The World We Would Live in
The bunker should have represented everything we feared most, all the paranoia of our time. It ought to have been a place we recoiled from, not a haven of hope and optimism.
‘In the future,’ Gavin announced once, when a crowd of us were in the bunker, ‘if there’s been no nuclear war, we’ll all have jetpacks for short journeys and go by monorail for longer trips.’
‘If you say so, Gavin!’ laughed Amanda, ‘Will I have a personal robot to deliver my jetpack to me in the morning as I eat my concentrated food pellets?’
There was more laughter, but Gavin insisted, ‘You can mock, but the boffins are doing amazing things with robots. By 1990, they’ll be doing all the boring work.’
We laughed again, but Gavin got listened to all the same. You did, if your father was a wealthy man who not only lived in a massive house in its own grounds but also had built a fallout shelter deep below the Victorian summerhouse. He was something big in the Scottish Office, Gavin’s dad, and if he thought things were serious enough to build the bunker, a bare room about the size of a small kitchen, then it seemed right to be worried.
‘If a bomb went off over Glasgow, would this thing really keep you alive?’ I asked Gavin once. He shrugged and said, ‘Probably not. I don’t know.’
Deep down we all knew this, and probably that’s what made the bunker something to enjoy rather than a place of dread. If the nuclear nightmare came true, this place would just be radioactive ashes, like everywhere else. Why not make it our refuge when we were at Gavin’s? Its clean, bare modernity (it wasn’t fully equipped yet – when Gavin’s dad started to load it up, it really would be time to think Apocalypse) inspired us to dream of sunnier futures than the one Kruschev and Kennedy and Castro seemed to be planning for us. I remember one Friday when we went straight there after school, about six or seven of us. We had all been in revision classes for O Grades and were wearied by them. ‘Maths is such a pain,’ said John, ‘why can’t they invent a machine that does all the work?’
‘Those big computers can do lots of calculations at once,’ I offered, thinking of the large structures the size of a house I had seen on TV, all blank white sterility and reels of whirring magnetic tape.
Gavin seemed lost in thought for a moment. ‘Ye-e-es,’ he said, doubtfully, ‘but computers will eventually get smaller and smaller. So small that they’ll fit in a room like this – or even on your desk.’
‘Never! You’re talking rubbish!’ John snorted.
‘No, really,’ said Gavin, with some seriousness, ‘and there will be special small computers, just for doing calculations. Things you can hold in your hand. We’ll all have them.’
We did have other meeting places. There was a milk bar in the local shopping street, the common room in school and the shed in our garden, but it was in Gavin’s bunker that we talked of the future, of our hopes, of the world we would live in once the superpowers had sorted things out and the scientists and engineers were freed to push out the limits of the possible.
Gavin hoped to get enough Highers to do physics at university while Amanda was aiming to study medicine. ‘I don’t want to practice, though,’ she said, ‘I want to go into research. The way things are going, we’re going to eradicate a lot of killer diseases over the next few decades.’ She was already saying ‘we’.
John wanted to be a musician. He played electric guitar but wanted to study classical before exploring the possibilities of the new beat music. ‘Soon rock and roll will be as respected as classical - rhythm and blues too. In the future there’ll just be music.’
I had no ambition to be a ground-breaking scientist or an engineer who would create new wonders of the world. I hoped to scrape into university, get by financially, get a job and enjoy the fabulous shining future that was surely promised for us all. I also hoped I might share it with Amanda.
Another time we were in the bunker, looking at the catalogue for an exhibition at the Kelvin Hall; it was about technology and gadgets that would transform our lives. A lot of it was humdrum – new types of vacuum cleaner, dishwashers - but there were also some of the first robots; crude, clumsy toys, but things of wonder all the same. John was excited about machines for creating simple electronic music. I remember that there was even something about space travel for all, promised within our lifetimes. One of the exhibitors was taking advance bookings.
Afterwards, as we started to make our separate ways home, I lingered in the garden, in the darkness, with Amanda. We held each other, safe from prying eyes, kissed and celebrated a timeless moment, one where there was no past or future. Then we looked into the evening sky, far beyond the faint skeleton-shapes of the trees, to where the stars flickered and gleamed.
‘Apparently you can sometimes see the Sputniks flying past, I said, ‘They say they look like shooting stars.’
‘You can,’ she said, with her usual certainty. ‘Will we ever fly up there, into space, do you think? You and me?’
‘I don’t see why not. If all the money and brains they spend on trying to blow everyone up were turned to that, it’d be possible – and soon.’
We walked off together, beneath stars and satellites, into the future.
I think about Amanda still. She did go off to study medicine, at Edinburgh, and though we tried to stay together, to triumph over distance (what was distance when space flight would soon be for everyone?), the link inevitably weakened and broke. I’d had to stay at home. University wasn’t for me, my parents said, and soon after my fifth year I started as a trainee in the council drawing office. I haven’t seen Amanda since her third year at Edinburgh, over sixty years ago, now, a chilly day when I visited her and we climbed Arthur’s Seat and agreed it was no longer worth pretending any more. I met John once in the early 70s, when he played keyboards in a progressive band that had a gig at the Apollo. Long-haired and spaced-out, he seemed happy when we snatched a drink in a nearby pub, but the fame didn’t last long. During the punk revolution, his band’s fortunes nose-dived and he left music. For what, I don’t know.
With Gavin I quickly lost touch. Shortly after we left school, his father was transferred to a job in London. Their old house isn’t there any more. It was one of those West End properties that succumbed to subsidence from old mineworkings. The bunker is, of course, gone too – undermined rather than obliterated – and the whole site is landscaped.
My wife died a few years ago. She was not Amanda, but I loved her, after a fashion. Our children are abroad, Sam in Australia and Amanda (yes, you can disapprove if you like) is in Canada. I retired many years ago.
I live in a modest house in Strathblane. There is a garden with trees and I often stand there on clear nights marvelling at the profusion of satellites blinking across the sky. I never got to travel in space, not with Amanda, nor with anyone else. I’ve never had a jetpack or a personal robot either. I remember Gavin, though, when I am sitting at my PC or using my pocket calculator or smartphone. Not all youthful optimism is misplaced, then. And, of course, we haven’t had a nuclear conflict, yet.
I have few visitors and am often alone. Occasionally a neighbour drops by, the local kirk elder calls for a chat or on very rare occasions I entertain relatives. But there is a room in my house that none of these people are admitted to, that they will never see.
While my wife was alive, it variously served as a large cupboard, as a boxroom and, in extreme circumstances, as a spare bedroom. There are no windows. I have redecorated it and placed a lock on the door. There is a comfortable armchair and the walls are full of photographs of my wife, of my children – as babies, as graduates, and Amanda as bride and Sam as groom – and of friends. There is even a dog-eared picture of me with that other, earlier Amanda, taken in an instant photo-booth in Waverley Station.
There, I listen to music that I have loved, read books that mean a lot to me and try to recall periods of fulfilment and contentment. I dwell on the people and places and experiences that shine in the memory.
This room is now, of course, my bunker. I go there to shelter from despair, to re-acquaint myself with the past, the past that mattered, that worked, that made me happy. But this is no mere exercise in nostalgia. No; I intend my time in the shelter to help me re-learn the art of hope; I try once again to anticipate, to be optimistic. Life (and death) has robbed me of these capacities more surely than did the fear of nuclear annihilation.
I feel the need to go there now. I hope you will excuse me.
About the author
David McVey lectures at New College Lanarkshire. He has published over 150 short stories and a great deal of non-fiction that focuses on history and the outdoors. He enjoys hillwalking, visiting historic sites, reading, watching telly, and supporting his home-town football team, Kirkintilloch Rob Roy FC. Did you enjoy the story?
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