September 1982
After university, I worked as a volunteer in a children’s home and special school in South Wales (of which, more later). One of the first things I was asked to do was to take some teenage boys to a military air show at RAF St Athan. While there, I managed to take a few photos while still keeping a close eye on my charges (none of whom, for obvious reasons, appear here).
It was with conflicted feelings that I did this. As a kid, I had an obsession with the military and its equipment, with toy soldiers and model tanks, and with learning how to shoot. The artillery piece in this photograph looks very like a toy of mine which pinged matchsticks across the length of my bedroom towards plastic troops wonkily arrayed on its hessian carpet. So I well understood the attraction, and could identify most of the planes and armaments on display, and knew something about what they did.
Since leaving toy soldiers behind, I had become more aware of how deeply the military is dyed into British culture—into its identity, memory, ethos and practice. And of how it drew generations of boys into its ranks, many of them working-class children with few other prospects. This was starkly so for those in my care, growing up in what had been a mining valley, now subjected to the scouring of Thatcher’s first recession. This militarism was not just a matter of history or of toys, comic books, films and TV series. The head of the school had been a special forces’ soldier, and he spoke of the regular astonishment of new recruits when they were called on to fight. As he pointed out, British forces had been continually in combat every year since the end of the Second World War—in Palestine, Greece, Malaya, Korea, Kenya, Oman, Northern Ireland… Signing up to the armed forces under the delusion of peace, they were the victims of a calculated culture of misdirection and ignorance.
So, although it is a futile activity, it is hard not to wonder about the lives of those boys and young men, especially the cadets, who clamber over cannon or peer into the cockpits of fighter planes, in the bellicose decades since. The photographs are antiques in one sense—the clothes and the armaments date them—and in another, thoroughly contemporary, one episode in an ongoing spectacle that has changed little. Melanie Friend’s fine photographic work on that military culture shows this only too well. Boys, and now more often girls, still don uniforms, learn to hold themselves like soldiers, and marvel at the technology of war.
My abiding memory of that event, however, was of another order of violence. The cadets posed by a Vulcan bomber, then a part of Britain’s nuclear force. The delta-winged plane, it seemed, had been designed to look as ominous and sinister as its purpose. One could imagine it fitting seamlessly into Kubrick’s meticulous examination of US nuclear bombers and their bureaucratic apparatus, seemingly technocratic, but in fact a deranged and eroticised wielding of the threat and actuality of genocidal violence.
When the Vulcan flew, its thunderous bass roar filled the sky, vibrating bodies and the very ground. I have not heard or felt the like since. The threat seemed palpable then because the government had permitted US short-range nuclear missiles to be sited in Britain, first at Greenham Common, increasing the threat of war by accident or design, and painting a prominent target on our small island.
That prolonged roar and the sight of the bomber in the air was an experience of the nuclear sublime, although that terrifying sight and sound, and all it brought to mind, could not readily be put into any box, pictorial or otherwise. As it does so often, the sublime subdues the observer with the spectacle of overwhelming power and hierarchy: here, not merely the will of the state to expose some boy’s body to bullets and explosives but its ultimate and paradoxical power, in its determined perpetuation of the status quo, to end everything.
Julian Stallabrass 