Half an hour later I walked over to it. The bomb detonated 600 metres above where I was now standing and directly above a hospital. The entire centre of the city was, with the exception of three buildings, vapourised. The first people to go in after the blast remarked that everything was covered in thick talc-like dust – all that remained of the buildings, the people, their possessions and their toys. I had seen the same dust covering downtown New York on 9/11, the remnants of the vapourised Twin Towers.
In the words of the Memorial Museum leaflet, ‘At the instant of detonation, the temperature at the centre exceeded a million degrees Celsius generating an enormous fireball . . . The blast pressure 500 metres from the fireball was 19 tons per square metre. Buildings were crushed. The heat rays and blast burned and crushed nearly all buildings within two kilometres of the centre. In an instant the city was almost entirely destroyed.’
Counting the dead was difficult. Some 80,000 were thought to have died instantly. But, said the pamphlet,
The special characteristic of atomic bombs is nuclear radiation, something which conventional weapons never produce. The acute effects that appeared immediately after the bombing manifested in a wide range of symptoms, including fever, nausea, diarrhoea, bleeding, loss of hair and severe fatigue. After-effects began to appear about two years later and continued appearing for more than ten years. These include keloids [huge bumps under the flesh], leukaemia, and various cancers that continue to plague survivors to this day.
By the end of 1945 a total of 200,000 people had died as a result of the bomb. Many more had died since and others were permanently crippled in body and in mind.
The Peace Museum displayed narratives, photographs and objects from 6 August 1945, but unlike, say, the Saigon US War Crimes Museum in Vietnam, it made no judgements and took no sides. It stated its abhorrence of nuclear weapons but indicted no one. That made it the more powerful.
After a minute looking at the photographs of blistered bodies and torn school uniforms I was crying. An hour later I walked out into the Peace Park of fountains, water, trimmed evergreens, blossom and an air of tranquillity and peace. Every minute a deep gong sounded. I would follow the example of the Peace Museum and make no judgements. Did the end justify the means? How many lives were saved by shortening the war? Was the murder of 200,000 civilians, most of them living wretched lives in the last days of the Japanese empire, justified?
Following the dropping of the second bomb, on Nagasaki, Emperor Hirohito, whose voice had never before been heard by his subjects, went on the radio for the first time ever. ‘This war has not necessarily been going to our advantage . . .’ is how what he said is normally translated. A ceasefire was declared a week later.
It was 6.30 p.m. when I left the Peace Park. I walked for an hour through mid-town Hiroshima, had a snack and a couple of sakes.
Every time I make one of these trips I wonder if it will be the last. Long bike rides are not like long car journeys. In a car you don’t think of getting hurt. If you have an accident the car may get damaged, but unless you’re unlucky you should be fine. If a biker has an accident he gets hurt. I’ve had two accidents in twenty-three years of biking, and although I was trickling along at 20 mph both times when an idiot car driver (to a biker all car drivers are idiots) decided to turn right across the road without looking, I broke bones while the driver hardly noticed the dent.
I’ve never hunted foxes, but biking and hunting seem to me to have much in common, although we bikers try not to kill things we can’t eat at the end of our jaunts. Both are very physical sports in which the cost of an accident is high. The physicality and the thrill is why I ride. Banking 1,200 cc of BMW a-scream into corner after corner for two hours of sweat-drenched mountain riding gives me a high I never get in a car, but might on a horse. I wouldn’t know; I’m scared of horses.
If you are my age, you pray that if one of those mountain bends leads you into the flank of a turning petrol lorry you will fly off into the sayonara, not the paraplegic ward. Bikers are always aware of it. That’s why biking makes you appreciate being alive.
*Bikes are meant to be feminine; mine, with its steel panniers, finned engine and handlebars that belonged on an ox, was anything but. I named her Spike after a well muscled personal trainer who looked after a friend of mine in Key West.
Acknowledgements
I am always struck by the length of Acknowledgements at the end of books. It’s worse than Oscar night. I have much that I can thank my parents, children and ex-wife for, not to mention thanking other friends along the way, but this book is not one of them. For me writing is a wonderful but solitary occupation.
If you want to know the best places to do it I would suggest the north Norfolk coast and a hotel in a fishing village in Brittany where much of this book was written. A big thank you to Norfolk and Brittany.
There are however two people to whom I owe a huge debt. Caroline Moorehead and Michela Wrong. They are both terrific writers. Google them and buy their books. When I thought I had finished this book I gave it to them to read. ‘Put a tick by the bits you like and a cross by the bits that bore you. Oh, and any comments would be welcome.’ They did. I followed their recommendations to the letter. They did not hold back but the book is the better for it.
Thank you, Caroline. Thank you, Michela. You both rock.
A Note on the Author
MILES MORLAND was born in India and grew up all over the place. He overcame a conventional background to lead a life of often absurd adventure. His first book, The Man Who Broke Out of the Bank, about chucking in his job and walking across France with his recently remarried wife, was a Sunday Times bestseller. He lives on a boat in London.
Also Available by Miles Morland
The Man Who Broke Out of the Bank and Went for a Walk across France
At the age of forty-five, Miles Morland resigned from his highly paid job as head of the UK division of a major American bank and went for a walk with his wife in France. Neither of them was used to walking further than the distance between a restaurant and a waiting taxi. They walked from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 350 miles through the foothills of the Pyrenees, staying in small country inns and occasionally sleeping out along the way. The author describes the pleasures and agonies of the walk and reflects frequently and with relief on the life from which he has escaped. The pressures of his former life had affected him in many ways, the repercussions including divorce and then remarriage to his former wife Guislaine.
‘Better than Peter Mayle … extremely funny’ Financial Times
‘Hugely enjoyable’ Sunday Express
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-man-who-broke-out-of-the-bank-and-went-for-a-walk-in-france-9781408863640/
www.bloomsbury.com/MilesMorland
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First published in Great Britain 2015
© 2015 by Miles Morland
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Photographs are from the author’s personal collection.
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-6367-1
ePub: 978-1-4088-6369-5
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Cobra in the Bath: Adventures in Less Travelled Lands Page 30