Strange Stories, Amazing Facts

Strange Stories, Amazing Facts... Furious Futures

We were living through dangerous times, I told my friends. Margaret
Thatcher was in No 10, and the USA was about to elect an old cowboy to
be her leader. A leaflet called Protect and Survive was being pushed
through our doors, about what to do in the event of a nuclear war.
There were films about The Bomb on the telly, showing model towns being
blasted to bits. The reporter said whitewashing the windows and hiding
under the kitchen table would a good idea when the time came, but I
didn't agree.

I was only thirteen and I was terrified! Spinning the globe that my
mother had given me for Christmas, I came to the conclusion that
Madagascar may be a safe place to flee to when the bomb dropped. On a
far-flung African coast and beyond the equator, it seemed as good a
place as any. I'd done the calculations, you see. The North Atlantic
trade winds would waft the poison dumped on America, and it would rain
radioactivity on our not-so-safe European homes when it hit our
coastlines, and so it would pay to stand back.

My stepfather had taken out a subscription with the Time-Life Bookclub,
and one day my paws fell upon a bumper tome called Strange Facts,
Amazing Stories. It was a big brown book and in the days before I
discovered punk and boys, I devoured it's weird and wacky tales. A
woman exhumed, whose hair had grown long, auburn and luxuriant after
her death. Mayan tombs, whose relief sculpture was a majestic figure
getting ready to fire himself into orbit. Huge lines on the ground at
Nazca in South America, guiding ET to Earth perhaps?

But there was one section that I came back to again and again, and the
big book began to fall open at that part quite naturally. It told the
story of a man who had predicted the end of the world, and he'd already
foreseen some major world events. The American H-bombs dropped on
Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the rise of Hitler and much more. This guy had
to be onto something, I thought. I flicked through those pages time and
again, with the same enthusiasm that I'd one day give to flicking
through a sale rail at DKNY.

But what had this man said that hadn't happened yet? My blood ran cold
as I read his thoughts for a terrifying future.

In the year 1999 and seven months,
From the sky will come the great king of terror,
Before and afterwards, war reigns happily.

The man's name was Nostradamus.

The next day, I went to school and consulted my war cabinet, Alex,
Amanda and Jacqueline. I told them of this man who had predicted great
disaster, and who was hardly ever wrong. We had almost two decades, I
pointed out, and I certainly wasn't going to perish when I could be
doing something about it. Alex and I consulted the globe once more, and
discussed how the nuclear bombs of the late nineties would be so much
more death-packed than the ones which had killed so many in 1945. If we
couldn't save ourselves and our families, I said gloomily, then perhaps
the best place to be was in the middle of the impact when it struck,
for the nuclear winter that would follow sounded gruesome. No trees or
parks. No supermarkets, so no food. Our homes obliterated. No music, no
quality of life whatsoever. Just scaly skin and the next generation
born with four legs and two heads.

But there was another way, an idea which we'd already toyed with.
Jacqueline looked at me with conviction. "We've got to build a rocket,
Emily."

We got to work at once, planning who would do what. Alex and I would
construct the rocket and the enormous boosters, plus work out where to
put the oxygen tanks etc. We'd also plan the trajectory and the journey
itself. It would be a very handy career move for me, as my ambition was
to be an astronomer. Together, we'd follow Voyager's route out of the
Solar System and into infinity. A drive by Saturn, taking in the ring
system that had baffled many a man of letters. The Pleiades, shrouded
in hauntingly beautiful blue gas. Zipping through the Ring Nebula in
Lyra en route to marvel at the Crab Nebula, the gaseous blow-out that a
spinning pulsar had jettisoned into space a millennium past. It would
be quite a charmed life.

Hence Alex and I, armed with the Astrophysics degrees we'd certainly
walk away with from Oxford University, would swot up on a bit of
engineering and assemble fireproof alloys, nuts and bolts far from the
prying eyes of NASA and British Aerospace. Amanda would get to be Steve
McQueen and fly the rocket, and Jacqueline's elevated tones were heard
to shrill

"A want tae do the interior decoratin."

But who would accompany us on our travels? A payload to the Moon took
at most a cargo of three. There were going to be at least four of us
heading out on the celestial highway, plus families. We'd have to be
strict and set limits, insisting that whoever came aboard had something
to contribute.

"Can I come with you on your rocket?" asked Debbie. By now the rest of
the class had heard about our scheme and were showing interest.

"Yeah, Debbie's dad's a dentist, so we should definitely take her" said
Alex.

"How many are in her family?" I asked.

"Four?"

"Well all right then" I agreed, jotting the figures down. "But we've
got to keep the number's down. It's not going to be the Starship
Enterprise, you know. And another thing" I continued, turning to my
friend Jane. "Your brother's not coming!" Jane's brother Christopher
was the first boy I'd ever properly kissed, and when it became clear
that he wasn't ready to settle down, I'd become cool and cynical. So
that was him without a ticket.

"That's not fair, Emily" Alex insisted. "If he can't come then your
granny can't come."

"My granny's getting on that rocket, and that's final!" I raged. "Just
you remember whose idea this was."

I began to sound like the guy David Essex played in War of the Worlds,
the foolish optimist with his proposal to regenerate mankind after the
Martians had attacked Earth. The only difference was that he
anticipated a future in the other direction - underground. And there
was one more hiccup before take-off. Amanda wanted to bring her friend
Jackie, and she was putting her foot down. There was no room for anyone
else, Alex and I told her. "I'm not coming if Jackie's not coming" said
Amanda, threateningly.

And if Amanda didn't come, who would fly the rocket?

We soldiered on with our plans for a couple of lunch-hours, but the
sensible girls who always sat at the front of the class had started to
sman behind their hands whenever they saw us. They wouldn't be
laughing when the four-minute warning sounded and they only had WW2
Anderson shelters to hide in, I told them. Additionally, Jacqueline's
high pitch was heard bemoaning the fact that Alex and I weren't taking
her job seriously enough. We ignored the item on the agenda about
curtains and floor tiles, as we brainstormed eco-systems and the
interplanetary contact that we'd surely encounter.

One day the lunch-hour ended in a scuffle. Jackie's place on the rocket
was still not confirmed. So far she hadn't earned it, we told her.
Tempers flared and someone said it was a stupid idea anyhow. Amanda
stormed off with Jackie, leaving Alex, Jacqueline and I sitting behind
the sports hall arguing about wallpaper, our engineering plans strewn
on the grass with Nostradamuses quatrains.

We returned to our form rooms after lunch, so that Miss Munro could
take afternoon registration. Our form teacher was probably in her
mid-twenties, blonde with dark roots, and she smoked cigarettes. We
often saw her do so as she passed us walking down Richmond Road after
school, in her lurid, green Volkswagen Beetle. She displayed a kind of
cool boredom whenever she taught us. Miss Munro was also my French
teacher, and I was used to getting top marks in her class. It made up
for my disappointing performance in maths.

At registration that afternoon, she was looking at us, frowning. In
front of her stood Amanda and Jackie. They waved their arms around like
windmills as they spoke to her, and the teacher's eyes travelled from
one to the other, as mothers do when children go into he-said-she-said
mode. There was a profound look of weariness on her face as she looked
at us, back at them and then back at us again. Jacqueline, Alex and I
knew that this tale telling had something to do with us, so we crept by
her desk hoping not to be stopped, on our way to double
chemistry.

"Not so fast, you three..." Miss Munro stopped us. "What's this that
Amanda and Jackie have just told me about a fight by the tennis courts
this lunch-time?"

Jacqueline and Alex looked at me.

"Well?" Miss Munro demanded.

"It was only an argument, Miss Munro, there was no fight" I told
her.

"And suppose you tell me what the argument was all about in that case,
and why Amanda and Jackie are so upset?"

Certainly!

"Well Miss" I began, cylinders igniting. "I've been reading about a man
called Nostradamus. He said that there's going to be a nuclear war in
1999, and we've decided to build a rocket to get away from it." I
didn't think that there was anything ridiculous about that. If
anything, I should be praised for my ingenuity.

"And this is what this row was all about then?" Miss Munro asked

"Yes" I nodded, not to be put off by the sneer on the teacher's face.
"Amanda was supposed to fly the rocket and Alex and I have been
planning how we're going to make it." My friends stood beside me and
said nothing. "We told Jackie she can't come with us, so Amanda's
upset. But there's just not enough room for everyone, Miss
Munro."

Miss Munro folded her arms. "Just go to your classes. And don't let me
hear about any more fighting" she said.

But her eyes said "get out of my sight!"