#16 SWEET LITTLE SIXTEEN

NINETEEN SIXTY-TWO

Sweet little sixteen: not tall, not through the spotty period, not in possession of a girl-friend but aching to have one, and not happy. Not least because I had just started A-level sciences, in order to be a doctor, help humanity and have a nice car, only to find myself bored out of my skull. The prospect of trying to get grades in these subjects good enough to get to university and change direction was deeply depressing.

Then came October, bringing two seismic game-changers. On the 5^th of October 1962 the Beatles released “Love me do”. It only went to number 17 in the charts but everybody sensed that something special had happened. There was no Beatlemania at first, just a sense of the new, an excitement, a rumbling which foretold an explosion, like the lightning anticipating a thunderclap. One afternoon, after school, I was ironing some shirts in the morning room while my mother was cooking close by. “Love me do” came on the radio, and I stepped back from the ironing board to try a quick burst of The Twist, which I’d just mastered in my bedroom. My mother laughed, with an edge of alarm and incomprehension: “Don’t be so silly, you look ridiculous!” Suddenly I realised that I didn’t mind her scorn, in fact relished it: it was the first glimmer of light from an opening door: independence and the rejection of parental authority.

When you see the first shots of The Beatles it’s striking how shorttheir hair was. But it was still shocking to the older generation, let alone their later incarnation. Very soon they became the four mop-tops, the loveable, cheeky, Scouse rascals who ran rings round the traditional TV presenters and music journalists, and captured my cohort as fans – all around the world. The music was totally original, yet of the moment, passed the old grey whistle test, melodic, rocking, and, remarkably, struck a chord that resonated across all the barriers of age, race and nationality, everywhere. Beatlemania simply became the most immense show-business                                                               phenomenon ever.

They might easily have had a very short career: 23 days precisely. Because from October 16 to 28 the US and the USSR were engaged in a terrifying bout of arms-wrestling, a flirtation with all-out nuclear war, which seemed a very real possibility, during the Cuba Crisis. The Cuban government had allowed the Soviet Union to build missile-launching sites on their territory 90 miles from the US mainland. Every sizeable city in America could be destroyed, at will. Ships carrying the missiles from Russia were steaming for Cuba. The US imposed a blockade. There was stalemate and 

paralysis, and the world held its breath, looking on in horror and

disbelief as this first nose-to-nose confrontation between Kennedy and Khruschev, representing the super powers, played out in slo-mo. People bought tinned food; some constructed ludicrously inadequate shelters; the Government’s Civil Defence advice (e.g.’stick brown paper on all your windows’) was exposed for the sham that it was: there is no defence against nuclear weapons. At the Eleventh Hour Khruschev had the courage to pull the ships back and a compromise was reached. Phew. Bit of a close thing, but no-one who lived it will forget how it felt: the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki that we had truly apprehended the holocaust of nuclear war – because we had to.

Not long afterwards I joined CND and met FA there: it was my first BOGOF, a political identity and a girlfriend. We lived happily ever after, though not together. Bob Dylan was the first chronicler of the nuclear age at this time. He wrote Talkin’ World War III Blues, a wry, surrealist skit, a dream about being a survivor in the post-nuclear desert: “you can be in my dream if I can be in yours” was the line that stuck in my mind.

BRUVVAFROMANNUVAMUVVA

You know that feeling when you are looking at someone, and there is a bell ringing: they look like someone or something else, but you can’t quite put your finger on it? I get that when I look at Donald Trump. The improbable hair, the eyes, the contorted mouth, the pink/orange skin that is somehow over-inflated – that’s it, he looks like a blow-up sex-doll...

 Inflatable sex doll                                                                                                              Donald Trump

SIXTEEN: licence to wed

I think people can still get married at sixteen, if they have parental consent. Given that the costs of marriage and divorce are phenomenally high in both financial and emotional terms, this seems like a potential car-crash for everyone concerned. It would be interesting to know what the average longevity for these marriages is, compared to 'adult' marriages, over 40% of which now end in divorce.  My money is on a shorter span and higher proportion. How can youths of 16 conceivably have had enough experience of relationships to make an informed choice of partner, or even know their own needs and temperament? The limit was made law in the days before living together had become widely accepted. A rational policy would be to require potential partners to live together for a 2 year period, until 18, in rented accommodation and without starting a family, after which they would be fee to do whatever they wish, but without the complications of property ownership and children, saving a lot of grief if they split up.

       DONALD TRUMP:   DEMOCRAT DOUBLE AGENT?

QUOTE/UNQUOTE

Nikita Khruschev on the Cuban Missile Crisis:

They talk about who won and who lost. Human reason won. Mankind won.

On the possibility of the Soviet Union rejecting communism (1955):

Those who wait for that must wait until a shrimp learns to whistle.

John F. Kennedy:

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.


Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.