mns  2006-10-22 10:26  Miscellaneous Pieces   

We were about nine or ten years old, my cousin Deirdre and I, during the height of the cold war.
Almost every day brochures came through the letterbox telling us of the expansion of Communism and the imminent dropping of the Atom Bomb. While we at home, were being advised to build a nuclear shelter in the back garden, my cousin, a boarder in a convent, watched a map on the wall on which the nuns had pinned tiny red flags. These initially were positioned in the Soviet Union, but as the days and weeks went by, the red flags multiplied and moved systematically across Europe in the direction of our island, and with them the terror of slaughter and the end of existence, as we knew it.
At home, my parents tried to retrieve the frightening literature as soon as it thudded on to the hall mat – not always successfully, as I was determined to know what was in store for us.
I was reminded of this when a leaflet for the National Planning for Nuclear Emergencies came with the post earlier this year, and I found myself thrown back to a time and place when I was gripped with icy fear.
Looking at the advice on restrictions, sheltering, agricultural measures and evacuation, I wondered where the iodine tablets were, and if they arrived should I keep them in the fridge and how I would tell my daughter without alarming her. And then I thought of a day all those years ago when I went into school having read one of those brochures in the early nineteen-sixties.

I was not the only one who was upset that morning, and our Latin teacher Maeve Binchy came in and saw these rows of pale faces, some of us in tears. She asked what was wrong, and dismally we told her of our fears, that the red peril was on its way, that we did not have shelters in the back garden, and that we did not know what to do. Listening thoughtfully, she assessed the situation, then she smiled encouragingly at us. She said that when the Communists arrived they would be coming into Dun Laoghaire. Where else could they possibly land, she asked? And that she, for one, would be down at the end of the East Pier to wave them in, and that we’d all have a party and everything would be fine. Sure, weren’t we known as the land of welcomes! It would be cead mile failte to the Russians and they’d love us.
Never has a classroom full of children brightened up so quickly. It had not occurred to us that there might be an alternative!

I have carried that memory of hope with me all my life; the knowledge of the possibility of choice, of keeping our intellectual glass at least half full, and the memory of the fear that was dispelled that morning so that I never again in my childhood was frightened by the arrival of an army bringing mayhem and chaos.
My cousin told me there was no such relief from the fear in the convent, where the red flags increased in number and the nuns prayed for the survival of Catholicism, and the girls feared rape and torture.
Putting down the government’s brochure with its emergency plans and countermeasures, I remembered when I was nine years old and I thought, where are you Miss Binchy – I need you again.