Читать книгу Under Pressure. Living Life and Avoiding Death on a Nuclear Submarine онлайн

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I’d been fortunate enough to win a scholarship to public school in the Midlands for some of my secondary education. I didn’t come from a wealthy family – my family had grafted all their lives – so boarding school had certainly been an eye-opener as to how the other half lived, but it was useful in developing coping measures and survival instincts, and enabled me to get along with pretty much everyone. It was here that I first read Simon Murray’s Legionnaire, his classic account of serving in the Foreign Legion and the very book that had inspired my ill-judged trip to Marseilles. But the book also taught me something else – that the traditional trip through further education and then college or university wasn’t for me. I’d had enough of textbooks, teachers and essays; it was time to do something against the grain for a few years and see where I ended up.

There didn’t seem much point hanging around in the real world, as Mrs Thatcher and her Conservative government were wantonly destroying the West Midlands and most of northern Britain. The very recent miners’ strike was evidence of that, with the hitherto unseen spectacle of the British police having pitched battles with miners in desolate fields across South Yorkshire. It seemed that tradition and heritage no longer stood for anything. The miners, who could trace their family lineage back to the start of the Industrial Revolution, when the mining industry supplied power to steam engines, generated electricity and heated buildings, now found themselves on the sharp end of the politics of hate and the systematic destruction of the industrial heartlands. Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham were the major cities on the brink of economic collapse, and this had a knock-on effect on their satellite communities, my hometown of Wolverhampton being one.