Apocalypse Fun!

A few months ago I visited the Hack Green Nuclear Bunker. Such is the breakneck pace at qanik, where a mere 18 months have passed since my last ‘update’ (the word seems hardly adequate), that it has been just three and half years since I first stated my intention to visit. You can perhaps only imagine how long it takes me to get around to doing things I really don’t want to do.

Anyway Hack Green is well worth a visit. Imagine a post apocalyptic Madame Tussauds on a shoestring budget. The site started out as a radar station in World War 2, but in 1984 became fully operational as a Regional Govt HQ in the event of nuclear war. From the Hack Green website:

‘From the ashes of a thermo-nuclear conflict the UK was split into 11 defence regions, each with a Regional Government Headquarters (RGHQ) protected to a high standard against the effects of nuclear weapons
… At a cost reputed to be some £32 million, the original Rotor radar bunker was converted into a vast underground complex containing its own generating plant, air conditioning and life support, nuclear fallout filter rooms, communications, emergency water supply and all the support services that would be required to enable the 135 civil servants and military personnel to survive a sustained nuclear attack.’

That opening:‘from the ashes’, gives you something of the strange flavour of Hack Green. There seems to be a certain relish at the prospect of nuclear apocalypse, with almost gleeful accounts and images of the hideous carnage that would ensue. Corridors are lined with disturbing yet quite groovily designed posters about the radiating effects of bombs of varying megatonage:

I was particularly interested to find one grimly humorous article detailing Birmingham’s plans in the event of attack and an assessment of how effective those plans were. The first part laid out in great detail the roles various members of local government would need to asssume, the second part went on to point out the flaw in these plans, which tended to revolve around the repeated observation that everyone would be dead.

 I sense that Hack Green feels a tiny amount of regret that it never got to fulfil its destiny. Pesky Gorbachev.

 There’s a lot to take in at the bunker. Many rooms are reconstructions of the various administrative areas of the HQ as they were in the 80s, others are given over to displays of what I guess you could call nuclear memorabilia, others still to reconstructions of Cold War scenes – for example a Soviet missile launch control room.

Please note the fine detailing here – the mannequin’s ID badge displaying a photo of the mannequin.

 I don’t suppose the shop window mannequins used in the various displays ever really saw their future panning out this way. How the poor male specimen in the radiation sickness tableau, covered in bloodied dressings and lesions, must think back fondly to his halcyon acrylic days in the window of Foster Brothers.

'Is this menswear?' 

Despite the slightly home made nature of some of the displays, Hack Green can’t and doesn’t fail to be a chilling place. In one mini-bunker room, you sit on a bench in a claustrophobic concrete space, hear the deafening roar of the blast above you and find yourself thinking that instant obliteration would be far preferable.

There is something both unbearably poignant and grotesquely laughable in the neat little offices laid out deep undergound. The fantasy of 135 civil servants calmly going about their business running Cheshire from beneath the ruins is bizarre. As I entered each carefully laid out administrative room, I found myself imagining the kind of horror film feral craziness that would really have been enacted down there once the bombs had dropped. 

This terrible juxtaposition of  the calm bureaucratic fantasy and unimaginably grim reality reached its apotheosis in Protect and Survive – the public information series on civil defence in the event of nuclear attack produced by the government during the early 1980s. I sat and watched all of the films at Hack Green. I remember these, like the US Duck and Cover films, being much lampooned, by comedians in the 80s, but really nothing could be as shocking or as jet blackly funny as the raw material itself. In the neutral tones of a home improvement video the narrator advises:

"If anyone dies while you are kept in your fallout room, move the body to another room in the house. Label the body with name and address and cover it as tightly as possible in polythene, paper, sheets or blankets. Tie a second card to the covering. The radio will advise you what to do about taking the body away for burial. If however you have had a body in the house for more than five days, and if it is safe to go outside, then you should bury the body for the time being in a trench, or cover it with earth, and mark the spot of the burial. "

The weirdest thing about the visit was the massive sense of recognition I felt. I was a teenager again growing up in the 1980s with the absolute conviction that nuclear armagddeon could happen any day. This never seems to get picked up on in popular remembrances of the 80’s  - it’s all synth pop, geometric hair and stone age computer games, but the perceived enormous threat of nuclear war is overlooked. I remember frequently dreaming about nuclear attacks and spending a lot of time working out exactly what I’d do when the four minute warning sounded. It was easy to mistake random urban sirens (particularly, I seem to remember, one that came from the Cadbury factory) for the signal that the end was nigh. I thought they should make the real siren more distinctive. I thought Rimsky Korsakoff’s ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ would be a good choice. As well as avoiding confusion this would really ramp up the urgency and panic of those frantic last moments – turning it all into a hilarious slapstick comedy. Happy days. I was a member of Youth CND, as were many of my classmates, not really because of any lofty political ideals, but simply in the desperate, terrified attempt to remove the large target sign we believed hovered over Britain. Without visiting Hack Green I might have misremembered all this as exaggerated teenage paranoia, but no, turns out it was all entirely justified.

Still – it’s not all doom and gloom. The proprietors have really made nuclear armageddon fun for the little ones by the addition of ‘Spy Mice’. Toy mice of various shapes and sizes, dotted throughout the site for children to spot.

Clearly the brains behind the operation saw what a rodent had done for Disney, and thought ‘Why not nuclear war too?’ Some might say this stretches the crowd pleasing qualities of  the mouse too far, and it’s true that the spy mice have a far tougher remit than Mickey, but the children there on the day I visited were so entranced by spotting the little fellas that they barely registered the fall out suits and Geiger counters they poked out behind.

No mice in toilets.

In one of the undergound rooms you can sit and watch ‘War Game’ the 1965 BBC drama about nuclear attacks on Britain. The original programme wasn’t transmitted until 1985 as it was considered too horrifying. As we were watching, a man came in with his son who was about 8 years old (there had been a sign on the door saying the film wasn’t suitable for children, but I guess once you’ve seen the rest you get a little blasé). They were just in time for the scene in which the documentary style voice over explains the three categories of casualties. The third category is deemed too far gone for the limited medical resources. An exhausted doctor explains that they are the hopeless cases left in a holding section to die in pain without drugs. A policeman then says:

"I know what'll be happening in a few days.They'll be... They'll be asking me to kill them."

 And we watch the broken looking officer with a gun in his hand work his way along a line of casualties. I’m not sure what the young boy made of all this. If I was a spy mouse though I reckon I’d resign.