THE COLD WAR

At a very rough estimate I seem to have spent over forty years of my life under the shadow of the threat of war. Most recently, of course, nuclear war. But the forty-year figure includes the six or seven years of the Second World War, two years of National Service (and theoretically longer, as I was on the reserve list for Suez, but never called), and over thirty years under the wide and threatening cloud of the Cold War.
It has not always been pleasant. Though I was at quite a young age, the Second World War was still a time of tension for me because my parents were inevitably tense and worried, particularly during the early 'invasion alert' period. National Service, in contrast, was OK and even a bit of a lark at times. But the Cold War was a slow-burning, seemingly never-ending drumroll of political and nuclear complexity which culminated, again for me, in the writing of a sort of  'for and against' document addressing the question of whether we, as a family, should or should not go to the trouble and expense of building an underground shelter.
My document concluded that we probably should. And this, remember, was as comparatively recent as the 1980s.
It is not easy to forget these things. But time does pass and we do forget, and this is one reason why the University of East Anglia in Norwich is carrying out a regional research project into the effects of the complexities and anxieties of the Cold War on the general population at large. I have no doubt that in due course it will produce some fascinating documents, or perhaps a book, detailing those sometimes very dark days.
Therefore, and for the benefit of younger generations which, thankfully, have not been threatened by the possibility of war on UK soil, a little stocktaking. In Norfolk and Suffolk the Cold War was a time when:
politicians from East and West were constantly bickering; Eastern bloc aircraft regularly tested the UK's air defences; ground-to-air missiles (at North Pickenham) were starkly visible to motorists on the A47; nuclear-armed F-111 jets and RAF V-bombers, along with Jaguars and Tornados, prowled the skies; there were A-bombs at Sculthorpe, Marham and Lakenheath; Neatishead early warning radar screens watched regular incursions by Soviet planes into our airspace, and just as regularly ordered UK fighters into the air; the TA was training hard in Thetford Forest to combat possible civil disobedience, sabotage or agitators; County Hall had an emergency war room; the Royal Observer Corps had an underground bunker in Norwich and dozens of smaller bunkers throughout the area; a regional government centre was housed in another bunker at Bawburgh; American spy planes, including Blackbird (SR-71) were flying in and out of Mildenhall, despite US denials; and a time when all the future seemed to hold, and all there was to look forward to, was the possible arrival of Rapier, Tomahawk, Bloodhound, Thor and latterly Cruise missiles.
Meanwhile, local communities argued and bickered over whether to appoint emergency co-ordinating officers, and displayed a persistent air of total indifference at being urged to 'stay where you are' and hide under the table if the nuclear alarm was actually sounded.
It was a tense time, particularly when you sensed what was going on militarily. It was also a time when an officer at RAF Neatishead told me that if they detected 'incoming' missiles they would have four minutes in which to sound the alarm before facing total obliteration. And when some people did build for themselves an underground bunker (I visited one, in Whittington, so I recall), for whatever good it would have done anyone.
In the end my family didn't build one. But that's another story.