A childhood memory, nothing more. I’m awake and in a cold sweat, heart thudding against my ribs. The unthinkable has actually happened. The blinding magnesium light. A sound like the earth torn asunder. I’m waiting for the searing wind and heat to rip through our home. Scorched meat on blackened bones. Please let it be quick. Let us be the lucky ones.

The blaze never comes. The storm-filled night rages on around us. I look out of the window, at the church on the hill behind our house. It’s still there, lightning rod smoking. The end postponed. But part of me never forgets that this is what it will be like.

Yeah, that’ll help.

I grew up knowing things too appalling, too adult, too sobering than I should have. We all did. ICBM, MIRV, Trident, Polaris. I knew the subtle difference between a hydrogen and a neutron bomb. The symptoms of a chemical attack. Death as an abstract. War divorced from the cost in soldiers. Superpowers fighting over ashes.

There was a penny toy dispenser outside our paper shop. Each toy was in a clear plastic capsule. It was a Saturday ritual for me to squander some of my pocket money on it. This one time what rattled out wasn’t a set of jacks or marbles but a strange necklace. Hanging from it was a tiny circular insignia, like a delta-winged plane with a line through the middle. It was a shit toy, I didn’t know what it meant then but I kept it.

It’s 1985. The previous year I had stayed up to watch ‘Threads’ and ‘The Day After’. The grit and the gloss of the end of the world. We had piled down the local Odeon for ‘Wargames’. Chock full of videogames and references to our brave new world of computers. Our generation fighting the folly of our predecessors with modems and Ataris.

Ooh. Pretty.

Theatre Europe brought the chill to our homes, to our bedrooms. A tactical battle for Western Europe played out on a humble C64. Even with massaged figures (to weaken the Warsaw Pact forces) the DEFCON level would inexorably rise as we played, the virtual continent sliding ever closer to a nuclear conflict. Different tactics would draw out the pain for longer, but always with the same end. An exchange of missiles. Dots on the skyline. London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow. Black clouds. Game over.

The consequences of your actions.

Peace never stood a chance.

http://www.gb64.com/oldsite/gameofweek/2/gotw_theatreurope.htm

October 2005.

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