The story of one house in Lausanne Road over a century and a half, and of one family who lived there in the 1950s.*
I was 12 when the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to muck up my life in Peckham in 1962.
It had begun when the Americans discovered that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba which could reach a large number of cities in the USA
The options were stark and pretty much seemed no win solutions ranging from bombing the sites to an all out invasion of the island.
Any such moves raised the possibility of a Soviet move on Berlin which in turn would prompt a NATO response and in all probability be followed by an invasion of western Germany by the Warsaw Pact and pretty quickly an exchange of intercontinental ballistic missiles on the major cities of each side.
Even now a full fifty-five years after those days in the October of 1962 I can feel a sense of foreboding and that was nothing to the emotions I felt back at the time.
Some are still all too vivid and the power comes from reliving them through the memory of a twelve year old.
I was playing rugby out in Ewell and on that Saturday morning I kept looking for that mushroom cloud which I was convinced would appear.
Nor was I alone in picking up on that sense of uncertainty. My friend Robin who is a year younger was also keenly aware of the events remembering “going into a room and my parents conversations falling away into silence.”
It was a tense moment and one that I was reminded of all over again when I was rereading the sleeve notes of Bob Dylan’s second LP, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan released in 1962 where he recalled that in writing A Hard Rains A Gonna Fall, "Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one."**
Of course for those at the centre of events with a great knowledge of just what was going on the future looked no less scary.
At a conference in Moscow a few years ago two of those at the heart of the crisis reflected on those few days.
The Russian had quietly phoned his wife and told her to take the children out of Moscow while the American had looked out from a White House window and wondered if would see the sun rise in the morning.
But it is those childhood memories that lock me into the seriousness of that confrontation and by extension to that second Cold War in the late 1970s and 80s.
But by then I had left Peckham and so are stories and memories for another place.
Pictures; Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, Charles Levy from one of the B-29 Superfortresses used in the attack, This image is a work of a U.S. Army soldier or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties, Andrew in 1962 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and a U.S. Navy aircraft flying over a Soviet freighter, these image in the public domain in the United States
*The story of one house in Lausanne Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road
**Which I have to confess loses something from discovering the song had actually been written in the May of 1962.
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| The Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 |
It had begun when the Americans discovered that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba which could reach a large number of cities in the USA
The options were stark and pretty much seemed no win solutions ranging from bombing the sites to an all out invasion of the island.
Any such moves raised the possibility of a Soviet move on Berlin which in turn would prompt a NATO response and in all probability be followed by an invasion of western Germany by the Warsaw Pact and pretty quickly an exchange of intercontinental ballistic missiles on the major cities of each side.
Even now a full fifty-five years after those days in the October of 1962 I can feel a sense of foreboding and that was nothing to the emotions I felt back at the time.
Some are still all too vivid and the power comes from reliving them through the memory of a twelve year old.
 |
| Me in 1962 |
Nor was I alone in picking up on that sense of uncertainty. My friend Robin who is a year younger was also keenly aware of the events remembering “going into a room and my parents conversations falling away into silence.”
It was a tense moment and one that I was reminded of all over again when I was rereading the sleeve notes of Bob Dylan’s second LP, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan released in 1962 where he recalled that in writing A Hard Rains A Gonna Fall, "Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one."**
Of course for those at the centre of events with a great knowledge of just what was going on the future looked no less scary.
 |
| Tracking the missiles across the Atlantic, 1962 |
The Russian had quietly phoned his wife and told her to take the children out of Moscow while the American had looked out from a White House window and wondered if would see the sun rise in the morning.
But it is those childhood memories that lock me into the seriousness of that confrontation and by extension to that second Cold War in the late 1970s and 80s.
But by then I had left Peckham and so are stories and memories for another place.
Pictures; Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, Charles Levy from one of the B-29 Superfortresses used in the attack, This image is a work of a U.S. Army soldier or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties, Andrew in 1962 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and a U.S. Navy aircraft flying over a Soviet freighter, these image in the public domain in the United States
*The story of one house in Lausanne Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road
**Which I have to confess loses something from discovering the song had actually been written in the May of 1962.
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