Taking a Cold War wander down memory lane in an excellent exhibition - Susan Morrison

Cold War researcher Sarah Harper puts the finishing touches to Cold War Scotland, a new exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland. Picture: Stewart Attwood

If you’re of a similar vintage as me, it's a bit of a wander down memory lane.

Who among us can forget ‘Protect and Survive’, the largely pointless pamphlet that appeared to suggest you could survive a nuclear blast by taking all the doors off and painting them white, then hiding under them.

Would a clutch of bedroom doors and a gallon of white emulsion see off an incoming Soviet 50 megaton missile?

Make up a sentence from these words. Hell, snowball, chance, not.

The leaflet also suggested you should ‘Stay at Home’. Well, you probably would. You’d be under the rubble.

Dunoon, where I spent a lot of my childhood, gets a starring role. Until 1959-ish, this little Clydeside resort had been better known for the Cowal Games, Hielan’ Mary’s statue and Doon-The-Watter steamers racing for the pier, but then the Americans landed on the doorstep.

They based their Atlantic nuclear submarine fleet in the Holy Loch. Faslane, the Royal Navy base, was just a little further up the coast.

My dad and I used to sit on Dunoon pier on warm summer evenings and watch the submarines slide out to sea at twilight. Dad said they always left after 6 because the Soviet Union clocked off at 5.30.

The Cold War ran fairly hot on the Clyde. We were living in the middle of a nuclear arsenal that could incinerate the planet and irradiate what was left, but we just lived with the bomb, and the radiation.

Folks used to joke that you could get a quicker X-Ray by sticking your arm in the water than going to Dunoon General.

We were living on the Cold War front line, and most of the grown-ups around me were quietly proud of Dunoon’s role in defending the West.

Most of them, remember, had seen the World War Two Clyde, when, as dad told me, you could run across the Clyde over the decks of the ships between Toward Point and Greenock.

To the adults around me, the Soviet threat was every bit as real as the recently defeated Nazis.

People overheard on the Dunoon-Gourock ferry who sounded even faintly Russian were regarded with deep suspicion and subjected to serious side-eye in the Tudor Tea Room and Gift Shoppe. If that didn’t break them, the coffee would.

A young woman stopped and chatted to me. She clearly regarded me as an exhibit.” With real concern in her voice, she said, "you must have been terrified all the time. “Nah,” I said, breezily, even when we had those moments when it looked like things were kicking off.

“Oh,” she said. “Did your dad have a plan, like a fallout shelter?”

“Yeah, he did have a plan, actually,” I said. “In the event of the whole thing going literally nuclear, he knew exactly what to do. We were going to pile in the old Morris Minor and head for Dunoon to sit on the beach. He knew not even heavy duty white gloss would protect us, and it would be best not to survive.”

It's a great exhibition, and it’s free, which is more than you can say for the nuclear deterrent.