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A sudden school outing – and you’d be bussed miles to some temporary depot where you got fed stew out of thin blue plastic bowls. The newsreels showed pictures of nuclear tests to everyone during their weekly visit to the cinema, in case anyone lacked the imagination to feel fear.
To those who have never lived through those times, the public mood was hard to describe. The author caught a whiff of it once again in 2001, when he found himself in New York City the weekend after 9/11. But there was this difference: chronic fear produces shrivelled hearts – yet the people he saw spontaneously taking to the streets for peace and reconciliation, completely filling Times Square in a massive demonstration against over-hasty retribution (an event that went largely unreported) had hearts that were still too warm and full of blood that was too red.
In 1961 our hearts were cold and white. We found little pity in them for those left behind in the rat race. That didn’t elevate us in our own eyes. So to shore-up our self-esteem we persecuted minorities – at least those minorities who looked as if they wouldn’t lift a finger to help themselves. Someone sectioned under the Mental Health Act of 1959 could end up locked away for life on the signatures of two doctors. So too could someone diagnosed as schizophrenic. In doing such a thing we were honouring the crimes of the fascist enemy we had not long beaten.
A lot of...