the Ebola virus. Or Sarin gas. Or DIY. Did you know that a thousand people a year end up in casualty from sandpaper alone?’ Dennis considers this a killer blow.

            My father shakes his head pityingly. ‘I’m delighted to say that I didn’t know that. And if I did, I wouldn’t be showing off about it.’

            The other tourists have finally realised that Dennis and Dad aren’t an English Heritage-sponsored sideshow, but just two blokes having the kind of spat you could see in your local pub any night of the week. ‘Torture chamber’s this way,’ a weary mother tells her ginger-haired twin sons. ‘Whips and branding irons and a rack where they used to stretch little boys who refused to eat their greens.’

            Dennis whispers, under his breath, ‘There’s a word for people who think ignorance is bliss.’

            ‘And there’s a word for people like you,’ Dad says, not under his breath at all. ‘Smart-arse.’

            OK, so maybe today wasn’t the best idea. It’s Dennis’s fault: his mother’s idea of an outing for her eight-year-old son was to send him on a ‘treasure hunt’ around the local shops until he found one willing to sell him twenty Benson and Hedges to bring home. So he’s never realised that wintry day trips to damp, draughty castles are simply the modern version of thumbscrews: torture for all the family.  

Thank God for out-of-town superstores with Sunday opening: shopping beats heritage every time when it comes to domestic harmony.

Mum’s lip needles appear again and I think it’s time to change the subject. ‘Maybe life wasn’t too bad if you were King but somehow I doubt Henry’s wives felt all that safe.’

            My mother looks at me gratefully, her face relaxing enough to remind me how pretty she was, once. ‘That’s true. What was it we learned at school? Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived!’ She nods in satisfaction. ‘Funny the things you remember.’

I haven’t exactly lightened the mood. We turn to stare at the crash-test-dummy wives, who surround the fat king, his codpiece obscenely prominent. Dad only agreed to come as research for his forthcoming role in the Operatic Society’s production of Henry - The Musical! but the part of a womanising, gluttonous patriarch fits him like a glove.

I remember studying the Tudors at school, sitting at the back of the History lesson with my best friend Lorraine, trying to work out which queen we most resembled. I saw her eyes narrow and braced myself: to this day, Lorraine combines ruthless honesty with a bitchy streak. I kept my fingers crossed as she considered my Tudor doppelganger. Please, please don’t let her say poor plain Anne of Cleves with her long nose and pointy chin, or sour-faced old Catherine Parr with her sulky lips.

But she must have been in a generous mood, because she chose Catherine of Aragon. It wasn’t a bad likeness: Henry’s first wife and I share the same round face, big eyes and flushed cheeks (I wonder if hers, like mine, went red at the slightest provocation). And while neither of us could be described as skinny, we both got a decent cleavage as a consolation prize.

Lorraine wanted to be Jane Seymour, until she turned the page in Kings and Queens for Secondary Schools and realised Henry’s third wife was distinctly beaky, had a double chin and looked nothing like the actress who did the ads for Le Jardin de Max Factor. In the end she settled for Anne Boleyn, ‘because Henry the Eighth dumped Catherine of Aragon for her as Anne was prettier. Like me and you!’ And then she giggled.

‘…but what I don’t understand,’ my father is saying, ‘is how come the most powerful man in the country had to keep getting married. One wife is enough for anyone surely?’

Mum’s lips purse so hard that even Dennis notices, but Dad ploughs on regardless. ‘I mean, sow his regal oats, sure, but wouldn’t he get a nightly smorgasbord of ladies in waiting dying to lie back and think of England? Perk of the job and all that –‘

‘Talking of smorgasbords…’ I interrupt, spotting my chance, ‘all this talk of death is making me hungry. It must be tea time by now?’

While more sensible families are tucking into IKEA smorgasbords, their kids safely immersed in the children’s ball pool, we’re being royally ripped off. Dennis has paid £20 for four teas and four ‘authentic Elizabethan cakes’. I love all cakes, but these taste as if they were authentically baked the same week poor Katherine Howard lost her head.  

            Rain thuds down on the corrugated iron roof of the King’s Buttery (which my father keeps repeating in a silly, high-pitched voice, ‘The king’s buttery, he’s covered in the stuff, that’s why he’s such a lard-arse,’ and then laughing at himself). It’s a modern building, if a World War Two Nissen hut counts as modern, and inside, you can see your breath in front of your face. The beige fan heaters produce very little warmth, but make the air smell scorched.

            We’ve found a seat by the tiny window, and I wipe away the condensation with my fingers. Framed by the glass, the castle’s like a drawing from a child’s picture book, with stone walls washed grey by the rain, and a perfect ring of a moat to keep enemies out…or the women in. The castle windows are even smaller than the one I’m peering through and I wonder whether the occupants felt lucky to be there, or trapped.

            Dad’s fallen silent, and Mum’s stirring her tea with the little plastic stick: the grey liquid whirls like filthy bathwater going down the plughole.

‘Tuesday will officially be the most depressing of the year,’ I say, to break the silence. ‘According to the statistics.’

            Oddly enough, this doesn’t seem to cheer anyone up, but Dennis tries to liven things up. ‘Don’t tell me…let me guess why. Is it because it’s the beginning of the week?’

            I shake my head. ‘It’s part of it, but not the main thing. Anyone else?’

            Mum begins to fiddle with a knot-effect gold button on her pink fluffy cardigan, so she’s obviously not playing.

Dad shrugs. ‘The weather in January is the worst of the year. So is it to do with seasonal depressive pre-menstrual tension or whatever hypochondriacs get?’

            ‘That’s another contributory factor,’ I say. ‘But there’s something more obvious. Dad, you definitely ought to get it, it’s your specialist subject.’

            My boyfriend and my father exchange looks of undisguised rivalry. Dennis tugs at the kiss-curl in his fringe, a sure sign of irritation. I’m already regretting the remark about specialist subjects, as Dad’s main areas of expertise are: a) women young enough to be his daughter; b) the best tailors for bespoke suits in Bangkok; and c) the love songs of Rogers and Hammerstein. Whereas the area of expertise I was referring to was…

            ‘Got it!’ Dennis claps his hands together. ‘It’s credit card bills, isn’t it? This is the week when the wages of Christmas sin come back to haunt us, in the shape of huge bills. Well, I say, us. I mean, anyone daft enough to rely on credit in the first place.’

            Dennis has never had a credit card, or an overdraft facility. He even got through university (BA Hons, Social Policy) without going into the red and prefers the certainty of standing orders to fickle direct debits. Lorraine thinks that makes him ‘the dullest man in the known universe, worse than Tim Henman or Prince Charles.’ But I love his utter dependability. Surprises are seriously over-rated.

            Dad tuts and chews his cake with grim determination. After forty years as a bank manager, he’s used to being in the right. ‘Yes, January is dismal. Which is why we’re taking that Caribbean cruise next month. What about you two? Any holiday plans?’

            He folds his arms across his chest in triumph. He knows the answer to this one already. We don’t do holidays. Not abroad, anyway.

            ‘We might take a cottage in Cornwall at Easter,’ Dennis says. His lazy mother never took him to the seaside, so he imagines Famous Five-style picnics on sunny beaches, rather than entire days spent in the car, chasing clouds from coast to coast, in the vain hope that it might stop raining for ten minutes.

            ‘Far East’s unbeatable at this time of year,’ Dad says, sensing victory.

            I sigh. ‘Dad, stop it.’

            Dennis takes my hand. ‘The Foreign Office website is very insistent that no part of South East Asia is 100 per cent safe for British tourists.’

            ‘As if anywhere is 100 per cent safe,’ Dad mutters.

            ‘Tenerife’s lovely at this time of year,’ Mum says.

            ‘OK, OK,’ I say, holding up my hand. ‘Dad, you won’t be happy till you’ve taken the piss so why don’t I do it for you? I know I’m safer in the air than I am walking down the street. I know there’s a whole world out there waiting to be discovered. I know I’m a great big cowardy-custard chicken scaredy-cat. But it’s just the way I am, all right?’

            Dad looks sheepish and I realise I must have been talking rather loudly as people are staring. ‘Now, now, Bean. That’s a bit harsh. What’s wrong with wanting my only daughter to live a little?’

            Dennis grips my hand more firmly. ‘We like staying at home,’ he says, ‘and if more people took our attitude, the polar ice caps wouldn’t be melting, would they?’

            It’s not that I don’t want to fly. I did it reluctantly when I was little, but the older I get, the more terrifying it seems. And however reassuring the safety statistics, I can’t bring myself to travel in a tin box with no visible means of staying airborne. Not that it hasn’t been frustrating. After university, I got endless postcards from backpacking college friends who’d been celebrating Christmas on the beach in Fiji, or swimming in Iceland’s Blue Lagoon. Dad offered to pay for a course he’d seen advertised in the Daily Mail called ‘Get High: Overcoming your Fear of Flying’. But then I met Dennis and he told me that fear was nature’s way of preserving the human race, and that I didn’t need to turn myself into someone else because he loved me exactly as I was.

            That’s when I knew we were made for each other.

            ‘I doubt one trip to the bloody Canaries would be responsible for the end of the world,’ Dad mumbles, but he knows he’s defeated. We sit listening to the rain on the roof.

            ‘Ought to start heading back,’ Dennis says eventually, ‘before the Sunday traffic gets too heavy.’

            I look at my watch. It’s two thirty in the afternoon.

            In the car park Dennis averts his eyes from Dad’s gas-guzzling 4x4, and Dad can’t resist a sly chuckle at our mauve super-mini (chosen by Dennis because it tops the European NCAP safety league tables). As I kiss my parents goodbye, I realise I’m rather looking forward to the most depressing day of the year: at least at work, you don’t have to pretend to be enjoying yourself.