A Necessary Holiday

Last autumn I took a holiday to Scotland. Going further west than Loch Lomond, where most tourists will sojourn, I visited Faslane and stayed on the shores of Gare Loch. I wasn’t there for mountaineering or whiskey touring or even playing on the countless golf courses around there; the trip was a pilgrimage to the Royal Naval Armaments Depot and the launching site of the Vanguard class of submarines, those monoliths of the sea that carry the Trident nuclear missiles. I could look on the Faslane base for a few minutes from behind the razor wire before being shooed off. From the shores of the loch, I could see the hillside under which some 200 nuclear warheads are stored. Settled behind giant steel doors, concrete and earth, I could feel their hulking power stretching across the water of Loch Long to where I stood in my anorak. Coulport is the name of the place where they are stored, just a couple of miles from the Faslane base and less than thirty miles from Glasgow.

Loch Long and Gare Loch are simply branches of the same inlet of the sea, piercing the map of the Scottish west coast with two prongs of blue. As a site for launching submarines, Gare Loch is sublimely suited: it is deep, isolated and narrow-mouthed. Since mid-1968, there has not been a moment when UK submarines armed with nuclear weapons have not been at sea, cruising in secret preparation to unleash forces more than a thousand times greater than those that levelled Hiroshima. These days, the Vanguard submarines are armed with the Trident missiles, built in the US. I was unreasonably troubled by the fact that our nuclear deterrent is American. The silent musing of the loch gave way to paranoid fears that the White House maintained control over the firing of these fearsome armaments.

The energy released by a nuclear bomb detonation is split roughly equally between a blast output, which tears landscapes, buildings and human bodies to shreds, and the heat energy output, which is sufficient to vaporise flesh. Considering facts such as these brought me some comfort and perspective; at least, I hoped they did.

I shared my fresh and detailed appreciation of the UK’s nuclear deterrent over a drink with the proprietor of my B&B. He trained a grey and inscrutable gaze at me for a while after I stopped speaking.

‘You have a wedding ring on,’ he said.

I fiddled with it nervously. ‘Yes. I can’t seem to get it off yet. Not literally, I don’t mean my fingers are too wide. But it’s there. Probably shouldn’t be anymore.’

‘I take it she didn’t die in a nuclear holocaust.’ This was rather sarcastic, I thought, given that I was a customer.

‘She’s not dead.’

He had nothing to say to that. So he swigged his bourbon (a deliberately obtuse choice, I thought) and spoke about other things.

‘You know, it isn’t usual to have holiday-makers stay here. We’re for the workers at the base. Men come up from Barrow; stay for a bit while working on the boats.’

‘Submarines.’

‘They call them boats. There was one chap staying a while back, he was in charge of periscopes. Just think, all day he just fooled around with periscopes. Moved them up and down, checked the camera worked…’

‘It’s a living,’ I said circumspectly.

‘It gets me though. These boats are carrying some of the world’s most powerful weapons, but they still need to poke a little tube up out of the water to see what’s what.’

It struck me then that my host wasn’t really all there. Or perhaps just a blethering drunk.

The next morning, I went back down to the shore. I was very keen to see a submarine either arrive or leave the base. Visions of a tremendous surge of water and the surfacing of an unspeakable creature chopped through my mind. I waited all day, but there was no movement out on the loch. It wasn’t like tide times: there wasn’t a publicly published schedule of the dispatch and return of the most valuable assets of the MOD.

‘What, would I be calling the Kremlin if there was?’ I said aloud to the sea and the wind.

Then I said: ‘Damn, my references are a little dated.’

Appalled with cold as night fell, I went back to the B&B. The owner was more obviously drunk tonight, yet less prolix.

I helped myself to a whiskey this time, as he started to tip forward on the banquette, chin to chest. I drank my scotch and looked out of the window, listening to the gathering gale. My reflections before bed were fallacious in their reading between unlinked lines of my life. I thought: just like the mind of my wife, it turns out the weapon depot and submarine base are closed to me. I thought: the nuclear warheads are a symbol of my wife’s terrible power – she rarely detonated, but the threat of detonation was what split us.

Shaking my head at my own tipsy allegories, I tugged off my wedding ring and deposited it in the proprietor’s glass of bourbon before heading to bed.