The H-Bomb Girl
Stephen Baxter
265 pages
published in 2007

This is a book that's going to give me nightmares, I can tell. Because I grew up as a kid in the Second Cold War, the last kids to grow up in the shadow of Nuclear Holocaust, when one side was ruled by a succesion of doddering paranoid old men who had gotten their job training under Uncle Stalin and the other was governed by a cowboy actor who half the time seem to believed he had been the war hero his b-movie career had portrayed him, I've always been fascinated and horrified by nuclear war. I remember having h-bomb nightmares almost every night when I was eight or ten. Even now, just reading the Wikipedia description of Threads is enough to give me bad dreams, let alone reading a novel the centrepiece of which is an all too realistic description of what could've happened to Britain if the Cuban Missile Crisis had not been defused in time. I can only imagine what the intended young adult audience for The H-Bomb Girl will think of it, having grown up with very different nightmares.

So far Stephen Baxter had never impressed me with his writing. I've read and enjoyed several of his short stories scattered through various anthologies, but bounced hard of his awful Mammoth novels while the other work of his I've come across never appealed to me. The only reason I picked up The H-Bomb Girl in the library was because it got talked about over at Torque Control during the runup to the Clarke Awards. Reading the first few pages intrigued me enough to take it home. Once I started reading it in earnest today I got sucked in and didn't stop until it was finished. There's not many books that I do that with these days. Score one for Baxter.

The H-Bomb Girl is set in 1962, just days before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Laura is a fourteen year old teenager who has just moved to Liverpool with her mother as her parents are going through a Separation. Her dad is a high RAF officer involved with the RAF's nuclear bombers and lives in High Wycombe. To keep her safe he has given her a Key, a phone number and strict instructions to deal it and repeat the phrases he told her to when the time comes. In the meantime she has other things to worry about, like fitting into a new school and getting away from mum's new lodger, an old wartime American friend called Mort.

At school things are weird as well, with one teacher, Miss Wells taking a more than usual interest in her, but at least she makes some friends: Bernadette, a much more worldwise girl from one of the estates; a black boy names Joel and Nick, a Teddy boy who heads a local band, Nick O'teen and the Woodbines. These three take her to one of the local hangouts, the Jive-O-Rama, where she meets another woman with a more than healthy interest in her, Agatha. What's more, Agatha seems to have a copy of Laura's diary with her and meanwhile Miss Wells is throwing around cryptic clues about what'll happen on "Black Sunday" the 27th of October and talking about how one day "they'll call you baby boomers".

Things get worse at home too, with dad gone but not after explaining what's going on in Cuba and now Mort starting to chase her as well, after recieving a visit from a superior officer (nicknamed the Minuteman) who could've been his dad or older brother, only wheelchair bound. When the Cuban crisis becomes public things come to the boil. Britain is put under martial law, with subversive figures arrested, the hospitals emptied to recieve war patients, armed police and soldiers on the streets of Liverpool, not to mention rationign and the whole kit and caboodle from World War II. Laura can't help but notice how pleased her parents' generation, the ones that lived through the war, secretly seem to be, as if this is all one grand adventure again. (Somewhat of a nod to Raymond Biggs' When the Wind Blows?)

The climax comes once Laura and her friends, almost cornered by Miss Wells and the Minuteman, escape from school and with help from Agatha move underground into the cellars, sewers and tunnels of Liverpool. It's there that Laura confronts Agatha and we get to read about the hideous alternative history of what happened on Black Sunday where she comes from... As you may have guessed, this is a time travel story and Laura is the H-Bomb Girl, the key who can decide what path history will take from here.

I won't spoil the further twists and ultimate resolution of the story, only to note it's properly naff but mythic: rock 'n roll vs Nuclear Armageddon! The whole book is in fact self-consciously myth building: Liverpool October 1962 does not only have the Cuban Missile Crisis after all, but also the Beatles and the birth of the whole Mersey Sound. Throughout The H-Bomb Girl Baxter contrasts these two forces, the adult world with its military pre-occupations and WWII nostalgia (Laura's mum playing Glenn Miller) and the teenagers and their rock that's not quite rock yet. This could've been another annoyingly self-aggrandising piece of baby boomer fiction, but fortunately Bxter is detached enough not to fall in that trap. Born in 1957, he wasn't quite old enough to have lived through this firsthand, which may have made all the difference.

One other aspect needs mentioning. In his own review of this book, Adam Roberts slags off what he sees as the anachronism of the cast. "Laura's friends are a Catholic pregnant schoolgirl and single-mum-to-be, a young black guy called Joel; a gay rock singer called Nick; amongst her opponents is a disabled man in a wheelchair, so all the equal opportunity boxes are ticked." This is a somewhat too cynical a take. It's obvious that Minuteman, the wheelchair bound villian is a homage to Dr. Strangelove, while it's harldy unheard of to have Black boys in Liverpool in '62, or single mums and queer rock singers. We have a tendency to "whitewash" the past and believe the multicultural society is a recent invention, but the past is much more diverse than we think.

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