No fear like a nuclear fear

The sirens of Temuka - the ones they'd use to call the volunteer fire brigade to go fight another hay-bale fire - would always ring out over the small town at midday every Saturday. Nobody could ever explain to me why they had to do it at that time, it was just the way things were.

When I was only 12 years old, I really wished they wouldn't, because I was absolutely terrified of nuclear war.

The threat of nuclear Armageddon was everywhere in pop culture in the early eighties, seering itself onto the public consciousnesses like a radiation burn. The Soviets and Americans had both been a hair trigger away from killing the whole fucking lot of us for several decades, and it was getting a bit much.

They showed us Threads and The War Game at school, and the familiar and cozy British accents just made the dull horror of the apocalypse all the more terrifying. Everyone watched The Day After when it was on TV, and the most horrifying thing about that film was the sombre end credits that said it would be even worse than that.

All the cartoonish post-apocalyptic nightmares - especially the Italian Mad Max rip-offs - didn't help, showing how fucking horrible things can get if you're unlucky enough not to die instantly in the atomic fire.

Even dear Raymond Briggs, who created the enormously popular Snowman and Fungus the Bogeymen books - the only graphic novels you would ever find in the local libraries at the time - came at us all with Where The Wind Blows, with the nuclear conflict seen from the perspective of a bewildered and blind public who think a door nailed to a wall will protect them from the end of everything.

Maintaining a sense of decorum even as they cough up their own rotting livers, it's the quietness of their demise that still haunts.

After all that, I was shit scared when I heard those sirens, convinced that a nuclear missile somewhere in the world had my name on it, even though I lived in a tiny town on the arse end of the planet.

I honestly can't imagine what it was like for people actually lived in places like America, having that loaded gun pointed at their head. My country told the US to fuck off with its nuclear weapons a long time ago, and has no legitimate targets. (Although that didn't stop arrogant colonialist fuckheads blowing up their bombs in the local South Pacific.)

The fear slowly died away over the turn of the century, but resurfaced in the past decade after finally reading the absolutely brutal Barefoot Gen, which shows the real horror at ground zero. There is a disgusting attitude amongst morons and meatheads that nuclear fire is cleansing, like thousands of people aren't burned so bad the skin is sliding off their bones. Or people feeling fine at dawn, spitting up blood at midday, and dead by dusk. All those children, trapped in their flattened homes as fire comes closer and closer

Barefoot Gen should be required reading in all schools, as much as Where the Wind Blows, just for the good of the human race. We shouldn't have to rely on fucking comic books to tell us of the horrors of the world and maybe do everything possible to stop them happening, but they're better than nothing.

I haven't lived in Temuka for many years now and have no idea if they still need to do the siren these days. But that fear is still there in the mournful wail of any such siren, and the echo of it in my head is still the most terrifying thing I can imagine.