_ YOUNG WRITER AWARDS

COLD WAR TO COLD STORE

Ross Clark wins this year's

Spectator Young Writer award with a report from Kentucky

The Winners Judges' report: There were more than 200 entries for the awards this year. Too many of them, we regret to say, regurgitated essays and betrayed no signs of original thought or care in writing, but the standard of the shortlist was high.

Among those who attracted our attention, but did not win a prize, were Charles Shaw-Smith, Peter Schweizer and Rupert Morgan. The schools prize of £200 in cash and £200 of books from Hatchards (who have generously contributed all the prizes) goes to Orla Mulholland of St Aloysius College, Glasgow. The judges also enjoyed the entry of Glenda Cooper of Birkenhead High School.

In the main section, the third prize (p250 cash, £250 of books) goes to Yvonne Gray of London E3, for her piece about the birth of her second child. The second prize (L500 cash, £500 of books) is awarded to John- Paul Rathbone of London W14, for an entertaining account of time spent with the Arhuaco Indians of Columbia. The winner (£500 cash, £500 of books and a three- month opportunity to write for The Specta- tor is Ross Clark, whose entry is printed below.

.The judges were Charles Moore, Domi- nic Lawson and Mark Amory, respectively editor, deputy editor and literary editor of The Spectator.

A YEAR ago, the carpet had been less damp. Now there was simply not enough money to keep firing the subterranean heating to the level required to dry out a Kentucky winter. Nevertheless, Mr Klin- ger managed to find a seat that he was not embarrassed to offer me, and we began talking.

A smile from Mr Gorbachev in Moscow could be tolerated, he explained, giving a faint one himself, but when the man beamed broadly in Washington right alongside Mr Bush, then the industry had collapsed. It was true that since the heyday of fear in the early Eighties business had Contracted and had settled into a steady stream about half of its peak volume. But during December 1987 operations had virtually seized up. The television was flowing with messages of 'damned optim- ism'. Nobody wanted to spend their money on fallout shelters any more; they were more likely to spend it on package holidays to Moscow. And so Corbin faded fast. It is now possible to find long strands of yellow grass poking through the exit road from the interstate; the motel has gone back to serving the kind of food that only a man from Kentucky would want to eat. The greatest change however is not visible from the surface. It can be seen 50 metres below ground, a distance at which three men from Ohio had once calculated things would be '98 per cent unaffected by the. worst-strike situation'. You can either raise your eyebrows and noisily suck in air through a contorted mouth, as most visitors apparently do, or try to work out exactly what the three meant. If you do the latter, then you only have ten seconds to come up with an answer before the lift cage arrives at the 'This one's from a standpipe in Peckham.' bottom of the shaft. Another minute, and you are through the three sets of solid doors, one concrete, one lead, one con- crete lined with lead. Now it is ten degrees warmer than it was in the enormous concrete igloo that covers the top of the shaft I did not like to think of the temperature that must have been reached when the heating was still up to drying out carpets.

`Ah, it's the humidity,' explained Mr Klinger, wiping his brow as if I had just reminded him that he ought to be sweat- ing. 'We never have any problem here with lack of temperature, it's just that the air has got to be kept circulating. Now we only actually use about one quarter of the original site. Water has begun to seep into the redundant chambers.'

If you stop talking and you put your ear to the wall, then you can actually hear it; an incessant drip, drip, drip next door. Soon some quite powerful pumping will have to be done if the complex is to be saved at all.

It was built between 1975 and 1978 by the Sheltax Corporation upon the profits amassed from 15 years of a multi-million- dollar nuclear fallout shelter boom. The demand stretched into every habitable corner of the United States, but the indus- try began to gravitate around the small town of Corbin, Kentucky for no better reason than that the bravest entrepreneur in the business, Mr Klinger's late father, happened to like the fishing there. In fact, Mr Klinger Junior explained, the people of Kentucky were probably less fearstruck about the possibility of a nuclear war than anyone else. There has always been a large minority in the town that eschews the idea of fallout shelters, however much pressure has been put on them to buy. Puy a shelter and invest in your very own boom- town.)' There has always existed a school of thought that says, 'The Appalachians will do just nicely, sir, and goddamn your beaver pits in the mud.'

This is quite an understandable attitude to take. It is not easy to imagine anything disturbing the pine-deadened silence that pervades the country around the town, least of all a Soviet missile loaded with a couple of hundred pounds of 'Hiroshima jelly'. There have always been far more important dangers closer to home, such as house-robbers and bears, against which every household in Corbin has invested in at least one hand-gun. And they would probably use it on you, too, if you dared to turn up on them uninvited.

Sometimes not even the local dangers can get to you, and you die quite naturally of some common Kentucky disease such as a stroke or a heart attack, like the one that carried off Neil Klinger Senior whilst on a fishing trip in the summer of 1982. He had been expecting to be bombed in a big way all his life, admitted his son, then it was a ten-ton tench that got him in the end. 'He could have took the strain of a head-on nuclear attack, but when it came to landing a fish he was a gonner. He found it even more exciting than his business.'

And his business was at one time certain- ly something to get excited about. In all, around ten million homes are believed to have been supplied with shelters either by the She!tax Corporation in Corbin or by its associates in several other states. All de- sign was completed in Kentucky, then firms elsewhere would fight for the con- tracts to supply and build them nationally; in the suburbs, in the mountains and on the plains.

Were they all 50 metres deep? Klinger laughed. 'No, they were not. That was the ideal, and ideals ain't always for the reachin'.' Several in California were in- deed dug to the full depth, but then Californians always are the fashion leaders these days, especially when it comes to paranoia. Otherwise, the shelters were scaled down to suit the pocket and to suit the garden. It was not always easy trying to bore down to 50 metres in a suburban garden only ten metres across. There was always a constant danger of the company landing itself in a lawsuit when the neigh- bours' garden began to sink into the hole it had just dug. Even so, insisted Klinger, you could be damn sure that the family were going to spend the money they had just won on buying a shelter of their own. That was the state of the country five or ten years ago.

Now, nobody wants to know. There was once a time when nearly every night somewhere in every town there would be a party to celebrate the opening of some- body's shelter. It may sound dangerous, letting everybody know that you were the person with the local shelter, but that was apparently not the point, assured Klinger. With every new shelter came two free hand-guns; they were quite sufficient to make damn sure the neighbours gave you no trouble once the four-minute sirens had gone off. But by advertising the fact that you had a shelter to your friends, you could get them grovelling at your feet, offering you just about any favour you cared to name. Some owners didn't even bother asking for the favours; they just set up a formal subscription scheme. You paid the money and you were allotted the space. Even this, though, caused a great deal of unrest. There was a celebrated case in Alabama in 1980 involving a family that had sold the space in its shelter many times over. When they rounded up everybody and counted, they found 154 subscribers for a shelter designed to house only ten people. State legislation was passed as a result of the case; now all subscription schemes have to be registered with the police. The police will probably be the first people shooting their way into the shelters once the warning sounds.

And now the bubble has burst, what happens? Do the people still want their shelters, or are they trying to dispose of them, not that a damp hole in the ground is an easy thing to sell for a family that has had all fear drained out of it. Klinger nodded his head. I had hit upon what keeps his business running, albeit at its contracted level.

There are few bounds to American opportunism, and, as soon as President Gorbachev had caught his plane home from his historic visit to Washington, Klin- ger bought up 200,000 hectolitres of Cali- fornian wine that had been floating around on the market. With an up-to-date list of his former customers, he has over the past year been distributing the wine at wholesale prices. Now a fair proportion of his shelters across the country are stacked full of it, ready for sale to local shops and restaurants. Some people have even ap- plied for licences to sell it to the general public, although in many states these are somewhat difficult to obtain.

So what has been good for world peace and bad for the fallout shelter industry has in turn proved to be good for the viticul- ture industry. But it does not end there. Klinger is now extending his commercial activities into frozen foods, hoping to provide a retail outlet for meat and vege- tables in nearly every street that could undercut even the hypermarkets. Early results appear to be promising, and the one-time customers who purchased shel- ters from Klinger in full expectation of a holocaust now find themselves acting as the guardians of mini warehouses; go- betweens with a massive fallout shelter manufacturer turned frozen-food wholesal- er on one side and their former shelter subscribers turned food and wine consum- ers on the other. Next year Klinger's earnings from his frozen-food and wine activities are set to surpass those he still derives from the building of fallout shel- ters.

The best, however, is just about to come, and could well see him reoccupying the entirety of his underground chambers in Corbin before the end of 1989. When the EEC Commission ban on growth hor- mones in meat comes into effect on 1 January, and very likely sparks off a trade war between Europe and the United States, American meat producers could well find themselves with enormous quan- tities of unsold stock on their hands. They are likely to be able to find a market for it in the Third World before long, but in the meantime they will require an unpre- cedented amount of space in which to store it. Klinger has already written to the large conglomerates — he did this before most people in Europe and America were actually aware of the trade war threat — and is waiting hopefully while they assess the situation. He may be in luck.

`If not,' he assured me in his back- country drawl, 'then there will always be somethin' else a comin'.' And no doubt there will. But for the moment it is ironic that whilst it was the ending of the Cold War that bust his business in the first place, it could well be the starting of a trade war that rebuilds it to its former glory. Unless Mr Gorbachev frowns in the meantime, that is.