Me And Bob And The Bomb
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday October 23, 1992
OCTOBER 1962. My final exams were looming, and so was a political showdown between the United States and the USSR. It seemed a pity. I felt I could have prevented a crisis if I'd been there to negotiate. I was a fan of Jack Kennedy's, but I also had a sneaking admiration for Nikita Khrushchev .
It was a busy month. That October My Fair Lady closed in New York after a long run. Walter Schirra went on a sixorbit flight in an Atlas rocket with a Sigma 7 Mercury Space capsule. Sheila Scotter arrived at Mascot (to be the editor of Vogue ) with 40 pairs of shoes and some fashion advice for Australian women: each of us should have a backless cocktail dress and a collarless, nearly full-length coat.
The threatened confrontation between Moscow and Washington gained momentum with almost every day that passed. REDS PLAN NEW CRISIS IN BERLIN. The Russians knew that missiles in Cuba were pointing at Florida and other parts of the southern United States. The Americans knew, too, but didn't know whether the Russians knew they knew. Both sides were stalling for time but a showdown was approaching.
On Wednesday, October 23, I read that there was an air of crisis in Washington, but American authorities were telling the public not to worry about the amphibious US naval exercises in the Caribbean. There was no intention to attack Cuba, they said.
I telephoned Bob Ellis at his Wiley Street flat that morning from the public telephone in the south-east corner of the Sydney University Quad. Almost at once another would-be user appeared outside my booth, jingling his coins.
I'd thought of going out to Wiley Street after my lectures, but Bob was in a state of high agitation. A possible world catastrophe was threatening, he said. Yeah, yeah, I replied, I'd read the papers.
"Read the papers |" he exploded. "They'd have been printed hours ago. I'm talking about now. Why aren't you listening to the radio? Kennedy's making a speech to the American people right this instant. Listen. Listen. I'll put the receiver near the set. Can you hear that?"
Through static and distance I could hear the Boston intonation without being able to make out any of the words. "Look, Bob, I can't really hear through the phone. I'll go home and listen to the radio later. There's someone waiting to use the phone."
"Great. The world as we know it is about to end but what you're concerned about is the embarrassment of making someone queue to use the phone. Listen to this bit. Can't you hear what Kennedy's saying? There are hundreds of nuclear missiles on Cuba pointed at the United States. Did you hear that? 'Weapons capable of hurling destruction into the heart of America' ... This is world war we're talking about. A nuclear catastrophe."
I went home to Bellevue Hill, listened to the radio, and telephoned Bob again. "The Reds and the Yanks have probably got missiles pointing at every centre of population on the globe between them," he said.
"Surely not."
"How would you know? How would any of us know?"
"Well, I don't suppose I do, really ... But listen, Bob, I don't think either of them's really the type."
"What do you mean?"
"Kennedy or Khrushchev. I don't think either of them is really the type to call for the obliteration of humanity. Kennedy wouldn't, and bullish old Nikita's got a decent streak in him."
"You're reducing it to personalities. We're talking about two infernal, implacable war machines."
"And two leaders."
Thursday was tense, too. The Americans, having imposed an "arms quarantine"on Cuba, were intercepting ships in the Caribbean. The Russians accused the Americans of taking a step on the road to thermonuclear war.
That night my father (the journalist David McNicoll) noticed how anxious I was. At dinner he was relaxed, even witty. "Look,
you don't have to worry about Khrushchev," he said. "I heard a first-hand account of how he looked on his way to a meeting in Moscow. Khrushchev was smiling. He's not about to press the button."
I was slightly reassured, but I didn't sleep much all the same. What if Bob was right? What if thermonuclear catastrophe was only hours or days away?
The next day, Friday, October 26, Bob was beside himself with panic and urgency. "We'll have to leave Sydney; there's nothing else for it," he said.
He believed that within 24 hours every city of more than a million or so inhabitants would have been targeted and attacked. We would have to leave before nightfall, but it mightn't be safe to use public transport because the Government could put it under curfew at any moment. I could see where this was heading.
"You've got the key to your mother's car, haven't you?"
"Yes, but that was more for when she was away. When she's here I can only use it with permission if she's not using it herself."
"The only thing is, I promised Mrs Masters something ..."
"What? Who?"
"I promised Olga Masters, Ian's mother, that I'd look after Ian. We'd better take him with us."
Ian Masters was a handsome, boyish-looking 17-year-old with wide brown eyes and a pleasant grin. Like Bob, he came from Lismore. Knowing how Ian looked up to Bob, his mother had asked Bob to help him cope with the big city in his first year at university.
I can't remember what I packed, but it wasn't much. I can't remember what I said in the note I left my mother, Micky, but I suppose I mentioned the Cuban crisis and the risk of nuclear attack. I told her I'd borrowed the car.
I collected Bob in Waverley and we drove together to collect Ian from his room in a seedy terrace in Glebe. There was no back seat in the Triumph Herald and poor Ian had to sit on the carpeted space behind the two bucket seats. He sat with his knees drawn up, his hands on his knees, and his chin resting on his hands. I still remember his trusting brown eyes, eyeball to eyeball with mine, every time I glanced backwards.
I drove. Neither Bob nor Ian had a licence.
By sunset we were on the highway going west from Parramatta. There was a lot of traffic. It didn't occur to us that there might be heavy traffic every day, or every Friday afternoon. We were convinced that we were part of a mass exodus from impending disaster.
It seemed a long drive west to the mountains. We drove into the glare of the setting sun, listening to the radio. "The United States has drawn its toeline in the ocean on the 24th parallel north of Cuba, and on it American gunners swivel challengingly to greet a stranger ..."
Thirty miles south of Key West, Florida, a civilian pilot radioed to Miami airport: "Man, there's never been surveillance like this." In St Petersburg, Florida, schoolchildren crouched down under their desks in disaster drill.
The road to Penrith was not a freeway. An overcautious, inexperienced driver, I kept to the inside lane so that other vehicles could pass me. I knew we had a choice of two roads west. For a number of reasons, I chose the longer, less populated route, Bell's Line of Road. I had some hazy notion that it would be more remote and hence safer, and I was beginning to worry about how my departure note would go down with my parents. In the worse-case scenario they might report me as a missing person. In that case, our conspicuous number plate, BBB111, could mean trouble.
Somewhere in the foothills of the Blue Mountains we went into a service station, where we filled up with fuel and bought pies and Violet Crumbles.
We didn't speak much as we drove on. It was dark. The Sydney radio stations petered out so Bob fiddled with the dial until we got 2KA. Lacking a proper appreciation of Armageddon, it was playing Top 40 numbers between the hourly bulletins.
After some hours we reached a vantage point where we could look down on the lights of Sydney in the distance. A sickening wave of terror went through me as I imagined the mushroom cloud, the sickly gases, the orange flares and the spontaneous fires of nuclear attack. In a vision as clear as a Hiroshima documentary I could see the Cumberland plain as an inferno; the city that once stood on it obliterated.
But when I stilled my imagination for a moment, the haze of lights on the horizon appeared quite normal, as Sydney slept on unafraid. We were no longer being passed by squads of caravans or cars with suitcases on their rooftops. There was no mass exodus. Most people were home in bed.
We weren't sure where we were, but it was somewhere west of the mountains. I was exhausted. As neither of the others could drive, I insisted we stop for a while so I could get some rest. There wasn't much prospect of sleep, but between news bulletins I lolled on the steering wheel, napping. Ian stretched out in the back as best he could. Bob slumped in his seat.
There were signs of improvement in what we heard. Pravda announced that Moscow was prepared to do everything to avert the war. In the UN someone quoted Churchill's words, "jaw jaw instead of war war".
With the first pink of sunrise, we drove on until we reached a fairly large town. Lithgow. We found some public lavatories, then parked the car in the main street.
I felt mildly elated by the change of tone in the news, as if things had edged back from catastrophic to merely critical. Ian was massaging his neck muscles. Bob, I slowly realised, was almost beside himself with rage at any hint of anticlimax. He wanted the world to be on the brink, he wanted to be the mastermind of any escape. He wanted a central role in whatever happened. Disaster would have been preferable to the dawning of an ordinary Saturday morning in an undistinguished mining town.
Ian ventured to say that things sounded as if they were cooling down and everyone was coming to their senses. As he'd scarcely spoken all night, these words were almost oracular. I agreed with him.
"It's good about Khrushchev agreeing to negotiations through the UN," I said. "It ties in with what my father heard on Thursday. Someone in Moscow saw him on the way to a meeting, and he was smiling."
Bob exploded. "Khrushchev was smiling | Khrushchev was smiling | I've heard of inanities, but that one takes some beating.
"Do we know what kind of smile exactly? The kind of smile you smile when you've got missiles pointed at every centre of population and you know you can unleash destruction at the touch of a button? The automatic kind of smile a vain man gives when he notices a camera? The kind of smile you smile when you're giving nothing away in tense negotiations? Jesus Christ, a smile tells us nothing."
"I find it more reassuring than a scowl," I said.
"Face it," Ian said. "The world's not going to end. Not today anyway."
"Just because the sun comes up and there's some vague news about negotiations, and Penny says Khrushchev was smiling. God Almighty |"
Bob got out of the car, slamming the door. We watched him lurch along the footpath, head down, toes out, hands behind his back, his expression black. His lips were moving as if he was uttering a string of unflattering comments about the two people he'd chosen to save from global disaster.
"I'm going to drive home," I told Ian. We waited 10 or 15 minutes before the little fieldforce of fury reappeared at the passenger window.
"Ian and I have decided to go back." I said. "You don't have to come with us, but you can if you want to."
"What choice do I really have?" There were a few more oaths, then he got in beside me, slamming the door after him. He sat in baleful silence as we drove east. He was fizzing with pent-up force like a grenade that's been thrown but hasn't exploded.
The radio began giving tips for the afternoon's racing.
We retraced the route of the day before, taking Ian to a narrow street not far from the university's Ross Street gates. Bob got out, too, muttering something about going to the Honi office. He was so cross with me that he could scarcely speak.
Early in the afternoon I finally reached Bellevue Hill. Everyone was out on the back lawn.
There was a muted explosion of It's Penny | and Where have you been? and Here you are at last | and God, the night you've put us through.
I was exhausted. I sat down, determined to keep as calm as I could. "Where have you been?" they asked again.
"We got as far as Lithgow," I said, the whole venture already sounding ludicrous to recount.
"Lithgow | Why Lithgow?"
"Bob thought we'd be safer away from Sydney. In case nuclear war broke out."
Micky gave a snort of laughter. "I don't know why you thought you'd be safe in Lithgow," she said. "There's a small arms factory there."
"Is there? I didn't know." There was no end to the things I didn't know.
"I'm afraid this has gone rather a long way," my father said. "The car's been reported as stolen, and you've been reported as missing.
"What were we to think?" he asked. "You left a hysterical note. We could only conclude you and Bob were suffering from some sort of folie a deux.
"I'm sorry to spoil the theory, but it would have to be folie a trois. Ian Masters was with us the whole time." The image of Ian's silent, serious, brown-eyed face came to me again. I wasn't the only person to have put an absurd trust in Bob.
I trudged up the narrow steps and stretched out on my bed, plagued by thoughts of Sydney by night, lying unaware of its impending fate, and the respective rages of my lover, my mother and my father until, with images of traffic streaming past my eyes, I finally drifted into an unquiet sleep.
© 1992 Sydney Morning Herald