Fifty Years Ago, Monday, 12th July 1976
(Okehampton Camp, Dartmoor, Age 14.9)
Reading Foundation, Asimov. The book travelled around with me. If there was a spare five minutes, out it came.
Picked up by an army truck — a three-tonner.
We rode in the back under a canvas cover, exactly like something from a war film. It felt military, tough and slightly dangerous at the same time. We weren’t strapped in. Every bump and jolt sent us swaying about, hanging on to whatever we could grab. A sudden stop would have piled us all together in a tangle of boots and limbs.
The truck was driven by one of the regular Army soldiers assigned to the camp. There were two or three of them. To my fourteen-year-old eyes they looked like SAS men: tough, capable, weathered and entirely at home outdoors. I was still toying with the idea of joining the RAF one day, so spending time around servicemen left an impression.
Go to Gunnislake Death Slide.
The name sounded dramatic enough before you even saw it. The zip wire crossed a flooded quarry, launching you out over black water that looked black and bottomless. Fall in there are your heavy boots would take you to the bottom.
I’d done death-slides before, so there wasn’t much hesitation. Thinking about it made it harder. The trick was to commit. Bo hesitation. Just step off, trust the wire and let gravity do the rest. Once moving, the ride felt solid and exhilarating rather than frightening.
Also abseiling.
I’d abseiled a couple of times before and could manage it, though never with much confidence. My problem was always that I wouldn’t let enough rope out to get properly clear of the quarry face. Instead of leaning back and trusting the system, I stayed too close to the rock and made life harder for myself.
Can’t find climbers.
That sounds more dramatic than it really was. The climbers had moved to another section of the quarry looking for a better route and were hidden by undergrowth. For a while nobody could see where they had gone.
Lunch then back to Gunnislake.
We spent more time climbing, abseiling and using the zip wire. There was a sense of adventure about it all.
Read Foundation.
Science fiction was pure escapism for me. Once I found the right book I became completely absorbed. Reading had been a struggle when I was younger, but now that I’d discovered authors I loved, you couldn’t get me away from them.
What attracted me to Foundation was not the spaceships or gadgets but decline of empires. Asimov’s Galactic Empire felt like a Roman Empire projected into the far future. The book almost read like history. Perhaps that was part of its appeal. Even then I was drawn to history and large patterns of rise and decline.
Fifty years later, there is a television adaptation streaming on Apple TV. It is impressive enough, but it is not quite the world I imagined as a boy. In my mind the Foundation universe was more ethereal, more distant, more like Imperial Rome transplanted into space. The private landscapes created by reading are difficult for any screen adaptation to reproduce.
Supper.
Getting cooler.
The famous heatwave of 1976 meant little to me at fourteen. I was aware of it because the news talked about little else, but it wasn’t something I thought about deeply. What I noticed was the immediate weather around me.
Isolated thunderstorms were beginning to brew. The wind had freshened. Up on Dartmoor the evenings could feel surprisingly cold even while much of the country baked in record temperatures.
Watch TV.
The television sat high in one corner of the recreation room, really little more than a barrack room. It was black and white. We watched Bouquet of Barbed Wire and Yes, Mike Yarwood.
The news carried reports of the drought. Forty-five days without rain, they said. The worst drought for 250 years. Yet outside, on the moor, the weather already felt as though it was changing.
By the end of the day I had travelled in an army truck, crossed a flooded quarry on a zip wire, clung awkwardly to a quarry face, watched television in a barrack room and spent every spare moment reading about the collapse of a Galactic Empire. Looking back, the two worlds seem oddly connected. One was a military training camp on Dartmoor. The other existed thousands of years in the future. Both felt full of adventure
Leave a Reply