I remember "When the Wind Blows" and the radio play that was based on it. That was terrifying, too - not least because the man had a voice like one of my friends, a nice decent unimaginative craftsman. I couldn't help almost picturing them.

There was one book where a little group of people dying of radiation poisoning decided to walk from London to Aldermasterton as a final protest. They started almost outside the place where I was living at the time and they ran out of strength and died in the building where I used to work (having covered about 5 miles). I have no idea who wrote it but I'm grateful that it wasn't written well enough to haunt me.

Remember the Cuba crisis? I was in Ireland and I came back to England the night of the confrontation. That was an indiscribable journey to a port that might have been radioactive when we got to it.