I had been told of a fine little place to camp the night. One of the locals, Ed Boyter, had told me of a secluded beach along the coast, so I drove there in my newly-mended Fig. See, it's usually worthwhile to talk to the people you see as you travel. I put my tent up on the beach and there I was. My tent was a dome tent, and so it was self-supporting; putting tent-pegs into the sand would be a futile action. The front awning had to be pulled forward and I did this but putting the guy-line under a stone. The outer skin (aka flysheet) was not taught, and in the old days your flysheet needed to be taught to be waterproof. These days however, the flysheet is made from a marvellous modern plastic, and it's pretty much waterproof by nature. I draped it over the tent and thought it was good enough without tension.

My tent on the beach

I was sitting on my own private beach in the darkness watching. No-one came to disturb me, no primitive farmers with hounds, no teenage delinquents with loud music and pimped cars, no policemen to see if I was in need of assistance. So I was there on the beach in the darkness watching. I remembered I had a small binoculars in my rucksack somewhere, so I dug them out and studied the lights in the distance.

But then I was attacked! The enemy had launched a surprise airborne attack on my position and my early-warning system was alive with activity, relaying an alarm to the command-centre in my brain and attempting to track the enemy aircraft. This was one of those seriously bad things that was so bad that I had a plan for dealing with it. The issue was whether I could employ my defence-plan from here on the beach, or whether the equipment I needed was in my car, a long way away. I hoped I had what I needed in my rucksack, and dug into it rapidly. I was looking for my bottle of deet, but the first thing I found was my battery-powered audio mosquito repeller. I'd forgotten about that. I turned it on and it emitted a high-pitched wail. It may be my imagination, but I felt that the air around my head cleared within a minute. I found my bottle of deet and put some of that on my hands, face and ears. Later I entered my defensive bunker and sealed the entrance so that none of the enemy could follow me with their blood-sucking millions. I wrapped myself in my sleeping bag, and had twelve hours to wait before it would be safe to exit.

There were other dangers I faced during the night. The first was from the tide which was going to peak at some time in the dark hours in the morning. My bunker was a bare metre from the high-water mark, and with a bit of wind it was possible for the waves to reach me. That would be dire. I developed a system of sticking my head out of the front of my tent for a brief moment to take a reading on the water-level, and then going back to sleep. It rose, the tide, but it never reached the critical level which would have forced me to abandon my bunker and carry it up the cliff-path. The other danger I faced was from the precipitation which rained on my bunker in aerial attacks. My bunker was built to withstand this kind of attack, but I hadn't managed to erect it properly and there was a chance that the rain would penetrate. Fortunately, the rain was light and, although one end of my sleeping-bag got a bit damp where it touched the tent wall, the tent remained dry. I had a lucky window in the morning when it stopped long enough for me to pack up and go.

Looking at what I've written above, it seems very alarming, but actually just describes dealing with common problems and pests. I was okay because I had a defence plan. Is a nuclear deterrent a defence plan? The CND firmly believe that the UK's Trident system represented a threat, not a defence. It's very difficult to know whether Britain's policy of having nuclear weapons helped keep the peace or promoted an arms-race. I look at what I wrote about self-defence at the start of this book, and my belief is that you need to know a bit about self-defence. What do you learn at self-defence classes? Answer: how to kick and punch, ie how to attack. If you watch that famous Japanese film "The seven samurai", near the start the old man notifies the village that when he was young he remembers a time when the bandits raided all the villages in the area except one. The one they left had hired samurai. Looking at this line of thought, I have to conclude that a small set of nuclear missiles aimed at the main cities in the USSR constituted a defence. The CND will hate me for saying it, but I think it's necessary to have a small nuclear deterrent, although I think the world as a whole would be better without nuclear technology.