Windy City

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

Some sat at their desks, fiddling with pencils and paperclips.  Others stood in the corridors, dimly lit by the emergency power.  With no phones and no electricity, there was nothing to be done.  An enormous silence hung over the whole building.  Outside, there was a clear blue sky.

Upon waking that morning, it was apparent that something was wrong.  The alarm radio had not gone off: its display was dead.  Throughout the still house all the electric clocks had stopped at the same moment: 4.34 am; it was as if time had had a heart attack.  No light, no hot water, no kettle: the tiny marginal acts of civilisation had been cancelled.

People stumbled into work as if in a trance, more out of habit than from any real sense of necessity.  Everywhere there were scenes of destruction:  huge trees uprooted, lying stricken across the road.  Cars were driven under them with white-knuckled bravado, or gingerly past them, up on the pavement.  People milled around, some taking photographs.  There were no trains and few buses.  An occasional ambulance flashed by.

On the radio the police issued urgent pleas for everyone to stay at home; it was pointless going to work they said.  And the radio itself was strangely different.  Bulletins were broadcast every ten minutes.  The mindless music and vacuous ads had all but stopped.  Instead, the catalogue of deaths and disasters, the no-go areas and the helplessness of the authorities were hammered home with a kind of crazy glee.  A curious jitter ran through people, as if someone had walked over their collective grave.  It felt like the end of the world.

It was the Great Wind of '87.  'The worst weather in 300 years', they said, 'the worst disaster since the war'.  The dead, though few, were publicly lamented - so alien to this sanitised world of ours is random, violent death through force of Nature.  Everyone felt an aesthetic pang at the sight of centuries of trees laid low in the dust; still majestic like fallen royalty, but doomed and irreplaceable.  But most of all people felt themselves chastened, as if they had narrowly escaped something unthinkable.  A case of presque-vu.

For winds, albeit of record speeds, had shut down the whole seething, pullulating metropolis of London.  No transport, no telephones, and worst of all, no power.  Mere air had pulled the plug on late twentieth century civilisation in so comprehensive a manner that people could only stand around and stare impotently.  Power and telephone lines were restored after some hours, but the effects of that great wind were felt directly for days after, and the scars would remain for decades.

Imagine, then, a greater wind, an unnatural wind whose very touch is death.  After a nuclear explosion, following the huge pulse of radiation, but before the even more horrifying fall-out of radioactive debris, there is a shock wave.  That shock wave moves across the land like the Voice of God in the Old Testament: it is swift and terrible and unstoppable.  In comparison the Great Wind of '87 will seem a light spring breeze.  Looking around at our silent, desolated city, were we not right to be windy?

(1987)

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8.8.88

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

'Now, who can tell me today's date?'  I remember the teacher standing in front of the class; a female teacher, so perhaps it was Miss Pinkney or Mrs Sutcliffe - but not Miss Grogden or Mrs Day.  I am at the back of the class to the right, next to Angela - but this may have been the following year.  I half remember sitting next to my best friend, Neil Campion, at some stage, which must have been around this time, towards the end of my infant schooldays.  Perhaps he sat in front of me.  I suppose I should be amazed at how easily I lost touch with him.  I never saw him again, though I do remember being told how his brother - who had a withered left arm with a rather disturbing hook-like device he clipped over it - was killed a couple of years later when he rode his motorbike into an unlit skip late at night.  Apparently his girlfriend riding pillion was also killed, but none of this touched me in the slightest.

'And what is special about today's date?'  Our double desk - whoever it was that shared with me - consisted of a top with a kind of rectangular cavity underneath.  In it we would keep all our text and exercise books, along with pencils and rubbers and set squares and the like.  I remember that I arranged mine in two neat ziggurat forms, one in each corner.

'And when will be the next time that that happens?'  Outside, in the sunlight, lay the grass playing area bounded by a high wire netting fence.  At the far end this gave on to the forbidden sports fields of the secondary modern school next door.  I never knew anything about this place, except that it was where most of those at my primary school ended up.  It never occurred to me to wonder whether I too would go there.  Not that I assumed I would automatically go to a grammar school, because I would not have recognised the concept; it was more that I spent my childhood in a strange kind of volitional and experiential haze.

'Yes, Glyn?'  But I did know what the date was, what was special about it, and when it would happen again.  The answer seemed obvious, and that I should know it, natural.  Like my desk, like the sunshine that poured in through the high windows, like the steady progress through the junior school towards the 11+ exam and beyond, everything in my world seemed perfectly ordered and perfectly right.  My schooldays were hardly the happiest of my life, but they were totally stress-free, insouciant, and frictionless.  I scarcely felt them pass at all.  Time flew by in standing still.

Thus it is that I have few memories from that time, just the odd, flickering image from each year.  But the question that opened that June morning has remained with me ever since.  Eleven years, one month and one day after hearing it, I wrote on my 1977 desktop diary for 7 July: '(remember 6.6.66?)'.  And I did.

And I do today.  The anniversaries are moments of punctuation which come round with a quirky regularity, as if governed by sunspot activity.  Like strange, temporal vortices, they exert a complex force.  All my life, I know, they will give me pause for thought: thought for what was on these dates in the past; and thought for what might be in the future.

(1988)

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