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Paranoid writer Tom Mitchelson bunkers down in a UK nuke haven.
But he got blown out when he begged the owner to reserve him a permanent place in the event of armageddon.
***
The End Is Nigh.
(And the world’s in the shithouse.)
That’s if you believe everything you see and read.
Forget stopping and smelling the daisies and going for walks on the beach – it’s time to make plans for the End Of Days.
Last year we witnessed live beheadings courtesy of ISIS.
Russia sparked World War III fears after it began flexing its military muscle in Ukraine.
There were revolutions in Asia and Islamic militants in Somalia.
And the Ebola crisis broke the borders of West Africa.
Closer to home, 6,000 ducks were killed in East Yorkshire as a guard against a new outbreak of bird flu.
And you can’t get a train anymore without a cop handing you a leaflet that says ‘Run, Hide and Tell’ in the event of a terror attack.
‘Run, Hide and Tell?’
It doesn’t inspire me with much confidence in the lasting nature of the human race.
If ISIS, Ebola, drug-resistant viruses and terrorists don’t get you, there’s the prediction (mainly from a bunch of cults in America) that this autumn a ‘Blood Moon’ lunar eclipse will spell the second coming of Jesus – referred to as a “great and terrible day of the Lord” in the Bible’s Book Of Joel, when the “sun will turn to darkness and the moon into blood”.
Even in the cinema there’s been no escape.
Smart apes and Interstellar were twin harbingers of doom.
The only kind of future we can now imagine is dystopian.
These deadly threats that press on civilisation from all sides only have to get lucky once. We humans need to stay lucky, or perish.
It’s all enough to make you nostalgic for the Cold War.
My new year resolution isn’t to ditch the fags or booze – it’s to find somewhere else other than Essex to live in case the worst happened.
I’m never going to be arsed to build my own underground shelter, or become US President, so I started 2015 by researching the locations of Britain’s nuclear bunkers.
And I soon hatched a cunning plan to make friends with one of the owners to get a spot reserved inside when The End hits.
It was either that, or bribe my way into gaining a space.
A quick fact-lesson before I get to that.
For 40 years, the threat of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union loomed over Britain and plans were in place for the outbreak of a Third World War.
They included the construction of a secret network of more than 2,500 bunkers capable of withstanding an atomic blast.
The plan was that Britain would be governed by a select few from the underground complexes.
Anyone left on the surface faced death in either the blast or from terrible radiation.
Mercifully these bunkers, which existed in almost every town and city, were never needed.
They became redundant following the collapse of communism when the nuclear threat receded.
About half the bunkers survive, although most of them languish empty or are off–limits.
The daddy of them all was near Corsham, Wiltshire, and was code named Burlington.
It was envisaged the Prime Minister and members of the Royal Family would shelter there.
The bunker covers 34 acres and, with 10 miles of tunnels, had space for 6,000 people.
It was surrounded by 100ft–thick concrete walls and bristled with equipment including a BBC studio.
There’s no chance I was getting in there – the bunker is closed to the public.
But it’s said to still contain vast stores with chairs still wrapped in brown paper, crates of loo roll, mountains of stationery and thousands of chunky black telephones.
There are also said to be stacks of beds, which would have filled dormitories of civil servants, typists, telephonists and maintenance workers, as well as a royal suite.
If the worst happens, it’s doubtful the government are going to let scum like us in to the likes of that shelter.
Even when bunker-fever was at its height at the paranoid peak of the Cold War, when it was considered likely that Russia would launch an all-out attack on the West, all we were given was a silly government pamphlet called Protect And Survive.
(It reminds me of the ‘Run, Hide, Tell’ pamphlet given out at the fag-end of last year at train stations.)
The Cold War booklet laughably told the nation to hide in ditches or sit under our dining room tables with cushions and a tin of Spam and plastic buckets for a couple of weeks so we would avoid the effects of an atomic assault.
Good advice.
The reality is that it was estimated that a Hiroshima-style nuclear strike on Britain could kill 12 million people and injure four million more – a third of the population in the 1950s.
Hiding under your kitchen table was never going to cut it in the face of that.
Remember the old couple who died slowly from radiation poisoning after following the advice of such a pamphlet in Raymond Briggs’ terrifying nuclear holocaust fable When The Wind Blows?
It’s no way to go.
Anyway, history lesson over.
After reading up on the country’s bunker situation, I soon found the Brit who has solid, and accessible – plans in place for The End.
Time to make a new pal.
Farmer Mike Parrish bought Kelvedon Hatch – the deepest nuclear bunker open to the public in Britain – direct from the government.
He was aged five in 1952 when his family’s farmland was requisitioned by the Churchill government and the underground complex was built in just seven months.
It was designed to shelter 600 people and politicians had planned to govern what remained of the country from there in the event of the worst.
Parrish won’t say how much he paid for the haven when he bought it in 1994 – when it was still under government guard.
It can’t have been cheap mind.
It’ll have been a lot more than the £2,410 the government paid Parrish’s grandfather for the 25-acre plot back in 1952.
Time for a visit
_____
Kelvedon Hatch is a 100ft deep, three- storey nuclear bunker with 11⁄2 ton tank metal blast doors, 10ft-thick walls, Faraday cage and concrete blast caps.
Parrish now runs it as part tourist attraction and part private emergency refuge. But he’s very – very – serious about using it as mankind’s last hope. So serious he’s already drawn up a list of
family members he’d invite. He also has ambitions to recruit a doctor, engineer and psychiatrist into their underground team to ensure humanity has a go at survival.
The place used to be an official secret. But there are now road signs in the Essex village of Kelvedon Hatch directing traffic to “The Secret Nuclear Bunker”.
It’s hidden in woodland and the entrance is concealed inside a fake 1950s brick bungalow, complete with a dormer window and nice spacious veranda.
This is where I meet Parrish.
Your classic affable farmer, he’s wearing a blue shirt and comfy shoes.
He leads me through a heavy steel anti- blast door, which gives onto a 110-metre tunnel sloping down into the ground.
It would be eerie making the 120-ft walk along an empty corridor knowing you may have just had your last glimpse of the outside world for at least 50 years if you’re going to wait out the dissipation of radiation from the atmosphere.
After a quick introduction, Parrish agreed to let me stay underground for a trial period, so I can report on the realities of life after the Big One drops.
We walk through another set of blast doors that lead to the shelter itself.
It looks like the set of a World War II movie – you half expect David Niven to be issuing orders for a bombing raid.
There are huge bakelite telephones connected to a manual exchange, radio equipment depending on valves, not transistors, a map table where battle markers can be pushed around and banks of obsolete Telex machines – all surrounded by 10ft-thick reinforced concrete walls. It’s funny to think if we had ever had an Alamo moment, this is where it would have happened.
Parrish tells me, “The government, under the threat of compulsory purchase, bought the 25 acres in the middle of our family farm. They bulldozed the hill away, built the bunker and pushed the earth back again and then me and my family carried on farming over the top as part
of the cover.”
He now has a detailed survival plan.
“We’ve got water, we’ve got diesel for the generators, we’ve got food,” he says. “We’ve got everything that’s required to lock down here for a year or two.”
I can almost see a flicker of anticipation in Mike’s eyes, as if he wants to prove to the world it was the right move to buy this thing.
The thing is, there won’t be that many to appreciate the decision if he does end up down here for real.
But his bunker is just what I may need in the event of the unthinkable.
Although the shelter is old it would be one of the safest places in the world – and I’m determined to get an invitation of a permanent space from Parrish.
I ask him how he would choose the people that would bunk down with him in an emergency.
“All my family,” he tells me. “And that’s about 100 people”.
“Any spaces left?” I ask.
“Oh yes, I think there’s room for about 200 down here comfortably. If we stuck to the original 600 we’d be like sardines.”
I go, “How are you planning to fill the vacancies?”
Parrish comes back with, “I treat it rather like a wedding list. Who would I want to invite? Do you invite your daughter’s boyfriend? Your daughter’s boyfriend’s parents? Your daughter’s boyfriend’s parent’s children?”
Depends if you like them I advise.
“What about friends?” I inquire.
“There’s one or two on the list,” he says, refusing to bend to my hints.
It crosses my mind his post-apocalyptic world is going to be a tad incestuous.
I’m going to have to be direct.
“What would it take for me to get a spot down here?”
“I’m not sure I’d want you,” he says.
Ah, right.
But I think if we had to start the human race again, it needs a deeper gene pool than Parrish is currently considering.
“Can’t we become friends?” I ask.
“I don’t see that happening. If you’re not family you’d have to have a skill,” he informs me.
“I can play the banjo,” I offer, thinking of a society that is forced to make its own entertainment.
Parrish seems to consider this.
But he tells me, “I need a doctor, I need an engineer. I might need a psychiatrist.”
Standing deep underground discussing Parrish’s plans for the end of the world, and knowing he has a cupboard with a two-year supply of baked beans I can see his point.
You would need a shrink down here.
Fifteen years ago Parrish offered a guaranteed spot in the bunker for 10 years to anyone who could come up with a £30,000 reservation fee.
There were no takers.
After 9/11 he had more than 200 enquiries.
I wonder whether money will still talk.
“Can I buy a place down here?” I say.
Parrish says the £30,000 offer’s still open – and that it’s the only way in if you’re not family.
“Can I pay half now and half when it happens?” I suggest.
Parrish, knowing the pound sterling may not survive a holocaust, shakes his head.
“All up front,” he insists. “But you’d have to be vetted first.”
Apparently I’m not top of his list.
“It’s not just the money,” he tells me. “Compatibility would be paramount. We can’t go round killing people off because we’re not getting on with them.”
That hadn’t even occurred to me. I ask Parrish if he has a gun.
“Yes, a number of,” he smiles.
It seems to me the man with the gun would be the man with the power.
And that man would be Parrish.
“Would you be the leader?” I ask.
“Initially. Because I’d know what’s going on everywhere,” he declares. “One would hope one wouldn’t fall into anarchy and cannibalism. But one doesn’t know what the future holds.”
Cannibalism? It’s not something I’d even thought of.
In my book, there would be nothing worse than escaping nuclear devastation only to be stuck in an underground shelter with a farmer and his extended family who want you for dinner.
“If you’ve seriously got the money then we’d make sure we were ready for you,” he finally relents. “But there would be one or two psychiatric tests. We don’t want you going mad because you’re confined.”
I ask him if anyone in his family has turned down his offer of sanctuary.
“A lot of family have indicated to me that they’d rather stand outside and die. That’s just personal,” he says.
He won’t be drawn on who they are, but I suspect they may be a lot closer than he is willing to admit.
This is why, if I had a bunker, you might find Dolly Parton discussing Geiger counters over a tin of peaches with David Bowie.
‘Who would you have in your bunker?’ could become the most compelling parlour game since charades.
Then it’s time for my nuclear test.
In order to see whether I could cope with the physiological pressures of living underground, Parrish agrees to let me stay in the bunker on my own for as long as I can stand it, but will check on me after 48 hours.
_____
Underground, it’s weird.
I put my stuff in the room that would have been used by the Prime Minister, although it feels anything but prime ministerial.
Just a single bed next to a desk and chair.
I’d at least have pimped my bunker if I owned this thing.
Parrish leaves with a cheery “good night” and the heavy doors slam shut.
The air tastes dusty despite being pumped through a series of filters and I look for a way to occupy myself.
No phone, no Internet.
And the creeping realisation hardly anyone knows I’m here.
I soon make a discovery: this is some boring shit.
Initially I wander round pretending I’m the last man on earth speculating about life outside in a nuclear winter.
I soon get to thinking, ‘How many slices of Spam and games of Patience could I endure? How many repeats of my banjo repertoire could my fellow inmates put up with?’
So I ended up lasting 48 hours.
It’s not the distant rumble of the generators, or the lungs of the air filters blowing gently down that drives you mad when you’re deep underground.
It’s the thinking about being driven mad that would slowly drive you mad.
If I did get a spot here, would the first gunshots of the inevitable coup wake me from my snoozing at the radio station, where I have been desperately trying to reach the outside world?
Would alien anthropologists of the distant future find our bones, lying where we died, the last evidence of our species?
Parrish comes to my rescue after the two days, cranking open the big doors.
I clamber out – and for the first time in a long while, I’m glad I live above ground. In Essex.
I can feel the sunlight, feeble as it is, on my skin.
I stop to smell those flowers.
Maybe life up top isn’t so bad after all.
Maybe Parrish should offer weekends down there not as nuclear experiences, but to give people a new perspective on their lives above ground.
Driving home, I listen to the news.
ISIS, Ebola, disease, tragedy and a promo for some noisy sci-fi war film.
Maybe it is time to start saving that £30,000.