Mother Russia (On the Beach in Moscow, Ayrshire)

From Nevil Shute’s post-apocalypse novel to Alex Salmond on Russia Today

There are childhood books that leave a mark, and books that scar you forever. Wolf Mankowitz’s novella Make me An Offer, encountered at the age of 12, left me obsessed with the Portland Vase and the seamier side of the antiques trade. Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra and William Anderson’s Nautilus 90 North imposed a lifetime’s fascination with submarines. Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth may have made me ponder Jesus arriving to whisk His Saints away, but why the hell should I worry, being thoroughly born again?

Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, though. Its impact was completely off the scale. I have no idea why my parents allowed me to read it – I suspect it was among the top-of-the-wardrobe stash of not-for-bairns volumes my dad thought I didn’t know about, in with his Victor Cannings, Desmond Bagleys and Ian Flemings. But read it I did, aged perhaps 13. Terrified doesn’t begin to describe its effect.

First published in 1957, On the Beach is set in the months after a global nuclear war which has essentially wiped out the populations of the Northern Hemisphere. In Australia, the crew of a US nuclear sub (it was probably the submarine on the cover that sucked me in) interact with the natives. Before the inevitable advance of radiation dooms everyone.

The details of how these characters’ lives end remain with me: the government suicide kits, parents killing pets, children, themselves. The symptoms of radiation sickness. The utter lack of hope, as the sub crew investigate a radio signal from Seattle thought to be possible survivors, but which turns out to be a window blind knocking against a Morse Code key.

It’s probably a rubbish book. I have no intention of reading it again to find out, especially not at this juncture. Much of its science has been proven wrong-headed or misleading. But On The Beach (still in print; two movies and a TV series have been made from it) reflected a generational concern: a worldwide nuclear war was on the cards, even likely. Are we prepared to live with it or will we try to stop it happening? I know of at least one prominent anti-nuclear campaigner for whom the book was a crucial inspiration.

Putin’s threats have brought to some people the revelation that nuclear war is still possible. But people my age grew up with it oppressing us. I can remember the civil defence sirens going off in Troon in the 1960s. An evangelical preacher who had been on the British Antarctic Expendition during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis describing how he and his colleagues prepared for the end of civilisation, knowing that they would be abandoned in the deep, frozen south.

This week the panicky nausea that came with reading On the Beach returned. Sure, Putin’s actions and his threats of nuclear escalation may be brinksmanship, mere strategy, but with tit-for-tat reaction times to a nuclear attack being counted in minutes, the fear nags away, sapping energy, eroding the will to do something, anything. Which is how terror works, I suppose.

Somehow, back in those baby-boomer years, we learned to live with it. Nuclear weapons and -whoops! apocalypse – became a kind of background hum to life. The Faslane subs and the protests against them were always there, but ignorable. And Russia? Hey, aren’t they the bad guys, poisoning folk in Salisbury? Annexing Crimea? Naughty! Never mind, at least Alex has his show on that TV station and Sputnik Radio is employing people in Edinburgh…

During my teenage years I was obsessed with Russia. I studied the Russian Revolution and its aftermath all through O-level, Higher, Sixth year Studies and two years at University. I remember the film Dr Zhivago every time I touch the scar on my forehead, from the sunroof on a Fiat 500 I crashed on the way to seeing the film for a second time. From John Reed through Pasternak to Solzhenitsyn, Deighton, Le Carré, Cruz Smith, Russia stalked me through literature. When I met the woman who is now my wife, she was just about to leave on a trip to the Soviet Union and China, travelling aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, with her mother. On the way back, Chernobyl exploded. But that’s another story.

Anyway, the past few days brought this song (there’s a link to a Soundcloud performance) to life. At least writing and recording it took my mind off things. As to whether or not the populations of Moscow in Ayrshire will be safe after a nuclear attack…well.

Mother Russia (Moscow, Ayrshire)

I fell in love with Russia

When I saw Dr Zhivago at the ABC

Omar Sharif, Geraldine Chaplin

Alec Guinness, Tom Courtney

They walked straight out of history

And Julie Christie, shining like a searchlight

She lived in Edinburgh for a while

Had a thing for journalists I believe

That surely indicates her taste and style

Drinking with hacks in the Jolly Judge just off the Royal Mile

Anyway I studied the Russian Revolution

Always more a Trotsky than a Stalin kinda guy

Though no-one wants to end up in Mexico City

With a cocktail icepick in your eye

That’s a cold and very unpleasant way to die

Russia, Mother Russia

Pepper vodka and pickled fish

Russia, Mother Russia

I had a Lada and a Moskvich

Caviar and caravan tea

Mother Russia and me

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov

Lev Davidovich Bronstein – he was highly strung

Joseph Vissarionivich Djugashvili

Lenin,Trotsky, Stalin – the names roll off the tongue

Like Crosby Stills and Nash without Neil Young

Russia, Mother Russia

Struck the Nazis with a fatal blow

Russia, Mother Russia

Gave Alex Salmond his own TV show

Sent a dog into space

In Mother Russia’s embrace

I longed to ride the Trans Siberian Express

And warm my fingers on a samovar

Discuss the failure of the collective farms

Dance a mazurka with a commissar

Get a tattoo in Vladivostok of a crimson star

But now I’m sitting here in Glasgow

The Holy Loch’s just 20 miles away or so

Waiting for missiles to fall out of the sky

I never got the chance to go

Just listened to that Sputkink Radio

Russia, Mother Russia

We drank Smirnoff when I married Karen

Russia, Mother Russia

We named our eldest after Yuri Gagarin

Though he prefers Gus

Mother Russia and us

(There’s a village called Moscow in Ayrshire

John Martyn used to live there

I’m thinking of moving

Surely we’d be safe there…)