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CAMPAIGN Spring 2022
off by heart, I’d still get him to tell me for the umpteenth time, what was it like, watching the bomb? And he’d describe it to me again, which always led me to the same conclusion; but how on earth could that be safe?
And then Dad would explain how he was assured at the time that atmospheric testing was safe because of reduced fallout. And I’d be sceptical, just as anyone of my generation born into a climate of fear of nuclear war, would be.
We’d talk about stuff, Dad and I – we
had differing views on many of the big topics – each of us products of our own generation and environment but united in our interest in current affairs.
There was the time an eminent scientist, Dr Reissland, sadly died in a curious loft fire at an apparently crucial moment of the NRPB survey, or the time Dad suspected our telephone was being tapped and I thought I was being big and clever by boasting to a friend about it over the ‘phone. In full clever-clogs show-off mode, I spoke directly into the receiver to the would-be
‘phone-tappers, it’s okay, you can take a break now because we’re only going to be discussing boys... and then the line clicked and we got cut off. And maybe that was just a coincidence, just like when John Major opened a pre-prepared file to answer from when Dad asked him an impromptu question in our local village hall.
Again, this isn’t about whether those suspicions were real or not
– it’s about that doorway in our minds, permanently wedged open to the possibility of dastardly deeds.
No surprise, then, really, that I have always had a problem with authority. I don’t like being told what to do without understanding why. I’m always asking myself, what else is going on here? And just like my dad, I despise injustice.
Today I’m a trained actor and writer with an interest in social justice.
I first learned the term Moral Injury whilst in a recent conversation with Ceri McDade. I realised that my family’s ‘permanently wedged-open doorway’ is a prime example of Moral Injury and that completely unwittingly, I had just written an entire play about it.
Only with the hindsight of adulthood do I now understand the impact of growing up the daughter of a man who had been so badly wronged by his own government, and the toll it must have taken on that man, my dear dad.
I’m not the first to say this – when the test vet story fully broke in the 1980s, it was before the big scandals of our time that have since opened up public perception to the possibility of high level wrong-doing and cover up. It took the Hillsborough and Bloody Sunday enquiries, SpyCops