Page 23 - CAMPAIGN Spring 2022

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wedding dress, a grass skirt and a lei necklace from Hawaii – from ‘Dad’s trip to Christmas Island.’ Not that I knew what Christmas Island was back then, though we possessed a bit of its coral. Cutlery as a souvenir, pristine in its packet from the BOAC flight to New York. And Dad’s old, brown, Duffel coat – the one he was wearing on his return, when he landed on my mum’s doorstep to offer the engagement ring he’d bought with his Grapple X bonus money.
Christmas Island has always been in our life. Initially, as a far-flung
National Service adventure from the distant past, when Dad made a journey that no lad of his age or status would ever otherwise get to experience. I don’t know when the words Christmas Island took a darker meaning. I don’t know when the dots began to be joined up between that far-flung adventure and the rare medical anomalies befalling ours and other families.
I was eleven when Ken McGinley founded the BNTVA in 1983, Dad was as an active member from the early days. It felt like Ken and Dad would be on the telephone all night,
every night. I have memories of us accompanying him to at least one of the early AGMs in Blackpool.
And quite frankly, I have to be honest, it was all a bit boring. But forgive me, I was only eleven!
A bunch of middle-aged men going on about something that happened decades before I was born, hogging the family telephone night after night as they discussed the details of their seemingly never-ending fight with the MOD.
It was boring because it was ubiquitous.
It was all I’d ever known; Dad went to Christmas Island as a teenager, he saw a Hydrogen bomb, his family was affected by it and the words BNTVA and Ken McGinley and National Radiological Protection Board and all sorts of other nuclear-related terminology were every day words in our house.
They were embroiled in an ongoing fight with the government and I witnessed how much time, energy and emotion it consumed - and to top it all, I couldn’t get anywhere near the family telephone to fulfil my teenage stereotype of spending all night on it.
One time, we had an Australian lawyer to stay – no idea who he was; a tall, lean man with a beard who was representing the Aboriginal people affected by the Maralinga tests.
It was all just more of ‘Dad’s stuff,’ so I probably didn’t pay much attention.
Occasionally my ears would prick up when something exciting happened; an invite to the House of Lords, or a BBC interview at our house. I’d seen Dad describe the bomb in numerous interviews and even though I knew it
CAMPAIGN SPRING 2022